After two weeks in phase 1, I have moved on to the more liberal version of the diet known as phase 2. In this phase, fruits and other healthy carbs like brown rice, whole grain bread and sweet potatoes can be reintroduced into the diet.  And more importantly for me, phase 2 allows wine consumption.
Surprisingly I was not really craving carbs after two weeks of almost no carbs. I got so used to phase 1, I could go on it for another two weeks easily, but I am not sure …

Yay, I did it! I have finished phase 1 successfully, with only very minor slips! Seattle got the biggest snow storm in more than a decade and we have been stuck at home since last Wednesday. I have to say this really helped me stay on my diet. As I mentioned before, South Beach Diet is easy to follow if you are preparing all the meals yourself, and this forced house arrest made sure that I got enough time to make all my meals. Also, I just realized that if …

I don’t even have an excuse for my tardiness this time! Can I use the acquisition of two new gadgets as the defense? Wii has been taking up a lot of my time and energy lately, it is totally cool and super-addictive. Also, I finally bought the iPhone and I am hooked!! For all the fellow iPhone owners out there, I have updated this site to be iPhone-friendly, so if you are stuck at an airport or something, feel free to browse around. Check the bottom of this post for …

I stopped doing the day-by-day posts, since it is is way too much work, who was I kidding anyway? I’ve been weighing in daily, and the weight has been coming down slowly but steadily.
First week went by relatively easily. It is definitely not a hard diet to keep up, if you are preparing all your meals. If you are eating out, it is kind of hard to find healthy choices. I started the week with preparing all the meals myself, but towards the end of the first …

Today the morning weigh-in showed only a 1/2 lb loss compared to a a whole pound each on the previous days.  But still it is going down, which is great news!  Today I had lunch and dinner outside, due to previous commitments. I was a really good girl, stuck with the program!
Lunch was at a Mexican restaurant. I ordered the chicken fajitas naked. Didn’t touch any of the sides except for a bit of guacamole and some lettuce salad. Most of the salad was under the refried beans, so …

This morning weigh in showed another lb drop! This is pretty good motivation to keep up with it! Now that I am having coffee, headaches have completely disappeared. I missed the morning snack today, since I was in back-to-back meetings till noon. So after breakfast, I directly went to lunch, but I had two snacks before lunch and dinner which makes it still 5 meals. Hope that is okay!
I was craving something spicy for dinner, so I made the Chicken Chili Fry using chicken breast instead of thighs as …

I woke up and weighed myself and I lost 1 lb in a day!! I know, I know, that is just normal fluctuations, but I sure was glad that it was fluctuating in the right direction. I started the day with a decaf like yesterday, but the headache started from the morning itself. After a particularly painful meeting after lunch, the headache got so bad, I was craving caffeine!
After I did a bit of research online, a lot of websites mentioned that two cups of coffee/tea a day …

After a day of pigging out, I started the day 1 of the diet. It started fine, but got really worse as the day went by. I had no idea first day was going to be like this! It wasn’t the diet that bothered me, food-wise it was pretty good! I was full the whole day, didn’t feel hungry at all. In fact I ate more than what I eat on a normal day, but divided into 5 meals. Normally I just have 2 meals per day.
It was the …

The diet starts tomorrow. I weighed myself today, and my BMI is 25!

BMI is meant to be used as a simple means of classifying sedentary (physically inactive) individuals with an average body composition. For these individuals, the current value settings are as follows:
a BMI of 18.5 to 25 may indicate optimal weight; a BMI lower than 18.5 suggests the person is underweight while a number above 25 may indicate the person is overweight; a BMI below 17.5 may indicate the person has anorexia or a related disorder; a number …

I haven’t been very active on this blog lately, one reason being that I’ve been writing another blog. I wanted to keep it private, since I was not sure whether I’d actually stick to it. Yes, I tried a diet for the first time in my life (if you don’t count the feeble attempt at the Cabbage soup diet that everyone was trying some years ago. That lasted just a day), and actually finished a successful Phase 1. So now I can safely share my experience with everyone. I know …

