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I’m really beginning to like spinach and having a couple of bags of frozen spinach in the freezer is fantastic, especially when I haven’t had a chance to do any real shopping, like this week.

There’s a lot of different pasta sauces that you can make without using meat or fish and this one is incredibly tasty.

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• Wholewheat Pasta With Light Cream Cheese In Tomato Sauce (fat.ie)

This post originally appeared on Losing Weight Improve Your Waistline - It's All About Getting Healthy & Sticking To A Diet

Alligator in Gaylord Palms Hotel (Photo credit: blacknight)

Last week I was in Florida for a work related event. I had been worried about eating while “on the road” and unfortunately my fears were more than justified.

I weighed in this morning and I’ve gained over 1kg, which is NOT good. Whether that is due to alcohol or food, or simply the combination, is not clear. I’m not happy about it.

So what went wrong?

And what can I do to fix it next time?

It started pretty badly with the Hilton Dublin Airport. There are no salads or light options on their menu. Nothing. There are a couple of “healthy” options, but I’d have been perfectly happy with a salad. So I opted for a side salad with a steak. Total disaster. The salad was pretty “sad” looking and the dressing was horrible. It tasted of cheap vegetable oil! For a hotel like that you’d expect them to either have a proper dressing or to serve you the oil and balsamic vinegar and let you do it yourself. As I stay there a lot this is a real problem. Do I need to find somewhere else to eat before heading to the hotel or should I make myself a packed dinner?

Days when you spend up to 20 hours in airports are always going to be a bit of a mess. I avoided milky coffee and stuck to plain. Foodwise I just ate the inflight meals.

When I finally got to the Gaylord Palms hotel in Florida problems began.

Breakfast, as I’d suspected, wasn’t an issue. They had a very good breakfast buffet and you could eat plenty of healthy stuff in the morning and get a good start to the day

Unfortunately a lot of the restaurants in the hotel didn’t really “get” the concept of “healthy” at all. Pretty much none of them had anything flagged as “light” or “healthy”, which is odd, as it’s not as if Americans don’t have obesity issues ..

The first evening’s dinner was typical of the problems I encountered. I ordered a steak salad thinking I’d get salad with a bit of meat. Instead I got salads drowned in dressing, cheese and topped with some kind of battered onion thing! (I was able to move some of this to one side and avoid it)

For the rest of the week I tried to get “lighter” options whenever I could, but to be honest I found it really hard. It’s as if nobody in Florida ever eats light food..

The alcohol consumed during the week is a different matter entirely and is linked in part to the type of event I was attending. With  a lot of other events I’d probably have been overdosing on coffee, but I need to keep an eye on the alcohol consumption in the future.

This post originally appeared on Losing Weight Improve Your Waistline - It's All About Getting Healthy & Sticking To A Diet

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I’ve never been into fashion. I’m much happier wearing clothes that are comfortable rather than even bothering to consider what’s “in”. But when you’re quite tall and big (even ignoring the fact that I’m overweight) your options are quite limited.

If you’re a big guy it’s quite awkward to buy clothes and footwear “off the shelf”. Sure you can usually find something, but more often than not you end up having to go with the most bland option available.

Shoes, for example, are always available in average sizes in Ireland, but once you get into the bigger sizes (and I wear either a European 45 or 46, which is a UK 11 or 12) the options become more and more limited. It has got better in recent years, but it’s hardly ideal.

I remember years ago discovering Palais de la Chaussure when I lived in Paris. For the first time I was able to actually choose which style of shoe to buy! That was a whole new experience for me. (If you’ve got big feet I’d strongly recommend them).

With the advent of the internet you’re no longer limited to buying locally, which has made life a lot easier. Some of the online shoe shops offer a reasonable range in larger sizes, so buying shoes and boots from Schuh is fine for me.

I’ve also found a couple of online shops in the UK that have a good range of “big and large”. Big Tall Order, for example, stocks a lot of things that you simply won’t find in local shops unless you want to spend lots of time searching (I don’t!). When I wanted swimming shorts they had a good range to choose from, whereas any shop I tried locally only seemed to cater for fitness freaks or very average sizes.

Another thing I’ve found annoying is buying things like jeans. I wanted to get Levi’s and some Dockers, but for some stupid reason the Irish and UK site doesn’t carry the “big and tall” range at all. You’d swear we were all midgets!

You can, however, find some good options either on eBay or by going to the US Levi’s and Dockers sites. The only problem with buying direct from the US sites is that you need a US address and you can get caught for import duty and VAT. Even with import duty and VAT, however, you still save on Irish prices.

One downside to ordering clothes online is that they can take a week or more to arrive and in my case that meant that by the time some of the stuff arrived my waist had shrunk! Not that a shrinking waist is a bad thing – there’s a reason I have a belt!

This post originally appeared on Losing Weight Improve Your Waistline - It's All About Getting Healthy & Sticking To A Diet

When I decided to do something about my weight I had to “go all in”. That doesn’t mean that I was going to do anything insane or completely radical, as I knew that wouldn’t really work. What it meant, however, was a change of attitude about a number of things.

Why do I want to lose weight?

There’s a number of reasons, but a very simple one is that I wanted to “feel good”.

