SILVER LININGS 2005

EDSA Shangri-La, Ortigas

September 25, 2005

TOPIC  : SOUTH BEACH DIET

MODERATOR : 

RACHEL ALEJANDRO (RA):   On behalf of I Can Serve, I welcome you to Silver Linings, particularly to the Big C Magazine's scheduled discussions.  So that's what we are going to do today.  Big C has lined up several interesting talks through out the day so we hope that you will stick around.  We are going to be in this room, which is Santan 1 room, and that we hope you will enjoy the topics that we have prepared for you today.  This is my sister Barni.

BARNI ALEJANDRO (BA):   Good morning.

RA:   She's The Sexy Chef.

BA:   Well, first of all good morning.  My name is Chef Barni Alejandro. My sister, Rachel and I, started a South Beach Diet Food Delivery Service called The Sexy Chef about a year ago.  I'm not speaking to you today as a nutritionist nor a dietician.  I'm just a regular person who firmly believes that eating healthily is the secret to living happily.  After all, we are what we eat.  Ten years ago, I didn't fully grasp what left over really meant.  Back then I was 20 pounds over weight, and was constantly sick.  And being a pre-school teacher, I was constantly being bombarded by illnesses everyday.  Yung mga bata di ba?   Always may sipon, may cough. So everything they had, I had also.  So we were all sick in the classroom. You know, I was wondering bakit kaya ganun?  Lahat na lang nasasagap ko?

My body's self defense was so low and I was so perpetually ill that Rachel came up with an awful nickname for me.  Imagine she called me The Sick Woman.  Okay? Imagine the morale I had with that coming from my own sister.  My family became worried with how sick I was getting.  I became tired of always feeling weak to a point that I would miss several days of work at a time that my mom eventually brought me to the US to see a doctor.

After some blood samples, the doctor told me the news that, my blood work was perfectly normal.  Seeing as that possibility had been eliminated, my doctor asked me about my eating habits.  “Hotdogs and fried rice everyday.” I replied.  After all, they're the easiest things to prepare, right? I was even convinced how lucky I was to have a 24 hour convenience store called All Day, All Night right in our condo.  That way I had access to potato chips and ice cream and all the other kinds of junk food all day and all night.  Hearing this, the doctor spotted the problem right away.  I was not getting enough nutrients from the food that I was eating.  He encouraged me to give up the processed food and start preparing home cooked meals.  Rachel bought me some healthy cuisine cook books and I begun cooking for myself.  I still remember the first dish I made.  It was called Eggplant Cormodoro.  It was a pasta, an eggplant pasta made with fresh tomatoes, basil, olive oil and lots of garlic.

To my surprise, not only was it you know, it was really, really good.  It was also very healthy.  This positive first experience inspired me to learn how to cook more healthy dishes.  Of course, my sister was very happy because this one is really matakaw .  She got to eat everything I made.  Just experiment some more, I'll bring you more cook books so that she'll eat more food.  Within 8 months of just cooking healthily, I lost 20 pounds.  So you can't say na parang crash diet na one week wow!  You know like that di ba ? t took 8 months, but without starving myself.  You know, it was quite simple, just really a change in eating habits. Basta it's not a crash diet but a healthier eating lifestyle.

Years later, I was fortunate enough to find a way to incorporate what soon became a passion for cooking healthy dishes into an actual lifestyle that paid the bills.  I read about the South Beach Diet and realized that in a way, since the day I learned to cook that Eggplant Pasta, I had been a South Beach convert already.

South Beach Diet is really all about eating healthily.  How can you go wrong by eating lean meat, poultry, seafood, fruits and a whole assortment of vegetables, di ba?  What more, after an initial carb-less two weeks, carbohydrates are added right back in.  Two weeks lang yun eh . We're not supposed to have any of the rice or the bread.  After the 2 weeks, in Phase 2, you can already add the healthy carbs.  You can have your fruits, definitely, and then you can add in your brown rice, your whole wheat bread, your whole wheat pasta.  So you can have everything but you just have to substitute you know, the bad ingredients for the good ingredients.  And of course sa pastry, there you can cheat already once in a while.  It's my favorite part.

Okay, so plus if you're takaw like me, the best part about the diet is that you're encouraged to eat 6 times a day with dessert pa .  So you can have breakfast, Lunch, dinner, 2 snacks and dessert.  So it's not like, have you heard of the parang the fruit and rice diet?  Imagine, you're just going to eat fruit and rice lang for one week or the cabbage soup diet.  I mean that's not healthy, di ba ?  You're just eating the same thing everyday.  You'll lose the weight, but the moment that you stop eating the cabbage soup you gain back the weight, di ba ?  So it's not, it is actually not feasible or liveable.  And also, I'd like to say that the South Beach Diet is not a diet but a lifestyle.  Just because you've lost the weight you intended, it doesn't give you an excuse to go back to eating hotdogs, fried rice, potato chips and ice cream everyday. What it requires is a little bit of discipline and a lot of delicious healthy food.  For the past 10 years, I've believed and lived this way.  And today, I'm proud to say that this formerly sick girl has transformed into a sexy chef.  What more if I can do it so can you.

