1 year ago
Post-Pritikin: Sick Food
I love soup. I honestly believe that Jews have a tendency to enjoy soup more than other religions because it’s such a large part of Jewish culture. The first solid food I ever ate was matzo ball soup at Passover. My first WORD was soup, for God’s sake. True story. So whenever I get sick, I tend to hunker down and ingest very little other than chicken noodle soup and bread for a few days.
When I went to Pritikin, I realized how much salt and oil goes into soup. Soups were the snack of choice at Pritikin, served at both snack times. Vegetable soup without salt or oil is really, really gross.
I’ve been sick for a little less than a week now, and and for the first few days I avoided falling back. Then I performed in a show where I had to scream multiple times. I already had a sore throat, and a slight fever had just crept up on me, and I had had it. At 1 AM, I had a slice of pizza, a falafel sandwich, and some red lentil soup. I felt really good.
Yesterday I continued on this tangent. My voice was almost entirely gone, and I felt like I was going to die. I had chicken noodle soup and a bison burger. When I went home for the day, I had some lentil soup with some oyster crackers. Then, since my brother was going to college the next day, we celebrated at a very nice restaurant and I had half a caprese salad, and osso buco. (My brother had never had veal before, so when he asked what it was, I said it was like beef, but younger and sexier and more tied-down and forcefed. I’m a bad person.) My brother, dad and I shared an ice cream sundae for dessert. It was very romantic. For a snack later I had some white meat turkey and a piece of challah bread.
TODAY
A turkey sandwich on wheat bread with lettuce and tomato. A-.
TONS of watermelon and mango. A.
Tagliatelle pasta with oxtail ragu. C.
Sushi for dinner with a salad. B.
TOTAL: B.
I’m still sick. What the hell?!
1 year ago
Post-Pritikin: An Ode to Bread
Oh my GOD, how fucking delicious is bread? Like, seriously, when they say something is “the greatest thing since sliced bread,” they could just say “bread,” except that wouldn’t work because bread is the greatest thing ever.
The one thing I miss most is bread, as you can probably tell. Sure, I still eat it, but definitely not in the same quantity. It’s not the same, you know? Before I left for Pritikin, I would mix roasted garlic olive oil and white vinegar, and just sit down and dip baguette into it. I could put away half a baguette in one sitting. I miss doing that, even though I know it’s terrible. But each bite of that bread-oil mixture is calorically like taking a bite of German chocolate cake (I mean that quite literally - a Pritikin email told me that).
I’ve been having trouble keeping my bread intake down. The other day I had a piece of Zomick’s raisin challah and almost ate the whole loaf. Thank GOD I had to leave the house. Bread is a delicious component in everything that’s bad for you, and almost nothing that’s good for you. Pizza? Cinnamon raisin toast? Grilled cheese? Even sandwiches, to a certain extent, are terrible for you mostly because of the bread. You can put nothing but raw veggies between two pieces of bread, but if those two pieces are foccacia, you’re putting away tons of empty high-density calories (and in foccacia’s case, a ton of oil as well).
But it’s SO GOOD. So damn good. The eternal conundrum continues. I bought some “Deli Flats” by Pepperidge Farm, which Pritikin used as veggie/chicken/turkey/bison burger buns, and those are fine. But it’s just not the same. Sigh.
TODAY
Breakfast: Nonfat Greek yogurt, tsp of honey, and 1/4 cup of granola. Also, the leftover barley orzo salad from last night (about 1/2 cup). A.
Snack (?): The nail salon I went to today had Brach’s strawberry candies - you know, the ones wrapped to look like strawberries? - and those are my FAVORITE CANDIES in the WHOLE WORLD, so I had one. GIVE ME THIS, guys.
Lunch: A roast beef sandwich with lettuce, tomato and goat cheese on a whole wheat baguette. I had to take off about a pound of the roast beef, there was that much of it. But oh GOD, was that whole wheat baguette good. B-/C+ because of the bread.
Exercise: I finally exercised today! 35 minutes of cardio, including intervals. Heart rate maxed out at 188, as far as I could tell without my heart rate monitor.
Dinner: 5 ounces of filet mignon and a baked potato with a little Heinz ketchup. I had the other half of the filet wrapped up and I gave it to a friend at rehearsal a little later. Should’ve had veggies and not used the high-sugar-and-sodium ketchup, but I’m proud that I avoided eating the whole filet and mashed potatoes (which I love; it originally came with mashed potatoes). I also was low on time and couldn’t have started with a salad, and all of the side veggies were sauteed (read: fried). B-, especially since I had beef for lunch as well.