I’d also like to look better. Being able to look in the mirror or look at a photograph of myself and not cringe would be a nice feeling.

Part of that overall “feeling” is reflected in how you dress and how you generally feel.

Put another way. If I wasn’t “happy” then I was going to have problems. I can’t get motivated or retain the self-control etc., to stick to a diet if I’m not relatively happy.

I don’t know if there are any “tricks” in this, but I do know that if I was on a diet where I was eating food I didn’t like I’d be pretty miserable!

Watching the graphs on the Withings is pretty cool (I even installed the iPhone app so that I can check it from time to time!) and keeps me motivated. The worrying thing, however, is realising just how much weight I’d put on over the last 3 years.

On the plus side, however, as long as I keep at this then the movement on the graph is in the right direction ie. downwards

This post originally appeared on Losing Weight Improve Your Waistline - It's All About Getting Healthy & Sticking To A Diet

But I have to admit I’m very tempted by the idea of “outsourcing” the entire thing to someone else!

There’s a few companies offering a “personal chef” service for people who want to eat properly and lose weight, but don’t have the time, energy of inclination to cook for themselves.

While most of them are in the UK and US I came across one that is available in Ireland (there might be more) – Diet Chef.

Looking at the costs it actually works out to be quite economical. Sign up for 3 months and you pay about €50 / week, which is less than what I’d spend on groceries in a normal week.

The range of food they offer is pretty good, though I don’t think it would suit me, as you obviously can’t swap things around – you’re stuck with whatever you’ve ordered.

Now if I could only find a solution for eating whilst on the road I’d be happy!

This post originally appeared on Losing Weight Improve Your Waistline - It's All About Getting Healthy & Sticking To A Diet

This post originally appeared on Losing Weight Improve Your Waistline - It's All About Getting Healthy & Sticking To A Diet

I’ve been playing around with a few and will post reviews of several in the coming weeks.

One of the ones I’ve played around with is the Livestrong.com MyPlate app on the iPhone.

As applications go it’s got one of the nicest and easiest to use interfaces I’ve come across and is pretty much “idiot proof”.

Livestrong MyPlate main screen

Once you’ve setup your profile the app will let you easily track your food intake every day with ease. The database of foods they have is pretty impressive too, so it’s not impossible to find what you’ve eaten (a weakness with Tesco Diets).

Tracking foods you’ve eaten with the app is simple. You just choose which meal it fits under and off you go:

Searching for Food to track using the LiveStrong app on iPhone

Unfortunately, however, the app is more than a little confused with measurements. It’s pretty clear that it’s an American app and that the support for metric weights and measures was an afterthought. So while some parts of it might mention grams etc., you’ll find most of it referring to ounces, which is more than a little annoying.

On this screen, for example, you can see a breakdown of a particular food, but the actual portion size isn’t that clear:

Tracking food with the LiveStrong app

You can also track exercise that you’ve taken and the app will calculate how many calories you’ve burned off.

Overall it’s a nice app, but the confusion around measurement units is rather annoying if you’re using Metric.

It would also be much more useful if it hooked into my Withings, which some of the other apps and services do.

This post originally appeared on Losing Weight Improve Your Waistline - It's All About Getting Healthy & Sticking To A Diet

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This weekend was my birthday, so I “broke out” a small bit and had a couple of slices of fruit cake.

That cake was much more “expensive” than I was expecting.

A slice of fruit cake (no icing or anything extra on it) weighs in at around 160 calories!

When you’re counting calories against a daily limit a slice of cake becomes a lot more than a mere “slice” – it is now a percentage of my daily limit.

And of course it’s not just calories that matter, or else you could eat rubbish and keep below the limit.

This post originally appeared on Losing Weight Improve Your Waistline - It's All About Getting Healthy & Sticking To A Diet

They’re not complicated and they’re not fancy.

The set is made of 2 x 1kg, 2 x 1.5 kg and 2 x 3kg with a handy little storage “tree” to keep them tidy in my room.

Like so many things that I buy with good intentions the dumbbells sat in a corner in their box until this weekend, when I finally decided that I needed to start using them.

Of course I didn’t really have a clue what I was meant to be doing with them – apart from lifting them

Fortunately there’s a basic leaflet in the box that gives you a couple of exercises you can try to start with, while there’s also quite a few sites with tips, advice and nicely illustrated exercise routines that you can follow.

Doing a few repetitions per day isn’t that hard and should get easier and better over time.

Now if only the weather was a bit nicer! Going for a walk at the moment might get me exercise, but I suspect I’d end up damp, miserable and worse off!

Related articles

• 5 Basic Dumbbell Exercises For Your Home Workout (johnisfit.com)

This post originally appeared on Losing Weight Improve Your Waistline - It's All About Getting Healthy & Sticking To A Diet

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My sister finally answered the question that had been driving me mad for the last couple of weeks.

How on earth can you slice pitta bread open without losing your mind?

The answer is incredibly simple – just pop them in the toaster (or microwave) for a few seconds first. Once they’ve been heated up a bit you’ll be able to slice them open quite easily.

So this afternoon I put this new knowledge into action when preparing this quite tasty snack.

This post originally appeared on Losing Weight Improve Your Waistline - It's All About Getting Healthy & Sticking To A Diet