Protein “Ice Cream”

Over the past couple years, I’ve played around with tons of high-protein, low-carb substitutes for common recipes with great success. The biggest things I’ve figured out? 1) Most people don’t notice if things normally full of sugar have a little less total sweetness and 2) You can almost perfectly substitute sugar with some protein powder and honey/maple syrup/coconut nectar or other sweetener of your choice. The texture remains the same, the sweetness is a little less (see point #1), and it holds together roughly the same.

In the case of ice cream, however, you’re really just going for taste and a creamy texture with a little bit of granularity (normally from sugar). That makes things easier, and I’ve found that almost anything you can blend into a smoothie can be turned into a frozen treat with just a little bit of love and an ice cream maker. One of my favorites lately has been almond butter/banana ice cream. I make this smoothie all the time, but lately I’ve been freezing it up a few nights a week and just eating it like ice cream. It’s fantastic.

You’ll need:

1 scoop Banana Casein
1 scoop Chocolate Casein (or chocolate cake batter — I use natural chocolate)
1 scoop Vanilla casein (I use the natural kind)
1 scoop vanilla (or chocolate) whey — (again, the natural kind).
1 Banana
1 Spoonful of Almond butter (2 15mL tablespoons if you measure it exactly — kitchen spoons are not “tablespoons”)
1 Spoonful of flax seed (option)
2 TBSP Coconut milk or cream (half and half would probably work too)

Stick all that in a blender with the least amount of ice and water you can possibly use to fully blend the protein and everything together. Put it in your ice cream maker for about 20-30 minutes or until it resembles…ice cream. Eat it. It’s delicious. And for that, you’re getting:

105g protein
50g Carbs (10g from fiber)
30g fat
900 total calories

AKA — awesome! This recipe will either feed one hungry caveman or provide dessert for about 4 normal people. I’d say that this is probably “4 servings” for most people, keeping in mind that protein makes you full very fast. Compared to the nutrition profile of Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Butter Cup Ice cream, each serving has 20g more protein, 11g less fat, 10g less carbs (and added fiber), 12g less sugar, and 45 fewer calories. It stores pretty well, so feel free to eat it over a few days or halve the amounts if you don’t want to save some.

You can probably get by with fewer flavors of protein if you don’t keep a huge stock like I do. Two scoops of chocolate whey and two of banana casein OR two scoops of chocolate casein and two of banana whey would probably work just fine if you only want to buy two tubs of protein. Keep in mind that some of the protein powders I linked to do have Splenda (sucralose) in them, which I find to be disturbingly sweet in large quantities. I prefer to use the natural protein (with some stevia only) as much as possible to reduce that. If you don’t mind a little extra sweetness and artificial sweetner, you could definitely just use two scoops chocolate and two scoops banana.

One simple rule for lazy dieters

Don’t feel like cutting grains and other modern foods out of your diet? Not big on exercising? Can’t be bothered to cook a single meal yourself? No problem, I’ve got you covered.

This rule won’t provide many of the benefits that you’d get from eliminating modern foods from your diet, intermittently fasting, or strength training and exercising, but if you can absolutely do nothing else, do this one thing:

Every time you eat (or drink), consume more protein than carbs

Ask yourself: What’s the point of eating? At the most basic level, you eat calories to fuel bodily functions and to avoid starvation. Most of us aren’t faced with starvation and therefore don’t have to choose between chewing leaves and dying from lack of food. That being the case, I recommend viewing the consumption of protein as the primary biological purpose of eating. Consuming protein should be your goal, and everything else should just come along for the ride. In short: The purpose of eating is to consume protein.

Here’s the deal: Protein, Fat, Carbohydrate, and Alcohol are the 4 macro-nutrients that are likely to comprise your food. Of these, Carbohydrate and Alcohol are completely non-essential. While bourbon is delicious, you don’t need alcohol and your body can manufacture plenty of glucose (carbohydrate) via a neat process called gluconeogenesis (literally, new sugar creation) from the protein and fat you consume. You could, in theory, eat a zero-carb diet indefinitely and be fine. Fat is also essential, but only in limited amounts. You could get by on just protein for quite sometime. Even trace amounts of fat with your protein would allow you to survive for a very long time. I’m not recommending a starvation diet at all, I am just pointing out that protein is the one macro you can’t cut out and so protein consumption emerges as the major biological purpose of eating.

