After years of yo-yo dieting & weight gain, I figured out how to stop the cycle, lose the fat, and gain muscle!
So I’m here to share advice on how to eat without rules or restriction and reach your goal body, using scientific research from nutrition & psychology.
…and share recipes, too!
Weight loss isn’t about eating less.
It’s about eating differently.
Losing weight, and especially maintaining it, is about what you eat, and how you go about eating it.
I know, this completely runs against conventional wisdom. But hear me out.
Conventional wisdom doesn’t consider the actual scientific research on how weight loss works.
I do: I’m a PhD!
I got my PhD in 2021, and I run studies at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and nutrition–and apply science to my daily life!
There is a lot of great research out there on how to lose weight, and be happier & healthier… but most people don’t know about it, because it’s hard to access & understand.
So I break it down by writing posts & filming videos so you can apply scientific findings to your life!
It’s time for another showcase of recent recipes from fellow WordPress bloggers! I don’t know about you, but to me the most Easter-themed food out there is desserts.
So the theme of this showcase is recipes for vegan treats, especially ones that work well for Easter. But, because I know many of us have limited ingredients right now, I’m including a variety of treats!
This Easter is an especially tough one for most of us having to stay at home, but a silver lining is that leaves us with more time to go all-out on cooking.
Do you know of any vegan recipe bloggers who deserve a feature? Comment with a link to them below and I’ll check them out for the next recipe showcase! (You can nominate yourself too!)
I hope you have a very happy, healthy Easter filled with delicious vegan food.
Now that temperatures are just starting to dip below the 80s here in California, I’ve been getting excited for soup season. I’ve been particularly pining for pumpkin soup to meal prep for work, but noticed that all the recipes I’d found weren’t nearly hearty (read: starch filled) enough to get me through the day.
So, I came up with my own! I wanted to add as much starch, protein, and fiber as possible while staying true to pumpkin soup flavor & texture, so I decided to add my favorite secret soup ingredient: chickpeas. Not only do they pump up the nutrition, but they make the soup really creamy.
This experiment once again confirmed my conviction that chickpeas are magical, and can and should be added to just about everything. (Including oatmeal–it’s good, I swear!)
Oh, and I whipped up a cream to top the soup with that looks and tastes fancy, but is super easy.
Did I mention this recipe takes only takes 20 minutes to make, and a serving (1/3 of it, about ~400 cals) has 19 grams of fiber and 24 grams of protein?!
A few weeks ago, I was on vacation in San Diego: aka a vegan foodie’s paradise. It was a great opportunity to be challenged and grow in my intuitive eating, and more importantly, to learn some insights to share with you!
For years and years, going on vacation meant a constant cycle of binge eating at restaurants, feeling guilty about it, trying to eat less at the next meal, failing, packing in as much cardio as possible… rinse and repeat.
Followed, of course, by the post-vacation constant, failed dieting attempts.
My last few vacations since getting the hang of intuitive eating, however, have been a world of difference.
This last vacation was an especially tricky case, because I was set on making a guide & video to the best vegan restaurants in San Diego… all over the course of a week! And I wanted to try as many dishes as humanly possible for it. (Luckily I collaborated with some of the restaurants, like Kindred in these photos, so I didn’t spend alllll the money.)
In the past, this would have spelled disaster: trying so many things would have meant cleaning my plate for every. single. dish.
But this time, I went with my gut, quite literally. And it went wonderfully. No binge eating, no guilt, no restriction… and all my clothes fit the same when I got home.
So here are 5 tips I’ve picked up along the way: how to make sure you’re eating just as much as you need (no more, no less!) while eating out at restaurants, being on vacation, or having any other big change in your usual diet!
1. Eat slower.
Your body has learned the approximate mapping between the volume of food you put in your stomach, and the amount of energy that volume usually results in. If you’re used to eating less calorie-dense food, like vegetables and grains, this is an especially important one. With salad or bread, for example, you might need to eat ~5 cups of it to get 500 calories. With the types of food you tend to get at restaurants or while on vacation, though, you could easily get 1000 or 1500 calories with 5 cups of food.
Now, I am DEFINITELY not advocating you count your calories. (Repeat: do not count your calories!) Rather, try some strategies to be more mindful of your hunger and satiety signals. Try eating slower to give your body a chance to catch up, start digesting a little bit, and realize that you gave it more calories per volume than it expected. For me, this is as simple as having appetizers first, then letting myself digest for the ~15 minutes it takes for the food to come.
