Egg fast

Egg fast

 

If you follow my instagram or twitter you may well know that I have recently been following an egg fast diet. For those of you who don’t know what the diet is I first read about it on the ketogenic woman blog and also I breathe I’m hungry has also talked about it and put lots of recipes up which you can read. It seems pretty popular on instagram at the moment and is supposed to knock quite a bit of weight off in just three days and so I thought I’d give it a go!

 

The basics of the egg fast are as follow:

 

·        Eat between 6-12 eggs per day

·        For each egg you eat also have 1oz (approx 28g) of cheese (any full fat cheese)

·        For each egg also eat also have 1 tbsp of butter

·        Try and eat an egg meal every 3-5 hours

·        No eggs within 3 hours of bedtime

·        Drink plenty of water!

 

The diet seems to generally last 3 days though you can do it for a maximum of 5 days, and some people seem to follow it regularly for 3 days per week eating LCHF the rest of the time. Saying that after doing it the thought of doing it again every week seems a bit impossible to me at the moment, but I will perhaps feel a bit different next week!

 

From looking at people online it seems that people seem to lose anything between 5-10lbs in three days, typically gaining around 2lbs back the day after completing the diet.

 

My egg fast diet.

 

I documented everything that I ate while on it, which wasn’t hard as it wasn’t very much food, or not by my standards anyway! Hopefully this might help if you are thinking of going on the diet and can’t quite think what you’d eat. I will say though that the diet does feel very restrictive while you’re doing it, it is not easy and though I tried to make the food as good as I could there were some definite low points where I got so sick of eggs, also I had a couple of incidences of heartburn (which I’ve never had before and is absolutely horrible!) they were only very brief though thankfully! Without further ado, here is what I ate:

 

Day one

 

·        One three egg cheese omelette

·        A bowl of egg mayonnaise (2 eggs) with grated cheese

·        A boiled egg, a slice of avocado (I counted this as a portion of fat (!)) and some grated cheese

·        A boiled egg

 

Total for day one= 7 eggs and pretty definitely far more than 7 oz of cheese, largely because I had no idea how much 1oz of cheese (FYI its hardly anything!!) was and also because I was feeling very hungry and cheese seemed to satisfy that a bit better then eggs.

 

Day two

 

·        Four (greedy!) mini omelette/ egg muffins

·        A bowl of egg mayonnaise (two eggs) with grated cheese

·        1 mini mushroom and goats cheese frittata

·        About 10 peanuts

 

Total for day two= about 8 eggs, and probably around 8oz of cheese, I’m not completely sure because the mini frittata was shop bought from M&S so I couldn’t tell how many eggs or how much cheese was in it. As you can also see I slightly cheated with the peanuts, but again I counted these as a source of fat as I didn’t really have any butter though the frittata was quite oily. I also had some mushrooms in the frittata which I wasn’t meant to have but the frittata was small so I reasoned it would have only been about one mushroom in total as they were very small slices and mushrooms as mostly water anyway! Also the frittata had less than 6g of carbs and 200 calories in total anyway.

 

Day three

 

·        1 mini mushroom and goats cheese frittata not sure how many eggs were in this  

·        A bowl of egg mayonnaise (two eggs) with grated cheese

·        3 babybels

·        Two hard boiled eggs

 

Total for day three= about 6 eggs (as I'm guessing there were about 2 in the frittata)

 Day four

 

·        A bowl of egg mayonnaise (two eggs) with grated cheese

·        Two fried eggs with half a small avocado and some grated cheese

·        No crust 'cheesecake' made from cream cheese, egg and sweetener. 

 

Total for day four= about 4 eggs 

Weight loss

 

This is definitely the most interesting part for me!

 

Day two- I had lost 2lbs

Day three- I had lost 2 more lbs (4 in total)

Day four-I had lost 2 more lbs (6 in total)

Day five-I had still lost 2lbs so that's 6lbs in total!

I was so pleased with that loss as the diet really did get easier and though I had planned to only do three days when day four came I decided to stay on it because I was quite into it and my hunger had really reduced. I did mention heartburn above which I got briefly on day two but I didn't get that again. Also I was straight into ketosis on day two! 

I am now thinking that this will probably become one of my go to diets when I want to lose some weight fast and am also thinking of trying to do it regularly anyway for a couple of days per week to keep the weight going in the right direction. 

I'd love to hear how other people have got on with it! 

