WARNING: If discussions of food bore you, come back tomorrow.
I was
asked about my diet, by someone who apparently doesn't (yet) know how giddy and
verbose I get when I'm asked to speak about virtually anything. More often, I'm
being asked to shut up. (Oh, now I remember why I keep this diary so
consistently.)
My diet can be adequately summarized by the phrase,
"Way too many pretzels." I never ever ever worry about not getting anough carbs.
There are also regular infusions of Gatorade and copious amounts of water
involved. The recent reports on water-drinking say that 8 8-ounce glasses per day
are not really required for sedentary people in a temperate climate, but I don't
really qualify on either count.
Because of the rowing and gym
schedules, I don't worry about calories much. Fortunately, my favorite pretzels
are low-fat. I do eat fats in moderate amounts but try not to go overboard. I
believe that individual needs vary quite a bit; I feel best with a higher
proportion of carbs than most articles I've read seem to favor, while Rudder has
only in the past year been eating more veggies and would still be happy with an
all-meat diet. He's also happy with big meals and not much snacking, while I tend
to eat lots of snacks and smaller meals. If I go too long without food I get
lightheaded and grumpy. I don't pack a lunch unless I have leftovers of something
I like, and even then there's a severe memory hurdle.
A usual week
includes several salads, along with stir-fried veggies whenever they're on the
menu at the cafeteria here. I try not to eat fast food more than once a week;
lately we've been going to the local Chipotle for burritos a lot when we want
quick food that's not bad for us. I don't eat all that much meat, really; shrimp
often, chicken more rarely (loved it when I was younger, but seem to like it less
now), and beef whenever I get a craving for it (or when someone else is buying the
steaks) maybe a couple times a week. It's quite possible that more protein would
help my energy level, but I don't like most fish (tuna, sushi, and lox excepted,
salmon if it's really good) and steaks or burgers give me awful stomach cramps, so
I have to want the beef enough to deal with the expected pain. Lately I've been
finding myself eating more at lunch and less at dinner, probably due to the size
of cafeteria / restaurant portions, and I figure this is better anyway, as I'm not
eating a lot right before bed. Especially on nights before rowing, when I also try
to eat non-greasy food that will not result in my wishing they'd invent rowing
shells with bathrooms. In fact, my diet is probably shaped more by IBS than by my
sports regimen.
I don't, as you may have figured by now, keep any
kind of track of what I eat. I try to eat more vegetables, not to make high-fat
choices too often, and to go easier on the pretzels. (Those are listed in
decreasing order of success. I also try to eat a lot of variety. The best advice I
ever got was to balance the food groups over a couple of days rather than at each
meal. For example, yesterday's lunch was a grilled cheese sandwich (carbs,
protein) with fried mushrooms (digusting, I Know), but I'd had a salad for dinner
the previous night so it was OK. Except for the fried 'shrooms, anyway. Do they
even count as a vegetable?
Since I imagine this is all tremendously
un-helpful for anyone trying to eat well, I will finish with an actual Helpful
Tip. A woman I work with tosses various combinations of fruit in a blender because
the resulting puree is convenient to bring to work in a plastic container (a
lidded cup, basically). The mix I saw looked like baby food, and is better than
fruit juices because the fiber is preserved. One warning: she said the day she
mixed waterm,elon and kiwi, people kept asking, "Why are you drinking salsa?" in
tones of revulsion.
Off to grab lunch.
Later note:
There's a new deal at the cafeteria. Now they make yyour sandwich for you, and
they have all kinds of fancy meats and imported cheeses, and fresh breads. The
down side is that there's no more tuna fish, it costs more (used to be by wieght,
now it's a set price) and was about twice as much as I could eat. The good part is
that I ended up with a sourdough baguette piled with Brie, mozzerella, lettuce,
tomato, roasted red pepper, and a few bits of artichoke heart. I was sort of
trying to recreate the best cheese sandwich I've ever had, from the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam, though I think the resemblance stops with the Brie, sourdough, and
tomoatoes. Still, it was far better than yesterday's grilled cheese. Anyone want
the other half?