I love food. I particularly love the trifecta of food: delicious, nutritious and easy to make. I haven’t always done a lot of cooking. Or I should say, I used to be a much lesser cook. I’m not really sure what happened. It’s almost as if I used to think that really delicious meals took hours to cook and required some sort of refined skill. And so I didn’t cook really delicious meals. Instead I stuck with a few very basic meals that took very little effort. They were relatively healthy (back in the day I thought a bowl of pasta with tomato sauce was a healthy meal), and they were definitely easy to make. But they were far from delicious. They lacked…the third heat.
Maybe the relevance of that clip is a stretch…but what can I say? I’m a fan of hilarity. But back on topic…
I’m not sure when I made the discovery that truly delicious (but still nutritious) food can actually made with little effort and little time. But it’s something that can’t be unlearned. And so now I cook delicious and nutritious meals often; but I am far from a slave to the kitchen. In fact most of the meals shown in the photos scattered throughout this article took about 30 minutes to make. That’s 30 minutes fridge to fork (F2F); not 30 minutes once you’ve already cut and measured everything like you see on most cooking shows. Read more…
I was at the bike store-coffee shop this morning for an Americano between clients (Cyclelogik has great Americanos – featuring beans from Francescos….mmm…) and was feeling a little snacky. It was almost 1130 and I had another couple of assessments before lunch. So I noticed the snack offerings they had today: a big oatmeal raisin cooking and a protein bar. Not thrilling, but I considered them enough to look at the nutrition numbers for each. The power bar looked decent: less than 250 calories, and it was somewhere in the 3:1 to 4:1 carbohydrate to protein ratio. It has fat, but fat is really not such a big deal – unless there is so much that it increases the calorie content too much. In fact some would call fat essential. And by some, I mean smart people who understand nutrition: The “Essential” in Essential Fatty Acids is not just a marketing thing. Read more…
Organic foods have become very popular as a result of a trend toward wanting cleaner, healthier foods that have less of an environmental footprint. But does the organic label necessarily mean it is healthy? I tend to think so. But my peanut butter experience this morning taught me a valuable lesson: even though the food is organic, it is not necessarily a quality product. Read more…
I am a food lover. I truly love the taste of food. I suspect I am not alone in my food-love, or in the challenges this presents in terms of maintaining a healthy weight. Or maybe it is that you are very busy and don’t have time to keep great food habits. Or you don’t know the reason, but for some reason, you just have a hard time with food. The reality is that for many of us, it can be tough to adhere to a nutrition plan. Food is hard for most people.
Many years ago, a friend made me realize that I was not alone in my food challenges. He had spent the past several months at a Buddhist monastery in England where they basically ate one meal a day of rice and vegetables. That’s tough! But it wasn’t just the food that was hard. He had hours a day of meditation, chores, and for one week he took a vow of silence. At the end of his vow of silence, he describes having gone down to “the big bacon hut” near the monastery and was shocked to see two of the senior monks devouring big bacon sandwiches. When he asked about it, they said that they still found food the most challenging of all of the hardships they have. Read more…
I just realized this week that I have the perfect body. It was an a-ha moment that followed a long period of small but important realizations. When I was a kid and through being a teenager, I was a bit chubby. Or at least I always perceived myself that way. I think clinically I would probably have been in the early stages of ‘overweight’. It certainly didn’t slow me down! I played and loved every sport I could, and I was good at them. But I occasionally got a comment from another kid about being fat. That sucked, but thankfully it was infrequent. Fast forward to my early 30s, and I was doing some renovations on a house I had just bought. Somehow in a short period, I had gained 10 pounds. Gaining that weight made me say “That’s it! No more!” And so I made changes. I changed my eating habits, and I changed the way I workout, and over one winter, I lost 25 pounds while gaining muscle. It was surprisingly not that hard. Friends and family that I hadn’t seen in a while were quite surprised at the change. Read more…
If you listen to Gary Taubes (author of Why We Get Fat, and Good Calories, Bad Calories), you would believe that the reason we are fat is because we eat too much carbohydrate, and that the way to solve the problem is to stop eating carbohydrates.
I’m not sure that the facts exist to support Taubes’ thesis. One hole, is that we in North America are fatter than virtually everyone else in the world (32% of men and 35% of women in the US are obese), but we eat less bread than they do. In fact North Americans ate an average of 60 lbs of bread per capita in 2000, which is less than half of what the skinnier Spaniards (15% of men and 21% of women are obese), Danes (no data found), and Germans (20% of men and 21% of women are obese) ate.1,2 Read more…
It’s been one week since I started my Precision Nutrition journey (click here to start at the beginning). All in all a pretty great week. Some ups, a few downs, but all in all a pretty great week.
I have avoided cottage cheese my whole life. I was probably 12 the last time I had it. And even then, it was only because I didn’t make the household food decisions. When I saw cottage cheese in the PN program, for some crazy reason, I decided it was time to give it a second chance. Read more…
I wonder if there is statistical information about how long most people last before falling off the wagon on a new nutrition approach? I’m going to bet 2 days is pretty accurate. I had hoped to jump right into precision nutrition, but the reality is, it’s a lot. It is a complete program, and with a complete comes a lot of information, and likely, a lot of changes. Read more…
My friend Mark Young (check out his great articles at www.markyoungtrainingsystems.com) turned me on to this great TEDx presentation video about will power. If you have 15 minutes to spare, watch this. It is a perspective that I have never heard before.
Yesterday was my first full day of “PN eating” (click here to read about it). It was pretty good. I have not technically fully started yet, as I am still going through the binder, and have not gone through the goals and measurement portion – which is important. I will be doing that this weekend. I do like that I could get started before doing that though.
Yesterday I ate well. A tasty omelet before work, a shake mid-morning, chicken with chick peas and a mediterranean salad for lunch, then a post-workout shake, chicken with quinoa and spinach for dinner, and then some steel-cut oatmeal with blueberries for my final snack of the day. All in all, it was pretty good. Read more…
