Meat(less?): Day 35

It’s been a while since I posted on my diet, but don’t think that’s because I haven’t been eating.  (ha Ha HA!  Whoo!  Alright now.)

After a little discussion, Katy and I pieced together the idea that eating both gluten-free and vegetarian can be done without too much difficulty when you prepare your own meals.  Turns out, it seems to be prohibitively difficult when eating at restaurants.  There’s one or two places where I can make it happen, but that’s not much variety, and sometimes social expectations and scheduling requirements combine to force me to eat at an awkward restaurant.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing.  After all, in the past few weeks I’ve already had conversations turn to people who attempted to eat vegetarian but had to introduce meat to their diet again when their blood sugar got out of whack.  I’m willing to accept that as a sign that I should still have the occasional morsel of flesh.  (If I haven’t made it clear before now, my reason for exploring a vegetarian diet had nothing to do with moral objections to animal consumption.)

So the new plan is that we eat vegetarian at home.  At a public dining establishment (or in some cases other people’s homes), I’m just accepting that my stomach will sometimes be called into service to digest masticated bits of muscle and fat.

Meatless: Day 18

There hasn’t been much drama in my meatless universe since those two unfortunate slip-ups.  I can cite an unexpected benefit, though.  I don’t have as many cravings to eat when I’m not hungry.  I’m not exactly sure how to articulate this phenomenon.

Historically I turned to particularly tasty (and almost always unhealthy) foods on a daily basis.  It wasn’t restricted to when I was having a particularly bad day and needed a pick-me-up.  Whenever it was time to eat, I would gravitate towards the tastiest option.  If it was healthy and/or inexpensive, so much the better, but those were secondary concerns.

I feel like my compulsion to consume the most rewarding flavors I can cram down my gullet has been lifted since dropping meat.  I’m free now to make decisions based on the physiological and financial ramifications of my diet.  Ironically, I’ve discovered a wealth of new flavors that I had been missing out on.  Peanut butter on millet toast is good eatin’, but anything named millet toast wasn’t on my radar a few weeks ago.

P.S.) Basmati rice is almost comically delicious.

Meatless (more or less): Day 8

On Saturday I went to an old friend’s wedding.  I had RSVP’d weeks ago and selected “steak”.  I wasn’t sure there was any good way to handle this.  Perhaps I could just ignore the steak and eat everything else on the plate.  That option wasn’t entirely satisfactory when I considered how much each plate costs at a wedding reception.

The decision became much easier on the actual day.  I was extremely hungry and the reception lasted for a long while.  It was never boring; there was just a lot going on.  The good news is that I didn’t feel like I was somehow derailed after the steak (which did taste pretty good).  I still thought of myself as a vegetarian who just happened to have eaten a steak.  It wasn’t any stranger than if I had eaten a meal a few weeks ago that didn’t have any meat in it.

As if to mock my conviction, the universe pulled another fast one on me on Monday.  It was a coworker’s birthday and we were all going to Bub’s for lunch.  This joint is well known for it’s one-pound hamburger (post-cooked weight).  Other than a banana milkshake (which I had) and a few salads (which I don’t care for), there was nothing on the menu that didn’t contain either meat or gluten.  I decided the best compromise was to order their smallest hamburger with grilled onions and no bun.  It wasn’t very filling, but it tasted fine.

The problem is that the makers of the Bub’s burger are expecting you to eat it on a bun.  The porous bread is able to absorb the tremendous amount of grease from the burger while it is on your plate or in your stomach.  Lacking any such support mechanism, my stomach seemed to feel I had simply swallowed a small cup of liquid animal fat for lunch.  I suppose that’s not too far from the truth.

I got right back on the vegetable wagon, though.  Today at lunch, I sat next to someone who had brought in my dietary nemesis, Marsh fried chicken.  It smelled and looked delicious.  Scenarios played out in my head of knocking her to the ground, grabbing a drumstick, and trying to get as many bites in as possible before I was restrained.  I enjoyed my vegetables and rice, though.  I figure if I made it through that, I should be able to stand up to just about anything.

