My rules for cheating day

There is some food, which I do not eat: sugar, sweets and juices from a shop, bread, meat and chicken, saturated fats (butter, sunflower oil), alcohol. In spite of that I enjoy every time when I eat! If I want something sweet I can always find a home-made replacement: mix bananas and cocoa in blender, make healthy candies with nuts, dried apricots or raisins, bake a banana bread or buckwheat flour muffins. Or I can just eat a fresh fruit. There are always some options.

But sometimes I do want to eat dessert in my favorite cafe.

So there are some rules, which provide harmony and balance between healthy diet and endorphin level:

1.      Choose one day in a week when you are going to let yourself eat food from your unhealthy list (that list may differ). It is better to choose a day off for that. Have a rest and enjoy a chocolate or an ice-cream, or chocolate ice-cream :).

If you eat a piece of chocolate every morning you should try to do it once a week. The taste of food from your forbidden list becomes richer and brighter if you eat it rarely. This fact was proved by me and my friends and relatives!

Fix the day you chose. In some nourishing programs it is called “cheating day”. It should be the same day every week. My choice is Saturday.

2.      Plan your cheating day in advance. If you don't, Saturday or Sunday can become a day of gluttony with heaviness in your stomach. You should enjoy your favorite sweets during this day.

If I want to eat some dessert during the week I make a promise to myself that I will slowly enjoy this dessert on Saturday. If I'm not in a mood and still want to eat it, I can replace it with home-made healthy sweets.

3.      Try to eat sweets and complex carbohydrates in the first half of your cheating day. You can have them on breakfast, lunch or as a bite. Even on cheating days I do not eat fruits or carbohydrates in the evening as they can quickly influence on fat accumulation. I always eat vegetables and fish or seafood in the evenings.

The main thing as always is balance. Having a cheating day, I don't hurry to eat a lot from my forbidden list. I am prolonging the pleasure. Usually I have some sweet dessert and coffee in the first part of day and some ice-cream later. Next week I can have a dark chocolate. Mostly I don't eat anything from that list. Just because I don't want to. I try to listen to myself and understand the true wishes of my body.

Dietary muffins

I don’t remember why and how I decided to cook dietary muffins this year. But recently I cook them quite often for our nice family weekends. I have tried different options of recipe. Firstly, I added a homemade cottage cheese, but I don’t eat dairy products for half a year now. So I created the different recipes and the taste is even much better. And now this is definitely dietary muffins without gluten, sugar, dairy products and butter.

Ingredients and proportions for six muffins:

• 2 small organic eggs + 1 egg white;
• 1 teaspoon of stevia (or teaspoon of honey);
• 1 teaspoon of cinnamon;
• 1 teaspoon of coconut oil;
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda;
• 4 tablespoons of buckwheat flour;
• 4 tablespoons of coconut or brown rice flour;
• 6 pieces of mashed dates;
•  2 mashed bananas with 1 teaspoon of organic cacao;
• dried apricots or raisins to your taste

I put dried apricots into hot water for 10 minutes. They swell up and the taste becomes very tender.

While dried apricots are soaking I'm mixing all the ingredients adding one after another. Then I put paste in baking cups filling them half and then bake for 20-25 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius.

I cooked such muffins several times. You'll have the tenderest taste if you add soaked apricots :)

One more nice option is to mash a carrot instead of dates with bananas and cacao.

Bon appetite!

Morning notes and fruit salad with cinnamon

Morning is my favorite time of the day. In the morning I love to do the most pleasant things: practice yoga, cook delicious breakfast, read a book, work out or just go for a walk. Recently I began to write morning notes. They say it helps to disclose the creativity. You wake up in the morning; you take a pen and write everything you have in your head (use a pen, not the keyboard or touch screen). The main thing is to write everything, even some funny and crazy thoughts!

This morning I wrote my notes and made bright fruit salad for breakfast.

Fruit salad (for two):

• 1 kiwi
• ½ pineapple
•  ¼ watermelon
• Cinnamon to your taste
• Home-made yoghurt or non-fat cottage cheese to your taste (optional)

Let this day be also bright and rich!

 

Breakfast: cottage cheese pancakes with strawberry

Recently I've cooked our favorite cottage cheese pancakes. That time I added more eggs and flour so portions were bigger than usual. I had them for breakfast and I wasn't hungry for several hours till lunch. Time of cooking: 10 minutes to prepare paste, 10 minutes for frying and making strawberry mix at the same time. Total: 20 minutes.

I always put the meal into the separate plates for each of us. We don't have additional plates or salad bowls with food on the table lest you want to eat more. In fact, a plate of food is quite enough to satiate the stomach.

The recipe of my pancakes:

• 2 small eggs;
• 2 small white eggs;
• 1 teaspoon of stevia;
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon;
• 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla;
• 3 spoons of rice flour;
• 3 spoons of coconut flour;
• 200 grams of cottage cheese.

I mixed all ingredients in a blender, then I fried pancakes in a pan with olive oil. At the same time I put washed strawberries in a blender, added one teaspoon of stevia and two spoons of coconut milk. Then I put three pancakes with strawberry "jam" in the middle of plate. I also put some berries to the pancakes and poured blended strawberries into the glasses to use it as a jam.

Bon appetite!

Healthy, sweet and energy snack

This Saturday night I decided to cook some healthy snacks to eat during the tomorrow’s journey. I chose one of the energy snacks, which are energy balls. I tasted them in Bali at Desa Seni resort. I was sitting outside after yoga, enjoying fresh air and sipping ginger tea. One ball supplies you with energy for two hours.

Recipes can differ but all of them include crushed nuts and dried fruits, sometimes honey, dried coconut and cottage cheese. The best thing is that you can cook them in 15 minutes, of course, if you have all the ingredients. For example I always have some almond flour at home.

I put 100 grams of raisins to the blender, then mixed it with the almond flour (about 100 grams) and added 3 teaspoons of honey. Then I rolled it up with my wet palms into bite-size balls and put an almond nut into the center of every ball. Then I rolled them in cacao and sesame and put into the fridge for the whole night.

The next morning we took them with us to our journey to Dalat, Vietnam. Energy balls can be an excellent snack before or after workout. Also you can use them as a healthy replacement for candies or as a dessert.