where the moon shines

Bad Carb Weekend

I just had one. A bad carb weekend. I’ve stuffed my body full of bad carbs. White rice, and pasta. Ugh.

Winging it with a pseudo-South Beach Diet isn’t working for me. I really need a meal plan, and I should go grocery shopping for the kind of food that should surround me. I’d been eating rice with my meals (just a few spoonfuls, but it’s still rice) and I’ve had a few bowls of elbow macaroni pasta. Hay. The family can’t be blamed really, it is not their responsibility that they make all these bad carbs available. No one forced me to eat those. Haha.

It seems that being in the office, or out at the mall, makes it easier to eat healthy. Odd, but true. I’ve always imagined that being outside would mean exposing myself to temptation, but I guess it’s been awesome that there are just a lot of alternative eating places now that offers healthier alternatives. There are the sandwiches as Starbucks on whole wheat bread, the salads at Gram’s too. And recently, a new store opened at The Loop: Refresher’s

This store is green! They have packed greens and you choose what dressing goes with it (included in the price, unless you choose a premium dressing). If you want more than just greens, they have a nice selection of ingredients like egg, cheese, ham, etc. I get a very filling pack of yummy salad here for 90 pesos. If I wanted to save a little, I’d limit myself to only two extra ingredients.

So let’s back up, you pick a pack of greens, choose your toppings, choose the dressing. Then the staff tosses them all together for you.

You can then enjoy your salad at The Loop, or bring it home. I wonder though if the greens would wilt if I take one around lunch time but eat it at night? Hmm. They also have set salads, meaning they’ve chosen the topping already. There’s nicoise, weight watchers (or something), among others. I tried the tuna nicoise once and it had olives and peas in it which I don’t normally add to my salads. It was good.

They also sell salad dressing in bottles, and some sandwich spreads too. No added preservatives. They have coffee grounds too, some veggie chips, and potted herbs.

Last week, I walked from the office to the Digiprint outlet in Morato (I had a roll of film processed, see my Lomo and Toy Camera Photography post for the results). It wasn’t really that far, but because I was wearing my high heels (the same one I put on at Mayeen’s wedding), I felt that I needed to take a break at this nice place, HalfMoon Cafe. I noticed a long time ago that they seemed to have merged with the breakfast place I Have Two Eggs, but we hadn’t been there in a long time, years really. Since I needed to lay off my feet for a while and my stomach was grumbling, I went in.

It turned out to be a very good decision, I had found another place to satisfy my salad cravings.

This salad is really good! It had strips of beef tapa, eggs, croutons, mangoes that weren’t sour, tomatoes and greens. The house dressing was good too. I had coffee, and I proudly shunned from the chocolate bibingcrepe in the menu. haha!

I think it’s wonderful that more and more places are offering Halo or Splenda without one having to ask for it. Is it more expensive for coffee shops to stock on this sugar substitute than refined sugar? I guess so. It’s sad though because outside HalfMoon it says that they have Roti bread. When I asked the waiter, he said that because they’re merging with the other restaurant, the asian café offerings were no longer available. What’s left is only the bibingcrepes. Oh, those are sinful!

Anyway, as soon as I stepped out of HalfMoon, I felt my feet start to hurt again. There were tricycles just across the road waiting to take me to where I was going but I was determined to walk my way to Morato circle. I didn’t stop to eat and then just give up, did I? So I made the trip and took a couple of snapshots using Pinky. I hope the shot of the boy scouts’ memorial comes out good.

Okay, here are the last food photos for today. This is from our last meal at Kenny Roger’s Roasters at SM North:

Healthy, no? But, I’ll have to confess that we couldn’t resist the new desserts that the waitress was offering. I just had to try their new pannacotta and crème brûlée!

It was my first time to try crème brûlée, it’s a lot like leche flan pala but less sweet, and with the torched sugar on top. Incidentally, P-Dub published her crème brûlée recipe on PW Cooks. You have to go checkout that recipe, you’d know why I so want to make crème brûlée! I don’t care about having to do SBD phase one all over again if it means I can make this and have it too before the strict phase. Haha Go see the recipe!

Posted in: Food, Health - Losing Weight

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Food, Health - Losing Weight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.