Food suggestions make me sad

I read these posts about what can fill you up and be tasty and healthy and I just get sad.

Here in Czech republic my food choices are limited at best.... we are talking lack of American Basics to say the least. I can rarely find Brown Sugar for example. And don't even talk about meat, a lean cut of beef here is not only rare, but expensive! Besides try and translate "sirloin" or "flank steak" into czech. :(

I suppose it is not so bad, but when I read the suggestions I am frustrated becuase half of the time the food, and the brand is not available at all here! And light or diet food is almost unheard of.

What is more frustrating is that the girls here are all skinny! They smoke, drink beer and eat deep fried foods and they are all thin and beautiful! It is so frustrating. I do an hour of cardio daily in the gym.... I have yet to see anyone else do more than 15 minutes of it.....

Sigh.

Sorry. I just get really frustrated and I have been on a sugar binge lately. Today I had two full Ritter Sport Candy Bars, (yeah those are available here! :) and I just feel guilty and bloated and most of all jealous! I am average in America but chubby here, een though I am in the normal weight zone. It is so frustrating for me! I am tired and sick and I wish I could just eat deep fried cheese with tartar sauce and stay thin!

i feel ya...im jealous of just about everyone who is healthy looking...

what kind of ethnic type foods do you have available?..i have no idea what czech food is like!

as far as the meats go, i get whats cheap and either a) eat less or b) skim the fat off after cooking (like ground beef for example...i always drain and blot it very well after cooking it before adding it to whatever)

do you have fresh fruit and vegetable markets?  If so, you can have those in your diet.

how about whole grains?  Is your bread whole wheat?  Do you have an equivalent to oatmeal that is whole grain? 

if the dairy is full fat, that's okay, you'll just have to be more careful about the calories.  In fact, I wish I had a high enough calorie budget to have full fat for all dairy.  The taste is so much better.

YUCK! whole fat milk.. I have lived on a farm for 23 years and always dranks raw unpasturized SKIM milk. I absolutley refuse to drink full fat milk I hate the taste. The Milk here is funny anyway, it is processed much different than American milk (mind you I think all store bought milk tastes off)

The veggies and fruits are hit or miss, a lot of things you just can't get here or get very sporadically even when they are in season... Like asparagus for example.

Whole grain oatmeal, yes I eat it already. I avoid the bread quite a bit because a lot of times it has CUMIN seeds in it.

I am only 5'2" so I have a low calorie budget anyway. Czech food tends to be very heavy in general and to be honest I am just kind of sick of it. I cook my own food. But it is frustrating because you just cant get a lot of stuff here. They just dont have it, I am just a little frustrated. Things that are low fat are REALLY expensive. For example there is only one kind of tuna that is packed in Water.... and it is about $1.50 a can ..... and the can is 80 grams, you know the little 3 oz ones. Just to give you an idea.

Fish is really expensive here. So is beef. Pork is ok, but I really do not like pork  :p so I eat a lot of egg whites and beans.

soups and stews from dried beans, peas, lentils etc. with potatos, carrots, canned vegetables. 

how long are you there?

Sounds like the food in Czech is similar to here in Germany. I can understand your frustration, but it can be worked with.

For one, why would you eat beef over here? It's poor quality, expensive, and hella fatty. Go for chicken or lean pork or turkey or venison. Fresh produce is also much easier and cheaper to get here, because most of the food suppliers are local. My local market is starting to fill up with the yummiest strawberries right now.

Ultimately, prepackaged foods are just not the norm in Europe. Americans are very reliant on that, so you've gotta find a way around that when taking advice from us. Like you said, all the staples are here. A tortilla is nothing but flour, water, and butter, right?

Well, you don't need "lite" and "diet" and "fat-free" foods to have a hot bod. THOSE kinds of foods actually contribute to the problem if you really want to get down to the nitty gritty of it. If we all just ate when we were hungry and had PURE, REAL foods to eat, even if they were "whole" or "high fat" we would ALL be PERFECTLY thin and HEALTHY. But we dont ... We eat cause it's there, cause it's convenient, and cause the media tells us to. We are brainwashed by advertising and lies. They make all that stuff in "convenient" packaging so we WILL keep eating it. It's ALL about making the might buck! Yeah, all our meats are full of hormones and God knows what; our vegetables are polluted ... well, you get the picture. Yeah, American food is "great." haha

i semi relate being american and living in a foreign country where it seems--no is FACT, that everyone is MINISCULE (girls and guys alike) yet drink beer and eat loaves of french bread at each meal. Then again everyone walks here, and all the food is fresh and homeade but still, in america i too would be average but here I feel like such a chub. All the sizes in the stores are like the american equivalent of 0's and 00's. I don't even bother buying pants here. But good thing is that since everyone makes all their food fresh, there are tons of fresh markets and to eat healthy here is so cheap. Eating junk is actually alot more coastly.

