We're Cookin' Now!

Hello and welcome back! We are now several weeks into this quarantine due to the Coronavirus or Covid-19 pandemic. Most of us are doing the same thing, adhering to the stay-at-home orders, practicing social distancing and trying to keep ourselves entertained.

The one thing that I continue to hear from many of my friends and family is that they are eating at home more than they used to before the pandemic. Most say they are going grocery shopping and loading up on food so that they can cook at home and not frequent the grocery store so often; as to avoid other people.

Turns out, Marzz and I are in the same situation. We normally go to the store 2-3 times per week and just buy enough food for the next few days. Currently, we're trying to buy for at least a week, if not more. Our only restriction is the size of our refrigerator and cupboard space.

Now for the villain of the story...

OVER EATING!

As we sit here, working from home or searching, sometimes for over an hour for something to watch, we find ourselves snacking, munching on everything from fruit, crackers, to cookies and donuts. I never would have guessed that it would be so difficult to avoid the temptation of eating. And it's not just eating, but we have breakfast, lunch and dinner for our three meals per day; but then we inevitably snack in between those meals!

It is our own fault of course. We're the ones buying the snacks at the grocery store, or having it delivered and adding it to our take-out or delivery orders. It's like we suddenly can't live without sugary foods and salty snacks. It is ridiculous!

Fortunately we haven't gone too far overboard and at this point in time, we're very conscientious of what and how much we're eating. If this has happened to you, fear not, there is still a chance to correct it and come out of this pandemic healthy and not with an extra few pounds tacked on.

Our solution has been meal sizes. We are making sure we're getting back into portion sizes for individual items on our plates and overall for the meal. Focusing on high proteins and low sugar and low carb items; with the exception of vegetables which often have carbs, but due to their other nutritional value they make the cut. This is something we were previously doing, more so from about Sept 2017 - Oct 2019. Sometime around October or November of last year we really began getting off our diet and eating a lot more junk food. This was not a good start as we entered this pandemic.

As I mentioned, we are correcting things and eating much better and we can already feel the difference. Our proteins lately have been either chicken or ground beef. Our go-to meals are tacos, beef or chicken, spaghetti, which is high in carbs but we also add a lot of meat to it. We have also made meat loaf, a chip-less nachos with ground beef and substituting the tortilla chips for slices of bell peppers. Lemon pepper chicken and an orange chicken recipe that I have round out our meals. There may be a few others but those are our primary meals and so far, we have not grown bored of them.

To solve our snacking problem we've turned to having baby carrots around, banana chips, nuts, trail mix and some beef jerky. Of course the trail mix has some sugar and the beef jerky is a bit high in sodium, but again, overall still better than the many chips, cookies and other sweets we were eating.

So what have you been up to? Any special or fun recipes you've been making or trying out? Let us know by leaving a comment.

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Take care and best wishes!