Total: B/B- (With the exercise I’ll give it a B.)
Post-Pritikin: One Foot Dragging
I’ve been sick for the past few days with a sore throat, coughing, and general lethargy and what feels like a little low blood pressure sort of feeling. I’ve been consuming more Vitamin C than ever with all this damn fruit I’ve been shoving into my face, and now I’m SICK?! I don’t even know how I got sick - no one I know or have encountered is sick. What the hell is this mess? I’ve been chugging 2 Emergen-C a day, sleeping a lot, and generally eating pretty well, and I feel a lot better today. Usually I decline pretty sharply after the first day of feeling generally like poop.
Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve kind of started to fall off the wagon. Well, not fall off the wagon. I’m still doing pretty well, and definitely much better than before. So, maybe one foot dragging along the ground whilst still on the moving wagon? That sounds pretty painful, I’d better pull that shit up.
I haven’t exercised all week, simply due to running around and having no time. (This is a legitimate truth, I’m not just being a whiny bitch. BUT I’ve been doing more walking and things like that, which I’m OK with right now. I go back to the gym starting tomorrow.) I weighed myself today and found that due to my careful eating, I haven’t gained any weight since Pritikin. I was NOT expecting that at all, I was expecting a little weight gain. That gave me the little push I needed for the past few days.
YESTERDAY
Breakfast: Nonfat Greek yogurt with 1/2 tsp of honey and 1/4 cup of granola with raisins. I’m good with this. A.
Lunch: Grilled chicken sandwich on foccacia with grilled veggies and tomato aioli, with a side salad. C+, because it had the aioli and was on white oily bread.
Dinner: Sushi! But I had an eel roll, which is salty, and some avocado, which is fatty. B-.
Total: B-
TODAY
Woke up late, didn’t have breakfast.
Lunch: Chicken in a cranberry port reduction with grilled veggies and a side salad. I asked specifically no oil and no salt, which kind of threw off the waitress, but the kitchen kindly obliged. My father and I split a dish of sorbet - I had a few spoonfuls of sorbet and ate the berry garnish. I give myself an A because DAMNIT, that was good.
Snack: I’ve gotten very good at cooking moist, delicious fish. I baked some salmon that was otherwise going to go bad, with some white vinegar. I had about 6 oz as a snack (a little much, but I was going to have a late dinner). B+.
Dinner: Turkey chili with beans, sliced tomatoes and barley orzo salad with peppers and onions. There was no oil in the salad or on the tomatoes, and from what I could tell there wasn’t any in the chili either. However, I did have a mint lemonade and a chocolate chip cookie. So, B-.
Total: B/B-
I promise that I’ll be better at actually updating this daily.
1 year ago
Post-Pritikin: Pritigood
A lot of people have asked how I’m doing after Pritikin. My answer is always “pretty good,” which I have shortened to the now-completely-incorporated-in-my-vocab “pritigood.”
There is no perfection post-Pritikin. I am now afraid to go into restaurants, for fear that my best is not good enough. But I’m relatively happy with how I am doing so far, especially since I’ve been very tempted as of recent memory. (For example, there is nothing I want more than a hot dog right now.)
Yesterday, I had dinner at P.F. Chang’s. Do you know how HARD it is to eat healthy at P.F. Chang’s?! The answer is, incredibly hard. But I still managed to do Pritigood. Here’s what I’ve eaten for the past two days.
YESTERDAY
Breakfast: Greek yogurt with half a tablespoon of honey and a crisp nectarine. (A-)
Snack: More yogurt, this time frozen. Fat free, plain tart. With mango, strawberries and a little melba sauce. Before 4 PM, I ate nothing but yogurt. (A, for a snack)
Lunch: Lunch was late. Everything was pretty late. I had some chili, vegetable soup, a little salad, a little Orzo, Diet Sprite, and a whole wheat raisin roll. (C+ - I’ll be honest, the chili had beef in it and had a little oil)
Dinner: The Dreaded P.F. Chang’s. I’m incredibly happy that places like this post calories now, although in an ideal world (at least, for me) they’d post sodium as well. In any case, I had the seared tuna appetizer with the mustard sauce on the side - that comes with a side salad, of which I had two because someone else ordered the tuna and didn’t want their salad. Then I had a TON of brown rice (FIBER, but I still had a lot) and a little of my friend’s veggie chow fun. For dessert, I had one of the shotglass desserts they have there (lemon and graham cracker or something, which was nice) and a bowl of fresh berries. (I’m giving myself an A— on this one, because COME ON, what else can you eat at a goddamn P.F. Chang’s?!)
