Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

I just keep learning things about myself. Like, nothing transports me to BingeVille quicker than an empty stomach and a sense of self-pity. To solve this, I eat small, balanced meals throughout the day and very rarely let myself feel more than a slight hunger. So far, it’s worked for me even when I can’t keep the pity at bay.

Another thing I’m learning is that I must, must, must have protein at my first meal. I can couple that protein with healthy carb/fiber, but full-on grains just kill me in the morning. I don’t just mean bagels or toast — even a healthy breakfast of steel-cut oats can send me crashing to the bottom of Carb Canyon and then messes with my digestion. So, for breakfast I try to pair a lean protein with fruit or vegetables and it’s enough fuel to see me through to lunch.

Weight Watchers mornings present a special challenge. My meeting is late enough to allow me to sleep in. (Blessed, blessed sleep.) With a 10:00 start time, I don’t get so ravenously hungry or thirsty before weigh-in that I feel I’ve done real damage. Then, though, the most reasonable time for me to do laundry is after the meeting. More than once, to fuel up for the laundromat, I’ve thought — “I’ll just grab some fast food. Just this once can’t hurt.”

But, it’s not just the calorie of the thing. It’s the soft-serve, hot-and-cold-running crap that awaits me at the fast food drive-thru. It’s the fake cheeses, fake eggs, and fake meats. Generally, I’m pretty good about packing lunches and snacks. But, when I’m on the run and have a hunger emergency, I sometimes need to find fast food in other places than the drive-thru. Sue me.

Here’s one solution that I’ve found:

Most grocery store produce sections will have sliced-up melons and fruits for sale in cups. It’s way too pricey for every-day use, but it works in this particular pinch. Then, I’ve found that many deli-meat manufacturers are selling single-serve pouches of meats. These pouches contain 70 or 90 calories of turkey. Yes, deli meats are notoriously high in sodium, but that salty flavor makes the breakfast feel like a melon and prosciutto plate. Since I first tasted that delicious combination in Paris, I always feel like it is super fancy and even the cheap grocery-store knockoff version satisfies me on an emotional and mental level in addition to the physical.

I swing by the store’s salad bar and smuggle a fork and a napkin and, if I need to, grab a bottle of water at the register. Voila! For less than the cost of a drive-thru meal, I’ve satisfied my need for protein/fiber combo and avoided that dangerous, soul-sucking hunger.

What do you do when you’re on the run? Help me continue to Ditch the Drive-thru!

My psychiatrist friend is fond of musing, “Mal likes little things, like purses and dogs.”

Well, who can blame me?

I like to counter his wiley, psychological ways by stating that I’m living out an unfulfilled fantasy of being tiny myself. An as yet unfulfilled fantasy. But, I digress.

Last year, when I was getting really serious about packing my lunch for work, I found some websites about bento boxes. Apparently¹ there is a tradition of Japanese mothers carefully packing compact lunches for their children, with cute little touches and flourishes to encourage their healthy eating. Like any good idea, this has been seized on by marketers and now there is a whole industry built up around “cute foods” with accessories and characters and so forth.

Still, a white, adult woman can find some use in the idea, and I bought a few grown-up boxes from J-list (which ships from Japan, so you have to be patient) and a few Ebay stores (most of them ship from the states) and began dutifully packing a small, healthful, interesting lunch every day. I got a lot of inspiration from other websites, bento bloggers² and the flickr.com bento group.

My experience with packing bentos is that it was a really great way to impose portion control, while still being interested in what I was eating. I did not create faces on my food with strips of cheese or use Japanese condiments just because I was using a Japanese tradition (as many bento-ers do, to make their food feel more “cute” in a Hello Kitty way), but I truly enjoyed the time I took each morning to pack lunch, and the challenge of maximizing nutrition, health, and satiety in small packages.

Just like purses and dogs.

This week, I am experiencing a return to bento. My first day, I did so with just plain kitchen containers, so you could see that you don’t have to have a fancy Japanese box to start in on the fun. Believe it or not, I managed to get lunch and THREE snacks into these containers. The larger container is a Ziploc disposable deal that I think is built for packing a sandwich and a few sides. It’s got little compartments, though, so I love it. (Little compartments! So cute!)