Not only is protein the most essential macronutrient, it’s also the most satiating. Fat mildly satiates the appetite and carbohydrate increases it. Taking fat out of the equation, you can think of carbohydrate like an appetite accelerator and protein like an appetite brake. The idea is that if you’re braking more than you’re accelerating, you will slow down. When you have carbs, you typically want more calories; there is a reason restaurants bring you bread before you order. Protein, on the other hand, fills you up fast and is all but impossible to overeat. Most people who don’t engage in heavy strength training have a tough time eating more than 100g of protein per day, which is about the amount found in 1.25 pounds (20oz) of meat or a dozen eggs. The USDA recommended daily allowance for protein is a mere ~50-60g for adults. Let’s say someone eats double the USDA recommended daily protein allowance, eating 120g of protein per day. If they followed my one rule above, let’s look at what their day could look like:

120g protein = 480 calories
120g carbohydrate = 480 calories
100g fat = 900 calories

For a total of 1860 calories — a perfectly reasonable amount of food for your average joe (or jane). In my experience, you’d be hard-pressed to find a non-athlete who would not get stuffed consuming 120g of protein per day. To the contrary, I have struggled to get people I’ve trained in the past (especially girls) to consume that much protein. Most people simply aren’t used to it and have no idea how filling it is. If you follow no other guideline, simply consume more protein than carbs anytime you ingest calories. You can get away with simply eating more protein than carbs and just ignoring fat because it’s also difficult to eat pure fat. Most fat comes along with protein and carbs so as long as you keep your protein intake higher than your carb intake you will most certainly keep fat low as well. I eat quite a bit of fat by most people’s standards (butter on steak, anyone?) and my fat intake is rarely more than 100g in a day.

Does following this rule require a little bit of work, in terms of getting to know what foods contain how much protein and carbs? Yeah, it does. But it’s easier than anything else you’re going to do diet-wise. This is as easy as it gets, and if you pay any attention whatsoever to what you put in your body you should get the hang of this in a week or two. If you’re doing serious strength training or engaged in heavy exercise, this will likely not work for you. If you are a typical gym-goer who just does some cardio and basic weight-training on machines and bosu balls, this would be fine as you aren’t doing enough to require more nutrients. For your average joe office worker, this would work fine and would definitely keep you out of trouble.

Just to cover a few examples:
-Soda: Not OK. Don’t even think about it. Diet soda is OK occasionally with food. Not by itself.
-A Sandwich/Sub: Anywhere from 20g to 60g of carbs. Good luck finding that much meat on a sandwich.
-Wraps with TONS of meat in them: probably a good substitute for above. You might get 40g of protein and only 20g of carbs.
-Pretzels/chips/nuts: If you have a small amount with a big piece of chicken or steak, sure. By themselves as a “snack”? Nope.

Most restaurants provide pitiful amounts of meat in their dishes. If you get something like a chicken Caesar salad, you will invariable have to request double chicken. Keep this in mind when ordering at restaurants and try to stick to whole cuts of meat with defined sizes (e.g 8oz chicken breast, 6oz pork chops) and vegetable/carb accompaniments to meet the rule.

Remember: the point of eating is to consume protein. If you aren’t eating protein, you shouldn’t be eating. If you make a point to always eat protein when you eat and then always eat more protein than carbs, you will keep yourself out of trouble. What about drinking? Stick to liquor and sometimes wine — stay away from beer and sugary mixed drinks. For aspiring professionals, Martin Berkhan has some good advice about how to get drunk, not fat.

Beef, Broccoli, and Caprese Salad

This was dinner the other night, using some of the ground grass-fed beef I wrote about earlier:

The ground beef came in packs that weigh about 1.25lbs each, and I stir-fried a whole pack along with a few cloves of garlic and a red onion. Once the beef was just about rare, I stir-fried about a pound of broccoli with some garlic and olive oil (regular, not extra virgin) in another pan. Broccoli only takes a few minutes to cook, so waiting til the beef is almost done (I was shooting for rare/medium rare) will have the broccoli finished at the same time as the rest of the food. I would have mixed them if I had a Wok. I also put half of an avocado on the side and sprinkled with some paprika.

While all this was going on, I made myself a caprese salad to snack on using some tomatoes, mozzarella, and some fresh basil from my basil plant. I added some dried basil and oregano on top as well as a small amount of extra virgin olive oil. I ate a few slices while cooking but you can see the remaining slices on my plate, not too far from my glass of shiraz. What you see in the picture is only about 3/4 of the beef, broccoli, and onions that I cooked. I saved the rest.

For breakfast the following morning, I fried up a few slices of uncured (preservative/additive free) bacon. Once the bacon was about half done, I added my leftovers to the pan. By the time the leftovers heated up, the bacon was done and I slid it all on to a plate, added the other half of last night’s avocado, and ate it all together with an apple on the side.

I got two meals for about 30 minutes of combined cooking and prepping effort, and the cost was about $5 for the beef, $2 for the broccoli, $1 for the onion/garlic, $1 for the avocado, $1 for the mozzarella and tomato combined, and maybe another $1 for the bacon and apple. I suppose the glass of wine was probably about a dollar or two as well. Not including all the “overhead” like olive oil, spices (paprika, pepper, etc) that averages to about $6 and 15 minutes per meal.

Ohh, so there’s the beef!

About two months ago, I ordered a quarter of grass-fed beef from a local free-range farm. The farm is family owned and the meat was hand-delivered to my house by the owner a month later. As I understand it, the cow roamed free in the pasture and lived a happy cow life, with all the cud it could chew and all the foxy female bovines it could get its hooves on. Once the cow had done all the partying it could do, it was humanely killed and then butchered into retail cuts and vacuum sealed.

