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My Nutrition Philosophy and Why I Can’t Follow It

Today’s post is going to be a little different. Plus, no exciting eats today. But take a moment to appreciate this. Image

I have like 8 mangos and I’m still thinking it’s not enough. Heehee.

Let’s talk Nutrition. It is a love of mine, although maybe it hasn’t gotten so much love lately. I haven’t really talked about my views on Nutrition much, and I have to say, my own eating certainly doesn’t represent my Nutrition beliefs.

Here are my 2 favorite Nutrition books, and believe me, I’ve read a ton. Now that I have a fairly formed belief system, I find it kind of amusing to read some of the books now. That being said, there is no one ideal diet that works for everyone.

This book a Nutritionist recommended to me. I ordered and read it immediately. Bonus: there is an app with all the recipes. My personal favorite is the granola bars. Image

Also though, the Chocolate Lush saved me when I was stupid enough watch cupcake wars after getting my wisdom teeth out. It is basically warm, gooey chocolate cake. It was painful, but so, so worth it. Image

The second is this book:

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This is the iBook form, I lent my roommate my hard copy. The author was actually my professor for my Nutrition class Fall quarter, although I had already read the book! This is my all time favorite Nutrition book. It is the most comprehensive and easy to understand, and it is very thorough.

So what have I learned from all this?

Aurora’s Nutrition Philosophy:

1. We really don’t know anything about Nutrition. This is an exaggeration, but there simply isn’t enough data to actually know anything for sure. New studies come out all the time. It is fairly easy to manipulate a study to show the intended result (soda companies fund some studies). We don’t know enough about how the human body works at a more complex level to know, for example, whether you get the same benefits from taking vitamins as from eating them in food. Our knowledge is constantly changing, conveniently for the fad diet companies…

2. If possible, try to have a fat, a carb, and a protein, plus fruit or veggies at every meal.

3. Carbs are absolutely necessary for Post-exercise recovery, not just protein.

4. Sugar….let’s not get me started on it. Let’s just say it is not terribly good for you…

5. Fad diets never work. Crash diets never work. You know how they say if you starve yourself, you will lose muscle weight as well as fat? And fat comes back faster than muscle? I had some first hand experience with that. When I was sick, for a good 2 weeks I hardly ate anything (because I felt terrible). I lost weight, including a ton of muscle. And guess what came back right away? The flab. And now the muscle is finally coming back…

6. Whole grains are better than white ones.

7. Avoid saturated fats (eat healthy fats, especially those Omega-3s).

8. More research needs to be done on Nutrition. This is where I come in 🙂

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Random picture because I had a ton of words…have you guys tried this stuff? It’s delish 🙂 I just wish almond milk had more than like 1g of protein…

So why can’t I follow my own Nutrition guidelines?

1. Food tastes good. Oops…

2. Eating nuts makes my skin go crazy…so getting healthy fats in can be more of a challenge. And let’s be honest. I’ve basically been getting strictly Sunflower seed butter as my healthy fats as of late. Mix it up!

3. Grains seems to make me fall asleep….Not sure why, and not sure what grains specifically, or all, but that kind of complicates matters.

4. I may be addicted to sugar, hence avoiding it/not eating too much is a bit of an issue.

5. I swear normally I am better with my nutrition…not sure what happened…

6. Sometimes I try to do too much and it all backfires.

If you guys haven’t noticed, I’ve been seriously searching for my Nutrition as of late…And since you guys haven’t seen any cat photos in a while (I’ve been back less than 2 weeks, so I guess it really can’t have been THAT long…), here you go!Image

What is she doing?

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Ohhh cats.

What is your Nutrition Philosophy?

Back in Action

Today was my first day back! Overall, it was a good day, but I’m starting to realize how tired I am now. I was feeling tired early last night, and a power outage in my dorm gave me the perfect excuse to go to bed early. As a result, I woke up a little before my alarm, yay! Before morning workouts, I usually have some type of quick bread and a cup of milk, but I forgot to get milk from the dining hall last night. Whenever I’m home, I make some type of quick bread and freeze it. I actually got my own freezer for my room so I can have a ton of different options for breakfast, because I have a ton of early workouts. Last quarter I had practice at 5:45 am most mornings, on the water. What was my preworkout fuel today? Banana bread!

