diet rumination

[garote]

I think I have finally assembled the perfect diet for myself!
Essentially it's a vegan diet with eggs thrown in, a skew away from starches and grains, and a few other tweaks. Not surprising if you know me. But I figured I'd paste it here just for the hell of it.

Here's the detail, in vague order from things excluded, to things included:

• Absolutely no fruit juice drinks, except for the occasional indulgence of sparkling cider or whatnot. Fruit juice is a glycemic nightmare for me. No soda of course.
  
• No dairy, especially no cheese.
  
• No meat, except for eggs from well-cared-for chickens.
  
• Only a smattering of those meat-substitute soy products.
  
• Sparse grains (pasta, bread, rice), unless I'm getting lots of exercise, in which case I eat more to get more energy.
  
• Few starchy vegetables - potatoes, yams, peas - with the exceptions usually being beans, like kidney beans or garbanzos.
  
• Very little non-pulpy starchy fruit, e.g. apples, pears.
  
• The occasional mango or melon (honeydew, watermelon, etc). These are on the borderline between pulpy and starchy.
  
• As much pulpy fruit as I care to peel and eat, e.g. oranges, plums, tangerines, grapefruit, pomelo, tomatoes, grapes.
  
• Nuts and seeds, when they're around.
  
• Plenty of high-quality oils.  On salads, or when making omelets, or frying up a batch of potstickers.
  
• All kinds of green vegetables, mostly in salad form - that is, mostly uncooked.  Broccoli, spinach, cucumber, kale, various lettuces ranging from green to purple, and so on. Peppers too.

This is not STRICT of course - if I feel like throwing some croutons on a salad occasionally, I will. Or if I feel like chomping a soy ice cream cone.

So why am I so opposed to cheese, and other dairy products? I have discovered that dairy does two things to me:

1. Its high caloric density offsets a lot of more healthy things I would otherwise eat.
   
2. It distorts my feeling of satiety, such that I end up eating more total calories than I otherwise would. And I gain weight. This wasn't such a problem when I was in my teens and early 20's, but my digestion has changed since then.

Most cheeses hover around having 70% of their calories from fat (it varies by type), and when people eat cheese around here, they usually eat a lot of it at a time. For its very high caloric density, it does not provide very much nutrition.

I suppose I might try it as a pure taste exercise - trying an exotic variety, for example - but that's hypothetical right now. I don't miss it.

Breakfast for the past two weeks has usually been an orange and/or a bell pepper eaten raw like an apple. Lunch has usually been a large salad from the cafeteria at work. Six bucks for a heap of romaine, spinach, red leaf, arugula, chickpeas, bell peppers, sprouts, cucumber, broccoli, olives, mushrooms, and crushed flax seeds. Dinner has been a mixed bag - sometimes soup, sometimes an omelette (though I have had trouble finding decent eggs lately), sometimes just something small like a handful of cashews and some carrots dipped in hummus.

My complexion has cleared up, my weight has stayed down, and I am never lacking in energy. I have even added some muscle mass.

Comments

[lutin.livejournal.com]

If you omitted the eggs, added fresh squeezed juices en masse and sometimes switched black beans in for seeds/nuts, this sounds exactly like the preferred diet I had in college which you would make faces at. Right now, the cool temperatures and huge adventures (50km, 4 hour trips 3-4 times per week, with 0 to 20km on "off" days) makes such light eating hard for me, but it feels sooooooooo nice when I do. Lots of juicy fruits + huge salads are Bliss.

[garote]

I can't remember what you ate in college. :D I do recall getting riled up about how much time you spent fasting, or reducing your intake to a small subset of what you usually ate...

[lutin.livejournal.com]

Funny, because I never fasted in college. (Not true! I spent 2 months fasting one day per week while at Berkeley. That's hardly "all of college".) I think you're confusing college with India, actually.


I do remember a lot of skepticism from you and the La re: my preferred diet of mostly salads with a few super protein, super veg meals thrown in ""for balance"".

[garote]

Oh yes, I remember the fasting from India ... frankly, that scared me!
Is that when you started doing "air fasts"?

[lutin.livejournal.com]

You make it sound like I've continued. (I haven't.) But yes.

[garote]

Didn't mean to imply that. :)

It's very strange though - my memory must be failing me. I do remember going 'tsk tsk' occasionally at things I heard about your diet, but I honestly can't remember what they were.

[lutin.livejournal.com]

I don't remember the specifics, either, just that you were Very Skeptical that I could survive on the "small" number of calories huge salads and fruit imply, or that I was getting a balanced diet that way. I think at that time your salads consisted of lettuce and you hadn't actually seen how huge or mixed the salads I prefer to eat actually are. I think also you hadn't experienced The Awesomeness of it, yourself, and personal experience counts for a lot. You were eating a lot of starchy, saucey, fake meaty food at the time.

ANYWAY I'm super happy to hear about your salad loving ways now, dude, and am happy to hear about the clear skin and clear mind and etc.!

[garote]

True, there was starch and sauce and fake meat ... but it was freakin' delicious!!