I just saw that Wardee Harmon of the Traditional Cooking School did a new video on her top 3 favorite “go-to” traditional foods for doing the Trim Healthy Mama plan. See the video embedded above. This THM Plan is how I am maintaining my 70 lb weight loss eating a variety of delicious foods, including carbs, without the weight creeping back on. Contrast that to the low-carb diet rut I had been in, where I was only eating about 10 foods.  I love Wardee’s suggestions, they are similar to mine. I would have to say mine are:

1. Eggs. I usually alternate this with oatmeal for my morning meal or my sourdough bread toast with THM jam from the cookbook and trimmy drink from the same book.  For S breakfasts and if I have time, I will eat 2 scrambled eggs, cooked with diced onions, diced red and green bell peppers, or diced yellow squash, previously sauteed in butter. This is so good! I learned from the authors in their THM membership site  (their “In the Kitchen Videos”) that thinly sliced summer squash sauteed in butter makes a great substitute for hash browns. If I have even more time I will add a small diced avocado and/or  grated cheese. If I am having an E or FP breakfast I use 3 egg whites with the same veggies, and add nutritional yeast to give the dish that “cheesy” taste. Of course I add salt and pepper, and sometimes cumin or chili powder or Italian seasoning. That’s basically the recipe for Serene and Pearl’s  eggatable scramble from the cookbook.

2.My whole wheat sourdough bread toasted to a wonderful crispness. It feels so good to eat my sourdough bread again! I didn’t eat it for about two years when I was on diffrent variations of a low carb, no grain diet. I can have 1 tsp of butter on one large slice or divided on two half slices for part of an E meal. Sometimes I top the toast with the THM Slim Belly Jelly from the THM Cookbook.

3. Greek yogurt. Here’s the recipe I use to make my own from scratch using 0% milk for 0% Greek yogurt (E or FP meals), and whole milk for full fat Greek yogurt (S meals). It feels so weird buying 0% milk after being immersed in the full fat world of the Weston A. Price diet, but I can’t afford the time and money it takes to buy raw milk, separate all the fat off, and make it into 0% yogurt for my E and FP meals.

Then for the next three of my “go-to” foods I would say:

4. Hot cocoa in a 1 qt Mason jar with stevia and collagen and 1 tsp of Kerrygold butter, for E or FP meals. I have this every morning. It’s my Mormon version of their Trimmacino/Trimmy recipes. But I have found that it tastes better for me if I cut back on the cocoa and up the stevia, so it’s 1 tsp cocoa to 1 tsp stevia, and then a few pinches salt, added to a quart jar of 3/4 boiling water and 1/4 room temp water. If I am having an S meal, I will add raw cream that I get from my cow herd share at a raw milk dairy. If I am having an E meal, I will just add collagen. Note: since I wrote that, I have discovered I can use less stevia when I make sure to buy stevia extract powder, which has no fillers, instead of the powders that are simply labeled “stevia.”

5. soaked oatmeal, soaked according to Nourishing Traditions guidelines, cooked with 1/2 of an apple, and then flavored with pumpkin pie spice and stevia. Or sometimes I will use a small amount of real maple syrup. The first time I had oatmeal after not having it for so long because I had been low carb/no grain, I seriously felt a “buzz” in my body, like my body was humming along at a new level of energy, thanking me for giving it some slow-burning carbs to soothe my adrenals.

6. Gluccie puddings. Oh my, I have been having fun with these! “Gluccie” is short for glucomannan, which comes from the konjac root, an Asian plant. It acts as zero calorie thickener. The puddings you make from these are creamy and sweet. That’s my favorite dessert texture. Yet they don’t have any fat! They are FP so I can eat them whenever I want without regard to the THM recommended 3 to 4 hour timing between meals. The picture above is a lemon pudding, with turmeric added to make it look yellow, and more stevia added to counteract the turmeric taste. In addition to this lemon flavor pudding, I also love others! The salted caramel recipe is sooooo good. I enjoy the peanut butter flavored pudding using pressed peanut flour. I am searching for a Purist caramel flavoring on Amazon Prime or Azure Standard, I’ve yet to find one. I like to make the pudding in a big batch and divide into small containers to cover me for the next few days, so when I have to run errands during lunch time I can grab one and eat later in the car. Watch the videos below to learn how to make the puddings.

