Healthy eating

Hallow pineapple!

So lately, like these few months (Probably start of March-present), I've been eating healthier!

I've been making my own healthy snacks/meals, and they're relatively simple and super easy - so thought I'd share them with ya!

1. Healthy dip with an apple and a celery!

Ingredients: For the dip- Plain yogurt, Peanut butter (Mine was chunky, but any would do), Chia seeds and cinnamon! OH, and of course, an apple or a celery! Or any other fruit/vege substitutes you may like/prefer!

*This serves exactly 1 apple and a part of a stick of celery - refer to photos

1. About 3-5 teapoons of plain yougurt (depending on your preferred portion)

2. 1 teaspoon of peanut butter!

3. 1 teaspoon (or less) of chia seeds

4. A dash of cinnamon powder

5. mix well, may require the 2 tspoons used from the yogurt and pb!

It's not exactly 1 stick of celery, it's like a part of 1 stick.

The result, can be eaten for lunch or as a snack! I find it very filling!

These are the exact ingredients I used!

 2. Banana and Peanut Butter on bread!

I think this is self-explanatory.

ingredients: wholemeal/wholegrain bread (It's healthier than white bread!), peanut butter and 1 banana!

steps:

1. Lay out your bread

2. Spread a generous amount of peanut butter on it

3. slice bananas with the knife used for your PB spread

4. lay them on top of your PB spread-ed bread

5. Bon appetit! Makes a filling breakfast/snack/meal!

3. Frozen blueberries covered in yogurt

(Inspired by pinterest!)

ingredients: blueberries and plain youghurt (Greek thick youghurt would be best!)

The needed utensils and ingredients.

1. Use a pair of chopsticks to pick your blueberry and dip it in yougurt

2. roll it around, try to cover it with as much yogurt as possible!

3. place it in a container to be refrigerated in the freezer for about 30 mins or >

TADA!

Frozen Blueberries covered in yogurt!

4. Baked pumpkin with a super simple salad

ingredients: pumpkin, garlic, salt & pepper, mixed herbs, olive butter, cinnamon powder, salad vege and eggs!

*serves 2 or a bit more people

1. place your cubed pumpkins in a baking bowl(?)

2. season it with salt & pepper, mixed herbs, a bit of olive butter, cinnamon powder, and add peeled and separated garlic cloves on it and bake for 30 mins until slightly brown

3. lay some vege on your plate you will use to serve

4. tada! Though I would've liked my garlic slightly browner

5. Poach eggs (i kinda failed like 3/4 of mine)

6. Lay them on top of the vege

Add your pumpkin, and dinner is served!

The end result!

5. The 2-ingredient healthy pancakes

(recipe from Blogilates)

The main ingredients

1. mash your banana, add an egg

2. mix and mash them together until it becomes a batter like so - kinda smooth and runny

3. Heat up your pan (non-stick would be best), I sprayed some butter cooking spray.
You could use butter, or any oil, up to you.

A wooden spatula and a rubber spatula would be very helpful!

I use a tablespoon to make my mini pacakes

In this whole process, this would probably be the most complicated part.
(Though generally the whole thing is super easy.)

 The batter isn't a lot, but because this works best if your pancake is mini, it takes awhile to cook and finish up your batter. So as you may know, by re-using the pan, it may leave slight burnt batter bits and a bit of dark oil, so what I do is use the plastic spatula to gently scrap off all the oil and what not to the sink/bin, and then re-spray the oil and you're good to go!

It's a bit hard to take photos while I'm cooking (wouldn't wanna burn up my pancakes), so I'll try my best to explain my frying process.

The wooden spatula comes in handy to stack my pancake batches and transfer them onto the plate.

The plastic spatula is to flip the pancakes and place them onto my other spatula.

So when I use a tablespoon to make a mini pancake, I would make around 4/5 at one go.

I flip them every few seconds, and using my plastic spatula on my right hand, and my wooden spatula on my left hand, I will stack the mini pancakes onto the brown spatula, then transfer them onto the plate.

Tada! The end result! Oh, and I added a few blueberries to some of the batter at the end.

If you'd like a healthy syrup ish thing for your pancakes...

2-3 tsp of  yogurt and 1 tsp of honey and mix well!

And you have healthy pancakes and syrup!

6. Healthy Study Roll

ingredients: tortilla wrap, peanut butter (mine was chunky), chia seeds, oatmeal, cinnamon powder and dark chocolate would be best!