How much beef is a quarter cow? About 130lbs, which takes up this much freezer space:

About 130lbs of grass-fed, free-range beef

I had to remove all my liquor and frozen fruit and veg from the freezer to make room for the initial haul.

Half of the amount was in the form of ground beef, and the other half was roasts and beef cuts. The average price was around $5.00 per pound, which is no more than typical grocery store prices for regular, corn or grain-fed beef. I sold off about a quarter of what I purchased pretty quick, and I’m slowly chipping away at the remaining amount. I expect it will last me til the end of fall semester, which makes it a pretty good investment.

Why grass-fed beef? Grass-fed beef offers a better fatty acid and nutrient profile than beef fed the products of agriculture. The meat tastes better, the fat has a different color and a better texture (it’s not slimy, but solid) and is better in every possible way. The animal was allowed to roam free rather than being kept in a small pen. This is better for the cow and better for the human consuming it, as the risk of E. coli contamination plummets when cows are not kept in close proximity to the feces of other cows. And morally, there is no reason to treat an animal inhumanely, especially if that animal is providing you with nutrition and sustenance. I eat a ton of meat and I buy free-range meat, eggs, and other animal products as much as possible. I’m of the mind that if an animal gives life so that I may have life, it deserves to be treated properly and live a happy, natural life.

If you’re interested in getting grass-fed meat or organic produce on your own, check out Eat Wild, a site which lists farms all over the country that provide “wild edibles”, with a focus on humane animal treatment, ecological sustainability, and organic foods.

I like my eggs like my elephants: poached!

I stumbled upon this NY times article via Dr. Eades’ website that gives instructions for a different way to cook eggs. The technique is something between scrambling and poaching and it results in some really fluffy, tasty eggs:

To make the eggs, you boil a small pot of water that is a few inches deep. While it’s boiling, scramble your eggs but do not add any salt or pepper or anything to the egg mixture. Even adding milk or water would probably make the mixture too thin to hold together in the water. Once boiling, add a little bit of salt and a splash of vinegar. Use a big spoon to stir your boiling water in order to create a whirlpool and then quickly pour your eggs into the center of the whirlpool. Cover the pot and wait for about 1-2 minutes [edit: I've experimented with this and about 60-90 seconds seems perfect, but you can keep them in longer if you prefer them firmer] then pour the eggs and water into a strainer to remove the water. It doesn’t take any longer than scrambling eggs normally and really is an easy thing to do. For this meal, I added some olive oil and red pepper flakes to the eggs and ate them with some bacon (preservative-free, of course), a tomato, some cilantro, and a couple melon slices.

If you’re curious, this meal would have about 650 calories, 45g of protein, 45g of fat, 22g of very low-glycemic carbohydrate, and about 2 grams of fiber. Of course this depends on how many eggs you use (I used 4) and your portions in general. If you feel compelled to add more fiber to this meal, try putting melon chunks in a bowl and topping with some flax seed, cinnamon, and nutmeg. I usually do that just because it tastes good, but I didn’t get around to it for this meal since I was trying to figure out how to properly scramble and poach an egg. Now, if I could get my hands on some elephant steaks and ivory utensils…

Two other things you can do with your chicken

I made these two chicken meals about a month or two ago and never got around to posting them. Chicken went on sale at the local grocery store – a very rare event – so I bought several pounds and grilled it all at once. I had to get creative with the leftovers over the next couple of days. The first meal was very well received by a couple of friends:

Chicken Broc & Guac

Chicken with broccoli and some tomato topped with guacamole – or “Chicken Broc and Guac” as it has come to be known. Guacamole is easy to make: find a very ripe avocado or two, mash, and add some crushed/minced garlic, tomato,onion, and chili pepper. Then add some lime juice, olive or coconut oil, black pepper, and some paprika and stir it up really well. You can use a food processor if you have one and it makes the process much easier, but it isn’t required. This is all done to taste, so there’s no secret to making good guacamole except to not dilute it with water or sour cream or god-knows-what-else restaurants put in their guacamole to make it awful. The broccoli in this meal was very briefly stir-fried along with some of the tomato that didn’t make it into the guacamole. There are about 650 calories, 60grams of protein, 34g of fat, 26g of carbs, and16g of fiber in the meal pictured and it was quite tasty.

The next day I used the leftover chicken alongside a green pepper, a few celery stalks, and another avocado for lunch:

Chicken & Greens – That’s paprika sprinkled on everything, in case you were wondering.

Almost the same nutrient profile here: 600 calories, 60g of protein, 30g of fat, 25g of carbs and 16g of fiber. I eat peppers and celery raw from time to time, but for this meal I stir fried them just enough to heat them up. I hate overcooked vegetables and I usually cook them just until warm.

Both meals here were very cheap: a couple of dollars for each meal’s portion of chicken, a dollar for each avocado, and maybe another dollar or two for broccoli, peppers, and tomatoes. I spent about 30 minutes cooking this food, but I got 2 meals out of it, so once again we have healthy $5 dollar meals that take fewer than 15 minutes to prepare. It doesn’t get much easier than this.