Total: B+
TODAY
Breakfast: Four ounces of white meat turkey and a banana. Put THAT in a smoothie! (A)
Lunch: Baked salmon with garlic and orange. This was probably the best thing on the menu, considering that I couldn’t shove any more salad into my face. I did start with a small salad (with only vinegar on top, god damnit I hate my life), and the dish came with roasted potatoes (with oil, damnit) and some veggies. (B-)
Snack: I belong to the Godiva Chocolate Rewards club, which means that I get a free piece of chocolate every month, no purchase required. We passed a Godiva while we were shopping, so I got a lemon sorbet truffle. It was ridiculously rich. (C)
Snack: Some of my friend Liz’s mom’s homemade meatloaf, which was super delicious and totally worth it. I’d say I had five or six ounces. Irene reads this blog. Hi Irene! I also had two Sunkist Fruit Gems, which were also good. (B-)
Dinner: Tuna avocado sushi with brown rice, plus like a fourth of a rainbow roll. I used a tiny bit of low sodium soy sauce. I don’t think I can give up soy sauce completely, but I’ve become pretty good at using very little. I also had a piece of bread and a LOT of watermelon. (B+)
Snack: MANGO! My dad and I shared some mango. YAY! (A)
Total: B
I’m doing pretty well with keeping my snacking down to a minimum. I can only hope that I can keep this up.
1 year ago
This picture is of my first home-cooked Pritikin meal - baked bluefish with tomatoes and garlic, with white vinegar and tiny new potatoes. No oil, no salt. (OK, a tiny pinch of salt. But seriously just a tiny pinch.)
For those who do not know, I left Pritikin a week early. Not because of the program itself - I really did love it there, and plan to go back soon - I was just going a little stir-crazy and everything was just beginning to repeat itself a little too much. I came home last night and surprised my friend for her 21st birthday, then surprised another friend for his 23rd tonight.
Instead, for the next week I am going to use this blog to record my first week of eating outside of Pritikin. I’m going to grade each meal based on Pritikin standards, then grade the whole day.
SO. TODAY.
Breakfast: Greek yogurt with berries and a little granola. I asked for the granola on the side so I could put in how much I wanted, because they always put too much. (B+ because the yogurt was probably a bit fatty.)
“Lunch” (I write it in quotation marks because I ate this at like 6): The above picture. I ate the leftovers as a snack. (A-)
“Dinner” (At like 1 AM): Two beef meatballs with tomato sauce on a roll, and a lemonade. (C, because I avoided a lot of the things I COULD have eaten.)
The last meal wasn’t perfect by any means, but I ate it at one of my favorite restaurants and it was totally worth it. I resisted a lot of stuff today, so I’m pretty happy with how things went.
TOTAL GRADE: B-
1 year ago
Just hand-delivered a pizza to the waitstaff at Pritikin because they’ve been so nice to me.
Had breakfast because I was up anyway for my blood draw. Guy (Knowitall’s Soulmate) said that he was from San Francisco, near Ghiradelli Square. I jokingly said, “Aw, now you have me thinking of ice cream sundaes.” He turned to me and said, in all seriousness, “Why don’t you just eat rat poison?! They’re essentially the same thing.”
Well, sir, when I get home I’m going to have a sundae just for you. Or at least a bite of one. Because preaching about how “dessert is an addiction” all through breakfast makes you an official asshole who needs to be defied sometimes.
1 year ago
BONUS POST: This is what my body looks like when you look through it. The MUSCLE is the really visible gray line - as you can see, my definition in my arms and legs is pretty good. The fainter gray line outside of that is my fat line. As you can also see, my stomach is GROSS AND HUGE, let’s all laugh together about it. (I am lying down, though.) Fun Pritikin Fact: The bones in the average human body weigh about 8 pounds.
Days Nine, Ten and Eleven: The Slump
Sorry I haven’t been blogging as fastidiously as I should be. I’ve been busy and tired and all that stuff. So, quick recap of the past few days:
On Monday night I went out to dinner with my father (he came to visit! YAY!) and a few of my Pritikin friends. We went to a sushi restaurant down the road. We asked for brown rice - they didn’t have it. Even though we’re not supposed to use it at all, we asked for low-sodium soy sauce - they didn’t have it. Oh well, we tried.
I started with a salad. The ginger dressing, the stuff that normally makes me swoon, was too salty. I had two sushi rolls after that, tuna avocado and yellowtail scallion. I used the slightest bit of soy sauce (less than 1/4 tsp) and sloshed it around the soy sauce dish thingy, so when I “dipped,” only the tiniest bit of soy sauce got on the roll. It was like heaven. I missed sushi so damn much. I also had a piece of eel, which was also very salty but also very delicious.