1. Spread some peanut butter on your tortilla skin

2. Sprinkle some chia seeds and a dash of cinnamon powder

3. Throw in some oatmeal. You can add fruits, granola or anything you wish!

I used this dark chocolate

4. Lay about a row of dark chocolate in the middle

5. Microwave it in the oven for about 30-40 seconds, spread the chocolate across

6. Roll it

7. And cut it if you wish, or eat it like that.

8. Quick and healthy study snack

Personally, I didn't quite like this one, it was quite bitter for me - due to the dark chocolate, but I guess it's healthy and simple so yeah! It'd be great if there were sliced bananas, strawberries or blueberries...

but I thought of this last minute due to a shortage of other food so yup!

Until then, stay healthy and full! :D

Cabbage Soup Diet - Day 1

HI pumpkins.

It's September! Wooooohoo. Time pasts so quickly, it's crazy. I'm not even sure whether it's a good thing or not, but boy, does time fly. Is it just me, or is it something about the start of a new month that makes you feel like changing your life? Because heck, that's me every month.

And omg I. Have. Been. Craving. Eggtarts. For. The. Last. One. Month. Like Maan they taste amazing. They even look like sunshine.

So anyways, today I'm starting my first day of the Cabbage Soup Diet.
It lasts for only a week, and it is rumoured to help you lose weight fast.

The website for all the information is here.

So I'm doing a little tweak to this diet, because I know for one that I can't follow it exactly.

They have a 7 day plan which we have to follow, and the first day one is this;

Day One:

Fruit: Eat all of the fruit you want (except bananas). Eat only your soup and the fruit for the first day. For drinks- unsweetened teas, cranberry juice and water.

I'm actually not sure if we can eat other things, I guess we can't... but I kinda cheated on the first day :C oops. So yea, for today, this is what I ate:

Breakfast : A bowl of cereal with fullcream/skim milk.
Morning tea : 2 apples
Lunch : A bowl of cabbage soup
Tea : An apple. A huge bowl of cabbage soup

Beverages : 8 glasses of water, a quarter cup of soy milk and one mug of vege juice (lettuce, apples, oranges, carrots)

So I'll be updating my progress here; and fingers cross, I'll lose just as much weight as what most of the reviews were :)

OH. the tweak that I mention, I am skipping a meal a day. So it's not recommended since they call it cheating, but I'm gonna do that because I'm still on my 40 day fast. AND, I will be eating cereal for breakfast anywaaaays, cause it's fast, filling and convenient for me. So those are 2 things I'm breaking.

For my cabbage soup:

I cooked like a tiny pot of cabbage soup for myself.

And I ate a bowl of cabbage soup for lunch.

They have a list of ingredients required/recommended for the cabbage soup on the website, but I sorta cut mine down by a whole lot because I don't think it's necessary.

So last night, I spent like an hour juicing, washing 2 cabbages and carrots, cutting them up into smaller pieces, and re-washing them. Yes, it took me an hour altogether.

So for my soup, I added maybe a handful of cabbages, slightly more perhaps? A few pieces of carrots, like more than 5? 2 small tomatoes, and a bit of abalone mushrooms. Not like the button or chinese ones.

I filled like perhaps 4 or 5 cups of water.

For seasoning, I used a bit of garlic powder, barely, I'd think. And a quarter of chicken stock.

I let it boil until I think my vegetables have died like my tomatoes were peeling. haha. OH, and have your carrots like yaknow, soft and all. Then I think it should be done by then.

So actually it didn't taste too bad. It reminded me alot of the ABC vegetable soup my mum made when I was younger. I didn't like that soup. And actually, I really didn't like tomatoes or cabbages. HM.

I was really hungry at lunch, and I watched my dad eat beaufort mee, my grandma eating char sau egg and vege; then coming home to the smell of chicken pasta which my sister made, and I tried like a spoon, and it probably tastes a whole lot heavenly compared to my plain ol' vegetable soup....

But I'm still determined :D so after lunch, I took a nap, and I woke up having a sudden craving for chips or dark chocolate. MAN I was craving real food. And actually, eggtarts. Like. the. whole. day. If only eggtarts had delivery :(

OH. And I'm planning to cut desserts while I'm doing this diet thing so yeaaaaa :(

So during tea, I managed to finish the remaining of my soup, which was actually a huge bowl. And I added like three tablespoons of macaroni cause I just couldn't stand it. #strike3 haha 

But I held back from eating any sweet stuff, no matter how good eggtarts were to taste, or the chips staring at me. I persevered! 

Oh, so my current weight is 47-48kgs. 

I think I'll weigh myself daily now just to see if there are any changes.

Anywaaaays, so that's it for tonight! Goodnight :)

OH And these are three Polaroids I got to keep from Saturday! with these awesome guys; Sam, Isaac, how Uei and Nathan :)