10 Fruits That Taste Awesome Grilled

Open-flame cooking brings out the best flavor in just about every food. When you grill vegetables and fruits, their natural sugars caramelize and they taste even sweeter. Many favorite fruits are fast and easy to grill, and they make a deliciously different ingredient, side dish, snack, or treat. Because they are nutrient-rich, filled with fiber, and low to medium on the Glycemic Index, fresh fruits are SmartCarbs you can enjoy without impeding progress toward your weight loss goal. Just be sure to consult your Grocery Guide for proper portion sizes.

Ready to try grilled fruit? Here are a few tips for success with all fruits and hints for enjoying 10 great tastes of the season:

Basket, Pan or Skewers

The grates that came with your grill are shaped for cooking meat, but less substantial ingredients, such as pieces of fruit, are prone to falling through as they heat up. When grilling fruit, put it in a wire basket or on a tray with small holes that allow the flames to touch the food but keep it from falling through. Another fun option: soak wooden skewers (like those used for kebabs) in water for 30 minutes, poke them through the fruit, then put them on the grill.

Go Large

Fruit cooks quickly on the grill and within minutes small pieces can begin to disintegrate. Cut it it in large chunks, even if you need to slice it down to bite-size before serving.

Light Oil

Spraying cut fruit with zero-calorie cooking spray, or tossing cut fruit with a little olive or coconut oil or butter before grilling helps bring out its flavor and prevents the pieces from sticking to the basket, pan or grates. Avoid drenching the food in fats, which can lead to a grease fire. Just coat it lightly.

Low, Indirect Heat

Cooking over high flames can leave you with burned fruit in a matter of minutes. Better to grill fruit on the outer edges of the grates or over coals that have turned gray.

Let Cool

Fruits contain a lot of water, which becomes extremely hot when grilling. Allow it to cool after removing it from the heat before eating so that scorchingly hot water doesn’t squirt out and burn your mouth when you bite into it.

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So now that you know the HOW of grilling fruit, here’s the WHAT:

1. Peaches

Slice in half and remove the pits. For more flavor, brush with honey and sprinkle them with cinnamon. Put peach halves on the grill with the cut side down and cook for eight to 10 minutes, until fruit is hot throughout.

2. Plums

Like peaches, cut in half and remove the pits before cooking. Leave on the grill for four to six minutes, until the flesh is tender but not crumbling.

3. Apples

Peel, cut into quarters and remove the core and seeds. Sprinkle with lemon juice to keep the cut pieces from turning brown. Grill for 20 minutes, turning every five minutes.

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4. Pears

Slice into wedges, cutting away the stem, core, and visible seeds. Brush with coconut oil and sprinkle with a little sea salt. Cook for 15 minutes, turning every three to five minutes.

5. Figs

Snip the tiny stem end off each fig and cut in half lengthwise. Coat in a light mixture of lemon juice, honey, and cinnamon. Grill for two to three minutes on each side.

6. Watermelon

Go with seedless varieties, if you can. Cut melon into thick wedges or one-inch-wide rounds. Grill for two to three minutes per side.

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7. Cantaloupe

Slice into one inch wide wedges with the rind still attached and discard seeds. Or cut into cubes (with rind removed) and slide them on to skewers. Cook for four to six minutes, turning frequently.

8. Pineapple

Cut pineapple into wedges with the skin still on the edges or remove the skin and core and slice into rings. Grill for about three minutes per side.

9. Bananas

Peel banana and slice in half lengthwise. Grill for two minutes per side.

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10. Lemons

Cut the fruit in half, pick out any visible seeds with a fork or your fingertip, and brush the cut sides lightly with oil. Set them cut-side down on the grill and cook for about three minutes, until the fruit is lightly charred. Squeeze onto grilled chicken, fish or vegetables.

The post 10 Fruits That Taste Awesome Grilled appeared first on The Leaf.

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[Q&A] If you practice eating at a deficit, how do you avoid becoming number-obsessed?

Hey all! Let me start by saying, I see all of you working towards your goal weight, an internet stranger is proud (and slightly jealous) of you.