Don’t think this would help? There are studies showing that eating slower actually reduces the amount of food and calories that you eat!1
2. Get appetizers.
To piggyback on the last tip, if you’re really hungry when you get to the restaurant, ordering appetizers (to share, especially!) can be surprisingly helpful for preventing overeating. Paradoxically, getting appetizers ends up making me eat LESS because I’m not ravenously hungry when it’s time to start on my entree. And not feeling as hungry to start with will help you pace yourself and be more mindful of when you’re satiated.
3. Plan to take home leftovers.
Unless you’re sure you’ll need to eat all the food to be satiated (which is totally reasonable, I usually finish a whole entree), go in with the mindset that you’ll take some food home.
This is NOT the same idea as the tip I’ve seen circulating in the dieting world, saying “put half your entree in a leftovers box when you get it to stop yourself from eating it all.” This is simply aimed at preventing you from going in with a “clean your plate” mentality… if you end up wanting to eat it all because you’re not full yet, you should absolutely go for it!
Bae sneakily pulled out the camera while I was eating 😛
4. Don’t force yourself to eat your next meal.
This is the most important tip so far, because it’s an example of how intuitive eating works beyond the level of an individual meal: your body’s ability to regulate your intake (so you eat what you need) operates over days, weeks, even months (thanks, hunger hormones!). It may sound weird, but hear me out.
Not forcing myself to eat at prescribed times has been huge for me. In the past I subscribed too heavily to society’s “3 meals a day” norm, and it got in the way of me listening to my body.
When I eat at a restaurant, I usually eat way more calories in a meal than I would at home, simply because my body is so used to eating a large volume of food. AND THAT’S OKAY! (Tip #1 can help, but probably won’t completely prevent it.)
Once you’re used to eating intuitively, you can trust your body to know what to do with those extra calories.
This tip helped me the most. My first day in San Diego, I ate a ton of incredible food at this brunch. I was still full around 5pm, 5 hours later. But my family wanted to make dinner together.
So naturally, I joined in. I was still mostly full, but I ate quite a bit anyway–because I had pretty much shut off communication with my hunger signals by choosing to eat when I wasn’t hungry in the first place. After feeling sick and overstuffed (on veggies, beans and rice, no less), I realized that eating dinner was not staying true to my body’s signals: it was telling me “I’m good, thanks”, but I ate dinner because I felt like I should.
No one can tell us when we should or shouldn’t eat. Only our bodies know that!
I redoubled my dedication to listening to my hunger, and it worked beautifully over the rest of the trip. How it usually worked was one day I’d do a big breakfast and dinner, with no lunch. (I’m like a snake when it comes to restaurant meals: I stock up, then feel full and satiated for like 8 hours. 😛 )
Then the next day, I wouldn’t feel hunger signals all morning because of the leftover energy from that big dinner. Then I’d get hungry around lunch, eat a big lunch, and feel full the rest of the day. Then repeated that two day pattern.
It was the usual 3 meal routine, just with double the meal size, spread over 2 days. And I felt great. No ravenous hunger, no feeling overstuffed, just eating when hungry & stopping when satisfied. I didn’t have to think about food at all in terms of what or when to eat, I just focused on enjoying myself. The bonus was I could spend less time finding food & more time at the beach!
Another way to think of it is naturally occurring intermittent fasting. Without the whole forcing-yourself-to-eat-in-a-prescribed-time-window part.
I don’t recommend forcing yourself to eat like this, at all. Some people do better eating more frequent meals, whereas I tend to prefer the snake-type eating style.
The main lesson from this tip is you may have to throw your usual eating routines out the window, and fly without the autopilot of habit: rely more on your hunger and fullness signals instead!
A shot from our favorite beach activity: boogie boarding!
5. Go easy on yourself.
If you do overeat til you’re sick, just dust yourself off, move on, and try again. Vacationing and eating at restaurants is about relaxing and enjoying your life (and your loved ones), not feeling bad about yourself! You may be tired of hearing it, but self compassion is an absolutely KEY part of intuitive eating.
Maybe you’re working on getting the hang of intuitive eating, maybe it’s your first time trying to do it while on vacation. Maybe you’re an old pro and it was just difficult this time. (Newsflash, no one’s perfect!)
That’s okay. If you gain weight, it’s not the end of the world. Feeling guilty can only make the situation worse, but self compassion can prevent and reverse it. Work on loving yourself where you are and the rest will follow!
