Day 2 Eating-for-LIFE -- Plug for meals by "Let's Dish"

I just need to put in a quick plug for Let's Dish (http://www.letsdish.com/). Let's Dish is a company that prepares all the ingredients for dinners (chops up veggies, single servings of protien ready, etc.), and then customers can come in to mix and bag 12 to 24 dinners in a single night. Shelley will go to Let's Dish once a month and create pre-made dinners that are kept in the freezer. The dinners are then made up really quickly when it is meal time, with very little mess! We save a bunch of money because our family dines out much more when Shelley or I are too tired to put together a dinner from scratch. HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO "EATING-FOR-LIFE"? As follows: When I start on the Body-for-Life eating plan, it is difficult to find recipes that work for both me and my "family" at dinner time. I have four kids, 6 to 15 years old. However, the Let's Dish dinners seem to generally work. Its not always perfectly consistent with Eating-for LIFE, but it is a great way to still have family dinner each night while only preparing one meal. For example, last night we had Italian Chicken with Cous Cous. The chicken was not breaded, but baked in a tomato sauce with some low fat mozzarella cheese melted on top. The cous cous are not whole grain, of course, but a "palm" sized portion of chicken and a "fist" sized portion of cous with some steamed broccoli was a pretty good meal the whole family could eat. Tonight we are having Dry BBQ rubbed Chicken with mashed sweet potatoes. The recipe could come straight out of Eating-for-LIFE. Convenience that lets you still enjoy a family dinner. ISN'T THAT GREAT!!

McDonald's Asian Chicken Salad?

Today I ate the Asian Grilled Chicken Salad at McDonald's. It wasn't on my eating plan, but my errands ran way over and while I had had a protein bar mid-day, my kids were starving.

NUTRITION: Without the dressing the Asian Salad has 300 calories, 10g fat, 23g carbs, and 32g protein. The HUGE package of dressing has 90 calories, 2.5g fat, 15g carbs, and 1g protein. I used about a third of the dressing and so total was 330 calories, 11g fat, 28g carbs and 33g protein. That fits within my BFL guidelines! Also the salad comes with Mandarin oranges, edemane, snow peas, red bell peppers and sliced almonds, so you fit in a serving of vegetables and nuts to boot. All this with only 1 gram of saturated fat because the fat comes from soybean and sesame seed oil and the almonds. Not bad!

TASTE: Compared to anything else on the menu, this salad actually tastes pretty good. I really enjoyed the edemane (soybeans), snow peas and sliced almonds.