meal plan

I'm finally dieting. It's a weird combination of keto, OMAD (One Meal A Day), and caloric restriction. This means I'm back to meal planning, with my default being two Paris Baguette salads and two chicken breasts on days when I'm out of ideas for what to eat. I'm trying to keep the sugar down to a bare minimum, but as I occasionally did on the Newcastle diet, I'm allowing myself the occasional carb indulgence as long as I stay within strict caloric parameters (e.g., you may recall that I had the occasional Subway foot-long because the sandwich would total about 800 calories). Since I think 800 calories is insane and not sustainable beyond the Newcastle diet's allotted ten-week period, I'm going for 1,000 calories a day. Slower weight loss, but weight loss all the same.

What's on the menu? Glad you asked. I've got two salads that'll be paired with proteins this coming week: caprese and Greek-ish (no red onions—not because I hate red onions in Greek salad but because I currently can't find red onions in my local groceries). I'm currently cooking a creamy chicken-and-dumpling soup using my keto-Spätzle recipe to make dumplings plus leftovers from a chicken thing I'd done a while back. I've got fettuccine faux-Fredo on tap for next week as well, but the pasta will be the tofu pasta available in my downstairs grocery ("So wrong!" shout the Italians). I'm also making an indulgence: Middle Eastern chicken, which isn't keto at all with its carby figs and raisins and chickpeas and pistachios (among the worst nuts to eat on keto), but I'll be restricting my portions on the days I do eat this indulgence. I have a beautiful prepackaged steak that my grocery is selling as some sort of high-end product from Australia; I'll be pairing that with a side of peas (admittedly not very keto, either: peas are quite carby). I've also got desserts like strawberries with yogurt.

In addition, I'm going to do a dish I haven't done in a long time. I don't know what to call it, though it probably has a name. It's a combination of cubed tofu, thinly sliced shabu beef, chicken, shrimp, mushrooms, and broccoli. Most of it is stir-fried; it all gets lumped together and covered in a generic, American-style teriyaki sauce that no Asian anywhere will proudly claim as a sauce from his or her culture. The way to make this sauce normally involves a lot of carbs: the soy sauce itself is carby, and then there's the huge dump of brown sugar, plus a cornstarch slurry to give the sauce its distinctive texture. Instead of regular brown sugar for my sauce, I'll be using my Swerve brown sugar, which is mostly erythritol; instead of cornstarch, I'll be using what's called "perfected xanthan gum," which is like regular xanthan gum except that it doesn't lump up so much, and it's got a bit of a smoother texture. Xanthan gum is keto, but it's a common ingredient in plenty of non-diet items like Italian salad dressings: it allows oil and vinegar to mix into a smooth emulsion and not unmix. Its emulsifying/binding properties make it an ingredient in some keto breads.

Photos of everything I do will, of course, appear here. Let's start with a tantalizing shot of the creamy chicken soup in medias res:

There's the chicken about to be mixed in, and I haven't added the heavy cream yet. The soup doesn't look like much, but its main components started off as ingredients in a chicken stock I'd been making for a different dish. Once that stock got made, I had all these solids as leftovers—the mirepoix (a mix of carrots, onions, and celery), the little chicken drumettes, some bay leaves, and the usual herbs and seasonings (salt, pepper, thyme, etc.). So I plucked out the peppercorns and bay leaves, then used my stick blender to blend the vegetal solids (after separating out and breaking down the chicken, of course). The carrots dominated that purée, which is why the soup is carrot-colored. I had some liquid stock left over, so I combined the purée and the stock to make my soup base. I also ended up adding heavy cream late in the process. As I said, I plucked the flesh off the drumettes and ended up with a decent pile of chicken for this chicken soup; I tossed the chicken into the broth (the moment you see above), added the heavy cream as mentioned, then added in my keto dumplings, which came from my very versatile recipe for keto Spätzle (which you can also use to make ersatz gnocchi). The dumplings were fun to make; I initially made them way too big, having forgotten how much water they absorb. I ended up having to cut each dumpling into halves or quarters. No matter: the addition of the dumplings added a special something to the texture of the chicken soup which, despite its carroty color, tasted so amazingly chickeny that I gave in to temptation and ate a second bowl (thus pushing myself well over my 1,000-calorie limit for Saturday). A further sin is, of course, the carrots themselves: celery has almost no carbs, but carrots, like potatoes, come laden with carbs, making them mostly verboten on keto (although carrots, like onions, will pop up in extreme moderation on some keto recipes).

I made a huge batch of chickeny chicken soup that will probably be my Monday and Wednesday meals this coming week. Later today (Sunday), I'll make myself a portion of keto faux-Fredo plus a caprese (fresh basil needs to be used fairly quickly, especially for salads). Tuesday will likely be faux-Fredo with Greek-ish salad. Thursday is when I'll eat my first batch of Moroccan-inspired chicken; I'll eat more on Saturday. Friday might be my beef-shrimp-chicken-tofu thing described above (Omnibus Oriental? no one says "Oriental" anymore; it's un-PC). The beef will probably last me through the weekend.

I'll be checking my numbers regularly. Because I'm starting from way behind, I admit I might not want to reveal my early numbers. I backslid a lot last year, and my abscess-ridden toe has kept me from walking, so I've been deprived of a major opportunity to burn calories through exercise. But I'm starting to get back on the exercise wagon: staircase training and biking are my two best bets for right now (biking is great cardio, for the moment, because I suck at it). The route down to Bundang and back is perfect for biking, although I'm going to start small and bike only about 30 minutes, then move up to an hour, then up to two hours, etc., as a way to get my "sit bones" used to sitting on a bicycle seat for extended periods. I remember how my lone ride back in 2017 was excruciating: I rented a bike and rode almost all the way to the Paldang Bridge, about 4 km short of the Paldang Dam. When I got back, my crotch was in agony, and I walked like a bow-legged cowboy for a week. The round-trip distance was around 50 km—the longest I'd ridden at one go ever, and I hadn't ridden for over twenty years before getting on that rental bike.

We'll see how all this goes—the dieting, the exercising, etc. I want to get back to walking. If I bike for cardio during the week (thus keeping pressure off my toe), I think I can risk distance walking once a week, although there's a chance that every such walk will undo the week's healing. More later on how all of this is going.