Here’s what I did:

1. Tuna salad on a bed of lettuce with sliced grape tomatoes. (Little tomatoes! So cute!) The tuna is one 3-oz can of water-packed tuna, about 3 tbsp of plain yogurt, 1 tbsp of fat-free mayo, and a handful of black beans tossed in for good measure.
2. Here you can see little packets of lemon juice, salt, and pepper that I bought from Minimus.biz when I was really into bento. (Little packets! So cute!) I use these on the tuna salad to make it more juicy and appetizing without wilting the lettuce throughout the day.
3. A Weight Watchers carrot cake. I don’t consider this a dessert, since I don’t find them very enjoyable, but I have some that I want to get rid of.
4. Under the cake, there is a layer of almonds — one ounce worth — which provides yet another snack.
5. A mid-day break of crackers and Laughing Cow cheese (Little cheese!) is perfect when paired with…
6. Grapes. Eating this snack mid-day feels all fancy, like a wine and cheese party (even though I don’t drink wine).
7. Finally, my favorite standby snack these days is a sliced apple with a tablespoon of all-natural style (yes, the kind you have to stir), reduced fat peanut butter. I find that this snack totally fills me up, provides some protein and good fat, and fiber to keep me going.³

I think I’ll be trying to incorporate more bento-ing into my plans, and dig out my old, cute bento boxes and little tiny condiment bottles and colorful muffin cups and… and… and…

Let’s finish off this cute entry about cute things with one more tribute to the ultimate cute.

That will be all. Carry on, soldiers.

1. I am not Japanese, nor do I know anything about Japanese culture, so I am only reporting hearsay and what I have read on the InterWeb. Do with it what you will. [↩]
2. Seems like just about any weird obsession has its own blogger following these days… [↩]
3. Heh. I just realized how you might read that. OH WELL. [↩]

What sort of amazes me is how much time and energy it takes to eat well and be mindful about things. For me, even after I had pretty well gotten the bingeing under control, I still had a problem with fast food and not, of course, because it tastes so much better than its opposite. (Whole food? Slow food? Speed-impaired food?) Fast food is just easier. It’s quicker to satisfy. It doesn’t involve washing dishes or storing leftovers in little plastic bowls which you then, also, at some point in the future, end up having to wash. Again.

Sure, I watched Super Size Me and was appropriately — even righteously — disgusted. I read Fast Food Nation and nodded my head along the whole way. I still wince when I think of my granny — an old farm girl and my favorite republican hippie — and the whole fresh foods that she insisted on eating and preparing for herself and for us. I know all about trans-fats and about french fries whose first ingredient is high fructose corn syrup and about the whole unfortunate Mystery Meat situation. Cheese substitutes. Formed patties of mincemeat resembling, on some alien planet, a chicken breast or a pork rib or a “nugget.”

It’s not that I don’t understand why fast food is bad for me. It’s just that I work 13-to-14-hour days and I get tired. It’s that I want to spend the weekend with my boyfriend, cuddled up and watching Buffy. It’s that, when you get right down to it, I sometimes lack the mental and physical energy it takes to plan ahead, have ingredients on hand, scrub, pluck, bake, scrape, and scour my way to healthy living.

PastaQueen talks about this very phenonemon in her new year post, stating that:

It will take time: I don’t just mean this in the sense that it will take a year to lose 50 pounds, though it will assuming you lose a pound a week, a safe and attainable rate. I mean you have to take time out of your day to exercise and prepare food.

Fast food is fast for a reason. It is fast in every way. It is quick to deliver what precious few nutrients it contains, then burn out and become lethargy. Become insulin overload. Become fat. It is quick to digest, due to the absence of fiber and natural ingredients. It is first in and first out, in a way. It is fast.

But, I’m trying to eat slower now. Slower in every sense. I’m trying to eat foods that digest slowly, that release their nutrients and energy slowly, that last longer, that require more work. I want to eat this slower food, well, more slowly. To savor and enjoy it. I am not, unfortunately made of money. I cannot hire a personal chef to prepare this food for me, and a maid to clean up the dishes afterward. So, in the service of slow food, here are some things that have helped me on those days when I’m in Danger of Drive Thru.

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The cupcakes above are not actual size. In fact, I shrank them down (”reduced,” as our grandmothers would be fond of saying) so as to avoid undue temptation for me or you or anyone else who doesn’t need delicious chocolate cupcakes on their mind. These are the cupcakes I made for my friend’s birthday yesterday, and dealing with the before-and-aftermath of baking them was tricky to say the least. It was a lot like sitting here, looking at the photo of them, and trying to avert my eyes. No really, look away. STOP IT.

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