 

 

Packed lunches

I can see from my instagram and blog stats that the most popular posts still tend to be the ones around snacks and lunch ideas so thought I’d do a short post with the salads that I have recently been taking into work and how I made them. I work quite long days so it is always important for me to take in plenty of food for the daytime so that I can fill up and don’t get tempted by other food!

 

Anyway, without further ado, here is the last week or so of packed lunches:

 

1. Rocket, kale, yellow and green courgette/ zucchini ribbons, pesto, pine nuts and feta. Dressing: lemon, mint and basil.

 

This is a really easy salad to make, I didn’t cook the kale I just shredded it till it was really fine and then mixed it with the rocket. I cut the courgettes into ribbons and then briefly pan-fried them until they were soft and then added the pesto and pine nuts (which I had toasted previously). For the dressing, I just mixed two types of basil with lemon juice and a very small amount of olive oil. This salad really was good and I ended up having it for two days in a row and dinner one night!

 

2. Zoodles, samphire, tomatoes, peppers sunflower and pumpkin seeds.

Dressing: pesto.

 

This was basically leftover from my meal the night before and just consisted of zoodles mixed with pesto, then topped with samphire which I pan-fried quickly, and chopped tomatoes and peppers and lots of seeds. Really easy to do as I had most of it already from the previous evening so I just popped it in a box and added the seeds. You can read lots of my zoodles recipes here where there’s loads of ideas!

 

3. Kale, avocado, yellow pepper, cucumber, linseed and pomegranate.

Dressing: tamari and lemon

 

For this one I just popped the kale into a blender and let it process till it was very fine and then topped with chopped avocado and cucumber. I then sprinkled it with golden linseeds and pomegranate seeds and coated it with lemon juice then tamari  (I didn’t bother mixing them together first) and then mixed it all together. This is one of my favourite salads, it’s so refreshing!

 

4. Spinach, basil, rocket, courgette/zucchini and pomegranate.

Dressing: lemon, mint and basil.

 

This one was done in a huge rush so I basically just threw in everything that I had I the fridge and mixed it well together. The courgette was sliced with a julienne peeler into very fine ribbons and was served raw. I used about ¼ of a basil plant which made it so tasty. The dressing was done by crushing basil and mint leaves in a pestle and mortar and then mixing it with lemon juice and a very small amount of olive oil.

5. Quorn pieces, zoodles in tomato sauce, rocket and mixed lettuce, cauliflower ‘rice’, and pomegranates

 

This salad did not have a dressing on it as most of the components were already in a sauce or dressing of some description. As you can also probably tell from the mixture of things in the meal, it was made up of leftovers from the previous couple of days. Basically it was quorn which I pan-fried in some rapeseed oil with garlic, zoodles which were pan-fried briefly then mixed with a sundried tomato and pepper sauce, cauliflower which had been processed to the consistency of rice and then mixed with sour cream, grated cucumber and mint, all served on a bed of lettuce. Again really quick as I basically scooped up things that I already had in the fridge from previous meals.

 

I hope this helps and gives you some ideas, I never spend more than about 10-15 minutes making my lunches and they are so tasty and save lots of money!

 

 

3 ingredient, very low carb crackers

Hello!

 

Anyone who follows my instagram or twitter will know how excited I have been about these crackers, which are very low carb and only have three ingredients (sort of!), and are so so quick to make.

 

I always think on Atkins/ low carb diets, there are lots of sandwich filings/ cracker toppings that you can have but very little to put them on and this recipe seems to have solved that problem!

 

I say three ingredients though it is slightly more but I have closed mixed nuts as one ingredient because I bought a pot of mixed nuts and seeds and just poured them into the bowl, but it may be more ingredients if you choose to get lots of different nuts and seeds and mix them all together yourself. Whichever way you do it they’re still very very quick and easy to make!

 

You will need:

 

• 300g Mixednuts and seeds- I used a mixture of pistachios, cashews, peanuts, macadamia and sunflower and sesame seeds
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp cold stock, or you can use water for speed.

 

Method:

 

• Put the nuts and seeds into a blender and blitz until they are all broken up into a reasonable smooth mixture
• Transfer into a bowl
• Add the egg and water and mix well with a spoon until it forms a stiff dough
• Tip the mixture onto a sheet of greaseproof paper or a Teflon or silicone sheet
• Roll it out with a rolling pin, or press it down with a spoon until the mixture is thin and forms a reasonable square shape
• Put into the oven at 180 degrees for 10-15 minutes
• Remove from the oven and cut into the shapes that you want, and cut it into a mixture of long thin rectangles and smaller squares
• Leave to cool and harden completely.
• Enjoy!