summerset

I use "Mühlenhack" - that's basically the only fake ground beef that's good tasting to me. It looks like already bakes ground beef, e. g. brownish and crumbly. The Garden Gourmet one has a realistic look (like raw ground beef) but it has "that typical taste" so to say and I didn't like it that much. I've seen a new brand lately that also sells fake ground beef and burgers, also looking like the raw version but haven't tried it so far. Maybe I'm going to get it and add it to some kind of casserole as a layer but for testing purposes I might simply make it into patties and fry it in the pan. I don't want to ruin a whole casserole with a taste I don't like.

Rest of the portion made a pita stuffing for tomorrow's lunch. Also a mixed salad with chick peas and a caesar dressing (cashew based with spice mix). Will also take some fruit with me. No idea how long tomorrow's working day will be.

Times are changing. A WFPB diet is more popular nowadays than it was several years ago. Plus, with too many patients not experiencing sufficient long term weight loss it's obvious that the "ideal post WLS nutrition" hasn't been invented so far.

Fake ground beef over rucola, shiitake, garden cress and some cucumber with cashew cream, eaten with a pita.

The more you see it as a "forbidden fruit", the more you're going to crave it.

The rest of the broccoli head will make a nice addition to a salad tomorrow. Slightly more entertaining: hazelnut protein mug cake. Unfortunately the top broke this time when I got it out of the cup. Tastes good though. Some chocolate sauce for decoration purposes.

Steamed broccoli with sweet & sour sauce. Boring, I know.

Almost everyone who's on a diet (especially a low calorie one) will experience this sooner or later, usually rather sooner than later. You're depriving yourself of the foods you like a lot and it's pretty normal that you're craving them. Expecting not to miss or crave foods you like and used to eat will just set you up for frustration.

That's all what these kind of comparison charts are doing: making people anxious.

Maybe I missed something but they don't seem to take height and therefore BMI into consideration? Interesting.

This will make a nice pita stuffing. I had leftover sandwich from lunch so I didn't open the pita package. Next time.

I had some salad greens that had to go. I was in the mood for something warm though and simply mixed the greens in. The greens wilted nicely. Tasted quite good.

My cheesecake.

Seitan sandwiches for lunch tomorrow. Insane amount of protein in seitan. New product from Kato. Will definitely be a keeper. Rubbed the seitan in two different spice mixes and fried it in the pan with some oil. Both taste good. Bad pic of one of the sandwiches plus bad pic of ugly cheesecake still in the bowl.

I tried a blueberry/lemon version of the microwave "cheesecake". I used a bit less protein powder this time and made the "dough" sweeter because it seemed to have lost some of its sweetness. I'm also going to let it get really cool before getting it out of the bowl before putting it in the fridge. Curious how it'll work out this time. I'm going to try the original recipe in the oven as soon as my egg replacer arrives. Maybe I'm going to add some frozen raspberries as a variation suggests.

Toasted sandwiches with smoked trout.

First attempt of a microwaved vegan protein cheesecake. Yeah... well... not that bad, lol. Needs some tweaking (or buying all necessary ingredients and actually following the recipe).

Leftover pasta with fake chicken schnitzel cut into strips, mixed with vegetables and sweet & sour sauce. Didn't get to eat my lunch today because stress which was leftovers from yesterday's meal. Hopefully it will last until tomorrow.

Vegan bolo with some vegetables and black bean spaghetti. Insane amount of protein.

For what it's worth: Effects of nonnutritive sweeteners on body weight and BMI in diverse clinical contexts: Systematic review and meta‐analysis

Yes. I think WLS makes maintaining weight possible for many patients. How hard or easy maintenance is for you personally depends on quite a few things that have a major impact on maintenance. - genetics (e. g. how fast your metabolism will be post-surgery or how much hunger pangs you're going to have) - post-surgery food preferences (your real preferences) - post-surgery preferred lifestyle (again, your real preference)

While artificial sweeteners are not exactly a health food (I try to stay with stevia and erythrith, the occasional sucralose in protein shakes), this whole insulin thing seems to be way overblown. In the end it's always CICO. Try to get the basic things right first, the fine tuning is for later. Don't make things too complicated, at least not in the beginning. A nice summary on artificial sweeteners and insulin levels if "insulin" is a major concern for you: https://www.zerofasting.com/which-sweeteners-break-your-fast/

I think that's a very important thing to say: "if you want to..." (put the ongoing effort into it forever). I have decided that I don't want to. Would I like to weigh 3 or 4 kg less? Sure, I'd like to. I'd like my muscles, veins and tendons to show more. But I'm not willing to put the effort into it when I can maintain BMI of 23 without having to go out of my own way to do so. I'm going to take what additional benefit plastics have to offer and then it'll be alright. On a side note: it's quite interesting how much more effort and vigilance one might have to put into this whole food/diet/exercise/weight thing to maintain a weight that's just a little bit lower. To me it's not worth it but someone else's opinion will for sure vary.

Unlike many others on this board I absolutely abhor the "abstinence forever, never again" approach with a passion because in too many cases it leads to the exact same problem that made you gain back 160 lbs. People start bingeing on the "forbidden foods" they denied themselves for a long time. That's not unusual and it happened after the diets we used to put ourselves through before WLS. I personally think it's a huge mistake of treatment teams to hammer the "abstinence forever, never again" mantra into the heads of their patients instead of steering them into the direction to learn to handle these foods in a sensible way because most patients will sooner or later try these "forbidden foods". They're tasty, they are maybe old favorites and (maybe that is the worst trigger) your environment views them as normal foods that can be eaten without feeling like a sinner that has fallen from grace. So now that the damage is done it's of course a huge and bitter pill to swallow. However, you now know that the approach you tried before didn't work for you. So you can do different and better this time. Yes, you need to cut down on calories but instead of denying yourself all the foods you like, incorporate them within reasonable amounts. Read about "normal eating" (the books of e. g. Geneen Roth or Karen Koenig have a lot to offer), it can help tremendously with emotional eating or strong food cravings. Do you still have restriction? If so, you still have something to work with and while the road ahead is a long one you can still make your way to a substantial amount of weight loss - but maybe you want to choose a slightly different road this time since the road you travelled before got you back to your starting point in the end, running around in a painful circle.