I'm starting next Saturday August the 1st and have no clue how to cook my wonderful cuban/latin healthly version food.

I'm gonna need a Healthy Latin Food Version for Dummies.

Seriously, should I cook with the "low fat" version of everything?.  I don't like to cook w/ adobos I'll rather do it myself, it does relax me a lot to minced the onions, the garlic, the pimientos morrones, the oregano... yummy but when it comes to the oil, even though I'm not a fryed type of person I use lots of pure de tomate (tomato past); vino seco; olive oil.

And no way I can cook frijoles negros (black beans) w/o sason.  Oh Lord help me here, LOL.

Need to loss at least 30 pounds to start feeling like myself again, my goal is 50, more than that I will be Jennifer Lopez, LOL :D

 In my opinion, keep your delicious cooking the same just eat smaller portions of it!  I am Cuban too, so I know all about the cooking . . . As long as you don't eat a HUGE plato de arroz, frijoles y bistec, you shoud be fine . . lol!  Wish you the best of luck!!

Hi,

I like some Cuban food, too.  My parents were Cuban.

I've read generally on this website that you should not have more than two teaspoons of liquid fat at any meal to try to avoid side effects.  This past Saturday I made one of the recipes from the little booklet that comes with the Alli starter kit.  It had half a pound of shrimp sauteed in two teaspoons of oil along with two cloves of garlic, and, then you added a bunch of crushed tomatoes.  I doubled the ingredients to make another portion for my husband, and, we both liked it.  So, I used four teaspoons of olive oil, but, I ate only half of that.  That was fine.  So, I would say that if you can sautee something in two teaspoons of oil, you'll be O.K., especially if it's something like shrimp which is so low in fat.  Two teaspoons of oil are only 9 grams of fat.

Also, many of the suggested recipes call for sauteeing lots of onions and garlic.  That's something we do in Cuban cooking, too.

I'll bet that we could even have breaded steak if we wanted to because the steak is actually very few ounces because it's so thin, and, we use like 1/4 egg per steak and a few tablespoons of cracker meal.  Maybe using a little Pam plus the two teaspoons of fat would work.

With the frijoles negros, you might be putting in a bit of oil to start with for the sazon, but, there are a lot of servings in a big cauldron of frijoles negros, so, maybe you'd still be below the two teaspoons of fat.

Also, something else I learned is that you can go over one-third of your daily target of fat grams in one meal so long as the rest of the day balances it out.  You just have to be careful not to go too high or you could have "treatment effects."  I haven't figured out how high is too high yet, nor do I really want to push that limit, you know?  I have not gone over 19.5 grams of fat in one meal.  You also have to be careful not too eat anything else with fat in it an hour before starting to eat a high-fat meal or an hour after taking the Alli pill with a high-fat meal because then those additional fat grams would add on to the meal's fat grams.

I have not checked the fat grams in a bag of platanos maduros from Publix, but, you can bake those in the oven instead of frying them, and, they taste good.  They're not the exact taste you're used to when you fry them, but, they're good.

Anyway, if you are able to use any Cuban recipes while on Alli, please post them!

Thanks,

Olga