evening 9/30/09

obviously, this is not a photo of my dinner. first of all, i've decided to try the No White Foods Diet; this means no white starches, no white sugars and logically, no white unicorns. second of all, i wouldn't eat unicorns because they have uncloven hooves. (i don't know how much you know about kosher laws, but this is a big no-no.)

what i did eat, though, was probably more exotic. i grazed for about 20 minutes, eating from several continents. first, i had a pinch of plantain chips. i followed this with some babaganoush, a small quantity of chocolate chips, vegan chocolate mousse, a vegetarian hot dog (to cleanse my palate) and then some soba noodles with okra. and thomas keller thinks he can plan a menu.

i do not have photographic evidence of this six-course "meal," but c'mon, i'm giving you a unicorn. don't get greedy.

afternoon 9/30/09

exact same meal from the other day. i'm completely unimaginative.

i even had a pluot again. i thought that this time, maybe i'd eat half of the burrito and that the pluots would have acquired flavor (other than that of a dow product).

if it's true that the legal definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result, it's time to institutionalize me. not only did i eat the entire burrito, not only did the pluot taste of gross, but i may have eaten both faster than last time.

interestingly, i ate both containers of salsa and i had coffee this morning, and my acid reflux/heartburn/i-don't-know-the-difference hasn't bothered me at all. maybe it's the kombucha i'm drinking right now.

also, (prepare for non sequitur) it dawned on me that i hate unspeckled bananas. most of my friends who eat them like it when they're a little green at the top. i do not. still-green bananas are hard and starchy, much like the consistency of a raw potato, i imagine. i dislike them so much that my gag reflex starts acting up when i smell, see, or worse yet, hear people eating them. who eats unripe bananas? koko? king kong? seriously.

morning 9/30/09

i felt like i was getting sick last night, so after that foam sandwich, i ate some steamed broccoli and squash, along with some garlic, tomatoes and about three bites of pasta. i also took some vitamins. i'm feeling better. one of my friends is currently awaiting results to see whether she has swine flu, so my sneezing and feeling blah is pretty petty.

i decided to be more mindful of my dietary choices, so this is what i ate for breakfast:

it's a cup of nonfat yogurt (which is always awful and should be sent to a culinary graveyard, along with peach fuzz and brussels sprouts), a banana, which was overripe with brown spots (my favorite), a handful of granola that tasted like fish food and about a dozen maple-glazed almonds. the almonds were delicious, so i quickly gobbled the rest of my slop so that i could eat them solo.

i also ate a few more almonds because i felt like it.

water, a bit of coffee and a fistful of vitamins followed.
maybe lunch will be better.

evening 9/29/09

since i'm busy packing up my apartment, i'm into convenience food. (because otherwise i faithfully seek out and peel fresh vegetables to make a salad, as evidenced in previous posts.) i already had marshmallow creme, peanut butter and white bread, so i did what any red-blooded american would do and hollered that a public option would kill america made a fluffernutter.

frankly, i'm sick of these, but i have to pack and also blog incessantly about every morsel of food that i eat, so searching out something with greater nutritional value is out of the question.

notice the texas chainsaw massacre-style lighting in this picture, including my shadow looming in the lower left corner. since waiting to get my camera was a hardship i could not endure, i had to take a bite out of the sandwich before photographing it. it now reminds me of crime scene evidence.

the truth is that i wasn't even hungry before eating this, but i didn't feel like waiting until i'm in bed at midnight, unable to sleep because my stomach is grumbling and then weighing the hunger against having to brush and floss again. preventative eating, if you will.

FIN

lunch 9/29/09

this was my lunch. it looks like breakfast because it was supposed to be, but i was kept waiting so long that it was well past noon when i ate it. and it was not brunch.

i have pretty strong feelings about brunch (i hate it as a concept) and so i don't use the word. if i eat it before noon, it's breakfast; if i eat it after noon, it's lunch. i don't see why i need a word to describe a different meal. maybe it says something about our culture that we've invented words for meals that aren't covered by "breakfast," "lunch," or "dinner." taco bell also has "fourth meal" and don't get me going about "linner." it sounds like a racial slur.

also, i've heard the argument that it's not when you eat, but what you eat that makes food "brunch":

"it's breakfast food in the early afternoon, so it's brunch," they say.

bullshit. if you eat cocoa pebbles at 8 PM, you just had cereal for dinner. you did not have breakfast. logic fail.

anyway, my lunch was some combination of tofu, potatoes, cheese, mushrooms and other things that are pretty obvious in the photo above, all grilled into a cheesy mountain. i should have taken a photo from the side to give you an idea of how tall this thing was. suffice it to say that seven hours later, i'm still not hungry.

mount obesity was delicious and i kept rationing it out in my head, saying things like, "okay, after half of this, you'll be full." and i was.

and after immediately eating the second half, i was comatose.

it didn't help that all the waitress brought me to drink was a six-ounce glass of water. by the end of it, my mouth was drier than perth in 2050.

anyway, it was great and once again, i forgot that i was going to report my eatings to a blog. better luck at dinner.

morning 9/29/09

i learn lessons the hard way, so not surprisingly, i've decided to resume my morning coffee habit.

i bought some recycled coffee filters at a natural foods store, mostly because i love high markups. one of my best friends was visiting me recently, when she pointed to the name of the brand:

"IF YOU CARE"

...




