Posts by karenkitten

This is the story of my life right now, because I am actually spending about half my time in India on business. I usually just try to err on the side of caution when I estimate the calories in restaurant meals...

If you're making the food yourself, though, you should be able to calculate your calories using the recipe tool. The biggest culprits are probably going to be rice, oil or ghee, and high-fat dairy like cream or paneer.  Chickpeas and potatoes can bump up the calories too.

I'm vegan and I love the dairy-free baked ziti bowl and the tofu scramble, but really there is almost no such thing as a bad Amy's entree! The enchiladas are really good and so is the veggie loaf.

Apparently enough people reported that they'd used Amy's foods to help lose weight that the company consulted with a dietician and came up with a diet plan involving their meals. Totally a way to sell more product, of course, but it looks to me like they are doing it very responsibly. I was using the plan as a general guideline in September, but then I had to go to India for work and of course you can't get Amy's products here. I'm looking forward to being back in the U.S. in a couple of weeks so I can get back on the plan.

I'm not affiliated with the company, I swear! I really just think they make a great product. The meals are perfect take to work for lunch, for example. Here's the diet plan page from their web site:

http://www.amyskitchen.com/special_diets/diet _plan.php

Original Post by amyvegan:

Karen ~ Is there a lot of vegetarian food in India, but hard to find food without ghee and other dairy products? Or is it even hard to find meat-free food? I love love love Indian food. And Bob Dylan for that matter.

Oh, there is PLENTY of vegetarian food here, literally in every restaurant, and even a lot of egg-free food (they call that "pure veg" or "100% veg"--that's a religious thing for most people who do it). It's the dairy part that gets you, as you guessed. You kind of have to assume that everything has ghee in it, and lots of the veg dishes have cream or paneer (a kind of fresh cheese, consistency of tofu--you probably know that if you love Indian food!). Part of what makes eating in a restaurant hard for me is that usually I just feel like it's easier to give in and try not to care whether the dish has dairy, and I hate that. Also, most of the food here is very high calorie. They use a lot of oil, and there's all that naan and rice and deep fried stuff like samosas. It's killin' me. So I try to avoid restaurants altogether.

And as for Bob, well...what's not to love? :)

I'm vegan and living about half the time in India at the moment, which is easy (although not low calorie) if you're vegetarian but almost impossible if you're vegan. So, my food choices when I'm here are really limited, and I can basically never eat in restaurants. I eat a lot of fruits and cereal with almond or soy milk, even for dinner. Normally for me it is already guilt-inducing to eat something veg but non-vegan, but today I found myself looking at a blog about Southern California (where I grew up) that had tons of photos of Mexican food, and I wanted a big plate of carnitas (pork!) sooooo much that I think if it had magically appeared in front of me I would have scarfed it down immediately. I ended up making pasta with peanut sauce instead...but yeah, I think it definitely had to do with the fact that I am not getting a varied enough diet lately. Good thing I can't magically transport myself to San Diego.

Now that I think about it, I also was reading an article in the NY Times that described a croque monsieur sandwich with Gruyere and smoked salmon, and I would gladly have eaten that too.