Munich Eats: dean&david and I love leo

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Viv

One of the things I really miss about living in the city is the restaurants. In Munich, there are so many different places to choose from. All sorts of ethnic cuisine, casual, classy, cheap, expensive, junk food and healthy. I thought it would make for a nice feature to blog about (healthy!) local eats every now and then.

Last weekend, I met up with a friend for lunch. I had told my friend about my PCOS & insulin resistance so she was on board with eating someplace healthy. We went to dean&david, a healthy fast food franchise that has spread out to all major German cities but originates in Munich. I had been there once before, just a couple weeks earlier and I thought it was great. Until then, I had sort of thought of it as a place that sells overpriced salads and sandwiches, but when you want to eat healthy food, it really is perfect.

I ended up getting a Tandoori Chicken wrap and a side salad. In hindsight, just the wrap would have probably been enough, but I thought the salad couldn’t hurt, after all salad doesn’t have many calories. Something I also love is that dean&david have published the nutrition info for their salads, sandwiches, and wraps on their website, so I was able to double-check that I was making a healthy choice.

The wrap was absolutely yummy. And only 255 calories. All their sandwiches and wraps are between 234 and 396 calories so you really can’t go wrong. The side salad was around 200 calories (including dressing & bread). Next time I go there, I will probably go with either just a wrap or one of their salads.

Lunch was really yummy, filling and super healthy. My only complaint? Their drinks were a little overpriced. Considering that you just grabbed the bottle yourself from the fridge, paying nearly €3 was simply too much.

Afterward we went to I love leo, a frozen yogurt place that just opened in May and that I discovered when I was in Munich for a week in July. Frozen yogurt is not really that well-known here yet, so I was super-excited to find out you could finally get it in Munich. And they use low-fat yogurt, which, it probably still has more calories than yogurt but it is probably one of the healthier desserts to choose.

They have so many amazing toppings to choose from. I have had a hard time picking just three (that’s the maximum you get) every single time I’ve been there. They have different kinds of fresh fruit, nuts, various sauces, and toppings like Oreos, Bounty, Kit Kat, and cheesecake.

I really love the decor of the place. It is very simple, yet chic and comfortable.

A very happy Karen post-froyo.

I ended up getting frozen yogurt with cheesecake, fresh strawberries and pistachio sauce. It was honestly the best combo ever (though admittedly not the healthiest). But this was the first time I was there and they had the cheesecake topping, so I just couldn’t resist. But you could absolutely pick three fruit toppings and make it a perfect no-guilt dessert. Well, to be honest, I had no guilt over this dessert either, because it was just that amazing. Worth every single calorie.

Both dean&david and I love leo are in the university quarter of Munich, a beautiful part of town. I don’t go there very frequently but whenever I do, my mind goes into ‘what if’ mode. Munich is my hometown, an amazing place, and home to two of the best universities in Germany, but I chose to study in Heidelberg.

Whenever I am in the university quarter I wonder what would have been had I stayed in Munich. I would be so much more familiar with that neighborhood – like most of my friends who stayed are. It would be this university that is my alma mater, not Heidelberg. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret that I left, my time in Heidelberg (and the States and Spain) was too amazing for that. But it does make me think what if … And it makes me a little jealous of the thousands of students who got and still get to know Munich in a way I never did.

Cravings

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Viv

Sometimes all it takes for me is to read or hear a word somewhere to get a craving. I am currently reading a thriller (out of all books it would be a thriller to give me a craving), and a box of chocolates was mentioned in one of the chapters I read tonight. My instant reaction? I pictured myself getting a box of Belgian chocolates at the grocery store and wolfing down the entire box. And in that moment, it seemed like an absolutely fantastic idea. (It probably does not help matters that it is currently that time of the month.)

I frequently have that happen to me. Often, all it takes is someone mentioning a pizza or a burger on a TV show or in a book, and all of a sudden I want nothing more than that pizza or burger. Luckily, I can hardly ever be bothered to walk to the grocery store to give in to that craving.

Tonight I had been planning to go to the grocery store, though, and I knew it would be hard to resist all the chocolate there (did I mention I live in Germany, we have amazing chocolate here). I also knew that if I bought a 100g bar of chocolate tonight, it would not live to see tomorrow, and I would regret it.

