Canadian Bacon is more like a low fat ham. You can find it in circle slices and cylinder shapes. Turkey Bacon is also good for Phase I. You may find that more readily available.
Hi WillowFae - I'm glad you decided to stake a claim on The Beach.
Canadian bacon is actually more like your bacon. It's not streaky bacon in other words. It is really a boneless pork loin that's been cured and rolled in meal - sometimes it's called peameal bacon. It's not smoked like ham, just cured in brine, I think.
Here's a picture of it before it is sliced.
Willow, if you search for canadian bacon, you'll find a huge thread on this, complete with pictures. I believe in Canada, it's called Cornmeal or Peameal Bacon or something like that? So in England, I'm not sure what it would be called, but maybe something similar? It's basically smoked ham rather than actual bacon, so it has much less fat.
Glad to have you with us...your avatar could not be cuter! Is that your little one?
As to salad dressings, you want to get something with 3, 2, 1, or 0 grams of sugar, and you want to take a close look at the ingredients. Don't buy anything with "hydrogentated" in the ingredient list. You're mostly looking for olive oil, soybean oil, canola oil, etc. Good fats.
I think some really important things to purchase are:
Low fat cheese (no more than 6 g of fat per serving)
Natural Peanut Butter (ingredients should be peanuts and salt, if you prefer, but nothing else)
Nuts (roasted in good oils)
Loads of fresh veggies
hummus
Fat free or 1% milk
Plain yogurt, fat free or 1 % (mix with SF syrups to make it tasty... )
Lean lunch meats for roll ups and salads
Roasted soybeans (makes a great crouton substitute or snack)
Beans--watch canned labels for sugar
eggs
Sugar free syrups (Torani, DaVinci, or other brands...can be purchased at coffee shops)
Sugar subtitute (sweetener), such as Equal, Splenda, or Stevia
Looks like Ruth and Laurie covered your questions pretty well so I am just popping in to say welcome to the beach and I hope you make us a regular stop in your day.
Thanks everyone for the help and the welcome. I had seen the thread on the FAQ forum about Canadian bacon, but I still wasn't sure as we buy bacon presliced and it didn't look the same. But I've done some searching and found that what we call back bacon is similar to Canadian bacon (I found a cookery site that said that Canadian bacon could be substituted for back bacon). We have back bacon and I always trim the rind off before cooking it.
Thanks also for the info on the salad dressing and the useful foods. I assume the grams of sugar are less than 3g per 100g of dressing, yes?
I do have a question on the low-fat cheese. It says in the book to have low-fat, but in the recipie section where it talks about ricotta cheese it says "reduced fat if available". Does this mean that if you can't get reduced fat you can use full fat? I have looked in shops and can't find reduced fat ricotta (I find this to be a problem with American based diets, we don't have some of the foods that you do).
And yes, the avatar is my little boy. He is 14 months old but the photo was taken on his first birthday.
Welcome to the Beach, WillowFae!
Your little boy is doll.
Yes, if you can't get the reduced fat, the regular will do. You won't be eating a lot of it, in any case.
I'm all ready to go. Breakfast this morning was bacon and scrambled egg. Lunch will be chicken salad with a low carb dressing. The snacks I have with me at work are a piece of low-fat cheese and a stick of celery with laughing cow light cheese. Don't know what dinner tonight will be though - either fish or meat with veg.
Getting ready for phase 1
Welcome 
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