Anyone who knows me personally has seen me post on my social media about weekly meal prep. I’ve come around to the understanding that it is crucial to cook in advance if you have any designs on maintaining a healthy diet. I am extraordinarily lucky to have found a meal plan service that suits my dietary requirements wonderfully, and I can’t recommend it enough.
If you work outside your home, once-weekly cooking is a life saver. However, it does take a large chunk out of a weekend day. Every weekend. Forever. Between gathering items from the grocery store(s), and then actually cooking, dividing everything up into containers, and playing Jenga in the refrigerator, it can definitely become exhausting.
So, post Thanksgiving holiday(which felt like a week’s worth of cooking, but wasn’t!), I’ve decided to go a bit of a different route for a while.
It might sound extreme.
I’m going to eat only potatoes.
Really.
As if veganism isn’t ‘extreme’ enough, I’m going to retreat further into weirdness?
Yes.
Temporarily.
Hear me out.
Remember when Steve Jobs was in the news, wearing the same outfit every day? He said that removing the decision of what to wear every morning freed up his mind to think about other things. To an extent, I try to follow this. I don’t have a ‘uniform,’ but I do make sure my work week’s worth of outfits are ready to go on Sunday, so that I don’t have to stress in the mornings.
I’m ready to apply the same idea to my meals. Yes, batch cooking on weekends saves time through the week. But not cooking for a few weeks is going to save me even more time.
There is also a school of thought many raw food enthusiasts swear by, of eating only one kind of food per meal. They call these ‘mono meals’ (not to be confused with monomials — this is a no algebra zone!)
There is a little bit of science here to back this up. Different foods digest at different rates. So your protein, carbohydrates, and fats are all mixed in your stomach, but are breaking down differently. This is where all the food-combining people get their ideas about what to eat together and what to never eat together.
The gist is that eating only one food gives your body a break from working so hard to digest everything together. And I definitely feel like my body is in need of a break. Too much processed food does not make my body happy.
But, why potatoes? The Raw Vegans would tell me to eat only melon. (I wish I was raw. Like, really, really wish. But I don’t really like melon.)
Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame) lost over 100 lbs. switching to a whole foods, vegan diet that began with months of nothing but potatoes.He even wrote a book about it. Kevin Smith(aka Silent Bob) followed Penn’s plan after his heart attack, and is down 50 lbs. to date.
Then, there’s this guy from Australia, who did this for a solid year and lost 117 pounds! I don’t need to lose that much(anymore!), but I am a bit puffier than I’d prefer to be at the moment.
Potatoes have gotten a really bad rap in recent years, thanks to the “low carb” movement. No one stopped to think that maybe it is what we do to the potatoes that makes them unhealthy. Deep frying, smothering in butter, sour cream, ketchup, whatever else…if you take all that away, what about the plain old potato?
It turns out, the plain potato has many health benefits. Sweet potatoes have lots of other vitamins, too. I’m planning on eating a variety of different potatoes – if for no other reason, than to try to stave off any sense of boredom.
Personal Goal: From the Monday after Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve is exactly four weeks. That’s how long I’d like to stay potato only.
Rules: As I know it, you just eat potatoes. You don’t have to measure or count(this is a big deal for me), because you just eat potatoes until you don’t want to eat any more.
No oil, butter, sour cream, or anything that is/was/came out of an animal. (a no-brainer for me!)
Modifications: I’m not giving up coffee. Or tea. And I know that on alternate Sundays, I’m going to have to eat breakfast out, which will likely be a fruit salad.
Spudfit guy says he uses some fat free sauces and herbs. I’ll be happy to add some herbs and spices, but I definitely want to control how much sodium I’m allowing myself, too, since my body doesn’t seem to tolerate it very well.
I may add some cooked greens to the mix.
I’m writing this now, at the end of the first day. I had sweet potatoes for breakfast/lunch, and some baked, oil-free “french fries” for dinner.
