The Great Muffin Experiment, No. 5 (Jump to the Recipe)

I've lost about 40 pounds this year through the only real "scientific" method of weight-loss: CICO — Calories In/Calories Out. That is to say, I've taken in fewer calories than my body has used. Now that I'm weightlifting, however, I'm trying to put on some weight. And it's CICO again, except this time I'm taking in more calories than I burn.

There are probably millions of websites dedicated to weight loss, and I've fallen down quite a few rabbit holes trying to figure out how much to eat and what to eat in order to, at first, lose weight, and now gain muscle. Unfortunately, many of these sites give women — particularly women my age — a ridiculously low number for their TDEE, Total Daily Energy Expenditure, an estimate on how many calories a day one's body burns.

I have an Apple Watch, which does tell me how many energy I supposedly use when working out. But I don't know that the numbers are particularly accurate. Nonetheless, I've started tracking all sorts of data about my health in general, and my diet and exercise specifically. It's pretty easy to see how quickly this sort of attention can turn into disordered behaviors — obsession about food, exercise, weight, and so on. And so it's a real challenge, I think, to find a good balance with one's health, particularly with that notion of CICO hanging over one's head: the relationship between calorie consumption and calorie burn.

I've stopped paying attention to the numbers that Apple gives me for my calorie burn. But I do still monitor my calories — at first I did this with the MyFitnessPal app. But as it is really designed for weight loss, I've recently switched to another app, MacroFactor, that helps me focus on — as the name suggests — my protein macros while smoothing out any daily fluctuations in my weight.

"Watching my calories" hasn't really altered what I cook for dinner each night, although it has made me very aware of portion sizes (and the distortions that occur therein with nutrition labels). But I do plan out what I'm going to eat each day — and how many calories that'll be — in part because I've really struggled with the "bulking" part of my diet. Contrary to the sites that tell me I should eat 1500 calories a day, I need to eat about 2200. That 700 calorie difference? That's about two pounds of body weight — weight I don't want or need to lose, thank you very much.

Even at 2200 calories — particularly at 2200 calories that are protein-focused — I want my post-workout meals to be really dialed in. I have a rough budget of about 500 calories for pre- and post-workout meals each day: a 230 calorie protein bar, a 120 calorie Greek yogurt, which leaves about 150 calories for a muffin.

(Yes, we're getting to the part about muffins.)

Baking with Chocolate

Chocolate, particularly dark chocolate, boasts a lot of health benefits: antioxidants! lower blood pressure! prevents heart disease! And cacao, the seed pods from which cocoa is made, is also a popular "healthy" food, with its own set of perks. Plus — and this is really the key — chocolate is delicious.

So, there are many good reasons to put chocolate in your muffins. Except adding chocolate — in the form of cocoa powder, cacao nibs, chocolate chips, or what have you — will certainly increase the calorie content of your baked goods. A half a cup of cocoa powder — about the amount that would go into a batch of a dozen muffins — adds about 170 calories to the mix, or about 14 calories per muffin, for example. Adding a third of a cup of chocolate chips adds another 200 calories to the recipe — plus quite a bit of sugar and fat to each muffin.

I thought I'd try my hands at making a low-calorie, high-protein chocolate muffin. As there were beets in the weekly CSA, I figured I'd make chocolate beet muffins. Why not. I found a recipe that I tweaked in order to reduce the calories. More details on that below.

But I think I over-substituted; I was not very scientific in my experimentation, and I made too many changes. And as a result, when the muffins came out of the oven quite dry, I'm not sure I can diagnose exactly where I went wrong (or if the original recipe would have been equally flawed). I'll write another blog post soon about how to troubleshoot a failed recipe, but I want my main point to be this: the tyranny of CICO. Don't let "calories in" screw up what you eat. (And don't let "calories out" screw up how much your body needs to move. But that's another story.)

It's absolutely okay to indulge in something that's full of sugar and fat and calories. And if you force yourself to eat a shitty muffin — for the record, I should clarify, these are not shitty at all and I'm really enjoying them with my morning Greek yogurt — for the sake of your diet, then you're missing out on the beauty of food. Everything you eat should be good — taste good, make you feel good, and ideally good for you. (And chocolate is good for you, the scientists say!) But "good for you" without the other two — taste and pleasure — undermines your whole journey towards health.

Chocolate Cacao Beet Muffins

This is based on the recipe that appears on the Minimalist Baker blog.

Prep time: 10 minutes  ·  Cooking time: 20 minutes  ·  Servings: 12  ·  Calories: 130

Ingredients:

• 2 batches of flax eggs (2 tbs ground flax seed plus 5 tbsp water)
• 1 cup beet puree
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 cup banana, mashed
• 1/4 cup plain kefir
• 2 tbps coconut flour
• 1 1/3 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/3 cup cacao nibs

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 375 F. Line 12 compartments of standard muffin tin with paper (or grease tin).
2. Mix together the dry ingredients in a bowl.
3. In a separate bowl, beat together the flax seed and water, then add the other wet ingredients.
4. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add the wet ingredients. Stir swiftly, until combined. The batter should be thick, but spoonable. Add more liquid if necessary.
5. Gently fold in the cacao nibs.
6. Spoon batter into muffin tins, filling almost to the top.
7. Bake 15-20 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.
8. Cool for 5 minutes before taking out of the tin.

Some Baking Notes

The original recipe had 1/4 cup of maple syrup and 1/3 cup of brown sugar, along with 1/4 cup of coconut oil. I substituted a banana for the oil. Typically this is a one-to-one swap, but I increased the amount of banana to compensate for ditching the maple syrup entirely. I substituted kefir for unsweetened almond milk in the original. I also decreased the amount of brown sugar in the original, from one-third to just one-fourth a cup. I added some coconut flour, in the hopes of making the crumb soft. Ha. And finally, I used cacao nibs rather than chocolate chips.

The batter was really dry, and as a result, I think I overmixed it - just to incorporate all the ingredients, I had to stir a lot and add another tablespoon or two of water to moisten it.

Some "Health" Notes

By ditching the oil and some of the sugar, I did reduce the calories from 175 in the original to just 130. Having never made the original, it's hard to say what I lost in flavor. The original describes these muffins as "fudgy," and I'm not sure if that's code for "very dense" or if it's code for "pretty chocolatey." I might try to make these again the next time I get beets in the CSA.

My changes added just a tiny bit of protein to the muffin from the original; obviously, fat and carbs decreased. And the addition of cacao nibs introduced some caffeine into the mix, something that reminds me to work on a batch of muffins that actually focuses on caffeine - something I like to have before I lift weights (although I usually eat muffins afterwards, so...)