<p>My wife uses coconut milk in her cooking -usually for Thai dishes. Coconut rice goes quite well with many spicy Thai dishes. I should go look up the difference between coconut water and coconut milk.</p>
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<p>Whenever I go to a Thai restaurant, I wonder if the food in Thailand is like that and if anyone there has nut allergies. Almost everthing on the menu at our local Thai restaurant has either peanuts or coconut milk. Fortunately I’m not allergic to peanuts, so there are a few things I can eat.</p>
<p>I looked up coconut water and it looks like it does a good job in providing electrolytes. Coconut milk apparently is also good for you having some medicinal qualities. My wife doesn’t make coconut rice that often. She does make some interesting dishes with peanuts and tiny little dried fish along with a very spicy thick sauce. I’m not sure whether it is Thai or Singaporean but I believe that much of her asian cooking skills came from her mother who was good at cooking indonesian, malaysian, singaporean and thai dishes.</p>
<p>The ingredients are generally available in the Boston area. We use the former 88 Supermarket near Boston University, H-Mart in Burlington, and some small asian grocery stores in Burlington. You can definitely get coconut water or coconut milk at these places. I generally don’t pay that much attention to the ingredients. I do know that we have several cans of coconut milk in the basement.</p>
<p>Good luck, Missy. I hope they’re able to get the situation figured out. I was at a nationwide simulcast last night and Vera Wang was interviewed for a bit (it was on figure skating, and she was a former competitive figure skater and still designs skating outfits for some of the top competitors.) She looked scary thin, almost like a concentration camp survivor. No idea what is wrong, her arms and back and neck look like a skeleton draped in skin with absolutely no muscle.</p>
<p>Coconut milk is a very different animal. Very, very high fat, high calorie content.</p>
<p>One cup of each:</p>
<p>Calories:
568 coconut milk
320 half n’ half</p>
<p>Fat:
52g coconut milk
28g half n’ half</p>
<p>Carbs
25g coconut milk
8g half n’ half</p>
<p>Coconut milk is fantastic and apparently has “good fat”, so it’s not as bad as it looks in moderation, but definitely high calorie. I’m not sure how it’s made, but it’s essentially the entire contents of a coconut, the liquid and the white meat somehow purreed or steeped to form a very thick liquid. If a can sits for a long period of time, the white solds (with all the fat) settle to the bottom leaving the clear-ish coconut liquid.</p>
<p>It’s available in grocery stores now (in the Thai section), but the Thai brands in asian markets will be much, much cheaper than the US grocery brands like “Taste of Thai”.</p>
<p>missy:
Good luck getting the meds all sorted out and back to gaining some weight. I agree that being a little chubby is probably better than being signficantly underweight as we age. These thyroid adjustments must be heck trying to get right. Seems like a series of misses and corrections over time is the only way.</p>
<p>chintzy:
Hang on to those treadmill arms and don’t push it until you are ready.</p>
<p>MOWC:
I’m glad you had a good outdoor run this morning! I think spring is in the air and giving us all a little bounce in our exercise step. I really, really enjoyed my walk yesterday.</p>
<p>Well, coconut rice is very, very tasty. My guess is that you don’t actually get a lot of coconut milk in coconut rice.</p>
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<p>Oh, believe me, I know! So are all the Thai curry dishes with coconut milk. </p>
<p>I can whip up a few pretty good Thai dishes. I’m perfectly happy to cook with butter, so I’ve got no problem cooking with coconut milk. During a fat loss effort, though, you do have to be aware of the calories. Coconut rice would be way up the charts between the carbs from the rice and the calories in the coconut milk.</p>
<p>I agree about Vera Wang. Unless it’s a medical condition, seems like with all her money she could hire a trainer and a dietary consultant so she could work out and eat and look thin and buff rather than skeletal.</p>
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<p>The fashion world is not known as a epicenter of sensible approaches to health and fitness! Or even sane images of healthy body composition. It would not be surprising if someone in both figure skating and high fashion has spent a lifetime of an unhealthy relationship to food.</p>
<p>I mean, being an ol’ fat guy like me isn’t the only way to fall off the rails of health and fitness.</p>
<p>Is coconut water artificially sweetened at all?</p>
<p>Alwyn Cosgrove and Lou Schuller, authors of New Rules of Lifting, New Rules of Lifting for Women, and *New Rules of Lifting for Abs *did a Q&A session yesterday where they answered questions from people who use their workout programs. </p>
<p>They uploaded to an online player so you can listen online or download it as an MP3 for you iPod – makes great listening while doing a workout or jogging or whatever. It’s one hour long.</p>
