More diet tips

As far as recipes go, the "meat and potatoes" routine works well.

Pork chops, rice-a-roni, tossed salad without tomatoes, honey mustard dressing, and milk. The whole family will eat it and I don’t have to make anything "special" just for me.

You can also have tacos using Old El Paso taco seasoning. Just no hot sauce or tomatoes on *your* taco.

Homemade stew if you don’t use bullion cubes, 

fish and rice,

shake and bake chicken with stove top stuffing,

beef stroganoff still tastes good without the tomato paste,

try alfredo sauce on your spaghetti (it’s just a cheese sauce), ham and cheese on rolls home made pizza without sauce (my son likes it better that way anyway)

if you can find hot dogs without msg or soy products -

hot dog roll ups or macaroni and cheese with hot dogs

toasted cheese sandwiches with home made soup

home made chicken pot pie

mashed potatoes with chicken gravy

Another favorite is "Hawaiian Haystack". Pile and layer the following into a stack:

Cooked rice, small pieces of cooked chicken, warm gravy, grated cheddar cheese, chopped raw onions, chopped raw celery, and pineapple tidbits.

Some variations include crunchy chow mein noodles on the bottom, and for those who can handle coconut, sprinkle a little coconut on the top. I personally don’t do well with the coconut, but it’s laid out buffet style for my family to take what they like, including tomatoes, and I just skip the stuff I don’t want or can’t have.

All the fast food restaurants make it tough by putting soy flour in their buns and using soybean oil to cook their chicken. But I found a web site that has "copy cat" recipes of their stuff, so you could make your favorite stuff at home, including Kentucky Fried Chicken, and just don’t add what you can’t have.

http://www.kitchenlink.com/copycat.html   ##

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One of the toughest parts about the diet for me (initially) was that I ate out quite a bit and I lived off of fast foods. I live in California and discovered a great market called Trader Joe’s - I don’t know your geographic location but you can look up Trader Joe’s on the Web and maybe find one near you. This particular store sells some pre-packaged stuff but is very conscious about the overall health value of all that it sells. This means that most foods have little to no sugars, no eggs. Almost everything is natural. Because I still tend to eat on the fly being able to nuke a beanless burrito or the like and know that I’m not going to be ingesting s trigger food is a great help. I just want to add my personal testimony once more abou the immense value of this diet. I have a head full of hair. It’s not as long as I would like but it is as thick as a sheep’s you know what - a place I have not been in many years.

I eat lots of fresh veggies and fruit which originally was a drag and seemed boring but now my body craves the good stuff and I have lost weight steadily with no effort. Amanda mentioned looking at the diet the way a diabetic has to look at their diet. It’s a life saving necessity.

That advice has helped me to stay the course when I desperately crave a SNICKERS!!!

Kim W.

*There is a brand of fruit juice (100% juice) that I drink daily and
have no trouble with. The two flavors are Northland cranberry peach and
Northland cranberry raspberry. The peach one tastes remarkably like a
peach Jolly Rancher candy except that it is actually good for you. The
stuff is pricey ($3.79 a bottle) but I justify it by thinking of all the
things I am not buying by being on the JK diet. Besides, how can one
put a price on health? Without your health, you have nothing.

Yes, you should be able to make pancakes with just the white. I am an
avid baker and have experimented with my recipes to cut the yolks out
since I found the JK diet works for me. As a general rule, I have found
that substituting two whites where one would use a whole egg gives great
results. Also, you can use fruit juices in recipes to take the place of
sugar. With the pancakes, one thing you need to watch for is soy
products. If you are using a pancake mix, it will certainly have soy in
it. I spent twenty minutes in the grocery store looking for a pancake
mix without soy. I read every ingredient on every label. No mix
existed that did not have soy in some form. I mention this because soy
is my worst trigger, and it unfortunately is in darn near everything.
You really have to watch for it.

Having spent a fair portion of my time reading ingredients lists over
the past few months, here are a few products I have found to be yolk as
well as soy free. They also taste great, and are easy to prepare:

Michael Angelo's Fettucine Alfredo
Michael Angelo's Vegetable Lasagna
Annie's pasta side dishes (http://www.annies.com )   ##
Ronzoni pastas
Barilla pastas
*Orowheat Oatnut 3 Seed Bread
*many Lawry's seasoning packets (for help with quick dinners)
*Great Grains Toasted Pecan cereal

The health food store was a good suggestion. Some metropolitan areas have
the large stores like Fresh Fields; you might be able to enlist the store
manager as well in looking for non-soy products for you, although ...
many vegetarians use soy as a substitute protein, so be aware of that,
please.

I'd also suggest trying natural foods stores and/or co-ops. Again, be
careful of the vegetarian-oriented foods. A co-op might be the ideal
place, if you can find one; many of them stock natural foods and health
foods, and since they are co-ops, you could become an active member and
even be able to help order things without soy.

when you are craving something sweet have some sugar free jello w/ Lite Cool Whip on it. It's sweet, tastes great, you can pick your flavor and...it's
cools us down in this 80 degree So. Fla. winter! There are sugar free cookies at Publix which my daughter says are pretty good. Also, speak with your Dr. about craving sugar - it may be related to your insulin/serotonin level.