* * * * *
I hope these tips can help you the next time you find yourself thrown out of your eating routine with the fun of restaurants and vacation. And most of all, I hope you enjoy yourself!
I’m sharing the recipe for the salad I’ve had 3 days a week for the last four months. (I almost never do that, usually I’m all about variety with lunch & dinner.) This salad is the reason I’ve had to become mindful of my chewing, because I (almost) literally inhale it.
Making it is just so intuitive to me, I’d toss in ingredients by the handful and never really measured. But I finally got myself together and did it, because “2 handful of tomatoes, 4 handfuls of romaine…” is not going to cut it here. 😛
This salad keeps popping up as my lunch because…
a) it’s DELICIOUS and so satiating, I crave it every day
b) it’s whole food plant based and packed with protein, fiber, and fresh veggies
c) it’s the perfect way to use up garden tomatoes & chiles, and is so versatile with substitutions
d) it’s cheap & easy to keep the ingredients stocked all the time
I would even go so far as to say it’s my favorite salad of all time. My holy grail kale salad used to hold that title (which I’ll share in winter), but now this guy has stolen the crown.
My personal name for this? Sexmex salad. For lack of a better name 😉
Serves 1 if you’re like me, serves 2 for most people
Ingredients
1/2 cup brown rice or quinoa, uncooked
1/2 – 15oz can pinto beans, drained and rinsed
2 cups chopped romaine hearts
1 diced green onion (~1 tbsp)
3/4 cup halved cherry tomatoes (or chopped normal tomatoes)
1/2 chopped avocado
3 tbsp salsa
Salt to taste
Hot sauce to taste
Optional: juice of 1/2 a lime, minced hot peppers
This salad is really versatile, so change things up to suit your tastes! Add more romaine for a lighter feel, add double (or triple) the avocado if you’re an avocado lover, or swap out the pintos for black beans. The world is your oyster.
Directions
Cook brown rice or quinoa according to directions.
Add cooked rice to a microwave-safe bowl along with pinto beans and salsa, and microwave until warm but not hot; about 1 minute.
To your salad bowl, add rice and beans, and add all the other ingredients (and lime if desired).
One of the biggest obstacles to being able to eat healthier and lose weight is figuring out what food to make! There are so many amazing recipes out there, so I thought I’d start sharing some recipes by others (in addition to my own) to give you some extra food inspo here and there.
Plus, I want to spread some love for the vegan recipe blogger community, so I’m going to start doing occasional showcases of amazing looking recipes that I’ve stumbled across from other blogs–specifically, fellow smaller WordPress bloggers!
Here are July’s 15 picks, hot off the presses (or cold, depending on the recipe 😉 ):
Sometimes I like to make elaborate meals like my most recent strawberry shortcake recipe, but other times… I just want some potatoes. These guys are my favorite way to eat simple potatoes! They’re like a cross between chips and a baked potato—crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside, and so addictive.
And it’s so simple, I almost feel silly even calling it a recipe. I usually have them with just salt and pepper, but they can be flavored so many ways, with sauces afterwards or spices while baking! (I add a few ideas below)
Nutrition note: contrary to popular opinion, potatoes are a nutritional powerhouse! Not only are they packed with fiber and resistant starch which are both great for weight loss (see my video on resistant starch & weight loss), but they’ve got almost every nutrient you need to survive. For example, one 400 calorie meal of these potatoes would give me 20% of my daily protein needs; 10g fiber; tons of potassium, B vitamins, and vitamin C; omega 3s, and a bunch more.
Ingredients:
2 medium yukon gold potatoes (~300g)
Salt and pepper to taste (I use ~1/2 tsp seasoning salt, 1/8 tsp pepper)
Optional: spices to taste (can also use to replace salt): smoked paprika, taco seasoning, curry powder, chili lime seasoning, 21 seasoning salute (or other italian seasoning)
Directions:
Preheat oven to 420 degrees F.
Slice potatoes into ~1/8″ thick slices width-wise (aka, so they’re circles not ovals), as evenly as possible. The best way to do this is with a mandolin, but a knife will do!
Put them in a large tupperware, add spices, and shake them around to get them evenly coated.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Spread potato slices out in a single layer on the parchment paper with some space in between them. (Use multiple sheets if necessary)
Place baking sheet(s) in oven. If you have multiple sheets, place them side by side on one rack rather than stacked on a rack above the other–you want both sheets to get full heat from the top and bottom of the oven!