Now, on to my question: (Background: my main form of exercise is walking, I really don't enjoy it at all. So counter this, I eat at a deficit, 1200 calories) If you're like me, and focus on diet and not exercise for your weight loss journey, how do you avoid becoming obsessed with the calories in every bite?

Also, has anyone here come close to developing anorexia-type issues because of it? I get such a rush of joy from seeing that I stayed under my calorie goal for the day, that I work towards not making the counter read 1200. Seeing my own behaviour warns me of a bad pattern. Does anyone have advice on how to deal with this?

Again - keep on keeping on y'all! all the love

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SV: Broke through an 8-month 5lb yo-yoing plateau by changing my mindset and stalking r/loseit

Between October and December last year I worked my ass off through a combination of IF, CICO, and jogging to lose 20lbs. It felt utterly amazing but, despite all my best efforts to continue losing weight, I faltered. I let myself take time off between Christmas and the first week of January, I didn't go completely overboard but the 4lb gain it caused made me feel awful. Unfortunately, since January I've been in a horrible cycle of losing and gaining all while remaining in the same 5lb window of 213-218lb. It's been incredibly discouraging as it's like I'm consistently erasing all my hard work by falling off the bandwagon so shortly after. What's worse, this came after the three months between October-December where I lost the most weight I ever have (I've been obese since very early childhood) and was definitely at my healthiest.

To (somewhat naively!) feel like I've overcome a lifetime of bad habits by putting in 3 months of solid effort and then to just bounce around the same 5lbs for 8 months has taken a huge toll on my self-confidence. I've never wanted to give up on trying to lose weight but I have noticed that I've been feeling for months now like I'm losing the fight and perhaps I'm just not strong enough or not in the right place in my life right now to make a positive change.

Fortunately, this subreddit has given me a kick up the butt. Seeing other people struggle and succeed has made me feel far less ashamed and alone. I have made a point to look at one of my various weight loss and health subreddits every day with r/loseit being the main one. I've made 'discipline not motivation' my internal mantra coupled with the idea that every day is either a step closer to or further from my health goals. I changed from weighing weekly to weighing daily, as another reddit user suggested that would help me feel less caught up in the scale number as progress every week.
I've disassociated exercise with weight loss and instead, make the focus of my workouts to improve performance and build strength the results of which are so motivating that I now actually want to challenge myself to do more. Thanks to all of this, I've managed to push past the 5lb window I've been in for ages and I've consistently lost weight for 5 weeks in a row. Initially, this was only a small amount (I lost less than 1lb each week) but last week I broke through the 5lb window and in this morning's weigh-in, I was amazed to see that I've dropped a further 2lbs down from that window. It's also the lowest weight I've been in almost three years.
I know mindset is important to consistently making healthier choices but it isn't until today that I realised that was what had been holding me back. I wasn't trying to make healthier choices because I wanted to live a healthier life but because I was frustrated with myself for not staying on the bandwagon. I wasn't being healthier, I was just perpetually punishing myself and then either 'rewarding' myself or losing hope for a couple of weeks until I was back at the higher end of the 5lb window again. This is something I've seen people talk about a lot on here yet, I didn't realise I was personally struggling with it until I sat down and thought about why I've managed to break out of the 5lb yo-yoing.
I have a very long way to go, I know that. I also know that I'm not completely clear of the window yet. But for the first time since last December, I was excited rather than frustrated about what the scales showed and that, along with my realisation about what's changed, feels like an important step closer to what I want to achieve.

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[Day1] No more lying to myself, it’s finally time to lose it [23F] (weightloss buddies welcome)

Stats: 23 Female, Height 177cm (5ft9), SW: 80kg (176lbs), GW: 65kg (143lbs)

I’ve been chubby all my life, or at least I always thought I was. When I was 17 years old I already thought I was too fat when in reality I was only 61kg (= 134,5 lbs) which is actually perfect for my height (177cm = 5ft9). But I never thought it was good enough. Then college started and I started gaining a lot more... I wasn’t as active as in high school and found the love of my life: pasta! But it went very slowly, so I didn’t notice at first. Then I did started to notice, because I had to buy bigger clothes.. But I always said to myself: “it’s okay, I’ start my diet next week, as long as I don’t get bigger then XX lbs, I’m fine”. “And guys still notice me, so I’m fine..” (spoiler, when guys are horny, almost everything is fine if it’s for sex (in my experience, not saying every guy is like this!)

