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by Dan Empfield
1.28.02 (www.slowtwitch.com)
NINE DAYS IN 2.4.02
THE JOURNEY BEGINS 1.28.02
NINE DAYS IN 2.4.02
Nine days and counting since I’ve turned over a new leaf... of arugula. No more iceberg lettuce for this cowpoke.
It’s not a diet. I’ve already caught hell about this. It’s not a diet. It’s a lifestyle alteration. I don’t intend for this to be a temporary hiatus from my normal eating regimen.
For the first week I ate no red meat, no fowl, and no dairy. And very little fat. While not planned, it’s turned out that my two favorite meals were granola in the morning and fish stew in the afternoon and/or evening (more on this below). Both I made myself.
Making your own food is one of the secrets to eating right and staying on the wagon. Two things I’ve discovered: Eating healthy is cheap, and restaurant food is loaded wiith fat and calories and all the bad stuff I’m trying to avoid. Plus, restaurants are loaded with temptations. Waiters are always bringing the dessert tray around. And if you try to order something reasonably good, like a potato, you (well, I) can’t resist loading it up with every conceivable condiment. Your baked potato is a starch. My baked potato is 80 grams of fat in which there is some starch if you search hard for it.
I must report, though, that I’ve been very good, and I’ve not had much temptation to be bad. This is because of a decision I made. More on that later as well.
Granola is the easiest thing to make. Rolled oats (not quick oats) mixed with some canola oil, maple syrup, and honey. Throw in -- in my case -- slivered almonds, toasted soy nuts (that’s my secret), a little molasses, and then take your pick between dried dates, raisons, cranberrries, whatever. You toast everything minus the fruit on cookie sheets at 350 degrees in the oven, stirring it every 15 minutes or so, and it’s done in 30 or 45 minutes. After it cools you add in the fruit. I eat it as cereal using Nutrimil (a whey product) or soy milk. Tastes great. Better granola than the stores sell you, and tons cheaper when you make your own.
Today I made a new batch—a gallon and a half—but I omitted the canola oil. We’ll see how acceptable that is to my taste buds.
Fish stew. Just as easy. Boil a potato or two and a couple of carrots in a quart and a half of water (figuring some will boil out, and you’ll end up with a quart of broth). When they taters are about half done throw in celery, fish, and a couple of fish boullion cubes. Fifteen minutes later it’s done. I also threw in a couple of bay leaves and some thyme.
Yesterday I strayed from the base plan and made the beginnings of what will be my Slowtwitch Portuguese Stew recipe. I made a double portion of the above—I used large sea scallops, halibut, and mahi mahi for my fish—and I added a couple of chicken-apple sausages (my first and only fowl since my conversion). I threw in a few pinches of cayenne pepper, and about a level teaspoon of curry powder. So far so good. I’ll probably take it further next time and add some mussels or clams. There’s no hard and fast list of ingredients for Portuguese stew. Some people use cumin instead of curry, some use squid and not the other fish. They all add olive oil and some other fattening stuff, and my stew does not, and so is very low-fat.
I made enough last night for about four meals, which would be anybody else's six or seven meals. This is one problem I have. I just eat and eat. Fortunately, the meals I’m cooking nowadays have so much water in them that I’m filling up without having ingested too many calories compared to the meals I used to eat. I’m resorting to a lot of clear soups. I might have a clear tomato soup and a salad for dinner. My dressing is just balsamic vinegar (used to be several tablespoons of olive oil as well). Okay, I add some crumbled bleu cheese, but about half the amount I used to add. Some raisins or a cut up apple. A few slivered almonds (used to be walnuts). Just about as good as before, half the fat, half the calories.
The fat content of my food has dropped dramatically, and I’m also not eating too much simple sugar -- except in my granola. That’s probably the worst thing I eat. But how can I be a granola-head without the granola? I do notice that I’m not ingesting certain things like Diet Coke, mostly because I don’t eat the foods that—for me—the coke accompanies. In 1963 came the world famous slogan, "Things go better with coke." All this time I hadn't realized it but, for me, the truism is, "Fat goes better with coke."
The decision: All this is possible for me because I’d made a firm decision to go in this direction. Changing any habit is hard when I haven’t formed the resolve to do it. In my case, I realized the time had come for me. Tangential to this whole thing—but something I’m still aware of—is that there’s an ethical side to this for me. I’ve always been a big meat eater. But I’ve also become aware during the last several years that it was getting harder and harder for me to support commercial animal husbandry. I truly feel that in forty or so years we’ll have a social awakening about raising animals for slaughter much like we did 40 years ago with civil rights, 80 years ago with women’s suffrage, and 140 years ago with slavery. I doubt I’ll become a vegetarian in practice, but I guess I am one in spirit. If I do find a way to remain a healthy athlete while eschewing red meat I would consider vegetarianism. But one thing ag a time.
Am I lighter than I was a week ago? I don’t know. I’m not getting on the scale, and frankly I’m not worrying about any of that. It’s a mathematical problem. Calories in, calories out (in the form of work). Unless there’s some form of "new math" at work in my body the pounds will come off, and I must tell you there is a sort of liberating element to knowing that my eating habits are working in concert with my training instead of contrary to it.
All this will, I’m sure, make me a faster athlete. And that, by the way, is what motivates me. What I look like, how long I live, yes, these are important to me, but I must confess that they take a back seat to the issue of how fast I will be able to run and ride. The fact that the other good stuff comes along for the ride is, so to speak, gravy.
