Nachos and Chili Free Day
The strange thing about waiting for our Nachos and Chili Free Day to roll around was that it seemed like it was taking forever to get here.
Yet, now that the day has finally arrived, it seems to be not that long ago that Lyann and I were eating our fettuccine alfredo and our chicken croissant sandwiches on our last free day back in March.
When you are waiting for a free day to arrive, the time drags by like molasses, but in reality, it takes no time at all for thirty days to go by. If only more people knew how easy it is to commit to a task such as eating healthily for a period of only 30 days in a row. There would be a lot more slim people walking around out there. You probably could not throw a rock without beaning one in the head.
Not that I am suggesting that we all start throwing rocks at thin people. Yet I challenge you to throw a rock (or maybe a snowball because it is softer) into a crowd today and try to hit a thin person. The odds are stacked heavily in favour of hitting someone who could stand to lose a few pounds.
Fortunately for us, free days are not about picking on fat people or about worrying about our weight. Our free days here at SaveYourSweat.com are focused on enjoying whatever foods you want in whatever quantity you want. A free day is a one day reward for having eaten healthily and in the proper proportion for the last thirty days in a row.
If you are good about sticking to your diet of lean meat, vegetables and fruit for thirty days in a row, then you have every right to participate in celebrating a free day without the need for feeling guilty about what you eat. You do not even have to count calories on free days. That is what makes them so much fun.
We really enjoyed our most recent free day, our Nachos and Chili Free Day. Lyann had been craving a big plate of my homemade nachos for quite some time. I had been craving chili. These two items seemed like a perfect compliment for each other, so the idea for this free day was born.
We had been planning on scaling back the size of our free day menu since celebrating our last free day on March 4, 2009. We had so much food available to us on our last two free days that we were not even able to try some of the items we picked up. We felt sick after eating so much and figured it would be a good idea to try something smaller.
How We Spent Our Free Day Morning
As usual, our free day morning started off with a nice cup of coffee. I can not think of too many days in our household that do not start out with a fresh pot of coffee. We have one of the best coffee makers you can buy in terms of value. A couple of years back, I invested $125.00 in the purchase of a Tim Hortons home brewer. Here is a picture of me on our free day morning, getting ready to enjoy a fresh cup of coffee from our home brewer:
You will notice a couple of things in the photo above. I am wearing my pajamas. I always wear my pajamas on our free days and I make no excuses for doing so. Our free days are supposed to be about relaxing and I feel very relaxed when wearing my pajamas around the house. Free Day for us is kind of like a grown-ups sleepover party. It just would not feel right if we had to get dressed. That would take all the fun out of the day.
Our coffee cups appear to say “Sweat.” They actually have our company logo on them and they are our favourite cups to use for our coffee. They read in full “Save Your Sweat™ – Permanent weight loss WITHOUT exercise.” They read thus because that is what our company is all about; teaching people to achieve permanent weight loss without exercise. Now, back to our home brewer.
This Tim Hortons home brewer is the best little coffee machine ever. It is actually made by Bunn, the leading manufacturer of restaurant grade coffee machines. This home brewer has a heating tank built in that makes preparing a fresh pot of coffee a snap. The holding tank is always full of hot water. All you have to do is put a fresh filter and your coffee grounds in the funnel and pour a pot of cold water into the top of the machine.
Close the cover where you add the cold water and the machine begins to brew. It only takes about three minutes to brew a full pot of coffee with this Tim Hortons home brewer. I barely have enough time to wash out and dry our coffee cups before the coffee finishes brewing. We use big coffee cups (each cup holds 500 ml or 2 cups of liquid) and we can still get four full cups of coffee from a fresh pot, with a little left over at the end.
Maybe your coffee cups are not as big as ours, but that just means that a full pot made from this Tim Hortons home brewer will last even longer in your home than it does in ours. Now, our machine is about five years old and the holding tank has begun to leak, but I only paid $125.00 for the machine in the first place. That means I have had my coffee in less than three minutes for a period of five years at a cost of only $25.00 per year.
That is definitely less than the cost of buying a lesser coffee maker each year only to have to wait forever for my coffee to brew and to have the poor sucker break down after all the abuse it would take in my house. Our coffee pot works as hard as a car that is always being started in sub-zero temperatures.
We need something that can hold up under pressure and our Tim Hortons home brewer does the job nicely. We do plan on buying either another model like we currently own, or we may upgrade to a higher-end model from Bunn that I plan on getting from one of my old acquaintances that works for Russell Food Equipment here in Halifax.
How We Spent The Rest Of Our Free Day
The last few times we celebrated our free days, we began eating first thing in the morning. This did not turn out to be a very good idea. Since we have followed a controlled calorie intake diet plan for so long now, we tend to fill up very quickly when eating foods that are not a part of our regular menu.
