The basics
Some basic information about the ingredients and tools I use.
Prepping
- Eating according to the Zone can seem a lot of work and sometimes it is. Prep trays of food on the weekend or a free evening and warm them up later in the week.
- Another thing I often do is cook more blocks at diner time so I can have it for lunch the next day as well.
- Also: freeze a lot of proteins & vegetables for easy acces at days you don't have that much time. I put a weighed amount of blocks in freezer bags and write the number of blocks on it.
- Oatmeal flour | on a lazy sunday: use a (hand) blender to ground oats and make a bowl of oatmeal flour for easy access the rest of the week.
- Cashew flour | same as the oatmeal; ground the cashew nuts and save it in jar.
Ingredients
All the amounts I use are based on the general list of ingredients of the Zone diet website. For specific products, especially processed foods, you'll need to calculate how many grams you can use per block.
- Eggs | eat no more than 2 egg yolks per day. Only use the egg whites if you want to eat more.
- Goat Cheese | since my product is high in fats I count it as 1 or 0.5 block of fat as well as 1 block of protein
- Mozzarella | since my product is high in fats I count it as 1 block of fat as well as 1 block of protein
- Low fat quark | the standard volume for one block is 63 grams. Check your product and calculate how much one block is. I've noticed yoghurts and quarks vary a lot.
- Low carb wraps | I have found small low carb wraps that are half a carb block, which works perfectly. You can find them here.
- Cauliflower rice | a great substitute for rice is cauliflower rice. Which sounds fancy but it's just very finely chopped cauliflower. You can put raw cauliflower in a blender, but it's difficult to prevent it from getting into one big wet mash. The lazy girl in me spends a little more money and just buys it.
- Tamari | it's a gluten free soy sauce. Usually it's sugarfree as well, which I like and it often has less carbs.
- Sundried tomatoes | be aware what kind you use: most sundried tomatoes contain lots of fat. I found a product that has barely any fats and more carbs.
- Leek | my prepacked and chopped leek has different nutritional values than the general list, so check out how many grams yours is.
- Noodles | most noodles are very high in carbs. Try to find a product that has less carbs per 100g, like this one.
- Tofu | check the amount of protein in your product and use more or less tofu. It could differ from mine.