The Practical Diet

 H   ere are some thoughts about what I should be considering when thinking about the diet that will be at the end of this biomic experiment. You may want to look at it for ideas on some kind of diet you might be thinking about adopting. Remember, I'm not doing this to lose weight, although I very well could be.

(And remember, I'm going to try to work in as regular an exercise routine as I can—in my case, that would involve, for now, just walking.)

But also remember that it's not my plan to make this a temporary diet; with a few tweaks, I plan to adopt this diet or one like it for the rest of my life.

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So what is this diet-to-end-all-diets going to consist of?

Well, first off, I will never be able to sustain any kind of diet which will:

• Be expensive
• Be difficult to find
• Be quickly perishable
• Be difficult to cook
• Be messy to cook
• Take up too much space in the fridge
• Be unfreezable
• Be ultimately not very tasty
• Not be able to be substituted for

My present diet is fairly ideal because it consists of only three types of meals. All are low-to-non-containing carbs, and contain little or no red meats. In fact, they contain very little of any meat.

One is my standby: whole wheat pitas with a filling of pan-grilled chicken, reheated by sautéing with a little olive oil, with sliced red pepper, red onion and raw garlic, garnished with fresh raw cabbage/cole slaw mix (minus the mayonnaise), shredded lettuce and cilantro, with occasional addition of diced habaneros.

The benefit of this meal is that the chicken is cheap, has to be grilled only once in a grill pan and is easily kept in the refrigerator for up to two weeks. The assembly and cooking of the entire meal usually takes around 15 minutes, and most of that is waiting for it to get hot. The pitas just require three minutes in the toaster oven from frozen, do not fall apart and are extremely tasty.

The vegetables can all be sliced ahead of time and be kept in the refrigerator in their own containers. The whole dinner does not take up a lot of refrigerator space. You can shop for a week's worth of dinners once a week and prepare the fixings for seven meals all in one session.

Alternative #1 is whole-grain pasta reheated in a little olive oil with homemade tomato sauce (not from any jars) and home-made meatballs if I feel like it.

Alternative 2 is pizzas made with the same whole-wheat pitas as meal #1, with various cheeses, again red pepper, red onion, garlic and usually good-quality salami as the meat component (not 100% necessary).

Now . . . day in, day out, how does that strike you as a diet?

If I reduced the ice-cream-strawberry-apple whipped-cream dessert to just the fruits, nuts and whipped cream with no sugar at all, (meaning apart from milk in my tea and coffee that would be my only dairy intake—period) and perhaps indulged in some 70+% dark chocolate from time to time, and maybe from now on started to include the occasional shrimp, broccoli, carrots and green beans as possible side dishes, the whole system sounds eminently workable?

No rice at all. No bread, except for the aforementioned whole-wheat pita, and no pasta except for 100% whole wheat/whole grain (what the fuck is the difference?) and no high glycemic index vegetables, like potatoes  . . . no sweets except for raw fruits—apples, strawberries, possibly bananas, grapes and pineapple as well—and dark chocolate . . .

If I could stick to it, say, 28 days a month (the other two days possibly allowing for dining out, or a rare steak dinner at home) . . .

Seems to me my sugar and carb intake would be reduced to very, very low levels, and never be in a position to cause spikes. The grains would also be low glycemic index foods unlikely to cause spikes in blood sugar.

In the nuts dept, my main intake is from almonds and cashews, not peanuts. Seeds . . . I could sprinkle flax seeds over my fruity desserts, I suppose. Legumes? What the fuck is a legume?