I have seen some jacked food combos in my time that’ll make your hair stand on end, all in the name of “variety”.  I am a huge proponent of variety in one’s diet and when folks try to put this into practice, it sometimes translates into a nightmarish situation.   But there is a reason I harp on variety and it bears repeating in this post:  severe, hard core, no-joke, serious BOREDOM.  So much so, that you may find yourself chewing on grass just for a different feel and flavor on the palette.  This is where the crazy combos come in—and trust me, they are crazy.  It behooves us then to talk about what variety really is so we can avoid the pitfalls of every day eating that allow us to fall into the mundane dieting some of us are doing today.

There are three major things that come to mind when I think of variety in our diet:  different types of food, different food flavors and different textures of food.  If you have enough diversity in the types of foods that you choose, then you will do well in all three categories.  If not, you could be chewing on your blanket by the morning and that’s not a very pleasant thought.

Different Types of Food

I have this incredible talent for taking things that are simple and defined and making them confusing and complicated all in a matter of seconds.  I know this simply because when people tell me what they’re doing with their food choices all week long, they are nothing close to what I suggested.  When it’s one person, it’s them.  When it’s a bunch—it’s me.  Therefore, I own this and I get it and I am here to try to make it better by being more clear when explaining what your week should look like.

What it isn’t:

• A different food everyday that never repeats in the week. I don’t know where this came from but man am I impressed if you can get this done.  There has to be a food that repeats in a week.
• A different protein at every single meal. Again, no, you cannot have chicken at every meal but you can have it at 2 meals in a day.
• Thai food today, Mediterranean tomorrow, Italian on Thursday. You are not obligated to become Chef Boyardee.  Please avoid the temptation.

What it is:

Variety is varying the foods in your diet in such a way that your Monday does not look *exactly* like your Tuesday and that you sufficiently switch up your fruits, veggies and starches throughout the week.

• If you have chicken for lunch on Monday, have it for supper on Tuesday and have something different for lunch on Tuesday so you are not eating the same grilled chicken salad everyday for the next 2 years.
• If you have oatmeal on Wednesday, have cereal or oatbran on Thursday.  Go back to oatmeal on Friday.
• Have 3 favorite breakfasts, lunches and snacks each so you can rotate them around and keep it fresh.
• Change your fruit daily.  It’s the easiest thing to do since you do not have to cook it.

Different Types of Flavors

For some reason, this is the hardest of all the things to get folks to fool around with.  There is more to life than BBQ sauce, lemon/pepper, garlic salt/powder and grated parmesan cheese.  If you continuously eat the same 1 dimensional food flavor, you will have no defense against a meal that smells like Heaven and tastes like a motley of spices and sauces.  You’ll be dead in the water.  Most neglected flavors:

• Citrus (other than lemon)—Orange chicken is lovely.  I don’t mean the one you get at a Chinese food restaurant.  I mean one made from a reduction of orange juice.  YUM.
• Tropical—Mangoes, coconuts, passion fruit and so on can be very fun.  Get to know them.
• Polarizing—Cloves, mint, licorice (anise) and other dominating flavors

Check this site out and go crazy:  Khymos

Different Types of Textures

Protein powder is not a food, it is a supplement.  It is wonderful post workout to make sure you get in all your nutrients fast, but it is not a meal.  We are meant to chew our food and when you do not, you are not satisfied. When two or more of your meals are shakes, the odds of you being happy while having them are low.  Can you stay on it?  Sure.  We are happy to be unhappy for long periods of time so staying on it is not necessarily an issue.  Is it a good thing for you?  Nope.  Why?  Texture is more important than variety and flavor combined.  Any time I ask a woman why she ate such and such, the number 1 reason she broke her diet, she’ll say because she loved the way it crunched.  This is a major message for all of my non-starchers out there.  At some point, you could be taken down by an Ak-Mak cracker.

• Salad is great for a crunch but it rarely does the trick.  We eat it way too much.  However, croutons will light up your life alongside craisins, sunflower seeds, al dente beans and
• Mixing cold and hot foods together is another way to explore texture.  Hot rice on a cold salad or cold, crunchy veggies in a warm wheat pasta salad—yum.
• Next in line to crunch:  creaminess.  Melted cottage cheese on a potato or cold greek yogurt mixed with salsa, lime and pineapple on a piece of warm chicken come to mind.

