Carbs, Carbs, Carbs!

Marsha, Marsha, Marsha! Oh wait, this isn’t The Brady Bunch. Things don’t get resolved in a single half-hour episode!

Although I could go for some sweet 70s fashion right about now…

Ahem.

Today I had been feeling run down and I got to talking to my soul-twin Elaine. She’s big into weight lifting and has fully switched to clean eating over the past few months and is an overall badass bitch (this is a good thing). She thought I was missing some nutrients and asked me what my carb/fat/protein ratios were in what I was eating now.

I was all like “uh…I eat foods and stuffs” because I had no fucking idea. I’M NOT A ROBOT.

She ordered me to figure out what I had been eating so I started calculating my food intake for the day, and two things became glaringly obvious:

1. I wasn’t eating nearly enough calories.
2. I wasn’t eating enough fat or carbs.

The beauty of the plan I’m doing now is that I don’t have to count calories. The downside is that while I’m not hungry, I had been inadvertently been starving myself nutritionally. While I’ve been eating very well, those vegetables are really low in calories! Also, since I’m training for a half marathon, I really needed to make sure I was getting all the carbs I needed.

Thus, she gave me marching orders to consume more carbs – and good carbs! Guess I need to go to the store!

Since I was really low on my carbs today by the time I talked to Elaine, I made the call to add a pseudo diet-friendly bit of quinoa to my chicken Mexican bowls¹ tonight. I say “pseudo” because it’s technically a grain, but since it’s so high in protein, the less-strict grain-free/dairy-free² people out there say it’s “ok once a week.”

Now I need to really make sure to keep my carb/fat/protein percentages (40/30/30) in check and to make sure I eat enough calories. Blah blah blah….PROFIT!

Fun stuff!

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¹ – Chicken and jalapeños sautéed with a bit of chili powder and cumin served over 1/2 cup of quinoa, a bunch of halved cherry tomatoes, an entire avocado (healthy fats, y’all!) and some salsa and lime juice. Fucking delicious.

² – the diet I’m on is based on the paleo plan, but I’m not going to be all crazy-strict about it. Plus I like butter, so I’m gonna use it.