Thank you.

RA:  Alright. I guess some people, well, I was actually wondering why The Sexy Chef was invited to this event.  And you know being a diet food delivery service, we have to admit that of course our clients are interested. Of course they enrolled with us with the main objective of losing weight.  So what is the place of Sexy Chef in an event like this?  Because you know, from what I understand, sometimes the very issue that many cancer survivors face is precisely weight loss, unwanted weight loss due to the, I guess diminishing of the appetite because of the treatments.  It was quite surprising to me.  In fact, we were told that Phase 3 of the South Beach Diet, which is actually the Maintenance Phase, is really not all that different from the kind of diet that the doctors are actually recommending for cancer survivors.  Because after all, it is low in sugar, low in fat, low in calories.  So all of these things are actually what makes it similar.  I think there are slight differences in some of the allowable foods.

BA:  There are certain things limited, maybe more limited.

RA: Yes, I think for cancer survivors you are really more encouraged to have more of the greens, more of the vegetables rather than a high protein, more of a protein based diet. The other reason for us being here, of course is the fact that we can probably say that this is our way of paying tribute, and kind of like continuing on with the work of our stepmother, Rio Diaz-Cojuangco, who is of course one of the more active and I guess more well known people who actually administer to a lot of cancer survivors, really gave all of her time.  I mean her ailment actually never stopped her even for one minute, you know, she never allowed suffering.  If there's anything that I can say that Barni and I learned from our Tita Rio while she was with us, is that she never took “no” for an answer, and that really pushed us to do what we are doing now.  Yet her passion in her life, in her last 6 years, it was to inspire other cancer survivors to live with cancer, with so much dignity and strength.

BA:  For 6 years…

RA:  6 years.  I guess our passion naman is to help other people eat in a more healthy way by providing the service because really it's just a simple matter of calling us, ordering the meals. As a cancer survivor I cannot, I mean, me not having cancer, I can't really begin to imagine what it must be like to, maybe on some days I can imagine that it would be difficult to feel attractive much less feel even sexy.  But life goes on even with cancer as our Tita Rio had showed us.  And obviously hindi tayo , I mean, like Tita Rio was a beauty queen. Even without any make up, even on her sickest day, she was still drop dead gorgeous, but not all of us are like that.  Some of us need a little help right?

So, anyway, with Sexy Chef we'd like to, hopefully give people some ideas about how to prepare food in a more healthy way.  Because from what we hear nga , the treatments also kind of diminish the sense of taste.  So it's a challenge to prepare foods that are low in fat, low in sugar, low in calorie, but that are actually …

BA: That is very high in flavor.

RA: High in flavor, that's right, that wakes up our palette.

BA:  You won't notice that it's diet food.  Healthy food can actually be really delicious.

RA:  Yeah, so she's gonna show you that this morning.  She has…

BA:   Yes, I have prepared actually, I'm taking you to Japan today.  We're doing Japanese cuisine.  So imagine healthy food can actually be international, and in my menu I try to keep it as interesting as possible.  Parang everyday gumigising ka , it's another country.  Italian, Japanese, Vietnamese… You know. So today, we are going to do Japanese.  We're going to make Chicken Yakitori, okay?

For the Chicken Yakitori, does everybody have a copy of the recipe?  Okay, and then afterwards you we'd be inviting you all to do a taste test you know.  For those who don't have a copy, we have some more over here.

First, let's discuss the ingredients that are needed.  We're going to need about a kilo of chicken breasts, lean chicken breasts that has no skin. The chicken breast is the leanest part of the chicken.  Tatanggalin ang balat so it's skinless and also kailangan white meat.  So chicken breast siya that's been cubed, okay? And then after that, for the marinade, you need half cup of soy sauce.  Try as much as possible to buy Japanese, Japanese soy sauce like Kikkoman pero medyo mahal siya .  If you want something cheaper you can buy Shanghai soy sauce. It tastes exactly the same.  You can buy it in Shopwise or Unimart.  Then after that, we're going to use the healthy oils.  Today, we're going to use Canola Oil, a tablespoon of Canola oil, and then we're also going to use one tablespoon of sesame oil.

RA:   Actually, many experts have doubts.  They began to call these oils, what you call healthy fats. You know similar to the fats found in avocados and nuts.  So, yes they are high in fat but they're the good kind of fat that we actually need in our diet because these are healthy.

