When Moms Meet sent me copies of Trim Healthy Mama Plan and Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook last October, I wasn’t interested to immediately dive in the entire trimming healthy plan. I had very little sleep and was exhausted because of childbirth and managing a newborn. I wasn’t thinking about losing weight.

The last two months has been all about keeping up with the demands of motherhood. Losing weight and getting back to my pre-pregnancy weight was not an issue as I was (and still am) breastfeeding my newborn and running around the house chasing twin toddlers. I did have very poor appetite and there were days that my body refused to accept anything other than hot chocolate. I wasn’t feeling healthy. I wanted to cap of 2015 by shedding off the excess pounds without having to starve myself or refrain from eating chocolate chip cookies.

But if you’re with our family 24/7, you’ll know that it might be impossible to lose weight if you look at our diet. We’re just big eaters. Mostly, big portions of everything especially meat loaf and steak. I have since cut down on rice consumption but there’s the temptation of replacing that with potatoes, which, by the way, is also my favorite.

I knew that if I have to go through this trimming healthy route guided by the plan and using the cookbook, I would need to cook food that my family will eat too. I need dishes that will be loved and liked by my husband and my twin toddlers.

 

Plan book, cookbook

I picked up the books – which, I kid you not, are heavy – and started reading about this wellness revolution. The Trim Healthy Mama Plan and Cookbook, written by sisters Pearl Barrett and Serene Allison, belong to the category of thick literature. The plan, for example, may be too lengthy for you to read from cover to cover in one seating. But the happy note is: it is written in such a way that you can hear the authors speak while you read. I could actually “see” their personalities spilling out of the book – and it made me feel like I’m looking at two smiling ladies who are just created a warm spot for me as Montana’s weather is progressing to winter.

The  Trim Healthy Mama Plan is the gentle and fun road to trim and healthy. It gives readers a unique way to lose weight and get healthy by eliminating sugar while still eating hearty, delicious food. The book includes menu plans, a list of super foods, time-saving tips, and pantry stocking and lifestyle advice to help readers reach their goals.

The companion cookbook offers over 350 recipes to help readers successfully slim down while eating well. This plan is for anyone, from those who love to cook from scratch with the purest ingredients, to those who can barely boil water. It’s not just for crunchy, health food types, and you don’t have to be an exercise fanatic to make this work.

Browsing through the recipes, I read quite a few unique and revolutionary cooking ideas and ingredient combination. My favorite is blending okra with eggs and mixing that with other ingredients in making brownies.

The cookbook presented pictures of the authors’ families, a warm personal touch that tells readers that these are real people with real families cooking real meals. There are over 350 recipes in the book which are not arranged according to breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Instead, they are arranged in this order: one-pot meals, hearty mains and sides, sunrise eats, sweet treats, beverages, and all things smooth and crunchy. I like this arrangement because it does not impose that a particular dish should only be written during breakfast. You can be as flexible as you like. I like to eat cake for breakfast, and pancakes and sunny side-up eggs for dinner. I also eat my dessert before the main course.

I said that the plan book is lengthy but reading through it (I did not finish everything of course), I learned that becoming trim and healthy doesn’t have to be painstaking and difficult. I don’t need to count my calorie intake all the time. I don’t need to give up one food group. I just need to know what type of food I’m eating. I need to know two main meal types (Satisfying and Energizing) and understand that S meals focus on fats and E meals focus on carbs. These meals are centered around balanced sources of protein. I like how they describe protein in these words: “If you need to lose weight, protein is the samurai sword in your weaponry against obesity. Eating protein, especially animal protein, can boost the metabolism by 25 percent.”

 

Recipes, dishes

There are ingredients in the recipes which you need to specifically buy for the purpose of cooking the dishes in the book. Some recipes call for gluccie, oat fiber, gluten-free baking blend or pure stevia extract, which can be bought in the The Trim Healthy Mama Plan and Cookbook, For my first attempt to cook some of the recipes, I only used ingredients that I could find in our pantry. I tried to use as less sugar as possible, except for the brownies where I cheated and went overboard in the field of sugars and sweets. Sorry.

I chose three dishes and two desserts from the cookbook.

BLT Frittata
We’re  a family who loves eggs so I knew this dish will be a big seller from the get go. The recipe called for parsley but I don’t like parsley so I did not include that in the dish. I added cabbage though as I thought it may be good to add a little green in the dish. The dish turned out really well and we had this for lunch. My husband made me reserve some slices for him for dinner. I’m definitely cooking this again.

Super Tuna Patties
I slept really happy one Saturday night because my twin toddlers ate two patties each during dinner. The recipe called for salmon but we didn’t have salmon in our pantry so I used tuna instead. I never liked fish in cans (except for spicy Spanish sardines) because, well, they smell fishy. I told my husband I’m serving tuna patties for dinner and he said he’ll passed; he said he’s not up to it. But when he had a bite of this patty, he immediately said we’re eating asap. Best paired with sweet chili sauce.

Coconut Thai Chicken
I’m Asian and a dish like this is close to home. I enjoyed this with rice but my husband preferred this with egg noddles. Unlike the frittata and tuna patties, this dish is messy for toddlers to eat on their own so we had to spoonfeed them. To fight off the spicyness, pair it with good girl moonshine, an all-day sipper with apple cider vinegar and ginger extract as the main superstar ingredients.

Cry-no-more Brownies
My attempt to make this as a healthy brownie was derailed after I saw all the chocolates that were still left in the counter from my children’s trick or treat participation. I decided to melt all the chocolates for this brownie recipe. I don’t have the Trim Healthy Mama Blend so I used the regular flour. But… I used okra! Hooray! You will never know that the slimy vegetable is present in this sweet goodness. I cheated on this one. I deserve a failing mark in the world of trimming healthy but I’m not sorry. Ha! This faux pas just proved that okra works in brownies.

Believe it or not chocolate chip cookies
The cold weather is here and we’re unpacking our winter clothes to keep us warm and cozy. That also means baking more chocolate chip cookies to be paired with milk. You can eat as much cookies as you want as long as you use the ingredients outlined in this recipe. Since I didn’t have the THM baking blend and Pure Stevia Extract, I used wheat flour and stevia powder, which are leftovers from my gestational diabetes diet. The cookies are wonderful. They’re not that sweet but are still satisfying comfort food for me and the family.

Trying out the recipes from Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook got me into the first step of finding an option on how to fulfill my 2015 goal of slimming down. What I like about it is that it empowers women to find their way out of the maze of diet foods, food fear, and miserable food bondage. Trim Healthy Mama is not a diet program; it is a lifestyle program that hopes to help readers of all ages and stages get healthy, slim down, and keep off the weight once and for all.

I now have one viable, doable option now for staying healthy.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: Trim Healthy Mama Plan  retails for $19.99, and the  Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook retails for $27.99 available everywhere books are sold. I received this product for free from the sponsor of the Moms Meet program, May Media Group LLC, who received it directly from the manufacturer. As a Moms Meet blogger, I agree to use this product and post my opinion on my blog. My opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of May Media Group LLC or the manufacturer  of  this  product. Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”