Grugger’s Way

I know that my diet is high in carbs, but mostly from vegetables and cereals. Perhaps I need to look at this more closely. I eat mueslix, which does have quite a few calories, but hell, I have to eat SOMETHING! I don’t eat meat or eggs and I avoid dairy as much as possible.


Oh, wait, there is that Ice cream that I love, a nutty coconut flavor, and of course, rocky road ice cream. I guess ice cream has always been a favorite dessert of mine. In the Navy, I was caught with a five-GALLON container of chocolate chip ice cream tucked under my arm while I ate it with a table spoon. There isn’t much of a chance that I will let go of ice cream just to lose a couple of pounds. There are so many other things I would rather give up that ice cream will continue to be the one pleasure that I still permit myself to enjoy. I will just buy one scoop at a time, instead of a half-gallon.

I am drinking plenty of water, and avoiding soda (and now beer), but I do enjoy the tropical fruit taste of that Glucosamine supplement drink called “Joint Juice,” but it’s only 25 calories a can and just one per day. I consider this to be a “health” supplement.” Ha Ha

I have cut down on bread, now eating just one slice of sprouted-grain bread a day, but do eat some sprouted-grain tortilla shells every week. I guess I have a few more dietary changes to make.

One consideration might be my portion size. I have noticed that I eat EVERYTHING on my plate, no matter how much, and often go back for seconds. So, even though the food may be healthful, I could still be simply eating TOO MUCH of it.

I also expected some weight loss, which would be good for me, but so far not so good. I am two pounds heavier, and have been sitting at this higher weight for a week now.

I am trying to determine what change in my diet could account for the weight gain and have decided that it is beer.

Or chocolate.

Or both.

Frankly, I have no plans to give up either pleasure entirely, but I do know that my beer drinking has increased, right along with the outside temperatures. God, but is there anything that tastes so good as a cold beer at the end of hot day of gardening and landscape work?

But one beer a day, which is all I will admit to drinking, only adds about 700 calories a week, and that would be about a pound every five weeks. So, beer alone is not the culprit. Chocolate, on the other hand, has about 100 calories per ounce, or maybe a little more, depending on the type of chocolate. It would only take me about five minutes to eat 200 calories of chocolate. I deceive myself by purchasing bulk packages of chocolate-covered raisins and malted milk balls, and such other confections that might be labeled as “comfort food,” in very small baggies at the health-food store. Ha Ha Ha.

Trail mix is another really, really bad thing to eat if it contains chocolate and peanuts, and most of the mixes do. I once sat at the computer and consumed 2,000 calories of trail mix at one sitting, just while reading e-mail and writing in blogs. I broke that habit by NOT BUYING IT!

As usual, summertime brings many competing activities, and time for all is simply not possible. I’m sure that most readers share that experience. So I will do my best to post frequently, but I know that the daily post will be absent for a while.

Two weeks ago I began my efforts to eliminate meat from my diet, and by way of a progress report, I can say that so far I have been successful. I do eat fish, and have found the texture of fish tacos quite satisfying. I enjoy the taste of bar-b-que sauce on baked potatoes and yams, so that substitutes for pork ribs, etc. Not really a replacement, but the taste of “hickory-smoked” bar-b-que sauce satisfies some mental memory. Wierd.

So it’s on to week number three. We are eating quite a few artichokes, and thanks to Mike Foster over at Livelife365 How to Eat an Artichoke, I have learned how to properly prepare them. His little “you tube” video is worth a visit, so I have linked to that.

We are now eating salad every night, and I eat a lot of burritos as beans do provide protein and seem satisfying since they sit pretty heavy in my stomach, like meat.

I used to think vegetarians were rare (no pun), but it seems that vegetarianism has existed for centuries!

Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, Socrates, Plutarch, and Pythagoras were all vegetarians. (This is based on their writings.)

Albert Einstein, Voltaire, Van Gogh, Henry David Thoreau, Albert Schweitzer (at the end of his life), Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Leo Tolstoy.

In recent years, many celebrities have become known for their vegetarian ways. Often times, they use their celebrity status to promote causes, like animal rights and so on, like Pamela Sue Anderson.

Did you know that all four Beatles were vegetarian? Paul, John, George and Ringo. Incidentally, Linda McCartney, Heather Mills (McCartney), and Yoko Ono (Lennon) too.

There are a lot of musicians who list their preference as all-veggie, including Michael Jackson, Carrie Underwood, Ruben Studdard, Avril Lavigne, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, K D Lang, Leona Lewis, Tommy Lee, Pink, and Seal.

Actors are prominent in their veggie-ness too, including Robert Redford, Mary Tyler Moore, Hayden Panettiere, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kate Winslet, Sandra Oh, Diane Keaton, Vanessa Williams, Lisa Kudrow, Alyssa Milano, Anne Hathaway, Bernadette Peters, Brad Pitt, Brooke Shields, Candace Bergen, Christina Applegate, Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson, Pierce Brosnan and Woody Harrelson.

Then there are those who don’t fit into any of the above categories but are prominent in the public eye, including Ariana Huffington, Ellen Degeneres, Vanna White, Deepak Chopra, the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, and Paramahansa Yogananda.

The fact of the matter is there are hundreds of people whose names or work are familiar to you and me. They are famous for many reasons, and a vegetarian diet is just one aspect of their lives that gets attention.

I researched this in order to become more “assimilated” with the veggie diet, and feel like I am not so “out-of-the-mainstream” as I used to think. This will take some time, however, it is not automatic. I may falter, but I will not fail. My health is at stake.