The Bachelor Gets Health(ier)

Okay, so sitting around an office building all day, doing office work, and due to construction I can’t take the stairs for exercise. This has put a damper on my enjoying of delicious Bachelor foods, so how the heck have I managed to lose weight in all this?

Enh. Probably because of a reduction in processed sugars, and a consistent out of office curriculum.
Plus I’ve been packing lunches to work that are healthy and nutritious. Eeew. That doesn’t seem to fit does it? Healthy, easy to prepare, no dishes to care about. Hmmm, wait a minute, it might be … *gasp* good for me!

So, a while ago this started as just a penchant for some fingerfood, and snagging one of those little snack tray thingies with the slices of carrots, celery, tomatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, and a tub of Ranch Dip. These are sold in supermarkets now, and I like to think of them as ‘Lunchables for grown ups’ now if they just had meat!

So. I thought, how to make these, since I can get one of those little food tray thingys from the disposable inexpensive Tupperware section. Then I thought about how to get some jerky, since $5.99/pound would just suck, since any healthy bachelor knows this stuff is the best for a energy-packed snack.

Hello. Ebay?
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=ronco+food+dehydrator&category0=

Yep. You remember it. The Ronco Food Dehydrator, and all the ads, you saw because you were up late or early, or forgot to turn the television off and woke up with it talking into your head. Don’t worry. These things, there’s a jillion of them out there, and if you use one you get really good results. I particularly like to go and find random fruits and vegetables from the Asian supermarket and dry them down to dried up chunks. It’s always an experiment to see what will come out good, when it’s dried.

Mango, guava, pineapple bananas, sliced, cubed, dried, tossed in along with layers of … thin sliced beef/pork/chicken which is also available in the same supermarket, since those are a good place to grab stir-fry ingredients.
I marinate the meats and dry them according to whatever they are, and whatever they should be. When it’s deer & elk season this year I plan on doing the same with a good load of those, since I found one of the ’7 layer’ models.

Off to the store to get some granola, a good heaping bag of the crunchy kind. I mix about 1 part granola, 2 parts jerky (dried and cut into ½ inch squares /cubes to taste) 2 parts dried fruits, including the easiest of snack foods; raisins.
What’s that? My daily snack food / lunch food is trail mix?

Trail mix with MEAT.
Of course I also chop up celery and such, but I have to take those in daily, I can take in a week of my granola/jerky mix and leave it in my desk. The AC keeps the desk drawer somewhat above the melting point for chocolate (as has been found with stashes of Halloween candy / girl scout cookies, etc.) but I’d never think it cool enough to keep veggies.

So anyway, this mix has been keeping me away from going down and snagging the cheeseburger with fries & soda that I was getting for a while (when my weight was maintaining but I could add the stairs to my mix to get rid of it) … and now I’m also, since I’m nibbling on the small bits here and there, where most people would take ‘Smoke Breaks’ I’d be nibbling a handful of this snack mix to keep me on an even keel all day, blood sugar wise as well. Yeah I’m not diabetic, but it runs in the family so I learned to watch out for it, don’t want to develop it.
That and switching from soda to tea has saved a lot. I tossed together the math and tried to imagine ’30 teaspoons of sugar per liter of soda’ and I squinted at that really really hard.

I grabbed the next sports-bottle-sized fruit-juice from the Asian supermarket (on one of my trips) and after I’d emptied of it’s original contents, popped the label off (shrink wrap vs. razor blade is always a win for the razor) and ran two teabags in it. With lukewarm water that chilled to just below room temp, overnight it made some really good tea. I mean REALLY good caffeinated tea. About as strong as good coffee without the bitterness. And I added four teaspoons of raw sugar to that to sweeten it up a little. For a 2 liter bottle, 4 teaspoons of sugar, and it’s a 2 liter of coffee-equivalent energy drink. Zoom!
Trading calories around has allowed me to continue losing weight, continue having energy all day, and yet keep under my food budget and save for the two or three nights a week I’ll splurge and get myself some steak.