Today we had to ran some errands, meaning we would be out all day and eating restaurant food. However making the right choices, I managed to keep my cholesterol intake below the daily recommended 200mg.
For breakfast my wife cooked a lot of oats, to make sure we would’nt feel hungry during the morning.
I added cashew nut milk to my oats. The good thing about cashew nuts, is that you don’t need to soak them to long. The not so good thing is that it’s not my favorite nut to use as an ingredient for sweet milk. Of course you can only know once you tried, because verybody has a different taste. And the unsweetened cahew nut milk is great to make vegan mashed potato.
For lunch we opted for noodle soup. Our favorite Ipoh Hor Fun restaurant (Ipoh Slice Chicken Hor Fun: Chan Tung Kee, Kuala Lumpur) is closed on Thursday. Favorite as the portions are big and they are used to us not wanting the prawns and the sesame oil on the soup. Opposite an equally good Hor Fun restaurant (Pau Kee, 10, Jalan Utara, Off Jalan Imbi), with smaller portions (delicious prawn wanton, but we want to go easy on prawns) and around lunch time a long wait. So since we were in a rush, we went to the corner coffee shop Weng Hing (Jalan Imbi 183) to order their famous pork noodle soup.
According to nutrition.com.sg, 1 portion of noodles, minced pork and muchroom soup contains 37 mg cholesterol. We will take this as an estimate for our noodle soup as well.
For dinner we found a Korean restaurant serving fish as well, and since my mother always says: "1 fat fish is still better than 1 piece of lean meat", in we went 🙂
According to nutrition.com.sg, 1 fish of 70 grams (oz) of fried Spanish mackerel contains 44 mg cholesterol. Surely the mackerel on my plate weighs more than 70 grams, so let’s use caloriecount.about.com‘s estimation that 1 fillet of 146 gram (5.15 oz) of Spanish mackerel contains 107 mg cholesterol. I didn’t eat the fried ikan bilis nor the egg omelet (portions 1 and 3 on the left top of the dish above the fish)
My wife ordered a pork dish, so for those who notice that after following 2 months of our low cholesterol diet, %-wise I lost more bad LDL than she did, there are 2 reasons:
- every person is different, what works for me maybe wont work for you or her
- she does eat different things than myself when we are not eating in.
And to illustrate the challenge of finding delicious low cholesterol recipes: I made the above almond milk shake with cherry marmelade. It looks better than it tastes…
Total daily cholesterol intake estimate: 144 mg
- breakfast: 0 mg cholesterol
- lunch: 37 mg from minced pork
- dinner: 107 mg from mackerel
Good to see that with choosing the right dishes, we can eat out 2 times without busting our cholesterol diet. It does take some discipline however to stear away from the usual rich dihes like nasi lemak or oily curry dishes. However I am not much of a fish cooking chef, so when a fish is on a restaurant menu, I better go for it 🙂
You notice me not mentioning once going to a vegetarian restaurant. That’s because I just don’t like the processed meat replacers that you again have no idea about what’s in it. Take for example Chicken Style Patties from Quorn. You would think that Quorn stands for healthy vegetarian meat replacement, but the patty they produce is 48% mushroom based and 52% "God knows what". (read here what the other 52% is all about). Anyway, I just don’t want anything processed. I want to recognize what’s on my plate so I have a decent idea of what I am eating.
Hello, I’m not sure how old your post is … I’m very curious about your experience and end result. I too have recently been told my cholesterol is high and I don’t wish to start with the recommended drugs. So here we are, learning about our eating habits. Where you successfully able to lower your bad cholesterol? How long did it take? Where you able to maintain?
Thank you for this insight on your journey,
Krissia
Hi Krissia,
Yes, I did manage to lower my bad cholesterol: it is now hovering around the maximum level.
It took 3 months to see a significant drop when eating less animal fat and of course no more artificial fats (no cookies and anything else that contains transfat).
Why hovering around the maximum level: because I do love to use real butter for baking, condensed milk in coffee and Greek yoghurt. So I do eat those and check regulary if my LDL is not going overboard.
Do note that the more I exercise, the more my HDL goes up, which makes my total cholesterolcount a bit too high as a result of that.
Hope that helps Krissia