A journey in words...

Welcome to my journey in words! A story about health, exercise, weight loss, food addiction, humor, size discrimination, sarcasm, social commentary and all the rest that’s rattling around inside my head...

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Friday, February 19, 2010

Where's the Beef?

There’s this great scene in the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” where the heroine of the story tries to inform her Greek Aunt that her Non-Greek Fiancé is a vegetarian. She has to finally explain the meaning of this alien word; that the man doesn’t eat any meat. To which her Aunt responds:

“He don’t eat no meat?!” and abruptly brings the entire party of a hundred some odd guests to a screeching, horrified standstill.

Obviously without the crowd involved, I would say this somewhat approximates my husbands horror-struck reaction to my telling him that I was going to try becoming a vegetarian.

This causes a problem for Ted in several fronts; for one thing he and my stepson consume a diet that consists of about 50% animal products on Ted’s part and closer to 80% for Kyle. On top of that – I do most of the cooking. So if I’m cooking without meat, what are they going to eat? I’ve already been given the hairy eyeball for my forays into vegetable-over-rice dishes that feature things like portabella mushroom as the star ingredient rather than steak cubes.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, I know it isn’t – and I really love meat. I’m probably going to wind up cooking separate entrees for Ted and Kyle and myself – which is going to no doubt be a pain in the butt. However, I need to do something to jump start my flagging motivation and I’m thinking this 10% dietary fat plan might do it.

It’s pretty simple; consume no more than 10% of your daily calories as fat calories. The un-simple part is this is virtually impossible to do when one is eating meat one or two times per day – meat has huge volumes of fat. It also means limiting things like nuts, cheese, *sob* butter, chocolate… you get the idea. I can have as many fruits, vegetables, grains and beans as I like. Sounds good – but I admit I’ve never successfully managed to satisfy a desperate craving for cookies with fruit, no matter how much fruit I eat.

You know those successful dieters who give beatific smiles and say things like; “I really do love my apples as much as I used to love chocolate! I don’t feel deprived at all!”

Yeah, I want to hurt them. Bad.

I’m going to start small… phasing out red meats which are the worst offender – and moving onto the paler things like chicken and pork. I will continue to eat meat products such as eggs, cheese, milk, and for the moment – chicken broth. This is because 80% of the soups I make use chicken broth and I’m not sure how to phase it out, but I will be experimenting.

I started today; oatmeal with sliced almond for breakfast, Chinese veggies and basmati rice with a big pink grapefruit for lunch and tonight is home made pizza. Considering all the nuts and cheese going on today I’ll probably miss the 10% mark but I’ll input it all into the Daily Plate tonight and see.

The real trick is of course restaurants; places like Red Robin where I’ll have to watch everyone around me eating big, beautiful hamburgers. I don’t know how I’m going to handle that right now – although considering I only eat at such places once in a blue moon it can’t hurt to have ONE burger every couple of months or so, can it?

All I know is I have to do something different to re-motivate myself and get moving again, and this is going to be it – at least for now.

Into the vegetarian abyss…

2 comments:

  1. Let me suggest this website:
    http://www.101cookbooks.com/

    and this recipe (which ROCKS. And I know you like Indian food...)

    http://smittenkitchen.com/2010/02/chana-masala/

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  2. I've been vegetarian for a little over a month and love it. My situation is easier since I'm cooking for just myself - but I know several veggie/omnivore couples that work it out. If you are at all interested in recipe chat, let me know. :)

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