For all intents and purposes, I am home for the holidays! However, now all the fears that I had going into this semester about changing my diet have become a reality. At school, really I don't eat that much. That's because everything I do eat I either have to cook or have enough of it lying around so that I can grab a quick stack. Sadly, I never seem to have a snack surplus. How, I am home in the land of plenty where there are lots of things to eat, but not enough food.
This is where the food mantra comes in. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." A couple of months ago I read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan and that was really the takeaway message. If you can find a copy and have a couple hours to read it (it's fairly short), I highly recommend it.
The "Eat food" idea is that you shouldn't eat anything that your ancestor wouldn't recognize as food. The first clue is to look at the ingredients. For bread, is it flour, water, yeast, and salt? Or is it packed full of iron, calcium, riboflavin, etc? If your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize the ingredients as food (or if you don't, for that matter), by Pollan's logic you shouldn't eat it. Why make bread sexier by adding iron and calcium when you can eat some broccoli along with your sandwich?
Okay, by reading labels over the past year I think I've gotten fairly good at determining if something is "natural" or "safe" to eat. If it has "natural flavors" I generally put it down, so I think I'll be able to spot "food" this break. As for the "not too much" part, that's going to be hard. I tend to eat a lot, especially if its food I really like. And of course, Christmas means Christmas food. Even before I went gluten/casein/corn/soy free at school I would go on a Christmas binge because I couldn't get tree-shaped butter cookies with green icing any other time of the year. I think I might be in trouble.
Luckily, my body has become accustomed to working on less food. So far this break as well as during the Thanksgiving break I stuffed myself to the point of shame and being downright uncomfortable. I say this is lucky because it means that I can work on listening to my stomach and gauging when I am full and should stop eating. If that means that I only eat two dinner rolls instead of three, so be it. I can ask my mom to make them again if I really liked them or I can make them myself. Plus, by committing to eating only "food", I can cut down on what I am actually putting in my mouth.
The "mostly plants" part of the mantra is going to be extremely hard. When I got home yesterday, I looked in the vegetable drawer and found it stocked with potatoes and not much else. I know we have bags of frozen peas and corn in the freezer and maybe a bag of baby carrots tucked behind one of the potato sacks, but that isn't a whole lot. There is maybe two onions and a single head of garlic in the house. My boyfriend and I usually use that much every time we cook dinner. I see no cabbage, no parsnips, and no full-length carrots! My world is upside down! Well, at least the potatoes mean that I can make a batch of home fries if I ever need a snack. And because I would actually have to make them means that I won't be mindlessly grazing. I think I might have to ask my mom to throw some more veggies in our meals too. Also, she needs to pick up some more onions.
So what's my progress so far? Well, yesterday I won't count because I had one foot in Amherst and the other back home and during the drive I was eating leftover Chinese food out of a container I was holding between my knees. I got orange beef (aka deep-fried candy meat) all over my pants. So today I decided to make myself an egg in a basket (for those who don't know, you cut a whole in a piece of toast, drop the egg inside, and fry it). I didn't check the bread, but it probably wasn't exactly food. Damn. I used canola oil as the frying medium, and that is usually genetically modified. Double damn. The "butter" I put on the bread to make it extra crispy was actually Benecol light, which is various vegetable oils solidified, colored yellow, and flavored to taste like butter. Well, at least the egg was natural, right? Well, it was pure white, all the eggs in the carton were uniform, and they each had a little breast cancer support ribbon stamped on them. I'm in trouble, aren't I? Well, at least the only bad thing about the Greek yoghurt I had after that was that it had natural vanilla flavor....
I can't really avoid the bread issue unless mom makes her own bread, which might happen soon. And all of the eggs at the supermarket are going to be uniform and have some sort of stamp, so I'll have to live with that. I don't know what other oil to use because olive oil won't taste right (believe me) and the only other oil we have is corn oil, which would be out of the frying pan and into the gas burner. I can at least avoid the Benecol. In fact, I wanted to use butter for breakfast but I didn't take it out of the refrigerator in time. I was worried that the oil would start smoking so I had to butter my bread quickly with a butter-like substance. I'm trying!
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