THE JOURNEY BEGINS 1.28.02
Through the very act of writing this I'm crossing a point of no return. I'm facing up to a lifelong fear, and because I may need moral support I'm using the engine of potential humiliation to power me forward.
I'm declaring war in my insipid lipid. Out with the adipose, in with the summer pose. I'm in haste for a new waist—the rebirth of a smaller girth.
Very often big decisions sneak up on me. If they're weeks or months in the making it's news to me. I wake up and discover this is the day I'm dealing with a problem I've avoided for a long time. I woke up Saturday last and found I'd been sent the memo about my diet.
I have of course dealt with excess fat many times before, but I've always done it through training, not through eating. If my diet improved, it was only as a result of a change in my cravings, and through the simple realities of scheduling: If I'm on a 6-hour bike ride I'm going to miss lunch.
But this is different. On Saturday I was informed by someone other than my conscious self that this is the day I'm starting to eat right.
As I look back on it, I'm beginning to think it was the result of a TV commercial I'd seen the day before. The guy asks his wife while looking at what she put on his dinner plate, "What's this green thing?"
"It's a vegetable."
"Hmm. Pretty good."
I have no recollection of what was being advertised—Lean Cuisine or Weight Watchers or something—but it was a cute commercial and it must've inserted a cookie in the brain's browser. Within a day or two my subconscious had made up its mind, or my mind—whatever.
Why is this different than any other time? I don't know. It just is. I've got 15 pounds to lose, they're the last 15 pounds, and I know I'm not going to be able to train it off. I've got to un-eat it off. And inasmuch as I'm a reasonably intelligent and well-informed individual, I know that it all comes down to this equation: Eat fewer calories than you burn.
But I'm a little bit scared. I love food. I'm in love with food. I'm married to food. Good food. And good food is fat food. Fat tastes good. Fat is the centerfold of food. Fat is the homecoming queen without a brain. It's going to be very hard to retool my desires. No mexican. No chinese. No cheeseburger and fries. No filet mignon with a loaded baked potato.
A little help here, that's what I need—hirty or forty thousand of my closest friends to keep me honest. That's what Charles Barkley's doing. He—the former perennial all-star basketball player (the wife and I are big NBA fans)—is now a sportscaster for Turner Broadcasting, and he's got a bit of a weight issue. So he set a date for a televised weigh-in, in his skivvies, and he's predicting a certain target for himself. I know why he's doing it. He knows only the fear of public failure is going to make him stop eating. He's using the audience as a tool, and we'll find out whether his ability to turn opponents away in the low post is matched by his ability to turn the fork away from his mouth.
His weigh-in date approaches, and if it's crunch time for Charles it is for me as well. It's always crunch time, especially when you're on a diet. All you think about is crunching this or that. But so far—and I've been on my diet for two days now—it's not been hard at all. I guess that's because I've made a life decision. I'm not on a diet. I'm just not going to eat that way any longer. At least not until I'm down to 165-ish (I'm probably 180 or perhaps 185 now).
I've got two role models. One is Lance. I have no idea how he eats, it's just the very fact that he emerged 20 pounds lighter than he was when he won a world cycling championship. Imagine that. That tells you how much we as athltes are leaving on the table—or not leaving on the table, as the case may be.
The other is John Muir. True he's been dead for eighty-some-odd years, but more than once he wrote about leaving Yosemite for a two- or three-day jaunt in the High Sierras to ascend a previously unclimbed peak with, "... a crust of bread stuffed under my belt." I've got to be honest. It wasn't climbing a high and steep peak that awed me. It was the lack of supplies he brought with him (not only food did he eschew, but warm clothing, tent, sleeping bag, etc.).
So I went shopping on Saturday, and I came home with a whole spitload of veggies, and all the stuff I need to make granola. I've never made it before, and got a recipe off the internet. Granola is not precisely a low-cal food, but I'm really trying to get my head into the whole idea of foods of a healthy theme. Besides, I thought I'd start with something easy like granola before I graduate to baking bread.
Bringing you up to date, I've now "archived" three large containers of homemade granola, all with a maple/almond base: raisin; date; and wheat berry. I'm pretty-much subsisting off that and bread I've gotten from the local hoity-toity Euro bakery (no cheesy, fatty bread, just straight-ahead bread); and soups and salads, fish, and so forth. The salad gets only balsamic vinegar as its dressing—no oil, and of course nothing creamy. Soups are usually more or less clear.
I've roped by buddy and expert frame builder Ves Mandaric into this. We rode on Saturday and I told him what I was doing and inasmuch as he's waging the same battle I am he said, "I'm in." Later in the ride, as we were rolling up one or another climb he'd say, "No proscuitto?" "No pecorino?"
He and I will be posting back from time to time to log our progress. Tonight I'm fixing myself Cioppino, but without the pasta—just as a soup or stew. What Mandaric's having for dinner I can't say, but his email address is ves@mandaric.com if any readers want to email and remind him of his duty to himself.
Speaking of you-all, feel free to post on the forun (nav bar at top) and declare yourselves in, and also do not withold your good low-calorie recipes. One thing, though: by "low cal" I'm not interested in relying on sugar or fat substitutes. Just post 'em on the forum.
