Green, Eggs, and Ham (and Pineapple!) Breakfast Casserole

I don't love eggs  in the morning. I am not unlike the Dr. Seuss character who just will not eat green eggs and ham. I will not eat them Sam, I am! But they are so healthy and a great source of protein, I've been figuring out ways I can eat them without any aversions issues. I've always liked german pancakes and breakfast casseroles so I started to experiment with breakfast casseroles that were whole30 compliant. I tried one in the crock pot and it turned out okay. This one though I did in the oven, and I just love it. It is delicious. The flavors are inspired by Hawaiian pineapple pizza and it turned out amazing.

Green, Eggs, and Ham (and Pineapple!) Breakfast Casserole

1-2 Tb coconut oil, basically enough to grease the pan
8 eggs
1/2 lb deli ham sliced thick, cut into bite-sized chunks- I asked for a half pound chuck at the counter
1/2 cup coconut milk
1 cup or 1/2 can pineapple, drained--I used tidbits-crushed might also be good
1 medium sized sweet potato, shredded
1 onion, shredded or processed small
3-4 cups greens, I used baby kale and baby spinach-chop them if you use the larger ones
1/4 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
2 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9x13 baking dish with coconut oil, set aside. Crack eggs into a large bowl and whisk to combine. Add coconut milk and whisk. Add remaining ingredients (except shredded coconut) and stir to combine. Pour into baking dish. Add shredded coconut on top. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for about 20-25 minutes. Remove foil, rotate pan and bake for an additional 10 minutes or until the center is set. Remove from oven and allow to cool enough to consume!

It is so delicious! The sweet pineapple and the salty ham mesh together perfectly. The eggs have a nice creamy texture and the coconut on top is just the perfect finishing touch! I ate this for 6 days in a row and it was delicious every single time and I didn't even add ketchup! I will say by the 5th and 6th days--not as good as the first few, but still delicious. I know it sounds weird, but trust me on this one. If Sam, I am had been offering this, no one could resist!

Notes:
I used a grater to shred the sweet potato, but you could just a food processor to make it easier.

For optimal health use pastured eggs and pastured pork. I used organic deli meat from Wegman's--A little more expensive, but your health is worth it!

Next time I think I might puree the eggs with the coconut milk and the greens. My baby had a hard time eating the greens whole even though they were cooked and would do better with them pureed I think. Also it would make the eggs really green!

Reading accompaniment: Green Eggs and Ham, By Dr. Seuss

Day 14 Whole30

Although I had hoped to do more updates throughout this journey, I thought it would be nice to do a half-way update with supposedly the 'worst' behind me. I have enjoyed this process thus far--for the most part. I am enjoying the food and not missing too many of my old foods. There are times when I just miss the convenience  of a sandwich. Amazingly my sugar cravings are pretty much gone. There are times as I scroll through Pinterest that I get tempted by some delicious looking creation, but for the most part I don't miss it. I do miss bread--terribly, and am looking forward to re-introducing it in a few weeks. I had already tried to limit my sugar and so my withdrawals were not bad. At the beginning, I had dreams about eating non-whole30 foods. They were all at family events were I had to try and pick out foods I could eat but there was nothing available. One Day 3, I woke up feeling shaky, nauseous, and extremely weak. I did feel better once I had eaten something. I believe it was because I went to bed hungry. I've tried to follow the no snacking before bed policy, and I've had some successful days when we've had a big dinner at 6:00. On those days, I've been able to go to bed without feeling hungry and I wake-up without feeling sick, but a lot of days I end up eating dinner around 4:00 due to my work schedule. I think my body just needs some nourishment before bed on those days or I wake up feeling terrible.  I think that my energy levels have improved, but I still feel tired a lot. However, that may be due to the fact that Remy has been sick off and on and he has not been sleeping well every night. There was a day, I think day 8 or so, when I wondered if this was even worth it. It just seemed so daunting and I couldn't tell that anything was different. I just didn't know if it was something I wanted to continue, but I have noticed a difference with my stomach issues and I don't feel bloated or gassy which is a major plus. I plan to keep going strong and know that for every day that I make the best food choices available to me, I am helping my body thrive, making me both healthy and happy.

