Lunch: Mountains and Molehills

The Twinkie Diet thing reminded me of a post I'd started, stopped and started again.... Think it's time I got back to that thought.

Lunch, the lesser appreciated of the three traditional daily binges. It can be awesome or devastating. We're all so busy in our daily lives that it rarely is used an opportunity for eating something good so much as just vacuuming down some calories to carry you through until dinner. Historically for my 10 years at this job I've done one of two things for lunch:

1. brought in a huge container of one single meal item. Seriously for me I might as well have been using a garbage can. Be it rice or pasta, everything was awash in meat/tomato sauce. I loaded up as much as I could into the biggest container I could find and of course would eat the entire pile in one sitting
2. wandered downtown or to the cafeteria to find some overpriced meal that would ultimately suck as a waste of time, money and tastebud satisfaction

Add this to the fact I skipped breakfast due to my innate laziness of hitting the snoozebar countless times in the morning before rushing out the door. This is bad.

So I was glutting down large amounts of food of dubious nutritional value on a previously empty stomach (barring a coffee) and basically forcing my metabolism to cope with the massive influx all at once. And it did....by making me 197lbs. The body can only burn so much as fuel efficiently in such a span of time, the rest goes to our portly pocket zones. In my case, the beer gut.

Over the last year or two I've been thinspired by many things to change my habits, TXXL has only reinforced that this is a wise course of action.

To be honest, it was also getting really really boring. My tastebuds are tired of monotonous daily meals of convenience so this also adds some meal variety to the routine of my 9-5 desk job grind.

Since I still skip breakfast to an extent I've finally settled on a more reasonable approach.

Solution:

1. Little tiny containers.
   
2. More of them.
   
3. With different non-meatpasta items in each.
4. Bring cereal bars and slices of bread for breakfast when I get to work
   
5. Keep items like peanut butter at work for breakfast bread
   

No. 4 & 5 keep me in check until lunch itself and provides something for my body to burn in the meantime, regulating the metabolism a bit better. The tiny containers are obvious portion control and more options adds more veggies and fruits into my otherwise meatcarby diet. It also has proven to be a quick meal to slice up tomato, onion, lettuce, cheese and meat the night before, throw it all into a container and bring two pieces of bread in another. Put container contents on bread, voila you have a sandwich and the bread isn't soggy.

For lunch I generally still have my mound of pasta, only a smaller molehill with more veggies in the sauce instead of a Half Dome-comparable load of meat and carbs. Half Dome is huge, see pic at the top, the view from the apex is incomparable.

I'm also bringing two juice boxes, one to go with breakfast and another for lunch to keep myself from running down the hallway to the nearest pop machine when I'm tired of just water.

Also common inclusions now in lunch in said tiny containers or on the side:

1. olives and pickles
   
2. mandarin orange pieces
   
3. yogurt
   
4. grapes
   
5. sliced sweet peppers
   
6. apples
   
7. oranges
   
8. bananas
   

I'm also a cheap bastard. This has proved a good cost-cutting measure as I got tired of spending too much money on bad unhealthy food prepared and served by obnoxious staff at unacceptable dives downtown when I either forgot to pack or got tired of my garbage can of carbmeat.

Sodium being a monster flab-builder in the Triad of Trouble (sugar, fat, salt), and being an addict to "pickled anything" which is of course a haven for high sodium.... I've happily discovered Bick's makes a garlic dill with 50% less salt. They taste almost identical to the regular pickles.

Behold the awesomeness of a low-sodium pickle!