Meatless: Day 3

Today the gang I worked with went over to ye’ ol’ Mongolian Grill for lunch.  If you’ve never been to one, imagine a salad bar with lots of raw meat and sauces.  You fill up a bowl and carry it over to the grill, a giant circular slab of heated metal.  Your food is unceremoniously thrown on the grill, where it is cooked by people wielding utensils that would look more at home in a medieval armory than a modern kitchen, before being returned to you.  Add rice or wrap in a tortilla as you see fit.

I’ve had quite a few enjoyable gut stuffing episodes there.  In fact, when I first went on a gluten free diet, the Grill was a haven where I could go out to eat but still control exactly what went on my food.  Here’s the rub: historically my bowl would be filled primarily with meat.  Would I yield to the temptation of this early test of my vegetarian convictions.

Fortunte smiles upon me.  As it turns out pineapple chunks, fried egg, peanuts, sprouts, onions, and lemon juice can really jazz up a plate of plain white rice.  That wasn’t the only pleasant surprise.  Usually when I push back from the table at this restaurant, I can feel my belly straining with the weight of all the food I’ve consumed.  Even though I ate the same quantity of food today, I felt quite comfortable after.

Meatless: Day 1

I have been a card-carrying carnivore for most of my life.  Even when I dabbled with food combining for a few months in high school, I still had a lot of meat in my diet.  So what would possess me to decide while thinking what to have for dinner last night that I wanted to be vegetarian?

I think it’s because I was reading Steve Pavlina’s blog.  Although he is a vegetarian, that’s not what motivated me… at least not directly.  For about five and a half months, Steve changed his sleeping pattern to polyphasic.  While most of us have a monophasic sleep cycle in which we have a long, unbroken sleep each night.  A polyphasic sleeper will take many shorter naps throughout the day.  It seems that most people have difficulty adapting to this type of pattern, but those that do generally report having higher energy each day and needing less sleep. 

Steve wrote a very detailed account of his first 30 days as a polyphasic sleeper in his blog and included updates over the following months.  I was completely fascinated by his account.  I decided this alternate sleep pattern is something with which I want to experiment.

A theme that popped up a few times in reading the account is a belief held by Steve and some others who left comments that adapting to polyphasic sleep is far more difficult if one is eating meat.  I won’t rehash the rationale here, but it seems plausible enough that I am willing to go along with it.

So the question became just how seriously am I interested in this serial napping.  Just four months ago I blew up my diet when I learned I was gluten intolerant.  Almost everything I had previously eaten was off limits, and I had to learn a whole new way to eat.  Am I ready to go through that process all over again?

Truthfully, I think that experience of changing my diet to remove gluten is probably what makes me know I can do this.  This type of fundamental change in one’s diet is neither easy nor convenient.  It can be done, though, and in this case I think the potential benefits are worth dealing with the obstacles.

So I became a vegetarian last night sometime between 6pm and 9pm.  We had a late dinner of potatoes and onions in a coconut sauce over rice.  The onions were surprisingly sweet; I guess they were Vidalia.  I had the leftovers for lunch today.  The experience of bringing my lunch to work (which I’ve avoided for years) was actually kind of nice.  I can’t wait to have some of millet bread for a snack when I get home.  We tried that last night, too, and it was a very pleasant surprise.  I’d resigned myself months ago to the idea that I would never again bite into a slice of bread and feel truly satisfied.  What a delight to be proven wrong!

I feel good initially.  I like the holistic reinforcement that this choice seems to align with all of my major goals: losing weight, getting off prescription medications (I take a proton pump inhibitor for acid reflux), sleeping more efficiently, progressing with yoga, having more disposable income (from taking my lunch to work if nothing else), and making Katy happy.  She’s wanted us to make this sort of change for years, but I just wasn’t ready before.

photo credit: Matt McGee