What I eat in a day to lose weight

In my last post, I explained why I'm trying to lose weight. Today I want to share with you how I've managed to lose 5KG in five weeks, and how I plan to lose a fair bit more. 

Two weeks' difference: June 7 on left, June 21 on right.

The eating plan I've chosen to follow is Trim Healthy Mama. I first tried eating this way eight years ago, when I was in the last few weeks of pregnancy with my son. It worked really well for weight loss (and for growing a healthy baby), but I found it too hard to maintain, purely because of how busy I was juggling babies and toddlers at the time.

These days I have more spare time, thanks to competent children and the fact my husband works from home, so I'm finding I can give Trim Healthy Mama the focus it needs. There are also loads of THM recipes online now and a lot more foods available that support this way of eating than there were eight years ago, which makes it a whole lot easier. 

What is Trim Healthy Mama?

I'm no expert, but the THM guidelines I try to stick to in order to lose weight are these:

1. Avoid white sugar and white flour. These are the only no-go foods, because they spike blood sugar levels too much, and one of the goals of the plan is to stabilise insulin production. Of course, if you do eat these foods, give yourself grace because it's going to happen from time to time, and your next on-plan meal is just around the corner. I have replaced sugar with stevia/erythritol blends, like THM Sweet Blend, THM Gentle Sweet, Truvia or Natvia, which are gentle on blood sugar levels. Monk Fruit sugar is also gentle, although it's more expensive so I've never bought it.
2. Centre all meals around protein, and choose one fuel source per meal - either carbohydrates (E for Energising) or fat (S for Satisfying) - not both. 
3. If eating an E meal with carbs as the fuel source, keep fat to 1 teaspoon or less. Also, stick to low-glycemic carbs like beans, chickpeas, quinoa, oats, brown rice, whole wheat sourdough, kumara, beetroot, etc, and don't eat more than 45 grams of carbs. (I actually don't know how to measure how many carbs I'm eating, so I may not be sticking to this very well.)
4. If eating an S meal with fat as the fuel source, keep carbs to 10 grams, but eat whatever amount of fat is required to achieve satiety. 
5. Eat plenty of non-starchy vegetables. 
6. Eat every three hours. Don't go more than four hours during the day without food, and make sure there are at least 2.5 hours between different fuel-source meals, so you don't unintentionally crossover. 
7. Throw in the occasional Fuel Pull (FP) meal or snack, where both fat and carbs are pared back. These are especially useful for snacks in between two different fuel-sourced meals, because they can pair with either a carb-based meal or a fat-based one. 
8. Drink plenty of water and sippers (refreshingly tasty and health-giving drinks). 

What I eat in a typical day

Breakfast

The breakfast I eat most often at the moment is scrambled egg whites on homemade organic sourdough, which is a carb-based E meal. I buy Zeagold Egg whites from Countdown, which makes this really quick and easy to prepare. I simply mix them with nutritional yeast, Nano Curcumin, Nano Silymarin and Nano Quercetin for their various health benefits and because they turn the egg whites yellow so they feel more like regular scrambled eggs. 

I bought an Ozeri Stone Earth frying pan (this is an affiliate link, which means if you click on it and purchase a pan, I will receive a small commission) so I could cook the egg whites without fat and they wouldn't stick to the pan. After doing some research, it seemed like Ozeri was the best choice because it doesn't release dangerous chemicals into food like other non-stick coated pans do. 

Cooking capsicum chickpea patties in my Ozeri frying pan.

Egg whites and other foods slide right off the Ozeri frying pan, so I've been really pleased with it. 

My friend, Dreama, gave me some sourdough starter and her sourdough recipe, so I've been able to make organic whole wheat seeded sourdough bread once or twice a week, as needed. My son really likes eating sourdough toast with jam and butter for breakfast too, which I'm happy about, and my girls have started eating it sometimes too.  

Lunch

For lunch I will eat on-plan dinner leftovers if I have any. Otherwise I might whip up a garden salad and add a tin of tuna in spring-water and some light cottage cheese for creaminess. Depending on what vegetables I use, this will either be an E (Energising carb-based) or an FP (low-fat and low-carb Fuel Pull) salad. 

Another favourite lunch of mine is this Crunchy Thai Peanut and Quinoa salad. 

I found the original recipe at Cookie and Kate, but have modified it to make it a THM E recipe. I'll be sure to share my THM version of this recipe with you in an upcoming post. I love this salad because it's really hearty and tasty, and I often have most of the ingredients for it growing in my garden, so I get to eat it super fresh. 

Sometimes for lunch I'll whip up a smoothie or a frappe. (I'm drinking a berry smoothie in the photo at the top of this page.) There are lots of recipes for these online and in the various THM cookbooks. 

Dinner

My dinners vary quite a lot, so it's hard to give you a typical one, although they do tend to be fat-based S meals. 

I often make some kind of creamy chicken and spinach dish, which I serve on cauliflower rice for myself and on pasta for the rest of the family, with a hearty serving of side vegetables. 

