As I sit here, baking gluten free almond cupcakes*, I’m reflecting on my diet for this month.
My biggest take- away message: don’t make people measure/weight their food. It’s time consuming and WAY more complicated than it seems. I’m a fan of one pot meals, but to make the ratios work, I have to make each aspect separate and then combine according to weight afterwards. Another way its super complicated is that recipes are in cups and cups only truly convert to ounces in liquid measurements. It makes buying fresh veggies an exercise in mental math acrobatics and guesses. I’ve had to make multiple trips to the store a couple times because I can’t tell how many cups 2 bell peppers make.
Yes, but how many cups will you make?
Adhering to macros that hinge on weight measurements is really time consuming. I was really lucky I managed to make everything for the week on Sunday night. It was midterms and I was WAY too busy trying to keep up with my tests to bother about measuring and cooking. It also takes a lot of time and patience to plug it all into fit click. The site is overall good, but it’s a little difficult to make minor tweaks in. Oftentimes, I’d plug a recipe in, realize I needed a half cup more veggies or something, and have to start all over. It would often take me over an hour just to PLAN the meals for the week, not including shopping, prepping, and cooking.
This diet also made it near impossible to eat out spontaneously. And 9 times out of 10, my phone battery is dying by the time we are going out to eat, so I can’t look it up. First world problems.
So overall, I don’t think I will ever put people on such a strict macro style diet such as this. Granted, we did make things harder by tweaking my diet every week. So I couldn’t just reuse recipes from the last week. I also think that it would be easier if I didn’t want to dress my food up so much. If I just had my portion of meat, my portion of veggies, and my portion of carbs; all separate, it would have been easier.
On a somewhat related note, a friend of mine showed me this blog talking about this engineer that decided food was too complicated. He took all the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) and found powdered forms of all the simplest things we need to operate and combined them into a shake he calls Soylent (unfortunate name, I know). I think he might be onto something, but I think many of the amounts need to be tweaked. Here is a link to the blog. http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298
Not the Soylent I’m talking about.
Well, happy Memorial Day! Thanks to all those veterans who are serving our country! Enjoy the weekend and stay safe!
*Sidenote: I do not plan on binging on cupcakes. Baking is cathartic to me. I plan on bringing them to school Tuesday. Hit me up!
Almond Cupcakes with Almond Cream Cheese Frosting. :)
