2013-06-18
in
6 min read
To recap, today approximates what would be the pescatarian diet option. That’s all of the lacto-ovo vegetarian option with fish added into the mix. That’s a pretty liberal diet with just the meat and poultry missing. I would have thought that as the diets get closer to my regular diet, which is sadly too close to my SAD diet, that it would get easier. Unfortunately I was wrong. It wasn’t that following the diet was hard, it’s just that I was pretty damn hungry by afternoon!
The day started off with a repeat of Rip’s Big Bowl. I originally had planned to douse that with actual milk rather than soy milk, but I forgot in my haste this morning. I don’t mind the flavor of soy milk, so that didn’t really matter too much to me. As on the vegan day, I was quite full at the end of the bowl so I took the banana which was supposed to be in it on the road with me to work. That became my mid-morning snack.
In the original plan I was going to get sushi for lunch. I do like to get my sushi fix a couple of times a week. I figured what better day to do that than on the day that adding fish was a big deal. As it turned out a bunch of people from work were going over to the local mall food court, so I decided to go with them instead. I had Chipotle for lunch yesterday and I would have had to get the vegetarian option again, so I instead went to the Panda Express right next door. I would have figured they would have had a couple of options, but sadly I could just choose between sauteed shrimp and vegetables (Pepper Shrimp as they call it) and the equivalent of sesame chicken made with shrimp. It was a moment of epiphany about what this would mean for vegetarian and vegan days however. The entire menu there only had four vegetarian options: the regular rice, the fried rice, the vegetable side and the vegetable spring rolls. There wasn’t any tofu dishes or anything like that. Unfortunately the fried rice has egg in it and I think that the spring rolls may have some egg product in it as well, so that means during the vegan phase I could choose a dish of plain rice and sauteed vegetables. That’s not too pleasing. Chipotle may be a regular stopping place.
The double entree is quite a large plate. It has a huge helping of lightly sauteed vegetables, which were more like steamed vegetables today, a little less than a cup of fried rice and a little less than a cup of shrimp and vegetables in a nice sweet sauce. I figured that would keep me pretty full, but not even close. By early afternoon I was ready for a snack. By late afternoon I was ready for a really big snack. I did check my calorie count for the day and there wasn’t a lot of margin in there, so I just sucked it up for dinner, hoping that would hold me off.
As I mentioned, I’m a huge fan of eating big. Anyone that has lived with me for more than a couple months have seen the types of salads I’ll eat for dinner. It’s enough to feed two people, maybe three. I start with a big metal mixing bowl and fill it with lettuce. I use a nice mixed greens mix, romaine, red or green leaf lettuce. I skip the iceberg lettuce as much as possible, which is always. When I have my garden boxes in good form it will include lettuce, kale, spinach and/or chard from there as well. To that I’ll add a big pile of assorted vegetables. Tonight it was three or four medium carrots, half a jicama (so about half a pound of jicama), a cup of sliced raw mushrooms and a tomato. Often times I’ll thrown in stuff like beets, onions, celery, kohlrabi, peppers and god knows what else. For the protein I added a can of salmon. I remember watching the movie “Driving Miss Daisy” and thinking how vile canned salmon must be, but in a pinch a few years ago I tried it and it’s a very nice alternative to canned tuna, which I’ve used ever since. An top of all of that I sprinkle on salt, pepper, garlic powder, dried oregano and dried basil. I have flavored olive oils at hand so tonight I chose to drizzle a tablespoon of lemon infused olive oil and then pour on some balsamic vinegar.
All of that adds up to over two pounds of salad. That should hold me over, I suppose. Unfortunately I tore through that and was ready for some more. I added some nice homemade french baguette to the top of it. That did little to stop anything. A decided to wait a few hours to see if I was still hungry, and sure enough I was. I therefore scarfed down a handful of almonds and a pound of watermelon. Still hungry, I topped it off with a small serving of homemade chocolate chip frozen yogurt made from my whole milk homemade yogurt. That actually topped things off enough, barely, so I called it a night.
Overall eating pescatarian in a healthy way isn’t going to be a challenge from a food choices standpoint, but I was disappointed at how hungry I was. I wouldn’t judge a diet by just one day, hence making these three month experiments during the actual phase, but I was surprised at how that all worked out.
Nutrient profile wise things looked a lot like yesterday. I again had a pretty balanced micro-nutrient profile, although Calcium and Vitamin-D were again on the low side. Macro-nutrient wise the protein, fat, carb balance was pretty much the same as yesterday’s. I also got pretty much the same amount of protein and carbs, which was pretty good. So from a nutrition perspective, things looked good. That again makes me wonder what was causing my appetite to be so sharp. I had been fighting off a headache last night, which made my sleep not so great. That continued on through the morning, so perhaps the combination of not great sleep and some slight illness made my body crave more food.
In the end everything went well but I was still hungrier than I care to be on any given day.
