Friday, October 8, 2010

October Diet Quality Card

daily diet quality dance card

As I write this, I am doing a terrible tango with Coke and a whole box of mac and cheese. What does that make me. More, or less credible?

This is as good as time as any to say that I post these fitness and food plans as standards and then often fall short. If you've been thinking that I'm doing twenty pushups every other day and healthily biking to work twice a week, um. I love plans, I love a steadfast plan like a woman with a theory that life would be truer if you state the exact stretch of warp over which you throw the woof that is not the plan, or how can you do justice to the pattern otherwise? That's Howards End, by the way, except that money is the warp in the actual quote. In any case the cloth is woven on the warp, but the warp isn't the whole cloth. If you think you don't like plans because you don't want to be bound to them, nobody says that you have to be bound to them.

But, diet. In addition to nutrient timing, I am trying to practice diet quality these days. It's terrible what motivates you, I've never been moved to get my 5 A Day to prevent, you know, cancer. But vegetables promote muscle recovery, I'm ready to give peas a chance. But I don't want to get into counting calories or grams of anything, I just want to eat a balanced diet of more whole foods. So I have this daily diet quality dance card that I adapted from Matt Fitzgerald's Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance, where each box is a "commonsense" serving of whatever and where the game is to fill up the white and light gray boxes and stay away from the dark gray and black boxes. [ETA 10/29/10: I tweaked this a bit based on a recent league nutrition seminar.]

Just for funsies, I filled this out for a typical day per my fall food plan. And you can see, 1) I got more fruit from banana fruit smoothies. CocoOJ2O doesn't count, by the way. 2) My vegetable intake is sad. Though it is better on days that I work at home. When I have vegetable soup, and not mac and cheese. 3) I don't even eat that much meat, and I get plenty of protein. 4) No problem with carbs, too. 5) I can add flaxseed to my pb apple to cover essential fat. That was in banana fruit smoothies, too. 6) Coke, why can't I quit you. 7) I did manage to stop eating potato chips, though. 8) Here it is in PDF format, if you want to fill it out for yourself.