Bake for 18 minutes, or until there are large golden brown bubbles on top of all of the slices, like in the photos. But don’t let them get fully browned!
Eat immediately, since they’re crispiest while hot!
I finally got my hands on the new Reddi-wip vegan whipped cream, and for my first time trying it, I wanted to make something a bit extravagant where whipped cream is a key ingredient: so I went with strawberry shortcake. My fiancé found a nonvegan recipe online, and we made it vegan and changed the method to make it easier—and it has turned out amazing every time! It’s now our go-to when we want a fun brunch.
We’ve also served it to nonvegan friends with rave reviews!
Makes about 16 shortcakes
Ingredients
Shortcake
4cups flour
3tablespoons sugar
¼teaspoon salt
5teaspoons baking powder
3/4cups vegan butter (for dough)*
1/4-1/2 cup vegan butter (for pan & topping)
1 1/4c vegan heavy cream, half and half, or coconut cream
Toppings
2pints strawberries
½cup sugar
Vegan whipped cream
*Our favorite vegan butter is Miyokos, and we add a bit of extra heavy cream to make up for it being a bit less wet than most vegan butters. Depending on the brand you use, you may need to add more heavy cream or non-dairy milk to make the dough smooth and moist enough.
Directions
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.
Slice strawberries to your desired size, crushing some of them if you prefer more juice rather than whole strawberry pieces. Mix with 1/2 cup of sugar, and set aside while you make the dough to let it produce strawberry syrup.
Make the shortcakes:
Stir flour, 3 tablespoons sugar, baking powder, and salt in a mixing bowl. Add 3/4 cup of softened butter, and use your hands to rub it into the dry ingredients. Add 1 1/4 cups cream, and mix to a soft dough. Add more cream (or nondairy milk) as necessary to achieve a smooth ball of dough with no cracks.
Knead the dough for 1-2 minutes in the bowl, then roll it to about 1/2-inch thickness. Using a biscuit cutter or jar (mine was about a 3″ diameter), cut an even number of rounds.
Use some of the remaining butter to grease a baking sheet. Lay the rounds out on the sheet, leaving some space between them. Melt remaining butter, and brush it evenly on top of the rounds.
Bake for 8 to 12 minutes, or until golden brown. Make sure not to brown the bottoms beyond a golden light brown color.
Serve warm. Top shortcakes with strawberries and whipped cream, and enjoy!
I would love your feedback if you try it! I would also love to see your posts–if you make it and tag me @veganmiche on Instagram, I’ll share your post! 🙂
I’m back in action, with a diet update for you! In the video, I show you my weight loss from a high carb diet (starch solution) versus my new diet. Plus, what my new diet is & why I LOVED being high carb but it isn’t my current way of eating.
Easter is coming, which means it’s time for (more) baking!
I tried to make my fiancé a replacement for his favorite vegan lemon tart that the store stopped carrying, and we ended up with something even better: these lemon cheesecake bars.
They’re like a cross between cheesecake and lemon bars: creamy cheesecake texture with bright lemon bar flavor and crust. It’s a match made in heaven.
If you like cheesecake and lemon bars, you’re going to love these!
Makes an 8″ round pan
Ingredients
Shortbread Crust
1/2 cup vegan butter (I highly recommend Miyoko’s)
1/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 cup all-purpose flour
Combine ingredients in a bowl, and massage butter and lemon juice into sugar and flour until it forms an even dough, without lumps.
Line an 8″ round pan with parchment paper, and press the dough into the pan. Bake at 350 for 15 mins. Remove from oven and let it cool for a few minutes.
Filling
1 cup raw cashews
1 cup and 2 tbsp coconut cream*
2 tbsp cornstarch
3/4 cup lemon juice
1 pinch sea salt
5 tbsp maple syrup
Powdered sugar to sprinkle on top
Blend all ingredients except powdered sugar until completely smooth and creamy, with no pieces of cashew left intact. (If you don’t have a high-powered blender, you may want to soak the cashews for several hours before making these.) Pour into half baked crust and bake at 350 for 20-25 mins, until edges start to crack. Remove from oven to cool for 30 minutes, then transfer to fridge. Let cool overnight, sprinkle with powdered sugar, and enjoy!
*Coconut cream is the hard part at the top of a can of full-fat coconut milk that has a butter-like consistency; not the liquid. You can also buy cans of pure coconut cream.
Miche, Ph.D. 