Whole Life: "To live deliberately"
I have been using MyFitnessPal to track what I eat for the past 4 or 5 months. It has been really helpful for me, not just in seeing the calories I am eating, but to see how that breaks down in fat, protein, and carbohydrates. As a vegetarian who has started a pretty rigorous work-out routine, I have particularly been focused on protein.
I remember when I was at New College, the student newspaper (The Catalyst) regularly had letters to the editor or columns or articles about being vegetarian or vegan. There was a common back-and-forth about whether veganism was ethically compulsory or ludicrously unhealthy. The "ludicrously unhealthy" camp was sure that you could not get enough protein in your diet without animal proteins, and that veganism was tantamount to an eating disorder. The vegan response was generally that the 100+g/day "requirement" cited by their opponents was essentially a construct of the meat and protein supplement industries, and that 50-60g/day was clearly enough.
I have generally tended to fall more into the vegan camp on this, and so while MyFitnessPal has recommended around 100g/day for me, I have personally targeted around 70-80g/day. In practice, that has meant that for days in which I was diligent about tracking my protein intake, I got between 59-96g/day. To stay at these levels, I have been eating protein bars and being intentional about eating nuts daily. Still, though, my "best" days are days when I get a lot of dairy and/or seafood.
I left off my last post thinking about Thoreau. In high school, I liked mocking his stay at Walden Pond, because while he later wrote that "in wildness is the preservation of the world," where he chose to write his big reflection on nature was a short stroll from town in Concord. Now, though, I have more sympathy. The goal of Walden was not to engage in survivalism, or to come face-to-face with wildness, but to go to a space where he could reflect deeply on life. I have been re-reading some Victor Turner, an anthropologist who wrote about how rituals create "liminal spaces," and thinking about how the Whole Life Challenge is one of these liminal spaces, "betwixt and between" states. I am entering it not because I will come face-to-face with my primordial self, and live the way I was meant to live, but because it is a space where I can reflect on how I want to live.
The first hurdle is diet. I am curious to see how I can get up to the amount of calories I need every day (yesterday I only ate 980 calories, which is clearly too low) and increase the amount of protein I can get from a wide variety of sources. If I ever want to greatly decrease the amount of animal protein I consume, I will need to find good and reliable sources of vegetable protein, and now seems like a good time to explore more of that.
I remember when I was at New College, the student newspaper (The Catalyst) regularly had letters to the editor or columns or articles about being vegetarian or vegan. There was a common back-and-forth about whether veganism was ethically compulsory or ludicrously unhealthy. The "ludicrously unhealthy" camp was sure that you could not get enough protein in your diet without animal proteins, and that veganism was tantamount to an eating disorder. The vegan response was generally that the 100+g/day "requirement" cited by their opponents was essentially a construct of the meat and protein supplement industries, and that 50-60g/day was clearly enough.
I have generally tended to fall more into the vegan camp on this, and so while MyFitnessPal has recommended around 100g/day for me, I have personally targeted around 70-80g/day. In practice, that has meant that for days in which I was diligent about tracking my protein intake, I got between 59-96g/day. To stay at these levels, I have been eating protein bars and being intentional about eating nuts daily. Still, though, my "best" days are days when I get a lot of dairy and/or seafood.
I left off my last post thinking about Thoreau. In high school, I liked mocking his stay at Walden Pond, because while he later wrote that "in wildness is the preservation of the world," where he chose to write his big reflection on nature was a short stroll from town in Concord. Now, though, I have more sympathy. The goal of Walden was not to engage in survivalism, or to come face-to-face with wildness, but to go to a space where he could reflect deeply on life. I have been re-reading some Victor Turner, an anthropologist who wrote about how rituals create "liminal spaces," and thinking about how the Whole Life Challenge is one of these liminal spaces, "betwixt and between" states. I am entering it not because I will come face-to-face with my primordial self, and live the way I was meant to live, but because it is a space where I can reflect on how I want to live.
The first hurdle is diet. I am curious to see how I can get up to the amount of calories I need every day (yesterday I only ate 980 calories, which is clearly too low) and increase the amount of protein I can get from a wide variety of sources. If I ever want to greatly decrease the amount of animal protein I consume, I will need to find good and reliable sources of vegetable protein, and now seems like a good time to explore more of that.