Quinoa, and other dietary diversions

[mellicious]

I am sitting here eating quinoa, which I have never had before in my life, to my knowledge. It's pretty good, really. Like rice with a little more body, or something. I cooked it (and almost scorched it) and then I didn't know what to do with it, so I just threw a little garlic butter in it. I'll have to look for some alternate uses for it. (I guess any recipe with rice would pretty much be a candidate.)

I tried it because it's on Weight Watcher's "filling foods" list, which is sort of a new thing they've come up with this year. I like it, because I am not good with the meal planning, but I can get down with "eat a lot of fruit" as the basis of a diet plan. - That's not all that's on the list, you understand, but I like fruit, generally, so that's the piece of it I gravitated to.

I couldn't find the whole list online, but here's the gist of it:

It's pretty similar to what used to be called the "core plan" except now it's not a separate plan, it's just a suggestion. Basically they encourage everybody to eat off this list - at least partially - because it's not only healthy, it's filling, see? (Which is true enough.) Don't be fooled by the vagueness of some of these categories - fruit and vegetables are pretty broad, but pasta and cereals, not so much. It only includes whole-wheat bread, brown rice, whole-grain cereals (and no sneaking in the kind with fruit or nuts, either**), and so forth. The soups have to be made out of other Filling Foods. The milk has to be skim, I think - and the only thing in the "snack" category is 94% fat-free popcorn, so I think they were being a bit misleading by even putting that on there, really.

Well, anyway, I haven't lost a bit of weight yet - probably because I'm still eating a lot of totally wrong things interspersed
with the Filling Foods - but I feel like I'm eating better, on the whole, and that's a start.


**That's not to say that WW is saying you can't eat the cereal with fruit and/or nuts, just that it's not in this list. I guess nuts, especially, are too high-calorie to be here. And a lot of those cereals with a lot of fruit and nuts also have honey and other sneaky calories added, I suspect. So you can eat them, you just gotta watch the points on them much more carefully.

Comments

[mellificent.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to try something different and see if I liked it, and it was on the list that I was discussing above. Barley was on there too and I think maybe one more grain that I don't usually eat - the quinoa was just the one that I found first! I do have the impression, though, that it's something that's relatively new in stores - in the last couple of years, at least.