DQS Scoring and Eating Stuff I Dislike
Weeks 7 & 8 report for my Endurance diet effort
Week 7 was a disruptive week where I was away from home for most of two days to start, so I didn’t eat well with ultra-processed fast food and some desserts. That meant poor scoring days no matter what else I might have eaten because with the DQS, if you lose points from consuming anything deemed not beneficial, like pop, processed meats and grains, or too much meat or dairy, etc. you can’t technically get them back. Sure, you can get points from good food to offset the bad food, but points for good food maxes out, while those for bad food don’t. The perfect score day of 35 only happens if you consumed sufficient amounts of good foods to max out those points, and did not consume any bad foods, or over consume some good foods like dairy and unprocessed meats. Any food consumed with deductible points effectively lowers your potential maximum point values for the day so you can max out your points gained and won’t be able to hit that 35 perfect score.
The other challenge to keeping a good DQS on any given day is the double whammy sort of impact from bad foods displacing potential good food you could have eaten and gained points for in its place. For example, if I had some small McDonald’s meal for lunch that deducted 8 points. Aside from the 8 points deducted, I won’t be eating another lunch that, if healthy, might have gotten me 8 points. So it is potentially a 16 point hit, or at least well over 8, rather than just 8! Of course, eating a second lunch or supper just to get some points back is not recommended. That’s getting some points back to bump up your DQS from its lowered value due to that lunch, rather than getting back your maximum points potential as discussed in the previous paragraph. That’s permanently gone by 8 points for that day from that meal.
The redeemable thing for me from my bad start in week 6 was that I came back with my highest DQS to date of 31 on the next day, and the rest of the week was strong enough to salvage a 20.0 average that was still far better than my baseline of about 10-12 before I started this whole thing on June 1st. That seemed to have given me momentum because Week 8 following was super solid with my highest weekly DQS average of 27.5, beating the old record of 26.4. One more instance of proof to myself that I can do this, and I can do it well.
Finally, after 8 weeks, I can see that my food and drink expenditures are just within $10 per day, on average, which is the target I have lived by since having eaten out too much in 2009 with a new job then, and challenging myself to be more disciplined with how I spent my money on food and drink. I had averaged over $12 per day that year, with the “eating out” category being the majority of my food and drink costs total, so I arbitrarily picked a close, but round number, of $10 per day. I have met the target every year since, going below $7 per day in multiple years when food was significantly cheaper. This year has proven to be the most challenging at $10.69 per day so far. That higher than $10 per day average is due to some challenges I had in winter and spring, where eating out was a coping mechanism for some regular annoyance at home, but I got that resolved and am now working to lower it to below $10 per day for the rest of the year. We’ll see if I can or will run out of time, because I’ve been on the cusp of it for the past two months, not significantly below it. But if we were to have started June 1st when I started this whole thing, I know can meet that $10 per day average goal unless I get an active dining out social life or something.
As for what I want to write about this week towards food details, I thought I would focus on where I get a lot of my points despite the fact I generally don’t like, or even despise, some of the foods that regularly gets me points. This is a huge challenge for people adapting to healthy eating, including myself, so what is one to do? Turns out, it’s neither physically nor biologically that hard, but only more psychologically and/or emotionally.
Your tastebuds regenerate every 10-14 days. Not all at once, of course, so it’s not like you can just get a new set one day and force it to start liking some new tastes. Getting used to new foods, though, can still be done in a matter of a month or two, depending on how well you do it. For some, gradually changing things starting small and increasing amount might work, while for others, brute force to just start eating things regularly in the expected amount for the future to force the issue might work better. Some prefer to adapt to one or two items at a time, while others might do the entire diet. Of course, planning to incorporate these things into your diet is important so you can find the right dishes, with the right amounts, and in the right frequencies to adapt to these new foods. Transition might actually be the hardest step because you’re neither here nor there for what you had been eating all along, and what you will ultimately be eating regularly. It can all be very challenging, unless you take the approach I did, which was to include the foods I disliked among many other foods I did like, and consumed on a regular basis, masked so I could hardly tell the foods I didn’t like were there. Below are some examples you might want to consider, or use to inspire your own ways to do the same thing with what you currently consume and what you want to add to that, or possibly replace some of the former.
Beets, avocados, and milk in smoothies. I neither like beets nor avocados, nor anything I’ve had with them that I can recall. At least nothing I’d also want to put the effort into making. I also probably wouldn’t like them in the quantities they come in, half or a whole of each at a time, even if I did find some dishes with them that I would make. However, I now get a bit almost each day with my homemade smoothies after walks or runs.
Olive oil in so many things. More details can be found in my post about being a statistical olive oil addict now, but some of it include a tablespoon: in the water steaming rice and quinoa (among other flavouring), in pasta salads, over pasta before the sauce is put on and mixed, mixed in the process of scrambling eggs, in effluent from noodles, etc. I add the olive oil, but I also know I consume it rather than waste it because of signs like less sticky rice, and barely any residue left on the plate or in the bowl from anything I eat.
Bitter veggies, as well as a lot of veggies. I wasn’t generally a big fan of veggies for most of my life, but I had gotten around the matter many years ago. Still, some, like bok choy, is bitter. Others, like garlic sprouts, I have to consume masked and/or suppressed by other ingredients so I can barely taste them, like with the olive oil example. These days, with access to a great Chinese grocer who carries tons of really healthy and exotic vegetables with lots of nutrients and, often, some hard to get nutrients, like bok choy, yu choy, and their sprouts that are a little easier on the taste buds to consume, on choy, watercress, okra, garlic sprouts, chives, enoki mushrooms, etc. I eat vegetables almost like a vegan for volume. The diversity is also great for my gut microbiome. My list of veggies also include the usual common choices like broccoli, spinach, white mushrooms, beet, and so on. I often find that dipping the vegetables in boiling effluent for pasta or noodles after I turn off the stove for a few minutes, or steaming them, make them a lot more edible and enjoyable. The effluent is always consumed fully, or saved for cooking as part of the water base for the next meal (i.e. water in which pasta or noodles are boiled), and consumed fully then, so no nutrient loss is taking place like there would be if the veggies were actually boiled and strained. I eat vegetables so much I almost always max out my DQS vegetable points (4+ servings). Thankfully, there is no point deduction for eating too many vegetables per day.
All natural peanut butter. I will end with a small refinement to my diet, which will continue to happen as I cycle through foods that last a while, or as I find or look into new alternatives. As my 1 kg jar of regular peanut butter ended, I thought to look for organic peanut butter to see my options. I didn’t have to look in the organic section as there was 100% natural peanut butter next to the regular stuff. Price? Same but for a smaller jar of 750g vs 1000g. For how long it takes me to get through a jar of peanut butter, which I will have to recalibrate at my more regular consumption pace these days, that’s nothing per sandwich, so I took it! Nothing but 100% natural peanut butter from now on! I put a date on my new peanut butter jar for when I first started using it, and will see when it’s done to do the math for how long it will have taken me to get through this first jar. Then continue the practice for future jars to see what the average turns out to be. Dating stuff that takes me a while to get through, whether food or otherwise like toilet paper, is something I often do for some interesting insights into my life. Sometimes, I get some context by seeing how I compare to some population averages that makes it even more interesting… like with toilet paper usage, actually. But I’ll save that for another post that will be very funny!