BA:   We also need fat naman e in our bodies, it's just choosing the fats that are good for you.  So open your canola and sesame.  Then for our vegetables we have about 1-1/2 tablespoon, chopped ginger.  So ginger is actually really good for you and it also wakes up the palate.  This is the kind of herb that makes it really malasa .  Okay, and we're also using 2 table spoons of chopped garlic.  And over here, we have 1 cup of Splenda, Splenda is a healthy sugar substitute.

RA:  It's made of sugar talaga.

BA:  Oo , it's made from sugar.  It's sucralose. It doesn't contain the saccharin and aspertaine.  And when you cook with this, wala yung bitter taste sa huli .  Kasi sometimes kapag aspertaine yung ginamit , at the end pag lasa mo, yung parang mapait na ano…

RA:  but the only thing with Splenda is that you can't caramelize it if you cook it.  So no leche flan…

BA:  She tried to make…

RA:  I tried to make leche flan, it was a disaster.

BA:  But for other things such as this dish it works perfectly fine. Okay, so there, 1 cup of Splenda.  This is the best part.  All you have to do to make this dish is you combine all the ingredients together.  So let's start off with the chicken breast….And that's it!

All you have to do is mix it all together.  Make sure all the ingredients are incorporated. So well mixed talaga and then you just let this marinate for about 30 minutes kung nagmamadali kayo .  If not, it's better to marinate it over night.  So it's really malasa .  And of course meron kayong option if you want to grill it.  Kasi actually a Yakitori is a grilled Japanese dish. Pwede mo siyang ilagay in barbeque sticks and you can grill it but in our café, we sauté it in a little bit of canola oil.

RA:  Next thing you know, you've lost 10 pounds.  Seriously, in like a month.  You can just continue to eat healthily.. Hindi niyo mapapansin.  Bigla na lang you will see yourself in the mirror.  I mean, your pants are looser.  That happened to my clients actually.

BA:  And over here for the dressing, we're going to use equal parts of white vinegar and sesame oil.  I think in our recipe it says one cup.  This one is 1/2 cup.  And we're going to use one table spoon again of the Splenda which is the sugar substitute and then you put a pinch of the…12 sticks of Kani that has been shredded.  Kani is actually an imitation crab that they use in the Japanese Restaurants the one you see in the sushi in the California Maki.

RA:  That's also made of fish.

BA:  Yes, it's made of fish actually.  Okay.  So for the dressing once again we're going to combine all of the ingredients.

RA:  By the way, feel free if you want to do like stop her…let me just stop you right now.  No, if you want to stop her and ask any questions, feel free to do that.

BA:  This one is just to taste, the salt and pepper.  Then you just garnish the salad with the shredded Kani. And that's it.  It's very simple and healthy.  So as you can see it didn't take forever to make all these dishes.

Okay, so eating healthily doesn't mean you have to slave away in the kitchen the whole day.  It can actually be simple.  It's just by using the right ingredients that you can make up the flavor. 

RA: At Sexy Chef iniba talaga naming yung mga items on our menu.  Like we didn't follow the things that are actually in the South Beach diet Cookbook because those ingredients are very hard to find here in the Philippines.  So you end up substituting and it doesn't taste the same.  It tastes bad.  So what we did really was to create, she, at least, created dishes that make use of what is readily available in the supermarkets, in the palengke .  And they're all original dishes, and of course you pick up from cookbook but she added our own thing.  I should know because I have her food everyday. 

BA:  Okay, while this is cooking, we can actually…

Q1:  Can we use yung ano apple cider and white vinegar?

BA:  Yes. You can actually that's even better.

Q2:  Do you have another substitute for Splenda?

BA: You can use the ___ product. I've been using that for a long time but it contains aspertaine which is proven to be not healthy anymore.

RA:  Actually the jury's out on that because there's so many different researches that are coming out and they are all contradicting each other.  It's really hard to tell what the long term effect of aspertaine is on people until people develop something.

BA:  Parang there's something

RA:  Sebya is another one di ba? Sebya?

BA:  Yes.

RA:  There's another one that's called Sebya.  It's expensive

Q3:  I'm sorry, we can drink what's that sugar you're using?

RA & BA:  Splenda.

RA:  It's actually sugar but the compound was broken up from what I understand kasi it's made, well, I'm not going to pretend that I understand to know the names of the ingredients, but the people that bring in Splenda here were explaining that because the compound was broken up the one that spikes up the blood sugar was taken away coz it's actually pala the other part of Splenda that makes it sweet.  So that part they retained but the part that gives it the calories, gives it the carbohydrates, that's the one that they removed.  So it is sugar, just without that particular element.