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I’ve been waiting for an excuse to post the recipe for my favorite banana bread! Here is the recipe, it’s super healthy and low to no sugar, depending on your preferences. I got it from Nancy Clark’s Nutrition book (there’s also an app with all the recipes). So here’s the recipe, which I’ve modified slightly:

Ingredients:

4 well ripened bananas

1 large egg or 2 egg whites

2 tablespoons canola oil

1/3 c milk

1/8 c honey (or more to taste, recipe actually calls for 1/3 to 1/2 c sugar)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1.5 c whole wheat pastry flour

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350

Mash bananas.

Add all ingredients except flour and mix well

Blend in flour, stir until moistened

Pour into 4×8 loaf pan, I recommend lining it in tinfoil

Bake for 45 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center is clean

Let cool for 5 minutes (in theory, i NEVER do)

135 cal, serves 12

For this particular batch that I ate from this morning, I added no sweetener, and added blueberries. Yum!

After enjoying my banana bread, I biked over to weights. In shorts and a sweatshirt. Bad idea. It was probably in the 30s, and I couldn’t feel my hands AT ALL by the time I got there. This is the first time I’ve done weights as part of rowing, and it was interesting. I’m really glad I’ve done a ton of weights already and know how to do all the exercises, because the trainer basically demonstrated what we were doing once, and expected us to do it. He didn’t teach the new people how to do snatches, or anything like that, and I cringed watching them. I just hope no one hurts themselves! The type of weights we did were endurance weights, which was different and kind of strange. Most of the exercises were with an empty bar, but we did a ton of reps of each exercise, without much of a break between sets. For example, we did sets of 40 squats with just the bar. I’m used to ding like 3-5 squats, with a heavy weight on. But it was a good workout. Immediately after weights, we had to do a timed run (it doesn’t have to be right after, but most people do it then because it was convenient). I finished the run in 34:08. The run is a loop of campus, and I think it’s probably around 4 miles, maybe less. It was a comfortable pace to me, and I think it compared decently to other people’s times. The funny thing was that I apparently do the run in the opposite direction as most people, so I passed post of the team at some point going the opposite way, and it was fun to give high fives. Great motivation!

After the run, I rushed to breakfast so I would have time to shower before class. Breakfast was a letdown. I was banking on a smoothie, and all the smoothie ingredients were out, but there were no blenders. And I wanted to grab bread for lunch because I didn’t think I’d have time to go to lunch, but all I could grab was a whole wheat english muffin.

Ok I totally forgot to take a picture of breakfast, but it wasn’t that exciting. I had a bowl of yogurt with frozen fruit (wanna-be smoothie), which was soooo cold, plus half a whole wheat english muffin with regular and strawberry cream cheese, plus some scrambled eggs.

After showering, I was getting my things together, and decided to make a peanut butter sandwich with the english muffin for lunch, when I realized I couldn’t find the english muffin. I searched everywhere! I mean, who the heck loses an english muffin?? My theory is that I left it at the dining hall, which would be preferable to finding it in 2 months.

I didn’t think I’d be able to return to my room before practice, so I tried to subtly dress for practice. Scarves hide all!

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Like the new scarf?

I had 2 morning classes. I thought I was going to be booked through until practice, but I ended up not having a chem section so I was able to get a real lunch. I’m optimistic about my classes this quarter. I wasn’t a big fan of my classes last quarter. My math class (linear algebra) was the hardest class I’ve ever taken in my life, by far. It was also pretty painful. I’m actually looking forward to my math class this quarter. It is Multivariable Calculus, which I actually took in high school, and the topic just makes so much more sense to me.

Since I was planning on a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, I decided to do that at the dining hall.

