Getting back to breakfast
Sicilan granita - A breakfast in Sicily I actually ate - lots of sugar and carbs here 🙂
I’ve been living in Italy 8 years. When I first moved here, I tried to keep my breakfast tradition of usually-savory breakfast with sometimes sweet (toast & jam). I missed bagels, I missed egg scrambles and home fries, I missed bacon. I remember the horrified looks of my then-Italian roommates’ faces when they walked in one morning and found me rolling ricotta up inside slices of salami.
It did not go over well.
But how else was I expected to make it through the day, sometimes only getting a chance to eat lunch at 3pm with my schedule, otherwise?
I slowly acclimated, through peer pressure and many social breakfasts, to eating cornetto / brioche (the Italian version of a croissant – less butter than a French one) in the morning on occasion. Then I started drinking coffee. Espresso, rather. I often went without breakfast completely but just for my one coffee.
Then I started eating the biscotti, cookies, which are similar to shortbread but not as buttery (see a trend?) When I first arrived in Italy I didn’t understand why they had such dry cookies, until I started dunking them in my morning cappuccino and afternoon tea. And then I understood.
They are delicious, and retain their shape even when getting dunked in delicious coffee. But they provide little to no satisfaction in terms of nutrition. Sugar carbohydrates sugar carbohydrates sugar. And of course, lots of fat.
So I stopped that.
Now I’m back to eating breakfast in the morning, with the aim of keeping me satisfied and healthy. That means protein. Fiber. Savory or sweet? It depends on the day.
These three breakfasts are in heavy rotation right now:
- 0% plain Greek Yogurt or full-fat fruit yogurt with All-Bran (got serious bran cravings last year, now I love this!)
- Oatmeal with nuts and/or honey and/or raisins & cranberries
- Cottage cheese with a savory spice mix (salt, pepper, others) 🙂
What gets you going in the morning?
Some more inspiration:
- Healthy Breakfast ideas and recipes from WebMD
- Is your breakfast making you fat? from the Independent (plus recipes)
- A Chowhound.com thread on needing ideas for protein breakfasts (note: not all healthy)
Food For Thought
Ben & Jerry’s comes to Italy? Not sure how I feel about that. On my food and travel site, I actually chronicle the search for quality gelato on the Tour del Gelato.
http://twitter.com/#!/rosso/status/76288640493424641
Tons of links and inspiration – share yours with me, too:
- One of my favorite stories ever is about what various families around the world eats per week: What the World Eats from Time. Now it’s getting more personal: what one person around the world eats per day: A Worldwide Day’s Worth of Food – I think it’s misleading showing the guy’s diet who’s waiting to qualify for a gastro-bypass (or similar) surgery – they should be showing what he ate to get to that weight!
- What Sugar actually does to your brain and body from Lifehacker – Lifehacker always has quality articles
- “Bloggers for a Balanced lifestyle” in Philadelphia, PA. August 19-20th – Another healthy living meetup I’ll just miss it by days.
- Want to try: these Crunchy Spiced chickpeas – oh dear, two chickpea recipes in a row – I will change this up! But I’m already thinking of my own spices to add
- Thinking about becoming a dietician? A dietician shares her story on Girl Heroes.
- What about a nutritionist?
- Goodbye nutritional pyramid, hello My Plate! @ObamaFoodorama A better visualization of the old daily nutritional requirements? I think better than the pyramid for sure.
- A guide to understanding said Nutritional Plate from Lifehacker
- The oldest female competitive bodybuilder, Ernestine Sheperd at 74 – gives good evidence to the argument, you’re never too old…
- Sugar may be an empty nutrient, but is it poisonous? from NPRÂ – a bit of a rebuff, may not be the cause of all our ills
Can’t lose weight? These diet blunders may be to blame – Definitely worth a read – and something to think about if you’re not journaling or measuring portions accurately:
Blunder No. 1: Eating ‘unhealthy’ portions of healthy foods
Blunder No. 2: Thinking fruit and vegetables are ‘free’ foods
Blunder No. 3: Going crazy with condiments
Blunder No. 4: Sprucing up the salad
Blunder No. 5: Eating like an athlete
It’s Ok, Look at Yourself in the Mirror
…when you work out, that is!
I was reluctant to try group exercises classes for the longest time while I was living in Italy because I was afraid that I wouldn’t understand the instructor and get frustrated. Luckily now that I’m fluent in Italian I don’t worry about that anymore.
Today in class there were three women, models actually, and this is important because not only could they not speak the language much, but it was obvious they weren’t big weightlifters. My cardio class has a very healthy portion of free weights incorporated into it, which is what I love, but it can be challenging or downright frustrating for those who aren’t comfortable.
