I am a bit annoyed!

Why am I annoyed? Because there are so many people who seem against calorie counting. If you are one of them and have lost weight, kept it off, can eat whatever you want...I am very happy for you and would be thrilled to hear of your continued success!

But, that is not me! That is also not so many people I know. I do not have the metabolism or physique of a thin person and no amount of exercise or eating stimulating food will change that.

I have very thick blood that doesn't oxygenate very well and my entire family have always had sluggish bowels. There is diabetes, cholesterol and thyroid problems in my family and while I am still in normal range it is because for 40 years of my life I had a weight problem and being in the public eye I was very selfconscious of what I ate and avoided foods that would have blown me up over 300lbs. Also my family for some absurd reason never had to diet, they were and still are all slim. I was the chubby one, so I am sure that my battle with food is what kept me slim.

BUT you should know, you can't name a diet pill, a diet club, a diet plan, a diet supplement, a diet food replacement, appetite suppresant including acupuncture and aroma therapy, fasting, hypnosis and more... that I have not tried!!!

I want to tell you more about the way I think, but the words only come from time to time and I am SO not a writer and that makes it hard for me.

I am going to all this trouble to post on a blog and on Twitter because I want to help. I can't tell you how badly I feel for those that are struggling like I did and I still do struggle a BIT. I want to help because I KNOW I can. I know that I have actually develooped new eating habits. IT IS TRUE. By counting calories and eating whole foods I can't believe how easy this is all getting. Can you imagine it being a habit to not overeat??? Can you imagine it being a HABIT TO NOT EAT JUNK FOOD? Oh my, it's like a miracle. Just from counting calories and avoiding processed crap food like the plague.

I just want to address Food and Eating in this post even though I have intense opinions of how we got lost and what happened to us emotionally, physically and spiritually as a result of our bad eating habits. Still, I do know for a FACT that we need to relearn how to eat.

We need to relearn how to eat, without doing it we are still condemning ourselves to the worthless feelings that come with losing and gaining.

Calorie counting. Why do I place so much importance on it? Because you must eat a certain amount of calories everyday to keep your metabolism going and to lose weight. THAT IS A SCIENTIFIC FACT. Hating to count calories or cooking and planning and preparing food for yourself is the single most destructive thing you are doing to yourself.

Can you imagine if a Mom didn't feed her baby properly, she would be in jail and the child taken away. Well you are not feeding yourself properly because you HATE IT???

Yep, you need to find the time...because you are miserable the way you are.

OK Why Count calories...because YOU have no idea what you are doing!!!!!! If you are like me!

You need to plan healthy meals of food that doesn't convert quickly to sugar in your blood (refined processed food) and count the calories so that you eat properly.

Know when you eat too much one night and the next morning you aren't hungry so you skip breakfast??? Breakfast THE most important meal of the day, YOU skip it! If you ate properly during the day you would look forward to breakfast.

Trying to stay on track, told you I am not a writer so I'm doing the best I can.

Just try counting calories, everyone has a method to do it, but the math- dividing the ounces into the calories, looking up the calories, the scraps of paper to write and add can be a giant PITA. So try http://www.sparkpeople.com it's FREE. It's the best way to track your food and nutrition, they do the math, the breakdown ALL for YOU. I am not affiliated with them in any way. You will not lose weight if you eat just an extra 100-200 calories a day that you do not burn. You can gain weight if you eat just 200 extra cals a day, maybe just 1/2lb a month but that is 30 lbs in FIVE years.

Once you know that you are eating the right amount of the right food you can identify the times that you are wanting to eat for all the wrong reasons. You can know the difference between habitual, emotional desire to eat. Only then can you deal with it. You may fall of a zillion times, but there is at least something to get back on to. There is no diet to blow, no food plan to screw up. There is just old ways to change and go back to proper eating the proper amount of calories.


This is for people who are just like me and are sick and tired of gaining weight and the desperate hopeless feeling that comes with it.