Sweet Potatoes and Eggs

So I am trying out some whole30 breakfasts options because I don't love eggs. I only like them scrambled and with ketchup and other stuff with them. So one way I like them is with tater tots. So this is my whole30 version of that. I was making this for me and my one-year-old so you can up the amounts depending on how many you're feeding and how much you love eggs.

1 small sweet potato cut into 1/4 in pieces
1/2 cup water
1-2 T olive oil
1 half red pepper diced
1 garlic clove
Salt and pepper to taste

Cut up veggies.  Meanwhile, in a medium skillet bring half cup of water to boil. Once it's boiling, add the sweet potatoes. Cover and cook for 5 minutes (this may take longer if you cut sweet potatoes into bigger pieces).  I took the lid off with a minute to go to let the water evaporate. Then add olive oil,  garlic, and red pepper and cook until soft about 1-2 minutes. Then scoot veggies to one side of the pan and (you may want to add more olive oil to the  empty side) crack eggs into other side and scramble them until they are cooked to your liking  and then mix the eggs with the veggies and serve. We had a couple avocado slices with it and I added a little bit of ketchup. I'll have to make a paleo version before I start. I have to say I quite enjoyed this new version and Remy loved it as well. I think this will be a great option for us. It took about 20 minutes to cook with the prep and cook time, so not a good option for the days I work, but any other day it is perfect!

My Journey to Health

After my son was born, I really wanted to focus on being healthy. I remember immediately after, I was not interested in any 'bad foods.' The thought of pizza, fried foods, or even sweets made me sick. I have since gotten over this feeling, but am still trying to be very healthy. I sort of went through different stages to 'lose the baby weight.' I didn't really do much for the first couple months--I was a little bit pre-occupied. I tried to eat healthy, but I wasn't focused on much of anything at that stage, except maybe sleep. Once my baby was about three months, I wanted to get out of the house and wanted to get at least a semblance of my body back--so I figured I should be a bit more serious about the whole weight loss things.

I started out using the myfitnesspal app, which I found to be very helpful. I challenged myself to record everything for 2 months. (I was getting ready for my sister's wedding that would be the month after the challenge). There was a lot that I liked about the app. I could track my weight, and knowing that I had to record it later, I became more mindful of the foods I was choosing to eat. I also liked the scanner feature that made recording things very easy. One of the best things about the app is that I tracks the nutritious on your food so you can see if you are getting enough or too much of certain nutrients.

Although there are some great features with this method, I found I got tired of having to record everything. I found that the app was very helpful when using packaged foods or eating at restaurants, while it was more difficult to input home-cooked meals. You can create recipes and it saves these for the future, but it was a bit more of a hassle. Since I was and am focused more on homemade meals and using whole foods, I found this to be especially challenging. I will say that it does get easier the more food you input, because the app remembers what you've made and what you've inputed. It works out because at the beginning, I had a bit more enthusiasm for the whole things and toward the end I was getting tired of it, but it was a bit more streamlined by that point. I don't know if I could have done it much longer than two months, but it was enough for me.

Myfitnesspal helped me to lose most of the baby weight. (I still had about ten pounds to go at this point. The last ten are really the hardest!) The other thing that this app did for me was open my eyes to how much sugar I was eating. My target was 20g of sugar. I never ever hit that target. I shot to the moon and back! There were days I was eating 158g of sugar!  On my good days I was still eating over double my daily sugar allotment. And I was eating healthy foods--no candy and rarely sweets. I didn't give it too much thought at first, but slowly I began to see the amount of sugar in the foods I was buying. It was really eye opening. My eyes had been open and they began to notice information on the subject.