We found that we felt sick and got full way too fast the last couple of times that we dug into our free day foods too early in the day. We decided to make today more like our regular days where we only eat once per day and wait until later in the day to indulge in anything. This makes for a great sense of anticipation as supper time draws near.
Our main meal of the day was obviously our Nachos and Chili. I have made nachos at home for Lyann on multiple occasions and she can never get enough of them. She actually never liked nachos until she tried mine. I do not think I do anything that special when I make them, but they seem to go over well all the time.
We did not want to go through too much trouble when preparing our free day food this time around, so when it came time to decide what to do about our chili, we opted to buy a pre-made store brand instead of cooking a pot from scratch. Remember that this day is supposed to be about relaxation, not stress. Here is a picture of all of the components of our main meal for the day:
This is not a whole lot of groceries and was therefore not all that expensive. The only component of our nachos that is missing from this picture is the ground beef that I used. I did not think it was a good idea to put the raw ground beef too close to all of the other ingredients because of cross-contamination issues, let alone all of the beef industry problems lately.
I could have actually bought a lot less than what you see here since it was only Lyann and I participating in our free day celebration. My eyes tend to be too big for my belly when we head out to do our free day shopping trips. Such was the case this time around. I could have bought half as much of the chili, tortilla chips and cheese, yet still had more than enough to satisfy both of us.
In the picture above, we have Campbell’s Hot & Spicy Chunky Chili, Tostitos Restaurant Style Tortilla Chips, Sobey’s Our Compliments Louisiana Hot Sauce, Unico Sliced Ripe Black Olives, Sobey’s Our Compliments Pickled Hot Pepper Rings, Tostitos Hot Salsa, Farmers Restaurant Style Sour Cream, Kraft Tex Mex Cheese, Old El Paso Taco Seasoning, Tomatoes, Green Peppers and Onions.
The amount of food in the picture above is actually sufficient for making four giant plates of nachos and four 2-cup servings of chili. You might want to use less cheese than I do, but free day is about having as much as you want. I chose to use one entire 380 gram package of the Kraft Tex Mex Cheese between our two plates of nachos. That is a lot of cheese when you consider that we usually only have 30 grams of cheese in a day.
This is a meal that is quick to prepare because all you have to do is sauté the green peppers, onions and olives, brown the ground beef and then mix these items together with the taco seasoning and some water. Put a layer of nacho chips on a plate, pile on some of the meat mixture and some diced tomatoes and cover the whole lot with the shredded cheese. Then add a second layer if you like. Place the plates under the broiler in the oven to melt the cheese and brown it a bit. Here is how our nachos and chili looked once prepared:
You should definitely put your nachos under the broiler in your oven to melt the cheese rather than using the microwave to do so. If you put your nachos in the microwave, even for as little as three minutes, your chips will get soggy and it will be like eating mush when you sit down to your feast.
Using the oven broiler is much like the restaurant method of using a salamander unit to heat your food. The broiler in your oven generates a direct, dry heat that melts your cheese, browns it nicely and keeps your tortilla chips nice and crispy like they are supposed to be. It is much easier to eat a plate of nachos when the tortilla chips are still firm. I do not know why, but making them in the oven gives them a nicer flavour too.
Speaking of flavour, Lyann really enjoyed the two croissants you see in the picture above. I opted for regular dinner rolls from Sobeys to go with my chili, but Lyann loves her croissants. I tried to get her two of the butter croissants from Tim Horton’s, but she had to settle for one butter croissant and one cheese croissant. Notice that we made great use of our salsa and sour cream as condiments for our great-tasting nacho plates.
Our drink of choice for supper time was Coke Zero. We usually do not drink pop at all and never would drink regular pop due to the high sugar and calorie content. However, when we do feel like having a soda, Coke Zero is our usual choice, both for the zero calorie content and for the taste. We feel that this pop is the best option for people who want to keep their calories down yet retain the taste of regular pop.
Just in case you think we did not enjoy ourselves on this day, tell me if we look happy in the pictures below! We never seem to get many pictures with us actually in front of the food we plan to eat, so we took these ones on-purpose today.
Maybe someday I will get Lyann to snap a picture of me with an entire hot dog shoved in my mouth, just so there is some visual evidence that we actually eat all this food we show you. Or perhaps we can take turns talking on our videos while the other person stuffs their face while on camera. Regardless, here’s us getting ready to enjoy our meals:
I do not know if you can tell just how much bigger my plate of nachos is than the one that is sitting in front of Lyann, but there was a big difference. We both had problems finishing our meals though. It is really incredible just how much our appetites have shrunk since we made the decision to change our lives through diet over two years ago.
Lyann only made it halfway through her plate of nachos, but she did eat both of her croissants. She also made it about halfway through her bowl of chili. I managed to clear off almost my whole plate of nachos, which consisted of two layers of ingredients. I also put away about half of my bowl of chili (about a 1 cup serving) and I ate all of my dinner rolls.
