“On Wednesdays we wear pink,” Karen famously says on the movie Mean Girls. On Sundays I eat waffles. Well, I don’t eat them every Sunday, but I have an affinity for big weekend breakfasts, and since my entire food intake yesterday only amounted to 828 calories, I figured I could splurge a bit and make waffles for me and the grandkids.
As a vegan, I’m finding that the same thing is happening to me this time around as happened last time I was vegan, I’m having a hard time eating enough calories. We went for an hour, or so, hike yesterday, so I burned quite a few calories doing that, and I ate a big dinner, but vegetables and other plant-based foods, don’t have a lot of calories in them. I have added an avocado to each day, so I can get a good base of fat in my diet, and I eat beans and rice for complete proteins, but there just aren’t a lot of calories there. I ended yesterday with a net of 237 calories consumed, which isn’t amazing or sustainable.
Because I’m not used to cooking gluten-free, sugar-free, and vegan, I looked up a recipe for waffles. I’m not sure I adored the recipe (though it was really tasty) and will definitely tweak it in the future to make a more waffle-consistency batter. This batter was thick and made waffles that were fairly chewy in the middle. Delicious, but chewy. Both my granddaughter and I like our waffles a bit more crunchy than this recipe made them, but my grandson thought they were just divine. Tomorrow I will see if cooking the waffle in the oven for a few minutes, after it has been cooked in the waffle iron, to see if that will make it a bit crispier.
Anyway, I made a nice peach and orange juice compote to top my waffle with, so I could stay with my focus of not adding sugar to anything. I do realize that fruit and vegetables contain sugar. I get the basics of nutritional science, but my sugar-free is avoiding added sugars. That said, I am still staying under 30 grams of sugar (which is all sugar that naturally occurs in the food, no added sugar) pretty much every day. I have found no recommendation for the amount of naturally occurring sugar a person should eat, but I did find the recommendation that women should not eat over 25 grams of added sugar (for men it’s 37; why do they get 12 more grams?).
Since last Monday, so for 7 days now, I haven’t eaten any added sugar, wheat, or animal products. I’ve lost 6 pounds, and my itching is all but gone. I was a bit itchy when I got home last night, but I think it may been stress-related, because as soon as I started up Ken Burns’ Civil War and began to relax the itching subsided. Ken Burns, you are a magic man.
“On Sundays I eat waffles.”
Reason Breeds Insanity 