Frosted Cupcake’s Fitness Quest

I’m always a big fan of quesadillas, but because we made tacos last night, I had a couple extra ingredients to play with today. Last week when he made enchiladas, my stepdad came up with a great, simple way of cooking chicken by surrounding boneless, skinless chicken breasts with chopped green ortega chiles and folding them into a foil packet, then roasting for about an hour on the grill (turning once at the halfway point). He made the chicken that way again last night for our tacos (which were AMAZING!)

So today I made a quesadilla using this:

1 flour tortilla

1 oz cheddar cheese (maybe a little less or a little more, depending on your preferences…)

1/2 oz shredded chicken (with the roasted ortega chiles in it)

2 tsp Newman’s Own Black Bean and Corn Salsa (again, more or less would be fine)

TOTAL: 265 cal (12.7 g fat, 22.4 g carbs, 12.8 g protein)

Really delicious, pretty healthy (by my standards) and very satisfying. Next time I might add a little avocado, too. If you try that chicken recipe, let me know how you like it! It makes for a very versatile ingredient, and we love it in this house.

Wow!! Just found this site, thanks to a link in another 3FC blog! Really awesome… I’m going to be using this daily (er, that’s the idea, right!) First, you enter your basic stats (height, weight, age), your baseline activity level, and then choose how much weight per week you’d like to lose. It then gives you a basic daily calorie goal. They have a database of tons of foods, with a very user-friendly, intuitive interface. You can even enter your own recipes and store them, and it’ll give you the full nutrition information for that creation! In addition to the food tracker feature, there’s a fitness/exercise tracker feature that works similarly, where you enter your activities and it calculates your probable calorie burn. It adds your tracked foods to your calories for the day, and subtracts the calories you’ve burned through exercise, giving you both visual and text representations of where you’re at with respect to your calorie goals.

AWESOME! I think this is going to be a great tool for me, as it does the work for me as far as calculating the nutritional information of the things I’m eating, and the calorie burn from the exercise I’m getting. I have a feeling the “calories burned” values are a little high, but I can easily take that into account when aiming for my daily goals.

Made another shake this morning… turned out pretty scrumptious (for me!) and has a healthy nutritional breakdown, by my standards anyway.

1/2 cup 1% milk

1/4 cup 2% cottage cheese

1/2 banana

1 scoop chocolate protein powder

Some ice

TOTAL 265 calories, 33 g protein, 3 g fat, 19 g sugar (makes about 12 oz)

I think that nutritionally, this was a definite improvement over yesterday’s shake, and it tasted just as good if not better (yesterday’s was a little too sweet, not surprising considering that it had 29 g sugar, versus today’s 19!) AND if you prefer to use non-fat milk, you’ll cut the calories to 245 and the fat to 2 g.

So I picked up some protein powder last night (GNC Pro Performance AMP Whey Protein), looking for an easy way to get more protein in my diet, which tends to be high in fat (lots of cheese…. what can I say, it’s one of my favorite foods!) and in sugar. I made a shake today which turned out great.

1/2 cup orange juice

1/4 cup strawberry liquid yogurt

1/2 banana

1 scoop vanilla protein powder

some ice

Blended it all together for a super-delicious 12 oz smoothie that was 250 cal, 22 g of protein, and only 1 gram of fat (from the yogurt; 1/3 gram from the protein powder). It reminded me a little bit of the drinks from Orange Julius that I used to have when I was a kid! When I crunched the numbers, I realized that while it’s high in protein and low in fat, it’s also pretty high in sugar (29g… oops). So next time, I’m going to skip the liquid yogurt (30 grams of sugar in 8 oz, yikes!! I have to tell my mom to stop drinking that stuff!!) in favor of a little milk and more ice.

Tomorrow I’m going to try making a shake with the chocolate protein powder that I also picked up. I’m imagining something with bananas, milk, and maybe some peanut butter… I’ll be sure write about how that goes! If anyone has ideas, please share