Keep in mind you will refuse to eat a food first because of feel on the palette before taste ever becomes an issue.  This means if you are at work with your packed lunch of mushy chicken and slimy asparagus and someone shows up with warm Asian chicken covered in an orangey/citrusy sauce with crunchy wonton strips and cold green beans marinated in a hoisin sauce, you could beat her down in the office.  Please let me know so I may be there.  I need the entertainment. Woop woop!

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I started to open this series up with a ton of science on our brains that shows how we are hard wired to desire certain types of foods and how these foods affect our emotions so we desire them more and so on and so forth.  However, I kept coming back to the same place of debunking some kind of crazy myth that we all seem to buy into that has been perpetuated by the powers that be and has secretly tormented us over the years.  I finally came to the conclusion that I need to debunk the myths first.

It is no mystery to any of us that we care about how we look.  We also love the satisfaction of a good workout, the feeling of being fit and the distinction of being different than the rest of the population.  With that love comes the heavy burden of trying to stick to a challenging diet for a long period of time:  no processed food, limited starches, limited sweets and low fat choices with very little support from outside of the clean community.  This is not the haven we thought it would be when we first signed up for this lifestyle.  I don’t know about you, but I know I thought this would be easy because I would feel great all the time and wouldn’t want unhealthy food because I was now “so healthy”.  I had no idea what I was in for the first time I broke my diet.  All I know is I started in the morning with Dunkin’ Donuts and ended in the evening with Bertucci’s and everything in between was a blurr.  That was 9 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday, although, that could be because there was butter involved.  Shhh.

When I first started dieting, I did it for a very specific reason so the means justified the ends.  I was a fitness competitor and the protocol was that you needed to torture yourself with dieting in order to get on stage or else you were not getting on stage.  Or let me say, I wasn’t getting on stage.  I don’t know if everyone shared my same views back then.  But there was an obvious reason for my very bland, boring diet that lacked variety, starch and fat.  Fast forward to present day and my diet, although still clean, looks very different than it did back then.   Flavor, texture, fat, balance and quantity vary all the time and that is something that has mattered far more than anything when it comes to me sticking to this eating lifestyle.  The majority of us who can’t stick to it long term or find ourselves struggling all the time are over dieting for the results that we desire.  If you say to me that you do not want to get on stage and you are not eating sodium, still eating tuna from a can or packet or follow any bogus diet in a magazine, we really need to talk.

This industry (meaning clean eating) it what it is because of competitors and fitness models.  You can thank both men and women alike that don the cover of magazines and strut across stages for our initial desire to enter into this way of eating.  Even if you are a runner/athlete, you have been enticed to this way of living because that’s how your favorite athletes are maintaining their weight, as well.  However, we want their look without the stage or the lights and believe to get that we need to follow their diet, or their method of dieting, *all* the time.  Not so, says I.  Also, this industry is full of “diets” but then refer to them as a lifestyle.  You cannot have a lifestyle of dieting (in the noun sense)—that’s a nightmare waiting to happen.  At some point we need to learn how to *live* this life instead of hopping on a diet for 12 weeks, off a diet into a pit of sugar for 8 weeks, back on the diet to negate all that we did in the pit, back off of the diet again into sheer anger and frustration and so on.   Or better yet, live in maintenance hell where you are constantly wondering if you are doing enough to stay where you want to be so you do more, crash, do more, crash, etc.

There are many things we need to consider when eating like this:  flavor, texture, variety and balance are a great place to start.  We also need to think about serotonin, dopamine, estrogen and galanin when it comes to the brain stuff and lastly, sodium, sugar and fat are beyond important to our long term survival.  Magazines like to talk in terms of recipes and nutritional sound bites, your friends will talk in terms of suffering, the internet is going to show you how much you suck at doing this but I’m going to talk about this as a living, breathing thing that must be learned and nurtured to be accomplished.  Are you ready?  Woop woop!!

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The hardest thing about exercise is to start doing it. Once you are doing exercise regularly, the hardest thing is to stop it.

Erin Gray

Oh my goodness, is this not the truth!

Have you ever had a day long conversation with yourself as to why, when or how you are going to make it to the gym that day only to wear yourself out emotionally before you get there just talking about it so you don’t go? 

