A day on the Clean food diet

I have had a few requests for a follow up to my diet and weight loss post from the 4/9/15 Life - Looking for balance and Happiness. Most of those relate to recipes that we use and what we eat in a 500 calorie meal. So, here goes.
A sample day. Normally I try to start the day with a pot of tea. An example would be the Japanese loose leaf floral Green Tea that I picked up at the Sydney markets a few years back. It's pretty nice now, but I'm sure it would have been so much better when it was freshly purchased. Also at breakfast I have Yakult style drink. We have found a cheaper brand that is sold frozen at the local Asian Grocery shop. I think it is made in South Korea.
This week's breakfast is Kellogg's Just Right Breakfast cereal. Make sure you read your serving sizes on the side of the packet. I have 2 servings of Just Right with 200 ml of Light milk and a large banana.
Just Right - 590 Kj for 40grams. At this stage I go to the BUPA calorie converter. Simply type in 590 Kj and you discover that it translates to 141 calories. 141 calories is 40 grams so 80 grams is 282 calories. Light milk is 94 Calories for 200ml according to Calorieking.com.au. The final item is a banana.Again I look up on Calorieking.com.au and it shows that a large banana is 122 calories.
So breakfast is :
             80g Kellog's Just Right 282 calories
             200ml lite milk                94 calories
             large banana                 122 calories
          Breakfast total                  498 calories
That may seem a little bit of hard work just to count calories for breakfast, but that is the main reason I eat the same breakfast for 6 days straight. Another habit I am just starting to develop, is recording the ingredients and quantities of the meals I prepare on a Microsoft excel spreadsheet.That way I don't need to reinvent the wheel every time I eat.

Now for lunch.
When at work I eat a simple salad most days. It consists of mesclun or mixed lettuce topped with tomato, cucumber, onion, carrot, Jalapeno Chillies, sliced beetroot and a hard boiled egg. During the day my liquid intake consists of a morning coffee and a few cups of tea. The tea is usually Puerh tea which is known to burn fat. If I am at home for lunch and feeling lazy I usually have 2 sushi rolls.

As for dinner here is an example from a couple of nights ago: I found a recipe online for salad nicoise (pronounced as far as I am aware Sal - add niss- waa) on taste.com.au. I work my way through the ingredients converting them to calories via calorieking.com.au
500 g Potatoes -                                            335 calories
300 g Green Beans -                                        87 calories
250 g Cherry Tomatoes -                                 45 calories
1/2 cup black olives estimated weight 100 g -   75 calories
425 g canned tuna (read from the tin) -            300 calories
1 Tbspn olive oil -                                          159 calories
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar -                           3 calories
Total                                                              1004 calories
Pretty close to perfect. You may notice that the original recipe states that it is 4 servings. I guess as a starter or side salad you may get away with serving 4. As a meal I think just 2 works well. From there I wasn't perfectly happy. Salad Nicoise for me always has a couple of hard boiled eggs. So I added 2 eggs which tally 73 calories each. That put me over by 150 calories in total. So, I adjusted the recipe. I reduced potatoes to 350 g, (235 cal) saving 100 of the calories straight away. I then reduced the olives to 75 g and 56 calories but added 100 g of mesclun or mixed lettuce to the salad which cost another 29 calories.


The final ingredient list looked like this :
350 g Potatoes - 335 calories
300 g Green Beans - 87 calories
250 g Cherry Tomatoes - 45 calories
75 g Olives - 56 calories
425 g canned tuna - 300 calories
1 Tbspn Olive oil - 159 calories
1 Tbspn Sherry vinegar - 3 calories
100g mesclun lettuce - 29 calories
2 eggs - 146 calories
All this totals 1060 calories. Only 30 calories per person over the 500 calorie meal limit. As they say, near enough is good enough (at least in this case).
As for making the salad, sometimes I think the food prep is easier than the calculation for dinner. In this case definitely so. Boil potatoes and hard boil eggs, blanch green beans (i.e. boil until cooked but still crunchy) , drain tuna,  peel eggs, run all hot foods under cold water until cooled, toss all together, divide, serve , enjoy.

And as Julia Childs would have said "Bon appetite".

Links
www.bupa.com.au/health-and-wellness/tools-and-apps/tools-and-calculators/calorie-converter
calorieking.com.au  they also have an iphone app.
taste.com.au

I forgot to mention 2 other little cheats I have in my day. 200 ml of red wine 136 calories and 20 grams of dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa) 122 calories. That is 2 squares of Lindt chocolate (they only have 10 squares per block). A little tip to eating chocolate is to break off the portion you are eating and then put the block back in the kitchen where you won't see it every time you walk by. Eating 2 squares is easy, not eating the other 8 is hard, at first.