Since I’ve been writing so much about various fad diets that you should just blithely ignore (with more to come), I thought it might be a good idea to write something about how a person should eat, and how well my own diet stacks up.
So first, for breakfast, Jim and I typically alternate between an egg-and-meat meal and a grain-based meal. If we had an omelet with veggies, cheese and perhaps some meat one morning then I might make whole-grain muffins the next day. Or we might have bagels bought from a good bakery near us or homemade granola. (We’re almost through the current batch, and I plan to tweak my recipe a bit to make it more clumpy, following Melissa Clark’s basic recipe.) I usually have my granola on top of yogurt.
By the way, have you ever heard someone say, “If I eat breakfast I’m hungry for the rest of the day!”? And then they use that statement as a reason for not eating breakfast. But let’s parse that statement a bit. So, as I’ve said before, when you get up in the morning you don’t necessarily feel hungry, as your digestive system has been pretty much shut down overnight. Eating breakfast wakes things up, which is good—you need energy as you get going. But often people do what I would call “counterproductive eating.” Let’s say that our hypothetical person has swallowed (sorry) the idea that she needs a low-fat, low-calorie breakfast. So she eats a bowl of Special K cereal with skim milk, something that has been pushed in the past as a good breakfast to keep you slim. One cup of cereal with one-half cup of skim milk is about 160 calories, just enough to tell her body that it’s time to start digesting but not enough to satisfy her for long. By 10:30 AM she’s starving. Of course! So she eats something from the break room or the vending machine or that stale bag of cookies lurking in the pantry. ‘Well!’ she thinks. ‘I’m not going to do that again!’ And she goes back to skipping breakfast. But all that does is to push the start of food consumption later into the day, always a bad thing.
Okay. On to lunch. I try to vary breakfast and lunch, so that if breakfast was largely grain-based I eat more protein for lunch. But here’s the thing: it’s almost always easier and faster to eat a bread-and-cheese lunch. So one of my favorite quick ones is a whole-wheat tortilla with black beans and cheese, either queso fresco or Cheddar, heated up in the microwave (my son thinks I’m barbaric for doing this) and topped with some kind of salsa. That’s not a bad meal, but it doesn’t have any fresh fruits or veggies in it. I’ve been realizing lately that I’m kind of negligent in this area. Again, ease and speed sometimes trump nutrition. At 4:00 it’s okay to have something (not a sn-a-a-a-a-a-ck, remember; a small, planned item), and I have multi-grain crackers in the pantry. Much better to eat an apple, though. (As I write this post I have an alarm set and plan to eat that very thing when it goes off.) It’s all too easy to fall into the habit of getting most of my calories from dairy, eggs, meat and grains. Those are perfectly fine things to eat, but I need to get the fresh stuff in there too. And I’m very lazy about including salad with dinner. Tonight we’re having leftover shepherd’s pie that I made with leftover lamb (do ya see a theme here?), and my vegetable drawer is pretty well empty. Grocery shopping is planned for tomorrow, by the way. I’m depending on my mother-in-law to have something for salad, but I should step up on that item more. The pie has carrots and onions along with the meat in the filling and a mashed-potato topping. Again, perfectly fine foods, but we need something green. I have a terrible habit of buying salad ingredients and then letting them wither and mold. It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that they require a certain amount of effort. I love this statement from Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book in discussing how some people shop for vegetables: “Your solution is usually to throw out some old lettuce every couple of weeks (because you buy it even though you don’t eat much of it, and it goes west with remarkable speed).” She must have been looking into my fridge! But I’m trying to stop this bad habit.
A perfect dinner to me would be salmon with some kind of sauce/glaze, rice or potatoes or sweet potatoes, and sautéed broccoli. If you have generous amounts of broccoli you don’t necessarily need salad. I should make that particular meal more often. (I plan a post sometime soon about how we all need to eat more fish.)
Well, I just finished my apple and now need to finish this post!