Sweet potato noodles with cashew sauce
Nearly 30 days ago I wrote about starting a vegetarian version of the Whole30 diet. I’m here to report back on how my attempt went and what I thought of the program.
First things first. Did I complete all 30 days of the Whole30?
On New Year’s Day, my husband and I were driving to the ski slopes and he said “I think I’m going to do an experiment with my diet every month.” “What do you mean?” I asked. And he said, “Like, one month do paleo, one month do something else… I’d do Whole30 but it is so cliche.” “I’d do Whole30 with you,” I gamely said. And that was that. We are four days in. How is it going?
Ain’t nobody got time to make dinner, and that’s why I’ve been trying out and writing about meal kit programs such as Green Chef (organic, vegan option; referral link available at end of that blog post) and Blue Apron (vegetarian option). We liked Green Chef a lot and were less impressed by Blue Apron. Most recently, we tried another popular service, Hello Fresh. Here’s the review…
Here is a second installment of my series on meal kits. Check out my first post here, where I reviewed organic, vegan meals from Green Chef. This week, I tested out three meals with classic meal kit service Blue Apron. How did it stack up?
Things have been… unstructured… since the end of my Renaissance Periodization cut and my BQ race at the Phoenix Marathon. I’ve written about my efforts to get back on track, not with the strict diet/training regime I had before, but something with a little direction. Basically, I need to do a better job of having food on hand so that I didn’t eat cereal and ice cream for every meal (true story). And a few new recipes after 12 weeks of the same tofu doesn’t sound like a bad idea. So I decided to try out some meal kit programs. I’m sampling Green Chef, Blue Apron, and Hello Fresh, at least to start. I’ll provide a review on each as I wrap up a week of meals. First up: Green Chef…
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Just after Thanksgiving, I started a 12-week cut on the Renaissance Periodization diet. I previously wrote about it here, and some RP “hacks” for vegetarians are here. In this post, I will mainly let my results speak for themselves, but I will also answer a few questions about RP. If you have specific questions, let me know — I am happy to share about my experience!
I believe that “diet” is a bad word. I believe that there’s a lot of evil happening at the hands of the diet industry and their co-conspirators (looking at you, women’s mags). I believe that our society has done a shamefully good job of teaching girls and women that they should always be “trying to lose weight” and should never be happy with their bodies. I believe that men need to speak about women differently. I believe that women need to speak about themselves and each other differently. I believe that girls need to be raised differently — including but not limited to changes to shape of their toys and the appearance of their Disney characters. I hope my kids never go on diets, and I don’t plan to use that word in front of them.
I set this all up to say — I’m going on a diet. A real one. With rules. And Excel charts. It’s not touchy-feely. It’s not “eating by intuition.” It’s actually the opposite of how I’ve been peacefully but unsuccessfully “trying to lose weight” for the past several years. Which is exactly why I chose it.
I’ve been traveling a lot for the past few months, commuting between DC and Colorado each week for work. I’ve spent a lot of time in airports, and a lot of time hangry on airplanes. But I’ve figured out a few tricks for how to eat healthfully (and as a vegetarian or vegan) while on the road or in the air and avoiding that gross-I-just-ate-a-ton-of-junk-and-now-sit-the-rest-of-the-day-on-an-airplane feeling as well as the I-am-going-to-eat-my-luggage-because-I-am-so-hungry feeling. Here’s what I’ve learned.
When I was recently home for a fake, post-holiday Thanksgiving meal, I was shocked at the degree to which my vegetable-loving mom does not know how to cook vegetables. I am assuming this is a common problem, and one that probably prevents a lot of people from eating the magnitude of veggies they’d like to eat (or should be eating). I am working from home today and multi-tasking, and I had about a thousand pounds of vegetables in the fridge from my farm share. So I’m roasting. This is hands-down the #1 way to cook vegetables. And once you know the general principles, it’s pretty foolproof. The only veggies I prefer sauteed instead of roasted are greens like collards and spinach. Everything else is getting thrown in the oven. So here’s how to do it…
So, as may or may not be apparent from my posts and the title of this blog, I am a vegetarian. It all began when I was about seven years old and my mom explained to me that beef = cow and pork = pig (“Like Babe?!”) I continued eating chicken and turkey for another five or so years before deciding that doing so was morally inconsistent. The hardest thing for me to give up was my grandmother’s stuffing at Thanksgiving. She makes it from scratch and stuffs it in the bird, and it is incredibly moist and delicious, or so I remember from 17 years ago when I last had it…
Even though my grandmother’s stuffing is “off the table” for me, I still LOVE Thanksgiving–the concept of having a holiday devoted to being grateful, and the way it welcomes the Christmas season, and the food. So I thought I would share some of my favorite vegetarian dishes for Thanksgiving, in case anyone out there is looking for ideas.
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