Q4:  Can you substitute with honey?

RA & BA: Yes, you can use honey.  Honey is natural.

RA:  But then again if you're diabetic, it's better to use Splenda.  Depends kasi what your purpose is, I guess. For our purposes, we're not really all that strict it's more of a maintenance kind of thing… you are not really looking to lose weight.  You just want to eat healthily. Honey is very, very good, a lot healthier than just the plain refined white sugar.

BA:  The worst really is just the plain white sugar. Anything that's, like, white kasi parang you took away all of the roughage and all of the grainy part which is actually the healthy part which aids in your digestion.  So even with the rice or breads, the browner, the better. The whiter, the more refined it is, your body isn't really able to produce the nutrients and it's not providing you with the proper fiber which you need especially for cancer survivors. It's so important to have a lot of fiber in your diet because it just clears out your system.  You go straight to the banyo .

Q5:  I know that red and brown rice are nutritious but how can you compare it with white rice.  The ordinary white rice when it comes to calories are fattening, di ba?

BA:  Actually the white rice has the refined sugars.  Parang it has been polished na .  They took away all the ingredients so it's healthier because of the nutrient sense.

RA:  Yeah, it's really more kasi like the brown rice still has the roughage which is the fiber so if you take away the fiber, all you have is just the white rice which turns into sugar the moment you digest it.

BA:  And when it turns into sugar, it becomes fat, and if you don't burn it, it stores in your body.

RA:  So parang in effect I guess, I would compare it to way like some people like to peel potatoes with all of the skin or eat an apple when you peel all of the skin.  All of the nutrients are actually there.  So you're missing out.

BA:  You're washing it all out.

RA:  Yeah, it's the same thing actually with the brown. It's not a question of really which is more fattening. It's really just a question of which is more nutritious.

BA:  And another thing about white rice, if you eat it parang you become really hungry afterwards.  After, that's my experience, parang after one hour busog na naman ako . It's because of the refined sugars in the white rice not like the brown rice parang afterwards.

RA:  Yeah, because the fiber actually keeps the blood sugar from rising and falling fast.  Kasi that's why the diabetics are told not to have so much of the white rice. Limited bread, limited sugar. It's because it causes the spike in the blood sugar.  Added with the fiber it kinda slows it down.

BA:  Exactly.  Kasi the faster it goes up, the faster it goes down. So next thing you know, you're hungry again.  Parang you're looking for the sugar high.  That's what actually causes the hunger pangs.

RA:  That's right which is what I always get.

BA:  Yes ma'am?

Q6: Puwede ba ang sesame oil sa mga matataas ang cholesterol?

BA: Well, use it more as a flavoring.  Actually ang sesame oil naman it's mostly used for parang a topping or a flavoring.  Hindi siya talaga ginagamit as an oil for frying.  Kasi yung ano niya yung parang smoking point niya is high.  Yung sesame oil burns easily so kung, pag ginamit mong pangluto masusunog siya actually.  So use it more parang topping or it has very strong… so pang flavor lang talaga .

BA:  Yes, ma'am.

Q7:  The amount of sugar in the Yakitori in the recipe is really one cup Splenda or is it one cup?

BA:  Yes, it's one cup for one kilo of chicken.

Q8:  Isn't it so sweet?

BA:  Actually, I'm going to invite some of you to try the food.  Actually kasi yung Japanese, that's actually the fusion. It's like a marrying of parang tastes which is the saltiness of the soy sauce, and then the flavor of the sesame oil and then the sweetness.

RA:  I guess it's according to taste.  Our recipe, for one kilo of chicken is one cup of Splenda.  But again it's up to you how sweet you want it.  Some people prefer it. kasi di ba when you say Yakitori and  Terriyaki.  Normally it's sweet…

BA: Sweet talaga sya like sukiyaki.

RA:   A lot of the Japanese dishes tend to be sweeter kind of like a salty-sweet kind of thing.  But it's up to you to really taste it

BA: Yes, salty-sweet.

RA: Ako , also with the saltiness.  Actually in our diet we don't put, with the food that we deliver, we hardly put any salt.  We just allow the clients to add na lang .  I mean, we put a little bit but I guess very, very minimal just so that may lasa naman pag, you know. I think it's really according to taste. Plus some people are really watching their sodium consumption.  So at least they have that option.

RA: By the way, we just opened a café.  We're having the grand opening next week.  But we are already open. The Sexy Chef, 136 Katipunan Road.  If you want to uncomplicate your life, you just order the food.  You can call 911-8888. It's all there naman.  So it's on Katipunan Road. We have wraps, pasta, salads. We have South Beach Diet meals for ordering.  We have low fat sugar deserts that you can order.  We also do parties.