Sometimes I make a chicken and pesto risotto, using a cauliflower/broccoli rice blend instead of Arborio rice.  I'm still perfecting this low-carb risotto recipe, but once I have it nailed, you can be sure I'll share it with you. 

Slow cooker beef curries are another favourite S dinner. I might serve mine on Konjac rice or cauliflower rice to keep it low-carb, and throw in a large side helping of green vegetables too. 

A recent lamb, feta and mint salad featuring lots of homegrown vegetables was so good, it tasted like something I would order at a restaurant. I based it off this BBC Good Food recipe, but added a few more vegetables to make the most of my garden, and of course I used an on-plan sweetener rather than castor sugar in the dressing. 

The lamb salad would be considered an S meal, because lamb is quite a fatty meat. I served it with homemade potato wedges for the rest of the family, but just ate the salad on its own for my dinner. 

Recently I also made a rare E meal for dinner of Chargrilled Capsicum and Chickpea burgers.

The rest of my family had theirs on homemade buns, but I served mine on sourdough to keep it on-plan. We had a few patties leftover, so I ate them for lunch a couple of times, sometimes on sourdough and sometimes wrapped in lettuce. 

Snacks and Dessert

Snacks and desserts are so important on Trim Healthy Mama, and are when I usually indulge my sweet tooth with tasty tummy-trimming treats. They are the thing that make this plan doable for me, because I don't feel deprived. 

In the pantry right now, I have a container of chocolate peanut butter cookies that I baked. 

These are an S (fat-based) recipe from the original Trim Healthy Mama book and are so easy to whip up using peanut butter, cocoa, an egg, an on-plan sugar like Truvia or THM Gentle Sweet, and vanilla. I also throw in a few Healtheries sugar free chocolate chips for extra yumminess. (I buy the chocolate chips from PAK'nSAVE or Countdown.) 

A couple of weeks ago I made Chocolate Banana Muffins, a recipe from Trim Healthy Cookbook. These were a good E (carb-based) sweet treat for me and were handy to take out and about.  

Sometimes its inconvenient to have an E snack or dessert, because I may have just eaten an S lunch or dinner, so I also fill my fridge with Fuel Pull desserts like Chocolate Snickers Pudding. Another THMer shared her recipe for this on the Trim Healthy Mama Journey app. (See more about the app below.) I've modified the recipe slightly to increase the protein, so will share my version with you here soon. 

My fridge stocked with two different-sized containers of 
Chocolate Snickers Pudding. 

These puddings are SOOO yummy and filling, but have very little fat or carbs so I can pair them with any type of meal. They use peanut flour as the base and glucomannan as the thickening agent. (My sister-in-law gave me the glucomannan, but I believe she bought it from iHerb. It goes out of stock on iHerb often so if that's the case, you can also purchase it from Supplements NZ, although it's more expensive from there.) 

Sometimes I eat fruit for my snack. We have a lot of mandarins growing in our garden at the moment, so I might eat three of these for an E snack. (They're quite small.)

Drinks and Sippers

If I'm hungry but it's not time for my next meal yet, I might make myself a hot drink or a sipper. 

My favourite hot drink is Avalanche Sugar Free Drinking Chocolate. (I buy boxes of these from PAK'nSAVE or Countdown.) 

I use unsweetened almond or cashew milk instead of dairy milk in these drinks, as they are lower in carbs and so make it a Fuel Pull drink. 

My favourite sipper at the moment is a Lime Boabab Boost Juice. 

I simply squeeze one of the limes from my garden into a glass and stir in a teaspoon of Boabab powder (I bought mine from iHerb), and a couple of tablespoons of an on-plan sweetener like Truvia. I top the glass with water and stir it all together. Boabab powder is an amazing super food, so this is a tasty and healthy way to refresh myself. 

How I'm staying accountable

When I decided to commit full-time to eating this way, I bought the Trim Healthy Mama Journey app to keep me accountable. 

I use it to post photos of all my meals so I can track when and what I'm eating. At the end of the day, I click the Daily Recap button, which groups all my meal photos together in a collage so I can see exactly what I've eaten that day.  

The photos are labelled with their fuel-type, so it gives me a good overview of the different fuel-types I've eaten, which encourages me to change things up and keep my metabolism revving. 

With the Journey app, I'm also able to track my weight and measurements, and compare them with my goals in a handy graph. I bought an inexpensive set of scales from Kmart so I could weigh myself, and I'm using my sewing measuring tape to measure my waist and hips each week. 

On the Journey app I can also post selfies and side-by-side comparison photos, which help motivate me when I see the positive changes happening in my body.

There's also a community aspect to the Journey app that I really enjoy. I'm able to follow other people on THM, and see what they're eating, which gives me ideas for my own meals. We can like and comment on each others' photos, to encourage each other on. 

When I started eating this way, I gave myself a short term goal of staying on plan until my next birthday (in September). I'm hoping that by then, the habits will be so ingrained that this will just be a way of life for me. I'm also motivated to see how I look at that next birthday. 

I'll be sure to post those recipes I promised you in the next couple of weeks, and will keep you updated with how I'm going on Trim Healthy Mama in future posts. Do you have any questions you'd like me to answer in a future post?