I love December! Everyone is in a jolly good mood all the time, not much’s happening at work, too many parties to go to, commute is pretty good most of the days and the streets are so colorful! I am avoiding the mall these days, which is where most of the ugliness of the season takes place. Just thinking about January makes me so sad! It was so hard to go back to work on Monday after the Thanksgiving week. So January will be even worse, after all the Christmas …

After a successful Banana Walnut Muffin experiment, I wanted to get a bit more creative on the baking front. This time I made a Banana Walnut Bread using pretty much the same recipe as the muffin, but substituted All Purpose Flour with Whole Wheat Pastry Flour and replaced most of the sugar with Maple Syrup.
Pure maple syrup is a good source of minerals,vitamins and amino acids and makes a great natural sweetener. You can substitute 1 cup of granulated sugar with 3/4th cups of maple syrup in recipes. Make sure …

Regular readers might know that I am not much of a baker. Actually, I don’t bake at all! Following a recipe to the exact measures is not something I can do very well. I always have to make some substitution or variation to make a recipe my own. Without having any basics in baking, I don’t have the know-how to make successful alterations, which makes it a very boring process. So I normally stay away from baking altogether.
Well, that changed last week when I had a week off, the first …

It’s been a while since a restaurant has really knocked my socks off, but this cozy little French/Spanish restaurant in Capitol Hill has managed to do just that! Olivar is owned by chef Philippe Thomelin who has worked at some notable local restaurants like Cascadia and Harvest Vine before. The interior is quite charming, though the Russian Murals on the wall really confused us. Apparently it is a historic building which was decorated by renowned Russian artist in 1931 so they kept the original decor on.
Though it is a tapas …

A gastropub is a pub that also serves gourmet fare, a few notches above your regular pub grub. Recently two new gastropubs opened in the Seattle area, I hope it is the start of a new fad. Great drinks and gourmet food served in a cool hip space is just my kind of fun!
Spur is in Belltown at the same location where Mistral used to be. They have completely revamped the space. The decor is very urban, it’s got that cool New York city bar vibe. Cocktails at Spur are …

Joule is a French Korean fusion restaurant owned by Rachel Yang and Seif Chirchi of Coupage, a terrific restaurant that went to the restaurant heaven along with several other Seattle eateries this year. I was pretty impressed with Coupage, as weird as it may sound the French Korean fusion really was a winning combo, so when I heard that the same owners started another restaurant with the same theme in Wallingford, we just had to try it.
It is a really small bistro kind of restaurant which had a good crowd, …

I have so many restaurants reviews in draft, I am using the Thanksgiving holidays to get as many of these reviews out before I completely forget about the experience, so this is going to be a restaurant review week here. We are going away on a short trip for a couple of days, so I won’t be able to reply to your comments, but I will be back with a recipe next week.
The reason why you haven’t seen many Indian restaurant reviews in this space is very simple – we …

Even though there is no shortage of fine food or shops in Seattle, we often drive to Canada to enjoy the range of food and shopping that Vancouver BC has to offer. There are a few favorite restaurants that we frequent, but we also try a new place every now and then. Bin 941 is not exactly a new restaurant, we’ve been there years ago, but somehow forgot about it over time. This time I was browsing through the complementary Vancouver magazine in our hotel room and saw that Bin …

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, but that is definitely not for the food. I just don’t get the fuss about turkey, it’s gotta be the most tasteless meat around in my opinion. I am sure there are others who will agree with me, if that’s not the case why don’t they serve turkey at any of the fine restaurants? We normally get out of town during thanksgiving, so I haven’t made many traditional thanksgiving dinners, but the few times I have, I always substituted turkey with chicken or …

Before getting into the food part of the past, I want to update you all on some geeky blog stuff. I recently upgraded the blogging platform to WordPress 2.7 and one of the cool new features is Threaded comments. Now you can reply to any comment on the site, your reply will show up directly below the original comment. A great feature for the comment space hijackers, you know who you are!
Also, some of you might have noticed the small images next to your names in the comments section here …