No bread, no pizza, no meat, no problem

A frittata made with three reduced-fat cheeses, tomatoes and pesto, above and below, oozing like the deep-dish pizza I deny myself to maintain my weight loss.

Most of the ingredients are available at Costco Wholesale. To prepare a 10-inch frittata, see Do you know how to do 'The Frittata'?

Do I miss bread and pizza, which I gave up a couple of years ago to lose weight, at the suggestion of my trainer at the gym? Absolutely.

I no longer have a trainer, but I'm still on a no-bread, no-pizza diet.

What I don't miss is the 48 pounds I've lost, giving me -- someone who has been overweight for most of his adult life -- a feeling of being relatively light on my feet.

My weight recently hit a plateau in the 179-181 pound range, compared to a high of 228 pounds in 2010.

A wedge of the deep-dish frittata with Della-brand organic brown rice from Costco Wholesale in Hackensack and stewed tofu from H Mart in Englewood.

Go brown

I've substituted brown rice, whole-wheat pasta and mashed sweet potatoes for white rice, conventional pasta and white potatoes.

I've added organic quinoa to my diet, making 2 cups at a time to provide a side dish for 4 or 5 breakfasts and dinners. 

I finished the quinoa on Wednesday morning. So I made 2 cups of organic brown rice with diced organic tomatoes in an electric cooker for the next set of meals.

Fluffy organic quinoa has fewer carbohydrates than rice or pasta. Here, I ate the whole grain with Chinese cabbage and spicy tofu from a restaurant that didn't have brown rice.

Instead of having bread with these organic eggs accented with pesto, I filled my breakfast plate with squash, sweet potato and sauteed cabbage with sweet peppers.

Two fish are better than one, as in this dinner of fresh wild salmon from Costco Wholesale in Hackensack and pan-fried whole whiting, which were $3.49 a pound at H Mart in Englewood.

I also gave up meat and poultry more than 3 years ago out of concern over all the antibiotics and growth hormones used to raise animals on factory farms, and the lack of information on most restaurant menus.

I've switched to seafood, especially wild-caught whole fish and fillets.

I also favor anchovies, sardines, whiting and other small fish that contain very low levels of mercury.

Homemade Black Tiger garlic shrimp and whole-wheat spirals with sardines.

Food discounts

Jerry's Gourmet & More and H Mart, both in Englewood, discount prepared food after 4 p.m.

Jerry's knocks $2 off its restaurant-quality Meals To Go, cutting the price for a complete dinner of fish, chicken or pork with pasta and other sides to $5.99.

Jerry's added a sign to the refrigerated case to make its Meals To Go easier to find. The small yellow stickers on the cover indicate a price cut to $5.99 from the regular price of $7.99 after 4 p.m.

H Mart, the Korean supermarket, cuts the price of Jinga-brand prepared rolls (kimbap) and other food  by 50% after 4 p.m.

On Wednesday, I picked up a seaweed-wrapped roll with fish sausage and egg for $2.50 instead of $4.99.

I also found a box of 20 small, yellow, intensely sweet Ataulfo Mangoes for $9.99, a discount of $6.

But my wife said the Englewood H Mart was selling the 20-package Shin Ramyun box of spicy noodle soup at full price, forcing me to drive to the Little Ferry H Mart on Wednesday to buy it on sale for $14.99, a discount of $3.

Kimbap and Korean pickles from H Mart in Englewood.

Weight-losing strategies that work for me

Mashed sweet potatoes stand in for fattening white potatoes at any meal.

Sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes. 

Brown rice, not white rice. 

No bread or toast at breakfast, but a bed of whole-wheat pasta for your eggs or egg-white omelet is perfectly fine and filling.

These are some of the strategies I've used to lose weight and keep it off since I gave up bread and pizza at the suggestion of a trainer at my old gym.

From a high of 228 pounds, I've reached a comfortable weight of under 185 pounds.

Organic eggs with manchego cheese and pesto over whole-wheat pasta.

It should go without saying that I don't eat dessert, unless it's ripe fruit with a great of piece cheese or an occasional sorbet.  

I've also stopped eating meat, meaning I can afford to eat a variety of full-fat, reduced-fat and skim-milk cheeses, and whole eggs. 

My overall cholesterol is about 140.

Seafood is a delight -- from Maine lobster to whole wild-caught fish to fillets flown here from Canada, Iceland and other countries.

I eat a lot of organic salad mix, tomatoes and cucumbers. I make canned fish salad with tuna, salmon and sardines, and eat it over salad, not in a sandwich. 

Kashi Trail Mix and and other bars allow me to skip lunch.

 

In the past, a snack would be cheese, smoked wild salmon, canned fish salad and other items, but I'd always eat them tucked inside Syrian pocket bread.

Now, I roll up slices of cheese and smoked salmon, dip them in mustard and eat them out of hand.

A spoonful of peanut or sodium-free almond butter is terrific followed by a spoonful of fig marmalade.

Fig marmalade goes beautifully with slices of manchego, a sheep's milk cheese from Spain. 

The almond butter is great over apple slices.
 

A spoonful of fig marmalade goes well with cheese.

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Blurring the line between meals

Breakfast without bread relies on organic brown rice bibimbap to give me a full feeling. In restaurants, bibimbap is usually served with a cooked or raw egg on top.

I've given up bread and pizza, but not foods that leave me satisfied and allow me to keep off the weight I've lost.

I often rely on 100% whole-wheat pasta from Trader Joe's and organic brown rice from Costco Wholesale -- and other dinner leftovers -- as substitutes for bread at breakfast.

My body seems to process whole-wheat pasta and brown rice better than their conventional counterparts or bread.

I miss pizza, but get the same gooey pleasure by adding sliced, reduced-fat cheese to omelets.

A gooey cheese-and-wild-lox omelet goes great with whole-wheat spirals.

Leftover sauteed cabbage and boiled squash add body to another cheesey omelet.

Stewed pollock, a prepared item from H Mart; smoked wild salmon and canned fish salad taste great for breakfast with tofu, radish kimchi and tomatoes in a za'atar thyme mixture.

I bought shredded vegetables from H Mart, and prepared a Korean comfort dish called bibimbap for dinner one night last week.

But I ate most of it at breakfast instead of bread (top photo).

For bibimbap, I made 2 cups of organic brown rice in an electric cooker, then added prepared vegetables from H Mart, a hot-pepper paste called gochujang and sesame oil.

H Mart Fresh in Fort Lee sells vegetables for bibimbap ($6.49).

This hot-pepper paste from Korea is one of the few without high fructose corn syrup.

H Mart Fresh (1379 16th St., Fort Lee; 201-944-9009) is the smallest of the Korean chain's stores in Bergen County, but it has a lot of prepared food and seafood, below.

H Mart Fresh draws shoppers from nearby high-rises. You see the word "fresh" repeated a number of times inside the store.

I did find a hot-pepper paste, called gochujang, made without high-fructose corn syrup or sugar (see photo). A 2.2-pound jar was $7.49.