Anyway, it kept going like this, I would always shift my limit a little heigher, while hating myself because of it. And in my head I was always saying “as long as I’m not overweight, it’s fine, it’s still easy to lose” If it was that easy, then why was I not smaller.. It was such stupid reasoning.

Anyway... I’m finally at the point I’m actually overweight and at a point where I can’t keep lying to myself anymore... it’s too much and something has to change. It’s not healthy anymore. And I’ve been on a self improvement journey recently. My mental health is already so much better and I’m finally starting to be kinder towards myself and trying to love myself. So I think losing the weight is the next step on my journey :) Also finally doing it for me, and not for others.. so my motivation is better.

I guess I just wanted to share, to make it official so there is no going back. So thanks to anyone who actually read this long as message :p And if there’s anyone who wants to be weight loss buddies, please message me! We could encourage eachother, send each other recipes and hold each other accountable :)

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Diet Soda and CICO

Hello r/LoseIt - first of all, thank you for inspiring me to get back to work losing weight. I've had an unhealthy relationship with food my whole life, and I've been fluctuating within a 60 pound window for the past several years. Recently I've found myself back up at my all time highs again, but I'm determined to lose it all again (again). In the past, whenever I was losing weight, I never counted calories. My motto was "Go to bed hungry and you'll lose weight". But this time, I want to do it sustainably, so my question is, can I really drink diet soda? It claims to have no calories and if my only rule is that I have to follow CICO then I suppose I can drink as much diet soda as I want? Before I go ahead and do that though, I want to know if any of you fine folks here have any thoughts about diet soda, CICO, and weight loss. Thank you!

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All my life my mom made me feel terrible about my body and that’s why I didn’t notice when I got fat

I know this is probably a common experience but I’m home for a funeral right now, and every time I see my mom my anger about this gets stirred up. This morning it was when I was looking through my stuff for a dress to wear to my grandfather’s wake and she kept saying the dress I’m wearing isn’t flattering (every other person who has seen me in this dress has complimented me on it) and then when I changed into a different dress she said, “that looks good and it’ll look even better once you put on shapewear.” Too bad I was already wearing spanx.

To be clear, I am fat. I’m 20 years old, 5’4, and 200 pounds. That being said — this is the first year of my life that I have actually been fat by any reasonable person’s standard. I was unatheletic in high school, but I wasn’t fat. And I actually looked really good at the start of college. I was often on the high end of average for my height — around 140. But that’s not medically overweight.

I started gaining weight rapidly in college, but part of why I didn’t notice it until I was 60 pounds overweight was that my mom had made me believe all my life that I was fat.

As a little girl my brothers used to take food off my plate during dinner, and she would say “don’t get upset, they’re helping you and making it so you won’t get fat.” Because kids repeat their parents, my brothers’ lifelong taunt for me was “you’re fat, you’re ugly, and you have no friends.”

When I wanted a snack and she thought I shouldn’t have one, she used to say this nursery rhyme, “fatty, fatty two by four — couldn’t get through the kitchen door.” To make matters worse, I went by Maddie as a little girl, so my siblings would usually altered the rhyme to include my name. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to eat or didn’t want to run and my mom’s automatic, emotional, response was “you’re going to be fat.”

All this meant was that I learned to steal food from the kitchen when no one was looking and eat six cookies or a pint of ice cream or whatever all at once because it felt like I’d never get to have it otherwise.

And I really need to stress, that at no point was I overweight by any definition. I was still in line with typical beauty standards and I was medically fine. But my mom never stopped talking about. I don’t think a week has gone by since I hit puberty that my mother hasn’t talked to me about my weight or “what I’m going to do to get skinny” or when I’m going to do a few more sit ups.

When I started taking anti-depressants in college her primary concern was that I would gain weight. She never let me take birth control when I was younger, and I realized I was gay in college so it’s a moot point, but I’m positive it had to do with weight gain.

And to make matters somewhat worse — she’s always struggled with her weight. She’s one of those middle class suburban women who’s just always on a diet and was almost always heavy. And I think it would be easier to feel angry if she was a size two than if we’re in the same boat.

