Show Notes

In this episode, we touch upon the crucial role of tracking calories for effective weight management, advocating the use of popular apps like MyFitnessPal and Cronometer to log food intake accurately. 

We also stress the importance of owning a kitchen scale for precise measurement of food portions. Emphasis is placed on tracking high calorie-dense food items such as oils, peanut butter and cheeses. 

We also share a variety of new vegan, high-protein, holiday-themed recipes – such as a chocolate-vanilla pudding pie, TVP chocolate chip cookies, and gingerbread cheesecake. 

Lastly, we ask listeners for recipe suggestions for the upcoming Veganuary and discuss what the next episode will cover – determining your ideal calorie intake.

Reference Links:

Kitchen Scale (affiliate link)

MyFitnessPal
Cronometer

Full Podcast Transcript

VeGAINS: All right. Welcome to the VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition podcast. This is episode five. I’m VeGAINS. I’m here with the awesome Protein Deficient Vegan. You want to say hi?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hi. Over the next couple of episodes, we are going to be giving you some fundamentals on how to reach your fitness and nutrition goals, especially with New Year’s coming up. People usually have resolutions, whether that’s losing weight or gaining muscle. We are going to give you some building blocks to work with. This episode specifically is going to be talking about tracking calories. So if you’re wanting to manage weight, tracking your calories is the most important thing that you can do, because what you don’t know, you can’t control

VeGAINS: That’s right. So we recommend you at least try this for a week. We’ll give you some tips on how to do it. There are a couple of apps that we like to use. MyFitnessPal is the one we actually typically use. It’s really good for putting in recipes. We make obviously a lot of recipes, so we keep all of our recipes in MyFitnessPal so we can eat them and track them.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hundreds.

VeGAINS: Hundreds, yeah. Cronometer is also another good one, especially for vegans. It’ll really break down your vitamins and minerals and stuff to make sure you’re not having any deficiency issues.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So initially, you might just want to start tracking everything you’re eating. Don’t change how you’re eating or what you’re eating. Just start logging it into one of these apps.

VeGAINS: Right. And you got to make sure you track everything. Oils in your food are a big one. It’s a lot of calories for just a little bit of oil and then anything you snack on through the day. People tend to not track that, but it is calories it’s very important to track.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Guilty. So if you’re going to track your food accurately, you want to make sure you know how much of it you ate. There are serving sizes on your boxes and your packages. Usually they have a volume amount and also a weight amount. The volume amount can change because things can settle in the packaging and whatnot. So it’s better to weigh out your food. So we would recommend getting a scale. They’re pretty cheap.

VeGAINS: Yeah, it’s just a little kitchen food scale. You get them on Amazon. We’ll probably put a link in the show notes to, like, a little scale we use. We actually have a couple of them, but they’re all pretty much the same. Just get one that’s on sale or something. If you don’t yet have a scale, you can just use, like, measuring cups or measuring spoons to measure out your servings. But those aren’t super accurate. So a scale is better, especially for things that are really calorie dense, like cheeses, peanut butters, and stuff like that, where just a little bit can be like an extra 100 calories. When you go to use your scale, a couple of tips. One, I would recommend leaving it in grams just because that’s what the serving is on most food items. And then two, you want to make sure you get familiar with the zero out function on the scale. So basically, you’ll put your bowl or whatever your food is going to be in on the scale and then hit the zero button and then add the food to the bowl. And you can do this with different ingredients multiple times to get the servings for everything. If you’re going to mix a bunch of stuff in a bowl yes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And then if you’re making a meal or something, most of your ingredients are going to be in raw form for calories. So, for instance, if I was making chili, I would measure out all of the raw ingredients and put all of those ingredients into my fitness pal as a recipe. And then after the entire meal is cooked, I will get like, a large bowl or a large container, zero it out on the scale, and then weigh whatever the final product is. And then I can divide that across how many of our servings we’re going to have. And that’s usually how we do meal prep.

VeGAINS: Yeah, if you’re just one person, you can just kind of rough estimate it and eat. If you eat the meal six times, it doesn’t really matter how much was in each serving necessarily. But if you have two people that are trying to eat off of the same thing, we like to use postit notes so we know how much is in each serving every time somebody goes to grab a scoop. So a scale should definitely be the first investment. If you’re interested in managing your calories, it’s really the most important tool for that. Exercise can only take you so far.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And then post it notes.

VeGAINS: And then post it notes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Can never have too many.

VeGAINS: We’re going to go into more detail on this in the next couple of weeks, but if you want to start out with this calorie tracking and you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on social media or the website.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And I think next week we’re actually going to talk about how to try to estimate what your calories should be, depending on what your goals are.

VeGAINS: Yes, absolutely. Got a lot to go into on that. All right, next up, we want to talk about some of the recipes we have out since the last time we talked. We were focusing on Thanksgiving recipes there for a while. Now we’re kind of moving into Christmas recipes, but also just some general purpose stuff that’s high protein and delicious. So you want to talk about some of those?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Absolutely.

