The Travelin’ Man needs to eat, too

After my workout yesterday, I jumped in my car and high-tailed it to Centralia, Wash., about 100 miles north of Portland. A crew was tearing down an old home on some property adjacent to our mobile home park and I needed to be there to supervise it.

This also gave me the opportunity to remove several heaps of trash on the property that have been dumped illegally. A truck was onsite hauling the debris from the old home to the landfill, and the excavator had given me permission to throw unrelated trash into his truck.

This is all actually immaterial to the point of this blog entry. The point, really, is that for 24 hours I was going to be extremely busy, extremely tired, performing labor and nowhere near a kitchen.

I didn’t plan ahead for this. Normally, I wouldn’t even need to “plan ahead,” but my new diet follows the Glycemic index and requires me to eat approximately five to six meals a day.

Right after Monday’s workout, I downed a protein shake and quickly packed my suitcase. I was about out the door when I realized I hadn’t packed any food. So I opened my fridge, grabbed a small cooler and filled it quickly with items that might get me through 24 hours on my meal plan.

I got to Centralia about two hours later and was hungry. It was about time for my third meal of the day, and my cooler didn’t have any protein that I thought would satisfy my appetite, so I hit a mini-mart to find some meat.

The best I could come up with was a hot dog, and my instincts told me, “Paisely would probably not approve of this.” So I discarded the bun, skipped the condiments and wrapped it in my own whole wheat tortilla. Hey, don’t say I’m not trying.

After busting my ass for three hours removing trash at our worksite, I had a snack from my cooler: Greek yogurt, a small apple and a handful of walnuts. For dinner, I hit another mini-mart and grabbed a pre-made chicken-bacon wrap with a flour tortilla. I capped the night with a hard-boiled egg from my cooler.

This morning I warmed up an egg wrap I’d brought from home (2 scrambled eggs in a whole wheat tortilla). Then I worked for five hours on our property again, skipping a snack without even thinking about it until I found myself starving at 1 o’clock. I looked in my cooler and wasn’t satisfied with anything, so I headed to a favorite restaurant of mine in Centralia: The Olympic Club.

I almost chose the grilled chicken salad, but then the very last item on the menu caught my eye: the West African Bowl with spicy peanut-tomato sauce, veggies and brown rice. Add chicken for $4.25!

Chicken = protein. Veggies and brown rice = carbs. Peanut sauce = fat. Perfect, right?

It tasted almost too good. It tasted illegal! But that wasn’t the problem. I’d skipped my snack, and I was starving. And restaurants always give you an oversized portion. I didn’t eat it all, but I came close and 20 minutes after I left the Olympic Club I felt bloated.

The point of this blog, I guess, is that following the diet is not always easy, especially when you’re on the run and you haven’t planned ahead. Paisley told me to spend a couple hours in the kitchen every weekend planning for the week ahead, and this is an aspect I haven’t been following well.

I have an embarrassing secret to confess: my mom helped me prepare a lot of my food these first three weeks, but she’s in California now until late March, and I’m really on my own.

And if I stop getting wasted every Friday, and spending the rest of the weekend hung over, I might even have time to plan ahead.

Food Jounal:
Breakfast: Scrambled egg wrap.
Snack: (missed)
Lunch: West African Bowl with spicy peanut-tomato sauce, veggies and brown rice.
Snack: Jack Links Jerkey from mini-mart; whole wheat mini-bagel with peanut butter and one stick of low-fat string cheese
Dinner: Pork chops, brown rice.

Exercise: 30 minutes of interval training on a treadmill at the Lloyd Athletic Club. This was a little out of my routine as I did it at 6:30 p.m. after getting home from Centralia. Normally I exercise in the morning.