It got to a point where I was spent all of high school thinking I was fat. I recently redownloaded MyFitnessPal and realized I’d make an account as a sophomore in high school. I weighted 134 pounds! Why the hell was I so stressed about losing weight at 134 pounds? Why did my mom convince me that I was too fat to wear rompers or bathing suits? Why did I make it a challenge in high school to see how many meals I could skip by just drinking coffee and not eating? Why did my mom only give me yogurt and nothing else to eat for lunch at school?

I remember one time, I came home from a physical and had lost five pounds. It wasn’t something I was trying to do — it was just puberty. My body was changing. For some reason my mom and I still got into a screaming fight about my weight on the way home and she said, “what they won’t tell you, because they don’t want you to get an eating disorder, is that you’re packing on the pounds.” But I literally wasn’t. I had lost weight that year. And all she said to that was “five pounds is nothing.”

I was going through my old yearbooks last night because I’m home, and I was looking at the picture from sophomore and junior year, which were the years those physicals encompassed. I had visibly lost weight. I always store fat in my face so things like yearbooks and drivers’ licenses make my weight really clear. I pointed these pictures out to my mom and said “look I lost weight in high school” and she just frowned and said, “maybe you knew your angles better.” I didn’t. The angles were the same. I had lost weight.

My mom claims she talked about my weight all the time because my sister gained a ton of weight in college and she was trying to prevent the same thing from happening to me. But my sister obviously had other emotional issues going on. Like the way she gained weight is the way a severely depressed person gains weight.

Now that I’m trying to lose weight, I hate even talking to her about it. Earlier this year, my friend, who is a super talented athlete wanted to workout with me because her ACL was torn and I was just trying to get into shape. I needed my mom to drop something off for me at school and we ended up meeting at the gym and she was so bizarrely enthusiastic about me working out with my friend, that my friend commented on it later.

I hate telling her about working out or eating healthy. It actually makes me want to do it less. In her mind, a woman is only worthwhile if she’s always trying to get skinnier. I don’t want to be skinny or conventionally attractive — I just want to be healthy.

Also, to make matters worse, I’m a lesbian, which she doesn’t like to begin with. And there’s all this baggage about being a fat, ugly lesbian that’s in my head to begin with. But my mom always seems to make any expression of my sexuality contingent on weight loss. Like I have a pixie cut now and she’s always upset about it. She insists that I don’t “have the right face for it” (how is it that every man has the right face for short hair, but only some women do?) , never mind that I like it and that the girls I date like it and that all my friends like it. And the excuse my sister makes for her is that my mom finds my haircut stressful because it makes me look even heavier than I already do because I store weight in my face.

I wanted to wear pants to my cousin’s wedding when we went shopping I saw a gorgeous jumpsuit. I pointed it out to my mom and she immediately said that if I wanted to wear something like that I needed to “slim down.” And while it’s not as directly tied to being gay — she also gets upset every time I mention wanting to pierce my nose because... you guessed it — I have a fat face.

I’m sorry. This is a long and rambly post but I just needed to get it all out there. I’m so mad. Yes, it’s my fault that I ate too much and didn’t exercise enough. But the way my mom treated my body my whole life and continues to treat it makes me so sad and angry. I mean, here I am on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, and I’m most upset about how everyone there is going to think I’m fat because of what my mom said.

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I lost 20kg and people pointing it out makes me uncomfortable, how can I say "please stop" without being an asshole

I lost 20kg (40lbs?) in 2 months due to severe health problems. It bothers me how people react to my weight loss.

Before, if people told me to lose weight, I snapped back at them. Now people comment on how I look and say "I wish I could lose that much weight too" and it bothers me. I didn't lose weight because of balanced diet or exercise, I tell them, "I lost weight because I was sick for weeks. It was painful and terrible.", and most people get embarrassed and say that they only meant the kilograms lost, not the process behind it.

It makes me uncomfortable that people notice my body and comment on it. I don't want to hear what they think of my body shape. It's positive attention, so I can't reply like I used to when I was obese ("I didn't ask you, I didn't ask for your opinion, it's none of your business") and some people keep doing it even though I told them to stop. How can I get through to them without being rude? I never thought I would have this issue.

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