I snuck looks at them during most of the class by glancing at the full-wall mirror, and though I felt a satisfaction that I was able to keep up with the exercises while they weren’t, I wasn’t comparing myself to them but the person who I was two months ago when I started doing that class.
Picture by djwhelan
But while I wasn’t looking at them, I was looking at myself, my form, and my energy during class. At the beginning when I didn’t have real confidence over the moves, I continued to watch the teacher instead of myself and this was a big mistake. Watching yourself in the mirror helps you see if your body is actually doing the effort your mind thinks you are. After several repetitions or later in the class as we get tired, we can trick ourselves that we’re doing great, but looking in the mirror helps you immediately see if that is true or if your elbows are too low or your hands don’t go all the way up to the ceiling.
So yes, look at yourself in the mirror. Revel in it – it’s not vanity, it’s healthy!
And as for those models? I took them aside at the end and showed them the correct form for a few of the bicep curls and tricep extensions that they were missing, so that the next time they can get an even better result from their workout.
Food for Thought
If you’re following me on Twitter you might see a few of these get Tweeted out, but not all of them.
http://twitter.com/#!/rosso/status/75317782996189184
Here’s some links to what’s been giving me food for thought recently:
- Fellow food blogger on a diet, Nicole from Pinch My Salt, blogged about how and why she went on a diet – food bloggers on a diet? officially a trend 🙂
- Is anorexia a disorder of the mind or metabolism? via Jezebel – relevant given my last post
- 11 healthy ways to load up on lean protein from RD.com – good ideas, get lean!
- Thinking of signing up for the Rock ‘n’ Roll 1/2 marathon in Vegas in December – I’ve always wanted to run this, especially as I heard not only is it a pretty flat course, it actually has a gentle decline throughout 🙂 and it’s at night! Fun!
- Cilantro lime chickpea salad from Oh She Glows – I love chickpeas, especially since they make my beloved hummus, but I’m eating more bean salads than ever
- Salad Pride blog – a different salad every day. via Steamy Kitchen – Love this idea – salads can get very monotonous if you’re not careful.
- And just for fun, a big list of 125 Fearless Female bloggers that I need to seriously peruse but haven’t had time to delve into.
What’s inspiring you lately?
I eat, you eat, some don’t eat
This week I came face to face with eating disorders. Not my own, though one could argue my relationship with food isn’t completely healthy, but of other people’s disorders.
Serious ones.
Bulimia, anorexia. Starving oneself to death. Bingeing. Vomiting. Punishing yourself for how you look. Not valuing your body and ultimately your life.
I wasn’t looking for them, but as most wormholes on the Internet work, you start at health food, and end up in bulimic land. Luckily I found some words of inspiration of overcoming an eating disorder (and I even bumped one woman’s story to the WordPress.com front page) but I found one site that really bothered me.
This girl was overweight from what I saw in a picture, and she’s rightly concerned about her weight, but her method in losing weight is completely harmful to her. Her posts are filled with goals of eating 350 or 500 calories a day, or even counting the hours since she ate last (sometimes more than a day). Often the posts are followed by big calorie binges and then purging. There were even her hopes of dying skinny, whenever she does die.
Having been overweight, or robust as someone might say, all my life, it’s natural that I considered what it would be like to be skinny. The “easy” way, or so I thought. To be able to vomit away my weight, and be skinny (and naturally popular, too, as a consequence). In middle school, it may even have seemed an ideal solution to my weight problem.
I never experimented with or came close to an eating disorder.
I’m not sure why. Perhaps I just couldn’t stomach (no pun intended) the thought of voluntarily vomiting. Or perhaps I didn’t think it would really make me happy to do that.
For whatever reason, I grew up and far away from even a remote thought. I accepted my body pretty quickly with how it was, and started to place more emphasis on being in shape, not on my body’s shape. I continued to stay active in sports and appreciate the effect and feeling I had of being healthy and active. I slimmed down a bit, and exercise has always been what I return to in order to have my cake and eat it, too.
As for that girl’s site, of course I couldn’t stop reading. I still can’t.
I reached out once, leaving a comment I hoped reminded her she’s not alone, to get help for herself, and pointed her to the above story for some inspiration.
She hasn’t answered me.
If I wrote her again, I would say, I was sure wrong about the “easy” misconception of eating disorders. It’s very difficult to punish yourself for how you look and slowly kill yourself through starvation and malnutrition.
It’s rather easy to accept your body and push yourself to be healthy.
Note: for her privacy I won’t say which site it is, because I’m hoping through writing online she can find some outlet and perhaps resolution. And perhaps she’ll read my comment over and over until it convinces her to reach out.
Food Blogger on a Diet 