Eating Healthy

This is a next installment of the post begun yesterday, "Workout Program Introduction"

As everyone knows, eating healthy is expensive. Much more so than picking up the prepackaged items that most supermarket shops are touting today. I find it interesting how much my diet has changed over the past few years, each time for the better. Both financially and in health regards.

It wasn't very long ago that I would eat fast food (in one incarnation or another) everyday for dinner. And to make more of a point of this, that was my only meal of the day also. Once I moved to Atlanta, my diet changed again. Since Angel & I were together again, eating at home became a more logical idea. We could cook for the 2 of us for less than a fast food meal for each of us. Not to say we cut it out completely, but we were eating at home more often. Then we bought our house. At this point, eating on the cheep became important. The house we bought is just about at the knife's edge of being too expensive for us to handle. So, at this point we were shopping on a minimum of a monthly basis for food items in the house. This was working out just fine. We had food to eat and it was more healthy than the fast food joints we were previously patronizing on a periodic basis.

Once eating more often at the house, we were primarily purchasing 2 or 3 step prepackaged meals. We'd get the Crock Pot meals, the Tuna, or Chicken, or Hamburger Helpers, or on rare occasion, we would pickup steaks to eat with canned vegetables and powdered potatoes. By far, I am not calling this healthy. Especially if you know how we were eating (particularly me). A meal packaged to serve 3 or 4 would possibly only serve the two of us. This typically broke down to Angel eating a correct portion and me eating 3. Now, I know that for most of you that know how I eat, this comes as no surprise. However, with eating approximately 2 meals a day now (since I can eat any hour of the day from home because I work from home), the increase in frequency of food consumption has had some adverse effects. My weight is fluctuating on a daily basis, but I was toeing the line at 175 at one point. For my age and height this is substantial. Especially since the Army keeps tabs on these things.

A quick recap of my weight fluctuation over the years:

Graduate High School in '97: 155 lbs
Graduate Basic Training fall '97: 165 lbs (also lost 2" at the waist)
Graduate AIT spring '98: 155 lbs (gained back the 2" lost at basic)
Through the 8 years following: Averaging 163 lbs
Within the past 6 months: Peaking at 175 lbs
Today: 169 lbs.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, the primary objective with this workout program is to get into a better physical condition to improve my PT score. However, I know that in doing so that I will also bring some definition to this undefined shape that I currently call my body. As also mentioned earlier, I'm not becoming narcissistic, however, I would like to be able to see my 6 pack again (and maybe improve it to an 8 pack along the way).

Which brings us to today.

So, we've received our ordered equipment and the room for the workout has been established. The only things left to do are to start eating in accordance to the healthy eating guide and doing the workouts. Keep in mind, the workout plan is 6 days a week for an hour each day. Anyway, the eating aspect is what I want to target in this conversation.

Angel & I opened the books and completed the required reading. We're motivated to start this plan and thus created a shopping list. This list was the largest shopping list we've ever created in our time together. We typically just winged it. Well, with the number of items that we didn't already have in the house and the number of fruits, vegetables, chicken, turkey items, we needed reference for at the store. This list was printed in Arial 10 point from a Google Spreadsheet in a single column and was a full 3 pages of items. We knew this was going to be expensive. However, we didn't realize how expensive.

Our first trip to the grocery store was to Kroger. We believe that they are open 24/7, however after being there for ~2 hours and approaching 11:30 PM, they started to shut off lights. We are not certain if they were trying to close or just conserve electricity. The biggest point is that there were not any overhead announcements. However, we were not trying to spend all of this time getting our items to be kicked out without finishing our shopping and call it a night with more then a dozen or 2 items unchecked from our list.

So, we've got a cart full of items from various locations we didn't previously purchase from around the store. Anyway, at that hour of the night, we kinda felt bad while checking out. Everyone else that was trying to check out were using baskets and only had a couple of items. We let a few people ahead of us, however, we would have been there all night had we let every person that came around in front of us. Well, during the unpacking of the cart, I'm pretty sure we filled the belt twice over. As previously mentioned, we knew that this was going to be expensive, just not HOW expensive.

After everything was all said and done, we had spent $426 and that was after saving $28 with our Kroger card. Of that amount, we had spent approximately $100 in just cooking accessories. These include spices, oils, an ounce scale, grater, syrups, sauces (such as tabasco), vinaigrettes, and cooking wines. Thankfully, future purchases of these items will be more spread out. That is a lot of money to spend on items that are to be used as accents. In addition to these one-shot items, there were many other things that we'd never had to purchase before. Cabbage, 3 different varieties (for cole slaw), eggs [3 18 packs] (we're not big breakfast people, but this menu calls for a bunch of eggs), artichoke hearts, hearts of palm (what is that anyway?), onions [3 different varieties] (we typically just use onion salt or the similar), skim milk (we prefer 2%), squash, fresh beans (Snow Peas & Snap Peas), protein shake powder (with Whey protein), cheeses [3 different varieties, mozzarella, swiss, and feta] (we typically purchased Velveeta and shredded cheese for tacos), salmon, shrimp, swordfish, turkey bacon, and the list goes on. But as you can see, these items individually are not too bad, however, everything at the same time became quiet a shock to the wallet.

So, once we get home and unpack the car and bags, it is time to finally eat. Well, as we came to find out, many of the menu items were missing one or two different ingredients still. I don't remember what we did have that night, but we did have something out of the book. I was kinda skeptical. Don't get me wrong, I'll eat just about anything, but this was so new and different, I didn't know what to expect. Eating healthy. Sounds bland to me. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. It was very good. It had a wonderful flavor and was even filling. Needless to say, I was shocked.

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So, I compiled a list of items we couldn't find in the time we spent at Kroger and decide to try Publix for the second round of shopping. We were still missing some items that we had never known existed before. This list includes items like Arrowroot, Arugula, Miso, Quinoa, shallots, Soba noodles, Jicama and lemongrass. Well, after doing some research as to what these things are, I came to know that there are some easier to find items to substitute with. But, we did find at Publix the Arugula (some leafy green lettuce like vegie). The rest of the items are MIA. Thankfully we know we can substitute flour for Quinoa, a lemon spice for lemongrass, onions and garlic for shallots, wheat pasta for Soba noodles. However, we are still at a loss as to where to acquire Miso (I doubt we can substitue this as it is a major ingredient of Miso soup), Jicama is some sort of starch and is also known as a Mexican Potato or Mexican Turnip or yam bean. I guess I will have to do some more research because I don't have the first clue where to look. If we were still in Pittsburgh, I'm sure I could find these things in the Strip. Well, our shopping jaunt to Publix came to another sum to exasperate the expense of this endeavor. Another $50 dropped there.

Well, I am happy to report that each and every item that we've prepared has been a smashing success (as long as you exclude the Chilled Cucumber Soup that I mixed wrong). These meals don't feel like a diet. The portions are large, they are filling, and they taste wonderful. Last night we had the Steak and Arugula Salad for dinner. Don't let the name salad fool you. There was more meat and tomatoes than there was leafy greens (same as the chef salad also). This plate also included a dressing of Balsamic Vinaigrette that needed to be prepared. This dressing was amazing. I couldn't have been happier. When I read that this was to be the dressing for the plate, I was worried. I've had a Balsamic Vinaigrette before, I wasn't too impressed by it. Well, I was wrong. The combination of this dressing and the arrangement of the plate was excellent.

So, in summary, we've spent damn near $1,000 in preparation for this adventure and we haven't done a single thing yet. I have high hopes for this process and hope to benefit from this expense. Only time will tell at this point.