No ingredients are necessarily off the menu in a T*** approach to food. Variety is a simple way of taking in as many different and essential nutrients as possible. Some ingredients should be used sparingly though, due to, for example, their high saturated fat content or the significant impact an ingredient can have on blood sugar levels. You will therefore find many ingredients in this series that would traditionally be excluded in particular diet philosophies. Remember that eating like a T*** is a way of life, and excluding anything altogether is counterproductive to that!
Serving Sizes
The serving sizes for all recipes are for individual portions, which are purposefully small. This allows those that want to spread their meals over more than 3 sittings to do so easily, without having to enter into complicated maths. Likewise, if your time is much more limited, it is possible to double particular meals to fit all of your dietary requirements into 3 meals.
Protein levels are intentionally higher than most governments’ recommended values. Current research suggests that these levels (10-15% of total calorie intake) may be adequate to ensure that the average person doesn’t lose any muscle mass, but it is likely to be insufficient for building muscle mass or even maintaining muscle mass in very active people.
If you do not live a particularly active life or suffer from a medical condition that requires a limited protein intake, you will have to adapt the recipes accordingly. In order to stay within reasonable limits of saturated fat intake, the protein in the recipes is obtained from a variety of sources, including non-animal sources.
You Call it Dinner, I Call it Breakfast
Although the recipes are grouped according to meal times, there are many dishes that could be eaten at alternative times too. Asparagus and poached eggs are equally nice for breakfast as they are as a starter; a chocolate brownie is a great mid-afternoon snack on its own or, served with some blackberry coulis, it makes a posh dessert; and in Asia, for example, noodle soup is regular breakfast fare. Don’t be restricted by the bounds of your culture or the groupings of recipes in this book. If it is wholesome, tasty and you fancy it, then go ahead and eat it!
Combine Recipes into Nutritious Day Plans
The individual make-up of the dishes varies considerably and you can plan particular meals according to your personal routine. A high protein, high GL breakfast is probably more interesting to you after a heavy weight training session in the morning, whereas a high fiber, slow-energy releasing breakfast is possibly a more useful choice for days when you know that you won’t get even a snack in until lunchtime comes around. If you are particularly inactive in the evenings – and your personal situation allows it – you might choose to have your most calorific meal at lunch and have only a light snack in the evenings.
Over the coming weeks, I will publish some examples on how to combine the Food For T***s recipes into Day Plans that provide the perfect mix of nutrition and joy, for different occasions.
The recipes in this series are easy and quick to make and require no advanced cooking skills. Superfast chopping skills are really cool of course, but in actual fact it is often not the speed at which you work that determines how fast you can put a meal together, but how you organise yourself. If you find that the recipes take you a long time to prepare, have a read through this article for some hints and tips on speeding things up.
Happy cooking and bon appetit!