7. spring green mix with cherry tomatoes and lunch meat thinly sliced. Again, lunch meat is not really Weston A. Price/Puristy approved, but there’s the budget thing again. That’s an FP meal if the meat is lean. To make it S, I add avocado and homemade ranch salad dressing made out of sour cream, salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning, diluted with water. To keep it FP, for a dressing, I use raw apple cider vinegar splashed on with Italian seasoning, salt and pepper. I plan on getting  salmon a lot more often to eat with this salad. If I have time, to add the “fun” factor to my lunch, I will make a wonder wrap from the THM Cookbook to wrap around the salad. This is a gluten-free, nut flour free tortilla or wrap. It tastes super yummy if I put 0% Greek yogurt on the wrap before it put the salad on it. As you can see, mine are not perfect and sometimes I get holes in them. I am still perfecting the art of making them to be thick enough not to tear any holes as flip them or slide them on to a plate when both sides are done cooking.

To round out my top ten (OK, 13!) Trim Healthy Mama favorite go-to items, I would have to add:

8. skinny chocolate, but I like to make mine with cocoa butter instead of coconut oil. I guess I am just tired of the coconutty taste after having coconut oil for so long. But I just read that extra virgin coconut oil doesn’t taste so coconutty. We shall see. I thought that was what I was already using. The chocolate tastes more like real chocolate with cocoa butter. Wardee says she like to just use Sweet Leaf stevia for her dark chocolate. I used Pyure this time and it tastes good, but it’s not as tasty as using honey, like in the recipe here. There’s still that slight stevia aftertaste, but it’s not that bad. I will probably just use stevia from now on, because Pyure (a blend of stevia and erythritol and “natural flavor” which can be a code word for MSG) really doesn’t meet my Purist standards.

9. popcorn, which can be part of an E meal, or an E snack, as long as you don’t add more than 1 tsp of butter over 4 to 5 cups of popped popcorn

10. sweet potatoes. I missed these in my low carb days! I love to eat a small one for lunch with 1 tsp of butter, and salt and pepper as a side dish, topped with lentils or sliced lunch meat. If the family has baked potatoes, I will have a sweet potato instead. White potatoes are a no-no on the THM plan but sweet potatoes can be easily subbed. Just don’t pile on the butter, use only 1 tsp to keep the serving in the E mode.

11. lentils made according to Serene and Pearl’s recipe in the cookbook with chicken broth and nutritional yeast.  If you cook it long enough they get really soft and taste almost creamy, almost as if you were eating an S meal, but you aren’t, it’s E, yet it feels so satisfying! So yummy! I think it’s the broth and the nutritional yeast that makes it taste so good. Even if I am out of chicken broth, I will make the lentil soup recipe with just water. I just made a big pot full over the weekend and we have leftovers so I will be having that for lunch as an E meal every day this week!

12. homemade salsa. I use the recipe here and it’s so flavorful.

13. cheese. I am not so Puristy as Serene in avoiding cheese made from pasteurized milk. Maybe someday I will get there. When I am super “hangry” and want something before I verbally bite somebody’s head off, chunks of cheese are my “go-to.” Of course, the goal is not to get to the “hangry” point but sometimes it happens because of life’s little emergencies when you can’t be in your kitchen preparing food and are still out running errands to the point of being hangry.

I am loving the THM Plan! It is a way of eating I can see me keeping for life, so that I keep my tendency to diabetes genes at bay. You can truly adapt the principles of the diet to wherever you are in your budget and purist-y state. There are so many more recipes in the cookbook I have yet to try!

I just tried out the THM Pancake recipe that uses cottage cheese and oats this morning and was pleasantly surprised at how yummy they are. They look just like white flour/IHOP pancakes. Yet they don’t spike your blood sugar. I can see that I will be making these for my family, as they still haven’t adapted to the taste of my sourdough pancakes. I also tried out Pearl’s THM recipe for French toast which is not in the cookbook, but available in the “In the Kitchen Videos” on the trimhealthymamamembership.com site. They were super yummy!

I was vegan for many years, just like Serene and Pearl, but I found it was not a sustainable way of eating, especially since I was repeatedly having babies and nursing. As a pregnant and nursing mama being vegan, I was constantly hungry! I wish I had known about the THM plan back then when I was having babies. I think it’s interesting that Serene and I have different definitions of Purism. I’m OK with using pasteurized cheese but I am still not sure about the pureness of the sugar alcohols used in the sweeteners. I will definitely not be using xylitol ever again, it really did a number on my digestive system when I tested it. Xylitol is used in the THM Super Sweet Blend. Wardee, who is definitely a Purist, says she only used stevia as her sweetener on the Plan. If you want more ideas about what to eat as a purist on the Trim Healthy Mama plan, Wardee is offering a free 1 week menu plan of Purist THM foods here.