I am just frustrated mostly because I am a baker at heart. I don't have an oven right now , but I am working on it I use my neighbors oven sometimes.  I love to bake bread and homemade rolls. I stay away from the low fat stuff too anyway, :D you need at least 82% fat in butter, or shortening to make your cookies turn out, and I prefer LARD for pie crusts.

I rarely ever buy prepackaged food, if at all,  only breakfst cereal really, I can cook much better than anything that is available prepackaged!!!.:) My problem is finding things like, brown sugar, almond extract, fresh herbs, cilantro, rosmary, chili powder, hot peppers, asparagus, cardamom, Pecans, coconut that is not like sawdust, you know cooking things.

As for your comments on the food in AMERICA  I think you need to know where I am coming from to understand my situation.

I am from a farm.... For 23 years I helped feed America. The milk I drank was raw, unpasturized, I always knew the cow it came from. We do not use hormones, and careful watch is kept on antibiotics and somatic cell count for milk, cows treated wth any medicine, the milk is dumped. It never even gets past the milker.

We butcher almost all of our own meat from steers we raised and I can tell you there is absolutley no hormones in it. We for many years have raised and sold Choice beef with no hormones. We have also raised pigs and butched and ate them as well as chickens. I am used to fresh eggs from our free range chickens also so it took me two years to finally get in the habit of checking eggs for cracks in the store.. I never had to do it before :P Even fresh butter was made from the cream on the milk (we always skimmed the milk we drank)

 There is always a huge vegetable garden at the house, fruit trees, and asparagus patch, rubarb patch, berry bushes, a herb garden and even a trout pond and trout stream. And of course sweet corn in the field in summer. YUM! Fresh fish from the lakes all year round.

I ate much better in America I assure you, I put on weight when I got here... not the other way around. Lol.... I geuss I am more missing Good old fashioned American FARM food more than anything else. But I suppose I will adapt to milk from a box and saurkraut from a can.....

so youre saying they really dont have fresh veggies or fruits there? thats odd right?....

I understand the low fat and meat being expensive..

lental and bean soup for you!

for the almond extract, you can substitute 1 tsp for 1 tbsp of any type of almond liquor.

I'm sorry it's so difficult for you!  You said you're average for the US but heavy for the Czech.  I have a friend living over there now and she seems to be doing fine--I'll see what she's eating.  Also, what are the "natives" consuming--maybe you'll get some good tips from them?  Remember, it's not the food item you eat, it's how much and how often.

Having lived in Europe for over two years, I am actually pretty shocked that you are having this much trouble finding fresh ingredients. I lived in France, and eating healthy was DEFINITELY cheaper than eating junk.  Also, Europeans don't do the low-fat/fat-free thing.  True, they do walk alot more, but I ate way more carbs (good and bad) and way less meat while living in Europe. Also, other than walking I made no real effort to lose weight or stay in shape, even though I really needed to. Even with all of this, I still lost 60 lbs! I will state one thing; Europeans are much smaller than we are. I was at a very healthy weight just before I left and still felt much larger than most of the European women.

While I lived in Europe I traveled alot, including to Czech Republic. I would have to agree that the fruits and veggies were not very plentiful, and I was mainly in Prague! 

I wonder if you tried to find a local farmers market if this would improve things for you; I know when I lived there I had alot of friends who were locals and I usually got recommendations from them. It seems like local farmers markets are the best way to go for this stuff sometimes!

I don't mean to pick on you, but that saurkraut from a can business is NOT an accurate picture, and you shouldn't resign yourself to that. I've been in Germany for the last two years and just got back from Czech last weekend, and it is easier for me to find fresh foods here than it was in the rural US. I grew up on a farm, and I ate all the same things you did in the states, but that's not a normal diet for most Americans.

On the high side, you're lucky because you know how to prepare raw foods. Try to find a local farm or farmer's market near you-- I know there are plenty of farms in Czech. You may be hard pressed to find fresh fish, but there is no shortage of produce! In a country that is so economically depressed, I bet you'll find that the local farmers are MORE than happy to cut out the middle man and sell produce to you wholesale.

first of all ritter bars with milk are to die for. and WORTH the extra cals. lol


but really just eat proper portions and count your cals.
i cant just buy whatever all the time either. so i just make sure my calories are adding up to what i should have and take a multi vitamin. if you really like buns and baking thats totally fine.
just see how much you are eating of them so you can be active to burn off any extra. its much easier, i think, to just eat when you are hungry. and if you want to eat it..do something to use those calories if you over ate. walking is free! and cookies with REAL butter are worth the walk. and i agree..if its not made with butter its crap.
especially cookies. it just doesnt crumble right.