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Pb on whole wheat bread. I was planning on just having a garden salad with it, but I couldn’t pass up some type of brussels sprout salad either. Plus, I had to have one of the stuffed tomatoes, stuffed with breadcrumbs and cheesy goodness. And of course, I came prepared.

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I brought my own peanut butter! I’ve probably consumed a ton of trans fat in the form of peanut butter at the dining halls here and at training camp, so I really want to prevent that.

Are you ever influenced by watching people eat? I have a bad habit of seeing someone eat something, and then deciding I have to have it, like it was somehow justified because someone else was eating it too. I never realized that would happen when I saw a stranger eating something. That led to this

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It’s some type of raspberry crumble bar. It’s oaty with raspberry filling, and is pretty good, but nothing special, it’s at the dining halls all the time.

After lunch I stopped by my dorm to grab a jacket for practice; BEST DECISION EVER, practice was cold! I had one more class of the day before practice. I was a bit concerned about getting to the pick up location by 3:15 if class ended at 3:05, but there was another girl from my team in my class, and we made it no problem. Before practice, I snacked on this:Image

It’s by far my favorite NuGo bar. It has way more flavor than the other NuGo Slim bars, and the regular NuGo bars are too sweet for me.

Practice mostly consisted of re-reigging the boats. We had the world’s shortest row afterward. However, something did happen. We got stuck in the sand. I never realized that a) that was possible and b) I should be concerned about it. The tide was super low today, so I guess that was the problem. It was bizarre, we were rowing along, and then all the sudden it got heavy and we weren’t moving. Since I was in the back of the boat (but the front in terms of what hits the sand first), I was about ready to climb out and start pushing. We ended up getting out of it by backing, but in the process we came dangerously close to hitting a channel marker. It definitely didn’t help that it had already gotten dark. There’s something really cool about rowing in the dark, it’s so peaceful, but it can also be difficult when I can’t see the water. I’ve never rowed at night before, but I think I prefer rowing in the early morning.

We made it back in time for dinner (yay), although dinner wasn’t spectacular.

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Spinach salad with raspberries, which was good, but eating spinach is difficult to do neatly. I had some steamed cabbage and brown rice, and some random roasted veggies with mushroom gravy, plus a few potatoes. I topped it with a piece of grilled chicken for protein. It was an ok meal, nothing to write home about. Dessert?Image

It’s definitely a dangerous thing to have unlimited access to frozen yogurt. I had half vanilla half chocolate, with cocoa puffs and peanut butter (yes, the trans fatty kind. ugh.). Some habits die hard, and apparently having chocolate peanut butter and cereal was a habit I developed at camp. I was feeling pretty decent about my day of eating, not too bad for a first day back.

However. Back in my dorm….I chatted with some of my friends, who happened to share my love of food, which naturally ended in snacks. They were reasonably healthy, dried fruit and nuts, plus naturally I had to finally crack open my favorite peanut butter! I also opened my new 99% cocoa dark chocolate. I love super dark chocolate. I will eat straight baker’s chocolate, but 99% is so much better because it was way smoother. But my roommate also brought back a Costco sized pack of Hazelnut chocolates….

I have the tendency to want to eat whenever anyone else eats. Sympathy eating, if you will. If I want to survive college, it’s probably not the best thing. Especially if I’m eating meals with my crew teammates who are a foot taller than me and outweigh me by like 50 lbs. At least if I want them to still outweigh me by 50 lbs! Tomorrow I’m having a Guacamole party with the avocados I brought from home, so I want to try to plan that into my day in terms of meals. What concerns me most is if my food gets in the way of my workout. And as my workout intensity increases, nutrition is key. As I said before, old habits die hard. So basically I just need to get back into better habits. As I think I’ve talked about before in another post, I’m a huge underdog in terms of rowing. I need to take every advantage I can get, and my knowledge of nutrition could be that edge I need. Interestingly enough, I find that when I’m better at resisting sweets, I’m also better at pushing myself through physical pain on while rowing. Go figure. Here’s to a healthy week! The good news? Tomorrow’s workout is on my own, and no class until 12:30 so I get to sleep in !

How was your day?