FOOD AND FITNESS DIARY – Entry 1

Welcome back to Vegan MoFo! In case you missed any of my earlier posts, you can check them out here:

• Mac n Cheese Monday: My Favorite Vegan Mac n Cheese and Mac n Cheese Round Up
• Tomato Tuesday: An Ode to Fire Roasted Tomatoes and Grape Tomatoes! Cherry Tomatoes! and Raw Vegan Chili (and stuffed mushrooms)
• What-a-Salad Wednesday: How to Build a Great Salad and 4 Delicious Dinner Salads with Homemade Dressings and Vegan Caesar Salad Dressing
• Thirsty Thursday: My 9 Favorite Vegetables to Drink and Smoothie Recipes and Tips and Fresh Fruit and Veggie Juices
• Fruity Friday: Making the Case for Fruit and Video Interviews with Fruitarian Michael Arnstein
• Saucy Saturday: Cheezy Walnut Sauce with Sweet Potato Pasta
• Something Random Sunday: My One Year Blog Anniversary

Today’s Fruitarian Friday post is my first entry in my Food and Fitness Diary Series. One of the things that I really enjoyed about being a part of the DietBet was being held accountable for what I was eating and my workouts. No one told me that I had to post that info to my blog but I wanted to share my progress with you and it really helped keep me on track.

I want to keep up with posting about my food/workouts/general life as it affects my health/fitness/well-being so on Fridays and Mondays I am going to share my food and fitness diary with y’all. Maybe you’ll find it all incredibly boring or maybe some of you will get a little inspiration from it!

While I was doing the DietBet I was following a low-fat raw vegan diet, which is sometimes called 80/10/10 or referred to as being a Fruitarian.

The gist of it is that I was eating only fresh, raw fruits throughout the day and then lots of raw veggies for dinner. It took a little getting used to at first but once I had been doing it for a few days I found that I really enjoyed it.

Eating monomeals of fruit during the day was so simple and delicious (and satisfying!) and eating only raw vegetables for dinner was really fun. I found that most of the time I was making much less of a mess in the kitchen at dinner time (which is always nice) and I never went to bed hungry. If you’re curious about what a monomeal is you can read more about that here.

Even though I really enjoyed sticking to raw 80/10/10 100% of the time during the DietBet (28 days) I am not sure if I’m quite ready to make that my full-time way of eating. A couple of weeks ago I went to a fruitarian pool party and met someone else who follows raw 80/10/10 and he’s actually met Dr. Doug Graham (the guy who wrote the book above). Dr. Graham said that it usually takes about 8 years for people to really commit to following 80/10/10 full-time. 

This was such a relief to me. Even though I know that eating this way is doable and that it makes me feel awesome, emotionally I’m just not quite ready to give up all my cooked foods. I don’t think that it will take me 8 years to come around to doing it full-time but I would like to ease into it a bit.

I’ve decided I want to commit following the 80/10/10 low-fat raw vegan way of eating 6 days a week, allowing myself to eat cooked food if I want to Friday night through Saturday night. Of course this is my life and I’m in charge so if for some reason I want some cooked food on a Tuesday then I’m going to eat it, but since I really do enjoy following 80/10/10 I would like to commit to it 6 days a week. I feel like overall this is the diet/way of eating that is going to bring me the most happiness.

Now, let’s get into what I’ve been up to this past week!

Monday 9/16/13

After eating so much cooked food on Sunday I was actually really excited to get back to eating raw on Monday.

What I ate: 
Breakfast: Green smoothie with 2.5 frozen bananas, 2 mangos, and some greens.
Snack: 2 pink lady apples with some PB2. I know that PB2 isn’t raw but it is lower fat than regular peanut butter so I’m okay with it for now.
Lunch: 2 pounds of grapes
Dinner: Cucumber, corn, and red onion salad, some stuffed tomatoes, and a bowl of homemade miso soup with raw carrots, daikon, and green onions.
TOTAL calories: 1,815

Ross saw me making these fun little stuffed tomatoes and actually said, “Those look really good. Can I have some?” This shocked the shit out of me because he never wants to eat what I’m making, even when it’s food he likes. I was more than happy to share with him! :)

Exercise: None. Monday is my rest day because I go grocery shopping and it makes me grumpy.

Cheats: I did have 1/2 of a slice of whole grain bread with some apple butter on it. Bread is my biggest weakness. I. Love. Bread.

Tuesday 9/17/13

What I ate:
Breakfast: Green smoothie with 2 frozen bananas, 2 peaches, and some greens.
Lunch: Uh oh. I was at Whole Foods today and I sampled some bread and bought a little bit of tofu from the salad bar. I have been dreaming about tofu for 28 days… I had to. I don’t even feel guilty. I also ate 2 pounds of grapes.
Dinner: Giant salad with my vegan Caesar salad dressing and carrots
Dessert: 1/2 a slice of bread with apple butter. Again, I couldn’t resist and I don’t feel guilty. Someone had to eat the other half of the slice from yesterday, so I volunteered.
TOTAL calories: 1,684

Exercise: Speed work! I went to the indoor track at the gym and ran 6 x 800 with the goal of completing each 800 meters in 4:21. It takes 5 laps on the indoor track to make 800 meters so my goal was 53 seconds per lap. Here’s what my workout looked like:

Wednesday 9/18/13

What I ate:
Breakfast:  green smoothie – 2 mangos, 1/4 of a pineapple, some raw broccoli, ginger, and vanilla
Snack: 2 bananas
Lunch: 1 mango and 3 apples
Dinner: corn, tomato, cucumber, and red onion salad, plus a giant green salad
Dessert: Banana ice cream with PB2 and vegan vanilla protein powder. I only used the protein powder because I didn’t want chocolate ice cream and I have this vegan protein powder that I need to finish up, so it was simply used for flavoring.
TOTAL calories: 1,931

Exercise: Today was a cross-training day. I did 33 minutes on the rowing machine – 5 minutes easy, 10 minutes hard, 3 minutes easy, 10 minutes hard, 5 minutes easy followed by 3 sets of 12 push-ups.

Thursday 9/19/13

What I ate:
Breakfast: 2 large bananas before I left the house followed up by a small cantaloupe when I got to work
Snack: 3 bananas
Lunch: 2 pounds of grapes
Dinner: Spiralized zucchini and kelp noodles topped with a peanut sesame sauce
Dessert: Chocolate peanut butter ice cream
TOTAL calories: 2,110

Exercise: Today was a tempo run! Ross was home when I got home from work but had to go back to the gym to train one more client at 7:00. I went with him so I could do my tempo run on the treadmill and we could just take one car, plus that would guarantee we’d be done at the same time. I did 5 miles total: 1.5 miles easy, 3 miles tempo, and 0.5 miles easy. The easy miles were done a 12:30 min/mile pace and the tempo was done at 9:31 min/mile pace.

When I woke up this morning it was raining and I could not be happier about it! We’ve been in a drought here in Austin for over two years so I am giddy every time it rains, even though it guarantees that I will be late to work. So worth it.