Boot Camp: Round Two started up on Monday! So nice to get back to that routine after having a week off. The new class is twice as big as the last one but all of the women seem to be very nice and there's that similar air of support and encouragement that existed with the last group. I'm not sure that we'll all become as close-knit a group as we were last month (we all went out for drinks and dinner after our last session!) but that's alright. Four of the women from the last group have returned for this boot camp so its good to have some familiar faces about!
Sara, the boot camp instructor, mentioned last session that we easily burn 800-1000 calories per session. This came as a huge (albeit welcome) surprise to me; I was sure that the number would be about half of that. I have read so many articles warning about how people always underestimate how many calories they consume and overestimate how many they burn that I suppose somewhere along the line I started almost doing the reverse to prevent me from falling into that trap. But it is important to be realistic, and to find the middle ground, rather than go from one extreme to the next. That way we can achieve the most accuracy and the best understanding of where we are at.
Just as important as it is to be realistic and truthful about where we are at from a healthy point of view, it is equally vital to remember
the needs of our bodies. In my efforts to improve my nutrition and to eat clean and non-processed, there have been a few stumbling blocks along the way which have caused me to stop and reassess my position. Such as, for example, my most recent baking fiasco!
Take a look at this photograph
:
What you see here is my recreation of the
pumpkin bread that I had made before. I was excited to try it out a second time with some revisions to the recipe- doubling up the cinnamon, adding a bit more ginger, using my own homemade applesauce, adding a bit more pumpkin and vanilla. I had high hopes for this second attempt at the pumpkin bread. And then I considered the salt.
I'm not super big on the salt. I don't like adding it to very much and I don't like the idea of having a high amount of salt in my diet. None of that processed-food-with-the-main-ingredient-being-salt business for me! So what do I do? I eliminate the salt completely.
Perhaps I'd hit my head on the wall earlier that day. Or maybe the oven was acting up and it was just a coincidence. Or maybe- just maybe- its a
bad idea to mess around too much with the basic ingredients of a recipe when you don't really know what they're needed for in the first place.
The end result was that when I took my delicious-smelling pumpkin bread out of the oven approximately 1 hr 30 minutes later and sliced myself a little piece, the inside was... raw. And I don't just mean a little bit mushy and slightly undercooked. No no. This was completely raw. It looked as though it had been in the oven for maybe 5 minutes.
I thought back to my elimination of salt.
Maybe, I thought,
it wasn't just in there for no reason whatsoever. I'd hate to waste that pumpkin bread. So I scooped out the innards, as you can see in the photo (because the outside cooked quite nicely), mixed in the required amount of salt, and plopped the whole big mess back into the pan.
Not only are some ingredients necessary for recipes, but the
order that they are added, for chemical reactions to take place, is also a key step. After another hour and a half of baking in the oven, the result was exactly the same: a cooked outside, and a raw inside. There was no saving this pumpkin bread!
The lesson learned here is that you should never stray too far from the original recipe unless you actually
know what you're doing and understand the chemical reactions of baking and cooking. I am assuming it must be the salt that is the main reason for this pumpkin bread not working, although I still am not sure entirely why it turned out so raw. I will have to try it out again, with the correct portion of salt, and hope to goodness that I don't just let a bunch of ingredients go to waste again!
And getting back to discussing extremes, this mishap also reminded me that my body
needs a certain level of sodium. Trying to cut it out completely is ridiculous. It brought things back into perspective and reminded me that if I start eliminating things like sugar and then oil and then salt and so on, then there'll be nothing left! All of these things are necessary. In moderation. I just hope that these reminders don't always come in the form of a failed baking experiment:)
Sara, the boot camp instructor, mentioned last session that we easily burn 800-1000 calories per session. This came as a huge (albeit welcome) surprise to me; I was sure that the number would be about half of that. I have read so many articles warning about how people always underestimate how many calories they consume and overestimate how many they burn that I suppose somewhere along the line I started almost doing the reverse to prevent me from falling into that trap. But it is important to be realistic, and to find the middle ground, rather than go from one extreme to the next. That way we can achieve the most accuracy and the best understanding of where we are at.
Just as important as it is to be realistic and truthful about where we are at from a healthy point of view, it is equally vital to remember the needs of our bodies. In my efforts to improve my nutrition and to eat clean and non-processed, there have been a few stumbling blocks along the way which have caused me to stop and reassess my position. Such as, for example, my most recent baking fiasco!
Take a look at this photograph :
What you see here is my recreation of the pumpkin bread that I had made before. I was excited to try it out a second time with some revisions to the recipe- doubling up the cinnamon, adding a bit more ginger, using my own homemade applesauce, adding a bit more pumpkin and vanilla. I had high hopes for this second attempt at the pumpkin bread. And then I considered the salt.
I'm not super big on the salt. I don't like adding it to very much and I don't like the idea of having a high amount of salt in my diet. None of that processed-food-with-the-main-ingredient-being-salt business for me! So what do I do? I eliminate the salt completely.
Perhaps I'd hit my head on the wall earlier that day. Or maybe the oven was acting up and it was just a coincidence. Or maybe- just maybe- its a bad idea to mess around too much with the basic ingredients of a recipe when you don't really know what they're needed for in the first place.
The end result was that when I took my delicious-smelling pumpkin bread out of the oven approximately 1 hr 30 minutes later and sliced myself a little piece, the inside was... raw. And I don't just mean a little bit mushy and slightly undercooked. No no. This was completely raw. It looked as though it had been in the oven for maybe 5 minutes.
I thought back to my elimination of salt. Maybe, I thought, it wasn't just in there for no reason whatsoever. I'd hate to waste that pumpkin bread. So I scooped out the innards, as you can see in the photo (because the outside cooked quite nicely), mixed in the required amount of salt, and plopped the whole big mess back into the pan.
Not only are some ingredients necessary for recipes, but the order that they are added, for chemical reactions to take place, is also a key step. After another hour and a half of baking in the oven, the result was exactly the same: a cooked outside, and a raw inside. There was no saving this pumpkin bread!
The lesson learned here is that you should never stray too far from the original recipe unless you actually know what you're doing and understand the chemical reactions of baking and cooking. I am assuming it must be the salt that is the main reason for this pumpkin bread not working, although I still am not sure entirely why it turned out so raw. I will have to try it out again, with the correct portion of salt, and hope to goodness that I don't just let a bunch of ingredients go to waste again!
And getting back to discussing extremes, this mishap also reminded me that my body needs a certain level of sodium. Trying to cut it out completely is ridiculous. It brought things back into perspective and reminded me that if I start eliminating things like sugar and then oil and then salt and so on, then there'll be nothing left! All of these things are necessary. In moderation. I just hope that these reminders don't always come in the form of a failed baking experiment:)