I’m bored. Not that I’m not busy, because I feel like I’m being ground to a fine graduate student pulp which can then be recycled into another graduate student. No, I feel like I need a challenge, old-school 2weeker style. I’ve given up on cold showering (although that will make a return in the summer when it’s less of a hazard), but I’ve put in bits and pieces of previous 2weekers.

This current one will be about my tubby. I’ve gained a wee bit o’ weight since this time two months ago. A lot of that is haphazard eating before, during, and after the wedding. A lot of it also is inactivity–I cycled not-at-all in DC, and I haven’t really been doing much running or sports since softball season ended a month ago. The only exercise I’ve been getting is my daily bike ride and some random lifting of boxes or such. That and my constant standing. But all this will improve. The other aspect, the eating aspect, is something I can work on right now. I feel like I must justify my knife purchase by cooking a lot (Christina will nod here), and I have been, but I’ve been supplementing my home cooking with disastrous snack food from work or from friend gatherings, etc.

So I propose for my next 2weeker to not eat processed foods. I feel like the food I make, even it contains butter and a lot of salt, is healthier than that random bag of radioactive cheetos that I had last night, or the animal cookies for dinner the night before, etc. So here are the rules:

No processed foods. So nothing that comes in a bag or a package, pre-wrapped, pre-mixed, pre- whatever. Coloring, additives, preservatives, all out the window! The only processing that I’ll allow is processing that I do myself (or that Christina does).

Exceptions: foods that are otherwise difficult to obtain or unfeasible to make myself. This includes things that require processing that I cannot hope to practically do with my current time/equipment limitations (press my own olive oil, make my own salt, roast my own coffee). Examples might include butter, olive/canola oil, coffee, tea, flour, etc. I’m also excluding meat, because I don’t have time to go all Michael Pollan on some boar right now. If it seems like a lot of stuff is in the exclusions, it’s probably true. However, there are some things that don’t make the cut that will probably help me in my health:

1) Soda. I have my own water carbonater now, but I still pick up the odd soda from Departmental events. Yesterday I had two “Juice Squeeze” things that had 43g of sugar each. Today I had an orange soda that had some oil byproduct. Not good. This category of hope also includes, sadly, beer. I will exclude beer that I steal from Brian, though, since he did that processing.

2) Carbs. Yeah, goodbye to non-homemade cookies, breads, crackers, chips, crunches, tortillas, fries, rounds, or wraps. I don’t typically care enough to make my own crackers or chips (although I have a weird microwave insert that makes a decent potato chip). I’ll eat bread Christina whips up in the bread-maker, but other than that, I’ll have to rely on brown rice, couscous, and quinoa. I will miss those grape nuts in the morning… there may have to be a transition period.

3) Junk food. Those little almonds with sea salt and turbinado sugar? Out. Chocolate? Out. Ice cream, smoothies, mochi? All out. This will hopefully leave me with fruit and veggies to replace the snacks. Also out is salad dressing (I’ll have to make my own). Also out is pre-assembled salad. That’s nice and all, but I think I can quite possibly chop my own lettuce, no?

This sounds great, but I’ll update you tomorrow on how the effort is going. My guess for tomorrow? “Poorly.”