Sometimes I Get Jealous...

I love eating the way that I eat. I love eating the foods that I eat. Eating this way has helped me gain energy, changed my body composition and allowed me to comfortably stop counting calories and worrying all the time about gaining weight.

How do I eat, you ask? Well, I try very hard to follow a Primal way of eating. I'm not strictly Paleo, but I do avoid grains, legumes and dairy* whenever possible. I use unsweetened almond milk in my coffee and I enjoy the occasional spoonful of peanut butter. I will eat special goodies made with wheat flour at family get-togethers, but for the most part I bake with almond meal and sweeten said baked goods with honey or maple syrup. No oats, spelt, amaranth, sorghum, barley, buckwheat or kasha for me.

That being said, sometimes I get a bit jealous when I go through my daily food blog rounds. Carrots 'N' Cake, KERF, Oh She Glows and The Edible Perspective (to name a few) are always creating amazing looking oatmeal or pancake breakfasts. Oatmeal and pancakes with nut butters, chia seeds and berries and coconut! Drool-worthy overnight oats. When I look that the pictures of these concoctions, I sometimes feel like I'm missing out. I want to put all of those delicious toppings on top of something, but I choose not to eat grains. Thus, a grainy base is out.

Last weekend, I gave in to my jealousy and created an almond meal pancake monster, which I topped with blueberries, almond butter and maple syrup. Totally hit the spot!

Monster Almond Meal Pancake

Ingredients:

1/4 cup almond meal
1 egg
1 tsp cinnamon
1Tbsp chia seeds
~2Tbsp shredded coconut
blueberries

I fried this puppy in coconut oil over medium heat until cooked through and browned on each side. Once finished cooking, I topped it with maple syrup, almond butter and additional blueberries.

This was going to be a single serving sized pancake, but it turned out to be gloriously dense and pretty gigantic, so M and I split it. It was everything I'd hoped it would be and more.

The primal way of eating works incredibly well for me. Not only do I feel and look healthier, I've also made huge gains in my workouts since switching away from the standard American diet. Eating this way, on top of my exercise routine, has given me the fitness results that I've always wanted...and I'm still improving everyday. A lot of that has to do with the way that I work out, but, they say, your body composition is 20% exercise and 80% diet.

I rarely crave grains, legumes or dairy and I don't really miss them either. Peanut butter is an exception: I do crave PB every now and then, but because my diet is pretty clean otherwise, I allow myself to give in to this craving (within reason). I eat so many vegetables and such a wide variety of vegetables that I never really want breads or baked goods.

* Okay, so lately I've been less than stellar with the avoiding of cheese. I really don't drink cow's milk, eat yogurt or consume any non-cheese dairy products. I try really hard to avoid cheese...but sometimes it sneaks into whatever I'm eating...mostly because other people put it there to sabotage me. Cheese is delicious, and I'm pretty sure it has addictive properties. I try to avoid it...really, I do.

An Extravagant Brunch

Last Saturday, I decided to make a delicious brunch. I was inspired by yet another gifty from IIN, gluten-free, wheat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free blueberry maple muffin mix from Purely Elizabeth.


All I needed to add was maple syrup (I used 1/2 of the recommended amount), olive oil, blueberries and vanilla. Easy-peasy. I stuck some blackberries in with the blueberries to make them a little more exotic and I thought about using coconut oil instead of olive oil, but I really wanted the brunch to be niiiiice, so I followed the recipe...

I popped the mini muffins into my ancient oven. (You can't really tell from this picture, but there are no numbers on the burner dials...they have two settings: inferno and gas leak).

The mini muffins came out perfectly!

Some glamour shots:

To round out our brunch, I made some scrambled eggs (two eggs, two whites each), and bacon, because, as we know, no brunch is complete without bacon! I also sliced up a peach I had lying around.

It was a protein packed, blueberry muffin-y brunch! The muffins were great: they had a very unique taste-- maybe it was the chia seeds and millet flour. I used to be some sort of muffin freak (I would eat a dunkin' donuts reduced fat blueberry muffin every morning before work in the olden days), and I really liked these! I'm not sure if I would buy the mix myself, but I definitely plan on using it as a model for my own healthy blueberry muffins.