Pasta! On a Diet!! Why not!

Hell yes, pasta is diet cool! (Just so long as you keep the total calories and carbohydrates in line on any given day, you can eat most anything you want to)! Really!

On an otherwise cold and dreary Sunday in February, I elected to mix things up a bit, diet-wise, and have myself some pasta for the midday meal! I was getting pretty bored with the rather bland lunches in the past and wanted to enjoy a steaming plate of Penne lisce along with some steamed broccoli, carrots and a slice garlic toast! The key to this meal-a-deal was to keep the amount of pasta at just 56 grams. Here was what I came up with:

As I saw that the actual weights of the carrots and broccoli were significantly less that what had been calculated in the dietary base, I toned the calories down to 380 and the carbs to 74 grams. With the total for this day being about 1500 and 140 grams respectively. That was well with in the dietary recommendation of institutes like the Mayo Clinic.

[Note that the Mayo Clinic recommended amounts are as follows: 'The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends that carbohydrates make up 45 to 65 percent of your total daily calories. So, if you get 2,000 calories a day, between 900 and 1,300 calories should be from carbohydrates. That translates to between 225 and 325 grams of carbohydrates a day.']

So on this day, it was no harm and no foul as I did get to enjoy a real change of pace lunchtime repast! Notes: The glass contained not wine, but rather some flavored water. I also used a butter and salt substitute.

The caloric low down on a serving of Spaghetti with meat sauce!

Whenever I set myself down to a plate of spaghetti with a meat sauce at lunchtime, I've often wondered just what the caloric impact is for a given serving!

Here are the averaged figures I came up with:

Spaghetti pasta = 3.6 cal per gram (based on using American Beauty spaghetti panel information)

Pasta meat sauce = 3.3 cal per gram (based on my research post)

So, the first task was for me to decide what size of a serving made any sense! As I have been on a diet for what seems forever, I'd long ago estimated that the average tri-meal caloric content I needed to hit was about 500. (That was an averaged figure that would work out to 1500 calories a day, leaving me a few hundred to use for snacks). Eighteen hundred calories was, in reality, a top limit for a male over the age of 60. At least for one who wanted to lose a few pounds a month.

OK, now assuming the meal would consist of only the pasta and sauce, I wondered what a 500 calorie deal would look like? OK. Let's assume I went for 100 grams of pasta. That would equate to 360 calories right there. Now, to be under that 500 mark, I could therefore apply about 40 grams of sauce (or 132 calories) for a grand total of 492 calories for the entire meal-a-deal! This seemed a livable portion. Note: One of the fun things to do on any diet is to cheat! (Something I do quite often)! I therefore added a slice of garlic toast and found myself in culinary heaven! what a great lunch! Then, I started to wonder about what I was going to have for dinner....

My new and modified Paleo Diet!

After giving the standard Paleo Diet a good go for the money, I've decided that a life without at least some dairy and bread products was just not for me.

Last December, I embarked on a new 'natural' diet aka the Paleo Diet that consisted of the kinds of foods that our long distant ancestors ate for a million or so years! It consisted of fresh meats, fish and poultry, vegetables and fruits. What was left out was practically everything else! No diary, no breads or pasties and definitely nothing out of a can or box wit the exception of frozen veggies. This life style did have one perk – it made a trip to the grocery store a breeze. However, I quickly found that eating fresh also translated into eating myself into the poor house! My grocery bills had skyrocketed and with other rising costs in my life (Obamacare), I quickly realized that I would have to either abandon or quickly modify this approach to healthy eating.

To that end, I decided to make do with a mixture of both approaches. That is, I would keep eating a lot of fruits and vegetables (assuming they were on sale), while also not shunning the occasional sandwich or glass of milk. Still on the 'severely limit' list were such items as processed meat and any of the canned goods that are mostly packed in salt.

So far, this modified approach seems to be working for me. As far as weight control, I learned long ago that it doesn't matter what you eat just so long as you control the amounts you eat! For instance, whenever I have stir fry or pasta (two of my favorites), I make sure to weigh them down to the gram to make sure they are fitting in with the overall number of calories that I can consume for the day. In my particular case, that's about 1600, assuming I also exercised on that day.