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.