Getting into the routine and a naughty diversion.

 Now that I have my scores, I've been using the app to explore the scores for all sorts of food and logging what I eat so I can monitor my daily scores and I'm pleased to say that I'm doing OK so far.  Kath and I are making a number of subtle changes in our diet and enjoying the changes.  

Here are a couple of examples and how they scored.  I'm not going to bore you with this stuff everyday, but I thought a couple of examples might  

On Tuesday I made a tasty veg curry and instead of having it with rice I just made a green lentil dahl.  Of course that scored really well.  Sadly I didn't have any mango chutney with it but that's a small sacrifice. I had a cheesy omelette with some spring onions and sliced red pepper in it for lunch and my normal fruit and yoghurt and sprinkling of all bran for brekkie.  And my overall day score was 71.  That's pretty good

Yesterday Claire and Grace came round for dinner and we had 'fishy dish' which is my version of a kedgeree.  In a wok, a knob of butter, cod steaks grilled and cut into chunks, frozen peas, frozen mixed peppers, rice, boiled eggs, and a heavyish sprinkling of turmeric.  Now white rice scores poorly according to Zoe, but the other ingredients, having fat (butter), protein and fibre effectively lower the GI of the meal so it scored OK.  I also cooked the rice in advance, let it cool, and reheated it with the other ingredients in the wok.  Apparently precooking, cooling then reheating rice and pasta reduces its GI, something to do with a change in the structure of the carb molecules.  Normal breakfast and some tomato and veg soup for lunch gave me an overall day score of 56, which is ok as my Zoe target for this week is 50+.  The target will rise over time.

So despite having a 'naughty' ingredient The meal scored OK, which goes to show that you don't necessarily have to cut out things as long as you mitigate them with other ingredients.  Rice pudding I guess would not get a good score.

Now I'm pushing my luck over the next two days. Beef.  That's a low scorer.

Today I'm doing a beef casserole(I call it my red stew) with a smallish amount of lean stewing beef, tinned tomatoes, roasted red peppers from a jar, butter beans, a parsnip, onions of course, and paprika and cayenne and a dash of Hendersons relish,  I might bung in a few olives.  We'll eat that with a baked sweet potato and some brussells sprouts. That's a real mixture of good and bad items, so it's interesting to see it scores 72 when I put it into the app.

Friday will I fear be a low scorer but it has to be done.  We only have beef occasionally, (save the planet and all that) but just once a month we allow ourselves a nice ribeye steak and the time has come. Yes, I know that's beef two days in a row, but we won't have any more for ages.  It's our regular monthly treat. Steak, oven chips, onion rings, a big mushroom grilled with stilton on top and a dressed side salad, and a bottle of Malbec.  I'll just grit my teeth and hold out my wrist for Zoe to slap.  The ribeye scores 35 (eat in moderation) and oven chips score only 16 (once in a while), then I add the side salad and wotnot and put it into the app and it scores . . 0, yes zero!  Oh dear.  But it does say I can have it once in a while.  I'll have to make sure I eat good stuff either side of it.

On the Zoe app the daily lessons continue.  One was about how they work out the food scores, which is more complicated than you might think.  Nutrients in the foods are combined with my test findings in some sort of algorithm.  

One thing I've just noticed is that the app has a bar code scanner so you can scan food packages to get their scores for you.