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Monday, June 8, 2020

Low Calorie Density High Volume Dinner



















   There's this thing about food. Some people, meaning me, continue eating past the point where their stomach is full. It's as if the pressure sensors in the stomach have lost their ability to communicate with the brain. I have my own first hand experience with over eating and in my case it's not about a failure to sense my fullness. It's about my brain having the power to override my stomach, full or empty. I'm a stress over eater. When the stress levels increase, my ability to control myself decreases.
It helps to keep an accurate food journal. That way both your stomach and your eyes will team up on your brain to force some accountability into the feedback loop.
In light of this fact, I started blogging 6 years ago to keep a record of my thoughts, my recipes and to share my journey to improving health with approaches you can  use to overcome the challenges. There are a lot of challenges. One big one is finding foods that are not conventional salads yet fit the bill of being very low calorie density, high enough in volume to satisfy my bottomless pit of a stomach and still have the high nutrient density that qualifies it as a WFPBNO component of a healthy meal.
A quest on par with finding a unicorn eyelash in a field of 4 leaf clovers.
     Enter a food called "Healthy Noodles".  I stumbled across them one day at COSTCO in the refrigerated section near where they keep the guacamole. The main ingredient is soybean flour. A 4 oz serving is 25 calories. Compare that to a 2 oz serving of whole wheat spaghetti at 180 calories. That means I can eat a whole pound of these noodles and it's only 100 calories!!! The packs are each 8 oz which is supposed to be 2 servings, but I ate the whole pack, pictured above with a lot of veggies. So the noodles were 50 calories, 2 carrots (50 calories), 1 onion (28 calories), 3 stalks of celery (26 calories),  1 ear of corn (110 calories), 2 cloves of garlic (< 4 calories), 2 leafs of purple cabbage (22 calories), 1 T  date syrup (59 calories), 1 yellow bell pepper (44 calories), 1 cup of chopped kale (33 calories), 1 medium naval orange (69 calories). 
That makes 495 calories for 2 servings or 248 calories for 1 normal person serving. Its low calorie with high nutritional density and virtually no flavor of its own.  You make it just as delicious as you want with your favorite spices to make it savory with soy sauce, onion, peppers and garlic or with some vinegar, citrus fruit and date syrup to balance it out against every taste bud in your mouth. This is a serious amount of filling food for one meal, but its so low in calories you could add dessert with no guilt!