Have you ever determined that today was the day you were going to get back on the wagon and get it done and you pack a great lunch and put it in your gym bag to bring to work—and then leave it at the door?  Or better yet, your alarm didn’t go off.  Or you woke up sick.  Or you got called in early for work….

What is that about?  Is there some kind of Universal Sick Joke out there that just plagues us women with this stuff?  Guys do not go through this!  You know it and I know it.  Somehow they are impervious to wavering.  It’s either they are doing it or they are ok that they are not.  We, on the other hand, will begin a torturous rant in our head that starts out low and gets louder throughout the day like that bad music in Damien: The Omen that ends in a crescendo at night with us declaring war on the gym the next day.

When I am not “on”, my husband can wake up, work out in the cold basement, get the kids ready for school, make their lunches, change the oil in the car, re-finish the driveway and set up the Mid East for world peace talks and I haven’t even decided what gym pants I’m wearing that day—AND THEY’RE ALL BLACK!   What is that about?  What hit me over the head and took my mojo away?

And it happens fast doesn’t it?  One day we are on fire.  We are working out every day, packing our food, getting it together, losing inches, losing weight, losing time…just downright losing!  And then…it happens…who knows what it is—it’s as mysterious as ‘other natural flavors’, but it happens.  WHAMMO!  We can’t get out of bed, we can’t get a rhythm, we hate our food, we feel fat (we still weigh the same, though, go figure!)…what the????

OH THE JOYS AND PERILS OF BEING A WOMAN!!

How do we get back on track?  Become a psycho!

Oh we’ve all done it.  We may not admit it, but we have done it.  We’ve pulled out the big guns and we’ve made a pact with the evil exercise and diet spirits.  It goes a bit like this:

Conversation with yourself….

“What worked before?  Sigh.  What’s killing me now is I cannot focus.  How can I focus…?  No choice.  If I just eat chicken, sweet potato and green beans only for 7 to 10 days that’ll get me back on track! 

I gotta get to the gym.  Ugghhh!  I hate my workout right now. (Mind you it is brand new but this is what us women are plagued with).  I need something new and hard to give me a kick in the arse!  That’s it!  I will do a simulated Iron Man race everyday on the treadmill/bike/wave machine at the gym and then try advanced kettle bell training for martial artists to see if I can hang!  And then if I can make it through that, I’ll be good next week!”

I know I am not the only one.  In fact, not only am I not the only one, some of you are reading this thinking, “Hell, I would have taken it one step further and bought myself a gym bag, a matching outfit and a new lunch container just to seal the deal!”  Although, that does sound good!

So we put our psychosis into action, now what happens?

We become gym rats. 

Now 2 weeks later we have a 5 o’clock shadow, mussied hair and keen resolve that borders on scary.  Now we’re lecturing everybody!  Yes, looking down our nose at others wondering why they couldn’t seem to make the same illegal pact we did with the evil diet and exercise spirits and sell their soul to the green bean!  Are you too good for the green bean??  Woman, focus!  Hop on board with us and just get it over with…you know you want to do it! 

But now you have a new problem.  You are addicted…and you know—and I know—that if you stop, you’re done for.  So you keep going like a hamster in a wheel until someone says something to you that just clicks and gets you back to reality.  Sometimes it’s as simple as, “What the heck is the matter with you, you clown!  Get off the treadmill, it’s been 2 hours!”  Or, a loved one like a husband who taunts you with your weaknesses, “Oh we’re back on this now again.  How long is this going to last?”  That gets your head together because you can’t let him know he’s right and you’ve entered the ‘psycho zone’ so you begin to plan a sensible dismount to this insanity.  And you begin to get perspective.  And honestly, you’ve gotten over the hump so you are back to normal again of just working out and enjoying it.  You’ve also started seeing other veggies besides the green bean.  Good thing, too, you were feeling stifled by the relationship.

You can now enter normal civilization again having survived one of nature’s greatest mysteries:  the exercise slump.  Not sure what it is but there is no vaccination for it (thank goodness or NY would make it mandatory in gyms) and you have no idea when it’s going to strike.  Just know, we’ve all been there.

“Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.”

Grenville Kleiser

Enjoy your day and I hope I didn’t ruin it for anyone who brought chicken, sweet potato and green beans today!:o)