...



...

prior to this pack of coffee filters, i was unaware that inanimate objects could be passive-aggressive. but congratulations, coffee filters, you sure showed me.

i also ate a pluot. stone fruits are among my favorite foods (not to be confused with stoned fruits, which one finds plenty of in west hollywood and the castro and are in fact, NOT among my favorite foods.) since there's about a one-month window during which plums, pluots, nectarines and peaches aren't sour, sucky and mealy, i normally gorge on them then. i believe that one-month period might be july, but i'm really bad with remembering times and chronology.

consequently, peaches are furry and disgusting and should be used to pelt criminals. they should be consumed only in times of famine. like brussels sprouts. maybe i'll make a peach-brussels sprout quiche when i have kids; it will be edible punishment for swearing and not being funny while doing it.

or maybe i'll just save and feed them this pluot, since it pretty much tasted like windex:















ever wish you could control+z an eating experience? if only bulimia weren't so out of fashion.

dinner 9/28/09

it's early for dinner, but today's been screwy.

i opted for the state food of northern california, a burrito. more particularly, a san francisco-style burrito. rumor has it (and by "rumor," i mean "wikipedia") that these burritos started in san francisco in the 60s. forget those minuscule, flaccid things from taco bell that taste like binder paper, our burritos are about the size of newborn babies.

i cut my bean & cheese fiber bomb in half to deceive you into thinking that i wouldn't actually finish it. but as they say in france, "le LOL."


i didn't bother eating those chips, though. they're just fried corn tortillas and since corn is why america is fat, i stuck to huffing my 1,400-calorie burrito in four minutes flat. i'm not out of breath or sweating, which means that i'm in great shape for competitive eating and awful shape for the rest of life.

the salsa was good, the beans needed seasoning, but they stifled my anxiety about moving, so, y'know, mission accomplished.

SNEAK EATS: since old habits die hard, i did have a few undocumented snacks today. i know that undocumented snacks are evil because they want to steal jobs from local snacks, but they do the dirty work that no other snacks will, namely providing cheap calories to keep me from going hungry.

today's contraband items: one piece of white bread with dulce de leche (maybe 1.5 tablespoons, emotional eating), a grande iced latte from starbucks (2% milk, needed caffeine to stop feeling bad about earlier emotional eating and had to have enough milk to neutralize the coffee), another tablespoon of dulce de leche (boredom eating) and a few radishes (bored at the taqueria, waiting for my burrito).

so i'd give myself a D- in dietary choices for 9/28/09.

good news: a lot of fiber from the beans, some calcium from milk
bad news: tons of white bread and sugar

to think about for tomorrow: less processed food, more living food

oh, well.

first meal

toast seems like a pretty good way to start the day. i'm sensitive to sweet in the morning, so something bland is good. i have some maple-almond bread that i decided to use.

since, as of three days ago, coffee gives me heartburn (or acid reflux? is that the same thing?), that's out, so i had some water.

there was a line in beauty and the beast where beast says tells his dancing candle (or teapot or something) that belle may have "a glass of water, crust of bread, then off to bed." that's pretty much what just happened to me.


i used earth balance spread because butter is too hard to spread on toast and since i'm impatient and about as graceful as a drunk russian, i normally massacre my toast and render it a concave, butter-saturated pancake.

since a slice of bread is supposed to be, like, 1/2" thick and a serving of earth balance is supposed to be a tablespoon, and my servings were about four inches and half a cup, respectively, let's say this breakfast cost me about 12,000 calories. i suspect this may be why i'm overweight.

since i wasn't out of breath after eating, i knew i was still hungry, so here's part 2:


you're looking at the ingredients for a fluffernutter. in the event that you didn't grow up in the 50s or a trailer park, a fluffernutter is a sandwich made with peanut butter (preferably an ultra-processed variety) and marshmallow creme. (not cream, mind you, but creme.) i opted to use homemade bread in lieu of wonderbread because i am, after all, watching my weight.

excuse me while i go shoot insulin into my arm.

weight loss through humiliation

i think now's a pretty good time to start making a food log. being overweight in america is easy. nobody gives you too hard a time and in fact, tons of people encourage it, either directly or indirectly (jewish and italian matriarchs, i'm talking to you). and as fun as it's been sweating while bending over for the past 24 years, i'm making a real, bona fide attempt to lose weight.

see, there have been instances where i've been forced to eat slowly. physical injury (to my shoveling hand, let's say) is generally the motivating factor, but eating with people who taste food before they swallow has also slowed me down on occasion. and when i eat slowly, i eat less. and i also feel a little self-righteous, if i can be totally honest.

so i'm making the assertion (based on approximately no research) that being conscious of food will somehow make me eat less and thus lose weight.

i heard about food logs (let's just call them flogs) several years ago, but never really cared until i decided for myself that it would be a good idea to have one. suddenly, it dawned on me while eating this morning that, if beholden to the opinions of others (from which i'm often shielded, what with eating in my dark apartment with no witnesses), i might actually breathe between bites.

i mean, there are no "others" who read this blog at present, but i intend to solicit some, so that i may have an audience for this. i believe that overzealous graduates from no-name business schools would call this "incentivizing" and though i don't have a powerpoint presentation to accompany this, i don't need one. because this is my sovereign blog.