Even though we only managed to each eat part of what we had set in front of us, we were stuffed. We brewed a fresh pot of coffee after we finished clearing up our supper dishes and gave our stomachs a chance to settle before pulling out the desserts that we had chosen for this free day.
Our Free Day Desserts
The last couple of times we have had free day celebrations, I have prepared our desserts from scratch. Since I like to have really rich homemade desserts that require a lot of chocolate, it can be quite expensive to prepare things in our kitchen. I decided to give myself a break from the stove and keep some cash in my wallet by agreeing with Lyann’s suggestion of getting doughnuts and Timbits (we call them sweetballs) from our local Tim Hortons coffee shop.
It was really inexpensive to get our desserts from Tim Hortons. I only paid just over ten dollars to get a dozen doughnuts and a 40-pack of Timbits. It is pretty sad that you can buy doughnuts for so cheap, yet good food like fresh vegetables is so expensive at the grocery store. Still, we like a good doughnut now and then. Here is a picture of all the desserts we bought for this free day:
I did forget to take the bag containing Lyann’s croissants out of the frame before I took this picture, but it does not really matter since everything is still in its packaging here. Never one to settle for minimalism, I just had to grab the two 4-packs of chocolate bars you see in the picture above when I was picking up the rest of the groceries for our free day. Why did I think we could make it through all of this stuff? I do not know.
I know that the picture above does not do too much for turning you on to having some Tim Hortons doughnuts or Timbits right now because you cannot see inside the packaging, but it was the only picture I had where the chocolate bars were included. I needed a group shot of all the desserts we chose for the day. Here are a couple of pictures of the actual Tim Hortons products that were hidden inside the packaging:
We each only like specific types of doughnuts, so the selection you see here may be somewhat limited in your eyes, but it was great for us. I picked up the old fashioned plain and chocolate coconut doughnuts for Lyann and I got the coconut cream filled and boston cream doughnuts for myself.
The plan changed later on when it came time to eat our doughnuts because Lyann actually favoured the coconut cream filled variety over the chocolate coconut kind. This was unusual because she usually does not like cream filled doughnuts, but since free day is supposed to be stress free, I put up no argument and dove into the Timbits you see below:
We got a variety pack of Timbits to share between us. I do not know how I expected that we would make it through a dozen doughnuts and 40 Timbits. Like I said earlier, my eyes get bigger than my belly on these free days of ours. We have become masters of freezing leftovers because the same thing seems to happen each time a free day passes. We always have a lot of food left over, even when we try not to overbuy.
We really enjoyed the desserts we were able to eat after struggling through our nachos and chili earlier in the evening though. I think I ate three doughnuts and maybe ten Timbits. We froze what we could not eat and will either offer it to company when they come over or will take that food out again on our next free day on May 5, 2009.
How This Free Day Affected Us
We were reminded once again this month of why we do not eat the foods we confine to our free days on a regular basis. Every time we go back to eating greasy, fatty processed and calorie-laden foods that we used to enjoy, even for just one day, our bodies get sick.
Our digestive systems get thrown all out of order and we usually get some serious cramps from all of the heavy foods we consume on our free days. We both felt really over-full after we finished our main meal, but made sure to partake of some of the desserts because we knew we would not have another chance to do so for an entire month.
We did not make it near as far through all of the good food we had bought as we would have liked to. It seems that each time a free day comes around, we are able to eat even less of the foods we used to eat all the time. I guess if you have to train your body not to like certain foods, it might as well be the ones that are bad for you.
If nothing else, at least this free day served to reinforce our knowledge that eating fresh, whole foods rather than processed foods is definitely the right way to stay lean and healthy.
Summary
Overall, this was a great free day. I learned that I am definitely more of a fan of waiting until later in the day before beginning to eat rather than starting first thing in the morning. I learned more about just how much my appetite has shrunk due to my diligence in keeping to a healthy diet for so long.
I lost weight by calorie counting and always knew that I would, but the appetite reduction came as a surprise and an added bonus that I did not have to work to obtain. I am glad that I can no longer pack away garbage food like I used to. I know that it was not doing my body any good, just like the Swanson Hungry Man TV Dinners I ate last month.
I think I had a mild case of scurvy when my gums were bleeding last month. If that is what substandard processed food does to the human body, then the major food manufacturers can keep it. I will stick to my regular diet of lean meats, vegetables and fruit whenever humanly possible. The only exceptions will be when I conduct my other four 30 day substandard food trials this year.
Once this year is over and my food trials have been completed, my focus will probably shift to another area of personal development and personal responsibility. For now though, you can join me over the next month as I complete my second 30 Days Of Healthy Meals food trial of the year. Stick around and get a look at yet 30 more ways that you can eat healthy, eat a lot and still lose weight.
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