On Doctor Oz's show (not in my normal repertoire, but I was on vacation at the time), he had a guest  that talked about the effect of sugar on our skin, our energy levels, our aging process. She laid out an incremental plan to beat our addictions to sugar. It involved cutting out all sugar natural or added sugar for three days to fix the cravings and then slowly adding back in parts certain servings of fruit, dairy, whole grains, etc over the four weeks. I bought (wasn't at the library) and read their book The Sugar Detox: Lose Weight, Feel Great, and Look Years Younger by Brooke Aplert MS, RD, CDN and Patricia Farris MD, FAAD. Well, I decided to try this plan and kick my sugar habit. I tried the best I could with following the plan, but I did not finish it out as planned. It made me nauseous and I just couldn't eat eggs in the morning. I was nursing and I don't know if I was getting enough to take care of me and my baby on meat, vegetables, and nuts.  I skipped to week four of the plan that had a couple servings of fruit, grains, and dairy added in. I tried to follow that as best I could. I don't want to say that I failed because I learned a lot from the experience, but I couldn't follow the plan as outlined. I did stick to the final week fairly well and dramatically decreased the amount of sugar I was eating. It also helped me lose the rest of the weight that I had gained with the baby and that stubborn 5-10 pounds that I had gained while working at a bakery five or six years ago, which I had been unsuccessfully trying to lose when I got pregnant. I do recommend reading this book as it does a good job of explaining the damage that sugar does to practically every part of the body.  It also helped me understand the importance of fat in my diet. I had never been a low-fat diet person since I find the fat-free stuff just isn't very good, but I don't think I understood the it's importance in our diets. This opened up my eyes to the benefits of coconut oil and that it along with butter and olive oil should be the fats we use in cooking. I also really like the focus on skincare (one of the authors is a dermatologist) since it is something pertinent to everyone. I don't think anyone wants their skin to age prematurely. The book also has some great recipes and some tips for what to eat when eating out. Really a great read with lots of great information, but the incremental plan just didn't work for me. I had a hard time with cutting out so much to then add it back in three days or a week later.

So if weight loss was my ultimate goal, I was done--I'd lost more than I'd been hoping for, but I was still focused on health. I also have bouts of as the yogurt commercial puts it 'irregularity.' And was hoping take care of some of these digestive issues through my diet. Also with the holidays, I really didn't stick to my low-sugar plan that well. So I was having some of the same problems that I had before with low energy, etc. I also came across this article by Dr. Dwight Lundell about what really causes heart illness [spoiler alert it's sugar] and was spurred on to cut the sugar back out. I looked into a high-raw diet and green smoothies, which I do see the value of and I find smoothies to be a great way for me to eat veggies and protein in the morning without gagging...I also was seeing all these paleo recipes pinterest. I didn't know what it was or why everyone was making paleo food, but I looked it up on the internet and immediately dismissed it. Give up whole grains?--Yeah Right! I love bread too much. Besides, people have been eating grains for thousands of years. I then met someone who put me on to Whole30.

So I looked into it and I have to say that the plan they have online I was a little turned off by--it cuts out so much and they don't even care! I felt like there would be nothing left to eat! But I did think that health benefits would be great and that I would love to not worry about any more digestive issues. It's just not pleasant. So I got the book (this one was at the library:) It Starts with Food by the couple Dallas Hartwig MS, PT, CISSN, RKC and Melissa Hartwig CISSN, RKC. And although the plan is the same, I find that the explanations in the book really helped me understand the reasons for cutting out the foods that they cut out, and I saw that they did care. They wanted me to be healthy. Really this plan is about eating the best foods that you can eat. The idea is that the food we eat should make us healthy not unhealthy and I can really appreciate that idea. I have come to realize through this journey that the food we eat really plays a vital role in our health. I believe by making good food choices, we can have good health without dependance on medications that have all sorts of side-effects. I definitely recommend reading this book because it explained some of the concepts that were in the article on heart illness in a more comprehensive manner. It aslo helped me understand why some options were okay (like whole grains), but not great. Whole grains have some nutrients, but not nearly as much as vegetables. So after looking at this plan, I am going to eat clean, whole, nutritious foods for 30 days so that I can kick my sugar habit, balance my digestive system, gain loads of energy, and help improve my immune system. I am now in the preparations stage of this plan and am working to fill my cupboards and fridge with healthy foods. I plan to start this weekend. I will report how it is going and post some recipes. I know I'm going to have a hard time with the breakfasts, but it really is the most important meal of the day.