Chris

Diet like "things I eat", not diet like "I'm on a".  I don't go on diets.

1) Baking

I made granola bars yesterday, with rosefox helping.  There were one or two things that I literally could not do (or couldn't do enough of), as one with arms that're sore due to work and stupidity.  Apart from that, baking was enough of a success to where I actually emailed R to see if we could try doing it more often.  With simple things, not like restaurant-grade professional stuff.

That started out largely because I realised at some point that I need to eat better/more, and one thing that helps are the Luna Toasted Nuts 'n' Cranberry bars.  So, I figured I'd try making some myself, to see what it was like.

Alas, I didn't bring one to work, because I totally spaced.  Maybe I'll try one tonight.

2) Cooking

I made steamed broccoli the other day with use of a steamer.  How the hell long have I lived with a steamer on the premises, and never realised that I, myself, I could use it to make food?  And then I found other things I could steam, like Brussels sprouts, baby corn, spinach, potatoes, and so forth.  Make a mixed thing of that, make jasmine rice at the same time, et voila: actual food!

I can't stress this enough: Brussels sprouts all the time.

3) Diet

I've been considering converting to a vegetarian* diet more frequently recently.  This is largely because meat has become really boring lately.  Specifically, if I eat chicken even once more, I'm going to die.  I can have really flavourful rice'n'beans with green beans, or... chicken?  Fie.

* Or "lacto-ovo-vegetarian", I think the full phrasing is.

Note: I didn't ask for ways to make chicken more fun, but thank you.

The things that have stopped me from converting to veggie-cat before: sheer laziness, and health concerns.  (There's also convenience, in that I don't care for spicy foods or certain veggies, which will limit me more, but I mean I don't go outside.  So whatever.)  Steaming takes care of the convenience; if quick-dinner means jasmine rice and baby corn, well, gosh.

For health, there's iron and there's protein.  The whole protein and veg*ns issue isn't that much of an issue, apparently.  So long as I eat more than crap each day, I should be fine.  For iron, I mostly worry because it's not uncommon for me to have to do two rounds of anemia-validating for blood donation, or to have to come back later anyhow.  So long as I meat a variety of things, again, I should be fine.

So, let's see how this-all works out.

I ♥ Junkfood Science.

How we've come to believe that overeating causes obesity, in which the blogger talks about the Minnesota Starvation Study.  It is fascinating.

In the years following this classic study, Dr. Keys put no stock in weight loss diets or height-and-weight charts. He called those charts “arm-chair concoctions starting with questionable assumptions and ending with three sets of standards for 'body frames' which were never measured or even properly defined.” And “diet fads are for the birds, if you don’t like birds,” he said in a 1979 University of Minnesota Update. He also noted diets such as those promoted by Adele Davis, based on natural foods and fears about processed foods, are “just full of hogwash.” There’s “no great sense to them at all.”

You should go read about the experiment.  It's worlds away from what I see nowadays, wrt diet and so forth.

NUT nutritional software, free via SourceForge.  Basically, a database for hacking your diet.  I did a search of the site and he mentions diet.losing-weight like once, and is discouraging of it.  Fantacular.

Also, yet another opportunity to learn ASP/MySQL.