So I treated myself to a 25g bar of dark chocolate (70% cocoa, 130 calories) before going to the grocery store. Once at the store I walked straight past the chocolate shelf, making sure not to look at my favorite kind (that would be Milka Daim, y’all). I managed to leave the grocery store without any chocolate. Or gummy bears. Or any other junk food. NSV!

Now granted, that trip to the grocery store only served a single purpose: to satisfy my craving for a bottle of Coke Zero*, but at least that has no calories, right? Right.

Do you ever get bad cravings like that from reading or hearing a word like ‘chocolate’ or ‘pizza’? How do you beat those cravings for junk food?

* Yes, artificial sweeteners are bad for me. Believe me, I know that and have already cut way down on my consumption of diet soda, but every now and then, I can’t help it.

On skinny people and being the listener

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Viv

It seems that when it comes to losing weight, ignorance and false information are incredibly wide-spread. In the past few days I have had both my sister (who is also overweight) and a co-worker (who is normal-weight) try to tell me that in order to lose weight, you should be eating 800–1000 calories. Umm no. That’s how much you should be eating if your goal is wrecking your metabolism.

The problem is that because I am overweight, people assume that I can’t possibly know anything about nutrition, because if I did, I wouldn’t be overweight. A discussion with co-workers today showed again how many people think that overweight people are ‘fat’ because they are too lazy to work out, and because they have no self-control when it comes to eating. But that is over-simplifying the issue. Of course overweight people got where they did by eating too much and by not working out (enough) – gaining weight, like losing weight, is biologically a matter of creating a calorie surplus or deficit. But it’s not that easy. And it seems that most people don’t get that. Or they don’t want to. Or they just don’t care.

The irony is that while I am overweight, I probably know more about nutrition than most thin people. Because I have actually educated myself on nutrition, and I didn’t do it by reading Cosmopolitan. I have done a lot of reading on how to lose weight healthily. The problem is not that I don’t know how to. I have known for years. It’s just hard to actually do it. And that shouldn’t be a foreign thought to skinny people. I have a co-worker who is very skinny but for a while she ate an entire box of Pringles at work every single morning. She probably knows it’s not healthy, but she ate them anyway. Is her eating that box of Pringles proof that she knows nothing about healthy food? Yeah, I didn’t think so. What is it that makes skinny people think they know anything about losing weight? They may know a lot about being thin, but losing weight and being thin are not the same thing. Heck, there are plenty of skinny people who don’t know much about healthy food. Of course being thin does not per se disqualify you from knowing anything about losing weight but, in my experience, most don’t because they were never in the situation where they needed to know anything about it.

Unfortunately I feel that as long as I am overweight, I am always going to be the one who is talked about, the one who is belittled and ridiculed, not the one who is listened to. Is that okay? No, it isn’t but even though I know a lot about nutrition, I have no credibility because I don’t look like what I know what I’m talking about. After some very insensitive comments by a co-worker today – ironically the one who knows about my insulin resistance and my changed diet – I have decided to keep my mouth shut on the topic at work unless someone shows genuine interest in what I have to say.

I had told my co-worker a week ago that I started running again, yet, when she asked me if I worked out at lunch today, and I replied that I go running three times a week, her reply was ‘oh please, since when? Yesterday?’ I am not sure if she knows how insensitive her comments are and while I have no plans of confiding in her again about this topic, I try not to be too angry. Unfortunately these are the kinds of comments that an overweight person has to deal with. If a thin person said they worked out three times a week, no one would question it. I am not sure if she thinks that just because I really did change my diet and really did start working out I am going to be thin within a week or two? Or even that she will see that I have lost weight within days. And that because she doesn’t, it must mean I am not actually losing weight or working out?

My weight loss has actually gone amazingly well. I have lost more weight in the past two weeks than I have ever lost in two consecutive weeks before. I think I will just have to remind myself of how well I am doing and that nothing my co-workers think or say can diminish that. I know that I am living healthily, regardless of what others think or say. I know that this is the right way for me and it is working. Regardless of how overweight I still am and will be for a while, I know I am on the right path.

For now, I suppose, that knowledge will have to be enough. And one day, they will see that too, and maybe then they will listen.