I love Cauliflowers and have several different recipes for soup.

I think that the best is to give you the basic recipe and then list some options. It is so easy. Cauliflower is a very bland veggie so taste it plain, you can always add spices. One thing I have learned about making fresh vegetable soups is that you don't want to complicate the recipe so that you don't lose the pure taste of the vegetables.

I prefer to use Leeks, but onions will do just fine.

Choose your fat/oil depending on how low calorie you want to make the soup.
Also

Here goes:

BASIC Cauliflower soup.

3Leeks or onions
Olive or canola oil, marg, butter, or PAM
1 large Cauliflower
2 chicken flavored bouillon cubes (I use McCormicks Vegan cubes)
*Milk + rice flour to thicken if you desire
1 tsp sweetener optional.



Roughly chop up 3 large leeks or 3 medium onions
In a large soup pot use 3 measured tbsps of olive oil or whatever you want, butter, margarine, veggie oil, Pam will save 300 calories for the whole pot.
Toss in the chopped leeks and on a medium temp saute them till they get translucent and soft, not brown. Stir often
I add little dashes of water if it starts to brown,
When the leeks or onions are soft add 1 whole roughly chopped up cauliflower
Saute for just a couple of minutes then cover the veggies with water. Careful not to add too much water, just enough to cover them (completely) otherwise the soup won't be thick enough.

Ok here is what I use, 3 McCormicks Vegetarian Chicken Flavored Bouillon cube, it adds lots of taste with no distinctive flavor, but you can use any chicken flavored bouillon cube. If you like to use liquid chicken broth then use it but make sure it's just to cover the cauliflower and veggies.
Let it boil, then reduce heat to simmer. It cooks very quickly.
OK that is the basic..

This is EXTRA
You can add garlic, shredded white cabbage ( I love nappa Chinese cabbage) Parsnips, peeled zucchinis...anything white.
Then you can add more water to cover and 1 or more bouillon cubes.

You can add favorite herbs, a bay leaf, grate some fresh nutmeg or make it spicy with cayenne or chilies or even some curry. Some people love a teeny little cumin in it while it's cooking. Of course you can add more herbs or spices after its cooked. AGAIN: Remember that cauliflower is a very bland veggy so use all herbs or flavoring very sparingly so it won't over power the soup


Lets assume you are going for the most basic plain simple cauliflower soup which is delicious. When the cauliflower is soft, use a hand held blender to puree it till its completely smooth...OR...
you can also remove a few pieces of cauliflower before you puree it and add it after to have the occasional whole piece.
I often will add a tsp of sweetener or sometimes a dash of lemon juice and sometimes 1/2 cup of milk. If you want it even richer, not concerned with extra calories, use butter or a dash of cream to make it silky. If it is too watery, I use a tbsp of RICE flour mixed in cold milk to thicken it. Do the same even if you added any of the other white veggies.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

Lots of people like it when I add the cumin, makes it sort of middle eastern tasting, but I do like the simplicity of it plain, reminds me of rich vichyssoise, you can top it with chopped chives or a dollop of sour cream. It never lasts long enough to get fancy around here.

*note if you don't want milk products, water is just fine, I make it like that for my lactose intolerant family members and it is just as rich.

Let me know how it turns out.

Is this you? Us?

We spend so much time thinking about food and our bodies and feel so helpless especially when we've made so many efforts to change. Maybe we've lost a few pounds or a 100 pounds, it took so much effort but slowly and surely we made bad food choices and the pounds crept back on.

We can get so muddled in our minds that sometimes we get such a blank spot that we just blindly eat anything when we get the signal "it's ok to eat". Sure when we are really busy or really occupied with other things we can actually forget about eating but as soon as there is a blank space in our lives the first thought is FOOD. All the time you hear people say they don't need to be depressed, lonely or bored to eat, they can crave stuffing food even when they are happy and feeling blessed.

