Written by Dr. Mark
This is one of our favorite meals on the Straight 60. Taco salad! Its pretty simple, take all your favorite taco ingredients and put them over a big bed of lettuce. Just be careful to make sure the salsa you use doesn’t have sugar added, and use it sparingly. For me this will take the place of my apple or berries for the day but its worth it.
We’ve been back at this for a little over a week now, and we’ve already brought back a few recipes that Amanda (my wife) and I had really loved on this diet that we hadn’t done since last being on this. Another dish we’ve grown to love is philly cheese steak stuffed peppers. Its very simple, take a green pepper, cut in half and clean out the seeds. Cook up some steak,cut into small chunks. Put a little cheese in the pepper, then the steak, then a little more cheese on the top. There’s not a lot of room in there, so go light with the cheese because the steak is the real winner of this dish. Then bake it until it looks good, cheese will be melted and pepper slightly cooked (I like it a bit crunchy still). Its delicious.
So this is just 2 of the amazing dishes we discovered while doing this diet. This is one of the great benefits besides the health aspect, it forced us to try new things and experiment. It was necessary for us, to not get bored, because salad every day can get boring quickly.
So if Straight 60 food is so awesome, how and why do people fall off, or revert back when its all over. It happened to me. I think it started with small compromises, which lead to bigger ones. But I think the ultimate reason these meals seemed to leave completely was simply convenience. Its somewhat unfortunate, but pretty much all of our meals that we loved so much on the Straight 60 required planning and work. Everything has to be made. For us, like I’ve said before, planning ahead is really necessary to make it work. So we’ve gotten back to planning out meals for the week. It really helps, and relieves daily stress of having to figure it out on the fly. It also gives me something to look forward to, so if I know Friday we’re having pizza (which we are this week 🙂 we’re going to try “meatza.” I’ll let everyone know how it turns out) I’m OK with eating just a salad Thursday night when I get home late. And then I’ll be OK fasting til lunch and only having a smoothie with Kale, Spinach, and coconut milk.
A few other dishes I can’t wait to have again, buffalo chicken lettuce wraps, vegetable lasagna, spaghetti squash, burgers over a salad, mashed “potatoes” (really cauliflower with a ton of Kerry Gold butter), not to mention desserts like chocolate almond butter cookies, homemade ice cream, and cheesecake. Hungry yet?
The point, the food on the Straight 60 is awesome. I know it can get boring quickly, or you have no idea what to make. I hope this will encourage you that there are a lot of options out there. You can even take recipes you love that aren’t approved and see how you can alter them to make them fit. Amanda found a lot of great ideas from just searching the web, pinterest specifically. Its a great place to start looking.
Eat well! -Dr. Mark