Thursday, November 18, 2010

I Feel Like A Morning Star

I feel a little out of place surrounded by vegan foodies not because I'm only veganish, which is really to say not vegan, but just that I'm not a foodie by a stretch. I mean, I like food. I think I like food. But I might think I like food like I think I like fashion. Okay, I'm pretty much obsessed with food but I'm not obsessed with food qua food. I'm obsessed with food qua fuel, or food qua fitness. I guess I'm a fuelie, or maybe a fittie. Food, for me, either has to fuel a workout or recovery after a workout. And also I have to be able to fix it in fifteen minutes or less, because I have the patience of a bat.

I don't know. Do you know? Bats. Patient?

But as it happens if you're super concerned about delivering the cleanest fuel to your muscles for a workout or rebuilding your muscles with the most nutrient rich foods, you do end up making a lot of room for fruits and vegetables, beans, nuts, and whole grains and you can only eat so much food. So other foods tend to get crowded out, and you sort of get veganish by default. I pretty highly recommend Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life by Brendan Brazier and also Thrive Fitness: The Vegan-Based Training Program for Maximum Strength, Health, and Fitness for vegan, vegetarian, and meat eating athletes, and for non-athletes for that matter. Though maybe that last part's not fair, I never could get good about diet and exercise until I had a reason to.

Anyway, I'm not saying that I'm the first person to put together the ideas of vegan and athlete. I mean obviously, there's this book.

Here's my thing: skating and playing derby is basically what my life is organized around, and I beat the hell out of my body for that. One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean shit. Which is from City Slickers, by the way. My other favorite line from City Slickers is Scoop of vanilla, scoop of chocolate, don't waste my time, which is my Darmok for something that's insultingly easy. Someday I'm going to put together my personal Darmok page, just to see it all in one place. But anyway I don't need food to beat me up, that's not what food is for. You understand, this is more of a steering wheel than a clean bill of health.

But yeah food's supposed to fix you up, not stress you out. Is what I'm saying. That's why I don't stress myself out cooking so much and stay away from processed and harder to digest foods as much as possible, I'm keeping my stress load down so I can do more pushups. So that leaves out dairy, too. You don't think I'm serious, do you. I mean, I'm serious about dairy. Though I'll tell you something interesting about stress, I used to be lactose intolerant when I was married. And now I'm not! Though I still don't eat dairy. Also I'm way behind on the pushups, better get on that—