After dinner, we went to a liquor store and bought a small bottle of Ketel One. Ketel One, fun fact, is one of the only alcohols that diabetics can drink because it’s made from potatoes and doesn’t boost blood sugar to an insane degree. We also bought no-sugar-added mango juice to mix it with (WORST IDEA EVER - it tasted awful).
We bought the Ketel One because we were playing poker with a few of the waiters when we got back to Pritikin. It was a successful night; I was the big winner, while J, the waiter who I mentioned earlier as being a big gambler, came in second. I went to sleep with a headache.
The next day (Tuesday), my left knee was hurting like crazy. My dad and I swam for a little while as I tried to take the pressure off, but I just spent most of the day resting it. Tuesday was the beginning of my Slump. I’m going a little stir crazy here. I don’t think it’s because of the program itself. I really like it here. I just feel like I can’t learn anything else. Every lecture I’ve been to for the past few days has just been reteaching information that I’ve already learned in another lecture. I’ve gotten into the habit of sleeping late, going to lunch, and THEN exercising. I think I’d feel this way anywhere. Three weeks, after all, is a long time.
Today I had a body fat composition test. A guy (C; I think he doesn’t like me because I don’t attend the morning classes) rubber-banded my feet together and I remained perfectly still in a machine for six minutes. This resulted in a scan of my body that showed my muscle and fat ratio. I’m gonna take a shitty picture of it and try and put it up. My body fat has gone down 18 percent in the past 7 years (if one is assuming both readings are accurate), which is good, but it’s still high. Celine Dion complimented me on my good muscle tone, which you can see in the picture. OH MY GOD, my stomach looks disgusting in the picture. But you’ll see all that.
I also got the results of my second blood test. My triglycerides have gone down 75 points (still high, though) and my cholesterol has gone down 30 points (still high, though). Good times.
SUNDAY
No Breakfast.
Lunch: “Enchiladas”, which were essentially a pile of So-Soya and beans. Mix in a little “ketchup,” it’s OK.
Dinner: Ahi tuna night!! The best, but not enough of it (as always). Hot chocolate and fruit crepe for dessert.
MONDAY
Breakfast: Oatmeal with raspberries.
Lunch: Chicken burger, which I had to order separately. The chicken is ground with carrots and onions, and is super delish. Mango for dessert (MY FAVORITE FRUIT).
Dinner: Sushi. See above.
TUESDAY
No Breakfast.
Lunch: Veggie lasagna - whole wheat noodles with spinach and So-Soya instead of cheese. I’ve come to terms with the fact that if I eat from the normal lunch menu, the food will look like slop no matter what.
Dinner: Pasta in some sort of creamy “seafood” sauce. This was the first dinner that I’ve been genuinely unhappy with. It had ONE tiny shrimp in it (hence the quotations around the word seafood), and didn’t fill me up in the slightest. I was starving later. Cherries jubilee for dessert (tart cherries in some sort of thick sauce).
After dinner I had two apples and a large unsalted unoiled pretzel at the movie theater (my dad and I saw a movie). Also two handfuls of movie popcorn. I consider that a win.
WEDNESDAY
No Breakfast.
Lunch: CHICKEN BURGER! MANGO FOR DESSERT! HAPPINESS!
Dinner: Stuffed shells, which is one of the best dishes they serve here. Another girl and I also shared an order of “tuna sushi,” made with brown rice and TONS of veggies and not served with soy sauce, but still OK. Fruit with orange chiffon sauce and hot chocolate for dessert.
And now I’m gonna watch TV.
GOOD NIGHT!
1 year ago
Day Eight - Famous Fatties
The Internet is fucked in the hotel, so this entry is going to be short because I have to type it on my phone.
A very famous documentarian has stopped into Pritikin for the second time in six weeks. He is known for his glasses and his baseball cap and his loud, annoying-ass sense of righteousness. He wore the cap, but not the glasses - I don’t know if he wore the righteousness because I didn’t eat with him.
Apparently a few famous people come to Pritikin. Jeff Garlin does, of course, and someone I met here encountered Chris Farley many years ago at the old location. But in my opinion, the most interesting Pritikin frequenter is the head of Perdue, the chicken company. In one of the lectures, the doctor warned against a “certain chicken processing company that shall not be named” where the chickens were stocked full of hormones and bad chemicals. I don’t want to besmirch Perdue’s name, but it was fairly obvious.
GOOD NIGHT!