So it must be our emotions, we have a problem with our emotions. YES, without a doubt there are people with serious emotional problems, these people can act out the severity of these problems in many ways not just with food. If you are one of those people, seek professional help.
There are many counselling groups and places to go to talk to people who can help you. You don't just have to go to a psychiatrist or psychologist; in this day and age there are so many sources that are willing to help you. There are even some free groups like A&A or Overeaters Anonymous and many Community centers often organize help groups ...it's up to you to get help.

But maybe you don't have severe emotional problems. Maybe you can see how well you solve all the problems and trauma that is our daily lives. Maybe you know you are actually smart and can function in spite of everything in your life including things that happened to you in your past. Maybe you think there is something the matter with your spirituality,/conscience/emotions there are so many books being written on the subject…yes maybe you can find a spiritual way to lose weight. Maybe you can lose weight when you immediately forgive yourself and learn to love yourself. Maybe you can even lose weight when you forgive everyone else in the whole wide world that you felt responsible for what ails you and the planet Earth in general. Past, present and future.

As long as you realize that the future is unknown and hellish problems can rise up in the future. So you also need skills to not fall into the old patterns when “stuff happens”.

Speaking of patterns here is what I think,

We broke our appestat. As soon as we overate repeatedly for years, we broke our appestat. That means we can go way past the signals that say “STOP! I am full, I can’t eat another bite”. It also means that no amount of work on our emotions will repair our appestat…only chance we have is years of re-programming it and a lot of hard work coping with eating less than we used to.

We have likely screwed up our blood sugar and forced our livers to store so much glycogen as fat that it will also take years to straighten out our metabolisms.

We had a bad habit of trying to starve ourselves after we ate too much. This has nothing to do with emotions or loving ourselves this is a natural logical response to overeating. *Ate too much one meal eat less next meal or don’t eat at all tomorrow.* Years of doing this has totally screwed us up.

I am going to take a break in posting about this just for now because I need you to hear me….you need to change. You do not need a diet. You need to relearn how to eat healthy food in proper portions everyday. You need to reprogram yourself. You need to face that years of screwing up is not because you are a pathetic overweight hopeless person, it’s because you got lost and lost the ability to eat properly. You became a HABITUAL OVEREATER, and it’s unlike any other bad habit, you cannot abstain completely like with cigarettes or drugs and alcohol. You have to eat

So this is about retraining, reprogramming and building new habits, it could take years. You are about to face a giant challenge that has many obstacles, hurdles and steps backwards…but…you first have to believe that a simple plan of eating healthy balanced meals in proper portions will restore you. Now here is where I get fanatical-ish. NO MORE PROCESSED FOOD. Listen, hear, understand…your body does not need one more drop of refined sugars in the form of processed food. NOT ONE DROP. In order to restore your ability to eat properly you have to believe that. This is not just about losing weight; this is about RECOVERING from food obsession and overeating.

*Addendum: I've become aware I should define "Processed Food". In reality just chewing your food is processing it. I am referring to all foods that are so over refined+ manufactured that they convert too quickly to sugar/glycogen in your body. I am not referring to Pre-Prepared healthy food. How to know the difference? Well this is a serious problem if you have to ask, sorry to be so blunt. Probably if you omit foods that are made with Sugar + Flour you will eliminated 90% of the problem processed food out there. Many professionals believe that if you crave a food you are likely addicted to it, and the primary source of food addiction is this quick digesting of food as SUGAR/Glycogen. Yes, processed food is quickly turned to ALCOHOL in your body and like an alcoholic you CRAVE more.

There is also a belief that if flour or sugar is listed after the 5th or 6th ingredient it is a very insignificant amount. Perhaps that is a good way to start eliminating it from your diet

Have a look at this post about insulin and your liver.

http://caloriegirl.blogspot.com/2010/02/good-carbs-vs-bad-carbs.html

I welcome questions on twitter :)

http://twitter.com/CalorieGirl