Reading Cookbooks

Adventures in Vegan

On and off since the New Year, I’ve been experimenting with a vegan diet. While I’ve given up meat (poultry, beef, and pork) entirely, I found myself shifting seamlessly from vegan to vegetarian to flexitarian depending on the situation. For the most part, I have been keeping a vegan kitchen, though a pint of the B&J finds it way into my freezer from time to time (who am I kidding… like it ever goes into the freezer… it goes directly into my face). I eat vegetarian out because I don’t really want to dissect menus and question waiters. And, I have continued to eat fish — but only for sushi or on the rare occasion I find myself at a steakhouse where the restaurant’s vocabulary excludes the word “options.”

But, after a week-long business trip where I primarily spent my time shoving every piece of food I could find into my mouth — sans the meat, obvi — I have decided to challenge myself to eat vegan for the entire month of April. Combined with WeightWatchers, I’m hoping to drop approximately 8 lbs before the Flying Pig Half Marathon in Cincinnati.

[Road trip!]

Does that sound like a lot? Eight pounds in one month? Maybe it is. But if I hadn’t gone nuts on the cookies, rolls, ranch dressing, croutons, cheese, and God knows what else during my trip, I would be talking about wanting to lose 5 pounds. Not eight.

So eight it is.

I’ve found that the hardest part about eating vegan is reading the labels of every packaged food you buy. So many products include some form of dairy or animal products — buttermilk, eggs, cream, whey, whatever — slyly tucked away in the middle of a long ingredient list, between high fructose corn syrup and xanthan gum. You can’t just pick a product off the shelf and assume it’s kosher — so to speak. You have to go all detective on that product’s ass and investigate. Fo’ real.

Luckily, as I was wasting time on the Internet yesterday, I found this — Trader Joe’s Web site offers a list of the vegan products available in its store. It also provides lists of products for other types of restrictive diets: low sodium, fat free, heart healthy, etc. If you’re not interested in the vegan products, go here and pick your poison.

So, Trader Joe’s saves the day, per usual. If you don’t heart Trader Joe’s, it’s probably only because you don’t have one in your state, because if you did, you would pilgrimage there even if it was 100 miles away. Life must be unimaginably hard for the Trader Joe’s-less among us.

Dissecting My Decisions

I left a rambling voice message for my workout partner Meg yesterday afternoon. It was something along the lines of, “You know I think I’m going to skip out on the gym today. I’m just exhausted. And my throat is a bit scratchy. I don’t know… maybe it’s allergies. This usually happens to me once a season, but then I’ll take one Claritin, and I’ll be fine for the rest of spring.”

In reality, I wasn’t feeling great. I was completely rundown after a week long business trip, and I had every right to bypass the gym and head straight for bed last night. But, I knew the hidden subtext of the message I left.

I was looking for an out. Not just a “get out of gym free” pass from Meg, but an opportunity to convince myself that it was OK to say, “Not today, healthy habits; maybe tomorrow.”

As I pressed send on my phone to leave that long, rambling message for Meg, I was mentally mapping the quickest route from the train station to my grocer’s freezer case packed with pints of Ben & Jerry’s. I knew exactly what I was doing.

Has it really come to this? In my world, are there really only two options: workout and have a healthy meal or don’t workout and eat an entire pint of Chubby Hubby for dinner?

I walked to my apartment convincing myself to call Meg back. I knew that if I went to the gym, I’d go to Whole Foods afterwards, and buy the ingredients necessary to make a healthy dinner. Do not to stop at the grocery store before you get home, I warned myself, because if you do, it’s all over…

This cannot be the way it is. It just can’t. But this is the way it always has been for me. One extreme or the other. Either stick to the healthy habits or throw it all out the window. Why have one cookie, when you could have six? Why have a bowl of ice cream, when it can be bought in and eaten directly out of a pint-sized container, no dishes necessary?

Moderation is not a word often present in my vocabulary… or my eating habits.

It’s this kind of behavior that has lead to me to define entire chunks of my life in terms of fat or skinny. And I’m smart enough (now) to know that if I don’t stop swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other, this sad fact is never going to change.

In the end, I went to the gym. Meg and I walked uphill on the treadmill for 40 minutes, a compromise since I wasn’t physically up for the full circuit workout we had planned. We went to Whole Foods, I bought carrots and spinach and other similarly healthy odds and ends, and I made soup for dinner.

One day. The battle won, but still… there’s a war to fight.

For some reason I never had the courage to ‘fess up on A View about my weight loss goals. I talked around it a bit, but I had issues with “going there.” But since this blog is a bit more focused, it’s seems as though I ought to start fresh.

I want to lose some weight. There. I said it. I’d be happy with 10 pounds. Delighted with 20. Ecstatic with 25.

And I’m going to give WeightWatchers a shot. Scratch that. Another shot.

On Fate and Blogging

No time like the present, am I right?

I’ll be honest, perfection really isn’t my thing. I don’t really believe in it. Perfection, that is.

So this is my thinking… I could screw around editing the Wordpress theme I have selected, purchasing a new digital camera, begging my boss to buy me Photoshop because I desperately need it for “my job,” and taking photos of food that will one day be part of the best masthead known to bloggerkind, or I could just get started and let everything else just fall into place eventually, no matter how long it takes. I am choosing option two in the hopes that my energy and excitement for this new blog will perpetuate, and my serious plans for this site will someday be realized. The future is going to be nothing short of awesome.

Where to begin?

I’ve been doing this for awhile. Blogging, that is. You can read all about me, the training, the food, the raving, and the ranting at my other blog, A View from the Park. I plan, for the time being, to post on both sites, perhaps cross posting from time to time. I’m a bit sentimental and have issues with giving up the blogger site that started me down this path nearly two years ago.

This site, Reading Cookbooks, is my second attempt at setting up a blog on a domain that I own. The first attempt was, obviously, not successful or you’d be reading that instead of this or my blogger site. I think I was just waiting until the absolutely perfect name for a new blog hit me like a punch square in the jaw. And, amazingly, one day, a year and a half later, it did.

True story.

Reading Cookbooks is the namesake of a creative non-fiction essay I wrote as a senior in college, which I plan to post here if I can find it and continue to have the burning desire to re-type all 12 pages of it. While the title really only scratches the surface of topics I will post about, I couldn’t resist the little bit o’ history, and when I found the domain was available, I assumed it was nothing short of fate.

I plan to use this site to talk about food and recipes, cooking and eating, diet and weight loss, health and wellness, body image and acceptance, exercise and training — all of the things I enjoy thinking and learning about combined with my one true love, my first love, writing.

So… I guess it’s official. I am one of those crazy bitches who believes she has so much to say… so much to — ahem – offer… she needs not one blog, but two.

Welcome to Reading Cookbooks.

So This Is New…

New blog! New blogging platform. New template! New color scheme. It’s anarchy!