Food hell is me in a grocery store buying anything other than paper towels and coconut water. My meeting last night got cancelled so I thought I'd use the time to get my food for my Koko nutrition project. It was a gorgeous sunset and I grabbed my list (after which I spent an hour the day before rummaging through our cupboards to find and check off the stuff we already had) and headed to the local Stop N Shop. I pictured myself spending maybe half and hour perusing the aisles, list in hand.
Two hours and a hundred dollars later, hot and sweaty, I was pushing a full cart out to the car. I'm going to eat all this food? Really? So much for the leisurely perusing. I don't ever buy anything in the middle aisles of a grocery store so this was major work. Tofu? Where in a grocery store do they sell tofu? I think it's cold, but not frozen. I ran into it accidentally while trying to find baby spinach, which I kind of knew the general direction of.
Driving home, totally exhausted, I realized it was now 6 o'clock and I was starving because I had been very diligent about eating the correct foods all day long. Dinner tonight was lemon baked chicken, tossed salad, and quinoa with Italian vegetable sauce. Sounds great, but I still had to haul in and put away the food before I could start making it. Carrying the bags into the house, I already started down on the "this isn't going to work" road. I was so tempted to pull that last healthy choice frozen dinner out of the freezer.
I covered the kitchen island with the mountain of bags and decided I should dig out the chicken breast, make the marinade and get it in the oven before putting everything else away. Did you ever try to chop things in the midst of a heap of grocery bags? Yes? How about if half of the things you needed to chop were still hidden in the myriad of bags?
By the time I had the chicken in the oven, I remembered I had to cook the quinoa and MAKE the Italian sauce. More chopping things I needed to hunt through the bags for. About this time I was sure this wasn't going to work. No – I resolved to do this. I wasn't giving up. This was totally new to me and I know myself. Whenever I attempt anything new, I have to keep at it. I've learned that if I just keep doing it, it gets easier as I learn more and more each day. While cutting the tenth tomato of the night (with the bags still on the counter) I watched the slices and what I call "not quite dices", and thought that after a week I'm going to know how a vegetable behaves when your trying to chop it.
I kept telling myself how much easier this will all get and how much I'm going to learn as I finished the meal. Food cooking, I finally cleaned off the counter. I had so many condiments and such that I knew if I put them in a cabinet I'd never remember what they were. I decided to leave them in a group on the counter.
The food was finally done. I opened the foil on the chicken. It smelled really good, but it looked white – like I poached it. The Italian vegetable sauce was done, but the quinoa still had too much water in it. (Could that be because I started microwaving it, then switched it to a pot on the stove because nothing seemed to be happening in the microwave?)
I finally got it all done, made a plate and ate it. Not bad, but I was immediately contriving shortcuts to this cooking and eating thing, when I realized the point of the whole plan was to make everything from real food, without fat and sugar so it wouldn't stop up my metabolism. Sure enough. All day I ate every two hours and dinner was no exception. By nine o'clock I felt it working. The more of this food combination I took in, the more I needed. I topped off the evening with the smoothie I missed in the morning and that seemed to calm things down so I could go to bed.
Tonight is no exception. The combination of food I ate all day has my metabolism raging. I need to stop writing to make tonight's snack. If I had eaten a regular dinner like I'm used to eating, I wouldn't want any more food until morning, and sometimes I'm still not hungry at breakfast. It's not exactly each individual food, or the fact that it is fresh food, it's the COMBINATION of the different foods that is causing this explosion of my metabolism. I ate more food today than I've eaten in a usual week and I still need more. As soon as you need to eat tons of food every two or three hours, you know it's working. You've found the right combination for you physical make up. I guess I will need that cart full of food after all.
Koko took my muscle mass, my e-BMI, my cardio, and my weight training results, along with a few questions on my website, and designed this food plan. It WILL work – but so will I. This will take focus and I've got to be diligent about it.
And so, as another day goes by, I REALLY need to stop writing this post and get to my snack – I can almost smell the apple with plain Greek yogurt. Who knew that combo would ever excite me? And….I have written.
The food hell laboratory:
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