<p>Here’s the link for the online player:</p>
<p>[Conference-call-Feb-16</a> by Lou Schuler on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free](<a href=“http://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/lou-schuler/conference-call-feb-16]Conference-call-Feb-16”>Stream Conference-call-Feb-16 by Lou Schuler | Listen online for free on SoundCloud)</p>
<p>Or use this link for a download to your computer:</p>
<p><a href=“http://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/lou-schuler/conference-call-feb-16/download[/url]”>http://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/lou-schuler/conference-call-feb-16/download</a></p>
<p>Here’s the nutrition info on coconut water:</p>
<p><a href=“http://vitacoco.com/wp-content/themes/VitaCocoH5/nutrition-info/pure-nutrition.pdf[/url]”>http://vitacoco.com/wp-content/themes/VitaCocoH5/nutrition-info/pure-nutrition.pdf</a></p>
<p>It appears to be straight coconut water with vitamin C (ascorbic acid) added. It is moderately high calorie: 90 calories for a 500 ml (17 ounce) container. That’s a heck of lot less than a sports drink.</p>
<p>I was watching the Today show while on the elliptical at the gym this morning. They had a segment hockey moms who play hockey. That’s what I miss about living on the east coast. I would love to play hockey again.</p>
<p>Some of the newer sports drinks have fewer calories but the traditional drinks had about 200 calories for half a liter. Some of the new sports drinks have no calories at all. I had a coupon come out at Shaws yesterday for a free sports drink with zero calories. I left it there.</p>
<p>My coconut water is 60 calories. 11.2 ounces. </p>
<p>Conversations I never thought I would have… planning to do a group run in the morning with my daughter! She and her husband are actually training for a half-marathon. You might recall that she and I did a half in late September that we planned to walk and wound up running. Anyway, her running has been going really well, and she was NOT my runner-kid. I said “You won’t want to run with me because I’m really slow right now.” We are planning 9-10 miles of the 16 mile organized run. These runs are affectionately called “training races” instead of “training runs” because it is easy to get sucked out at too fast of a pace. (I assure you that this won’t happen tomorrow for me…) Anyway, I’m happy to be running with my daughter! (her husband is on nights this week so can’t run- he’s a resident.)</p>
<p>Well, that was a challenging workout to finish off the week. New Rules of Lifting for Abs. Phase II is where the number of reps decreases to eight per set with a little longer rest periods. The idea is to crank up the weights. I’m trying.</p>
<p>4 sets of 8 split squats on each leg with two 25 pound dumbbells. Alternating with a bent-over row – one 40 pound dumbbell.</p>
<p>Then 4 sets of 8 barbell deadlifts paired with 4 sets of dumbbell bench presses with just the head and shoulders on a stability ball. Hold both dumbbell up with outstretched arms and then alternate lowering and pressing one at at time, then the other. I did that with two 30 pound dumbbells.</p>
<p>60 minutes on the nose. Average heart rate 73%. Max heart rate 98%. Probably on the split squats, but it could have been the bench presses.</p>
<p>These workouts are really fun.</p>
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<p>I guess two of us had good parent days. I got a call from my daughter this afternoon. She was walking home from the gym! She’s been going three days a week for the past several weeks and making some steps to “not eat like a moron” as they advise in New Rules of Abs. Following in her dad’s footsteps, she’s “lost 5 pounds” several times. She’s at least glanced at the Rachel Cosgrove book and is shopping for a pair of thermometer jeans, having already gone down one size. I’ve been working on her for a year, as gently as a dad can, to get her to join me in eating less and moving more, so this was a very happy phone call.</p>
<p>She’s doing your typical big commercial gym workouts – half hour on the elliptical and “some machines”. The meatheads doing biceps curls in the room with the dumbbells scare her off. But, she has another option in the private gym in the office building where she works, so I can probably get her doing some other stuff. At the end of the day, just committing to doing something three days a week after work is the big hurdle!</p>
<p>^^ That’s great progress. My daughter is pretty good about doing the right kind of weight workouts- no “little pink weights” etc. She has gotten a lot of info and support online. She doesn’t like the student gym at Vanderbilt, where she is a grad student. You can imagine the skinny little blond undergrad girls… She and her husband tried the faculty gym (since he’s staff), but the hours weren’t that great and parking is always an issue. The wound up springing for a non-Vandy gym.</p>
<p>My son works out but my daughter doesn’t like the gym - too many guys stare at her. She doesn’t do weights at home either. I need to find a solution but don’t have the spare cycles.</p>