VeGAINS: Okay. So the first one I’m really excited about is we made a well we, right. She made a chocolate vanilla pudding pie that is really outstanding and 20% protein. It’s pretty delicious. It’s literally like eating a big bowl of pudding with some peanut butter crumble on top.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So for this recipe, we used a premade chocolate cookie base. And then we made silken tofu into a chocolate pudding and also a vanilla pudding. And then we crumbled on top. Peanut butter powdered sugar crumble. And it is a delicious combination of flavors.

VeGAINS: Yeah, absolutely. Next up, we made some high protein TVP chocolate chip cookies. Everybody knows chocolate chip cookies. You probably haven’t had any made out of TVP. They’re actually really good and really soft. I like my cookies to be really soft, so it’s really awesome.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And I think they’re better than Lenny and Larry’s.

VeGAINS: Oh, absolutely. That’s a pretty low bar, but more protein, less money, and more taste, for sure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. We went and looked at the macros, and Lenny and Larry’s are, I don’t know, like 15 ish percent, and ours are 30%. And obviously, cost wise, it’s a lot cheaper to make your own than to buy Lenny and Larry’s.

VeGAINS: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But these are really great. And the good thing about the TVP use in this is you don’t need to rehydrate it. So it takes literally 15 minutes to make these.

VeGAINS: Yeah. Cool. And then we’ve kind of continued the pie cheesecake game here. We’ve been playing with some gingerbread cheesecake. That’s really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, TVP crust sounds weird freaking delicious, actually.

VeGAINS: Also 38% protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, 38% protein. And it has a tofu filling that tastes like gingerbread.

VeGAINS: Another one that we used in a lot of different stuff is actually a condensed mushroom soup that’s kind of like the Campbell soup, but veganized and high protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it is very handy for a lot of casseroles use condensed mushroom soup. And since that is not vegan, we made our own. And it’s high protein, so pretty much anything you put it in will become more protein.

VeGAINS: And we all like that, right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, yeah.

VeGAINS: Also a hash brown casserole. This one’s not high protein. It does have more protein than probably any other hash brown casserole you’ve ever eaten and tastes just as great.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It was dangerously good, actually.

VeGAINS: Also keeping up the potato game, we got a twice baked potato casserole, 25% protein, and it’s a big bowl of loaded baked potato.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s so good. It has, like, TVP fakon. Are we calling it fakon?

VeGAINS: Yeah, we can call it fake fakon bits.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, fakon bits. Amazing.

VeGAINS: Yeah. And then to switch it up and go for a cold dish, we’ve got a broccoli salad.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay. Have you been to a family gathering where you have, like, an aunt or someone that brings this creamy broccoli salad? It usually has, like, a fuck ton of mayo all over it. Well, we have high proteinized it and veganized it, and it tastes exactly the same, I thought.

VeGAINS: Yeah, it’s really nice. It’s, like, real light and refreshing. I think people say refreshing for light, things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I’ve heard refreshing used on the Food Network.

VeGAINS: Yeah, I get it now.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So it’s broccoli some of those fakon bits, Craisins, vegan cheese, and Sunflower seeds with silken tofu mayo dressing. So it’s really good.

VeGAINS: And then moving away from light and refreshing, you made a biscuits and gravy with a high protein vegan sausage gravy.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. It’s actually like your kryptonite. Yeah, and it’s pretty good. I don’t really like sausage of any kind, so he got to eat it all, which is good for him.

VeGAINS: Yeah, more recipes like that would be pretty cool. Also, we’re working on a bunch of recipes for Veganuary coming up at the beginning of the year. If you don’t know what that is, basically it’s just in January. A lot of people will try out plant based or vegan lifestyle and or diet. So we want to make sure we have some stuff out there for the people switching over who haven’t really made vegan food before. If you have any ideas for any recipes you would like to veganize, let us know. Again, you can email us. Reach out on any of our social media platforms. You’ll be able to find those in a link in the Show Note or just leave a comment on some blog posts on the website. Any of those things that we see equally well. So reach out.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yes, he sees them and then he lets me know that things happened.

VeGAINS: And then she responds

Protein Deficient Vegan: We got a system.

VeGAINS: All right, that’s it for this week. Next week we’re going to talk about that calorie number that hopefully you’ve been tracking from the time you heard this until you hear the next podcast. Give it about a week. And then also we’re going to have obviously more recipes because she’s cranking those out like a mad scientist. And we’ll have more veganuary tips for people who are curious about trying out plant based or vegan diet in January. All right, so I think that’s it. You want to say bye?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Bye!

VeGAINS: Bye everybody!

Vegan that likes to pick up heavy things and put them down again.
USAW Level 1 Coach
NASM CPT

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