Settling in with the Endurance Diet
Where I see the first plateau
Two weeks into the Endurance Diet and I have a good idea of where I will settle in for a while. It’s a great place that’s much better than where I was before, and which I will also enjoy more than before. Here are my bulleted notes for details:
My daily Diet Quality Score will range from 20-25, on a scale of -73 to +35, though starting at 0 each day. For context, I was at about a 10 average before, and 20-25 being where a lot of good athletes are at, supposedly. It wasn’t said in the book, but I’m guessing some of those elite athletes are not at the top score or range only because they consume a lot of whole grain carbs, for which there are penalties after 5 servings per day, along with some treats that I’ve never really had much of, and don’t see myself doing among the changes I’ve incorporated. There are enough already! As for the two weeks so far, I have averaged 23.6 and 25.9 per day, in that order.
One of my regular shortcomings will be in unprocessed meats and seafood. I don’t eat a lot of meats and seafood partially due to the extra preparation required compared to vegetables and whole grains. I’m not ready to consistently get 3 servings of it daily, and I’m not sure I’ll ever want to. Feels excessive for me. Two is even a challenge. What I will be able to do to help myself in this situation are to:
Consume more eggs that are a “super food”;
Consume shrimps more often; and
Diversify to include more fish after I learn some more simple, yet effective, fish cooking skills, like frying fillets with various healthy marinating sauces, pressure cooking fillets, adding canned sardines to pasta salads, learn how to cook more diverse fish like little smelt, etc.
Another regular shortcoming will be in dairy. I’ve had relatively little dairy in my diet for several decades, opting for plant-based milk instead of milk, and having only cheese on McDonald’s burgers a few times a week otherwise. I’m not sure my body is ready to handle that much more dairy on a daily basis yet. Like with meats, getting 3 servings per day feels excessive to me. I’ve been trying to get something daily via real milk rather than plant-based milk in my daily smoothie, and sometimes Greek yogurt for a dessert, and that feels like a level to try and hold. There’s not been any reactions from my body that I could tell, so it may just be a planning thing that’s stopping me, but for now, I won’t push things and diversify for little extra bits of dairy here and there (even if some are too small to count for a half serving), like:
Go back to my plant-based milk smoothie that tastes better;
Drink milk instead of plant-based milk instead;
Use cottage cheese some time on my toasts instead of peanut butter and/or honey;
Add cottage cheese to my tomato sauce for pasta; and
Add cottage cheese to hot pasta in pasta salads before mixing with other veggies.
Get my proteins from lack of meat and dairy through protein enhanced products like fortified plant-based milk, fortified milk rather than regular milk, and fortified yogurt. These sources are not meat proteins, but they’re still good proteins, and vegetable proteins tend to be cleaner without all the meat by-products. The fortified milk and yogurt are new to my diet, and more potent than the fortified plant-based milk, so I might actually be tripling that protein source in my current diet than the one before. Add to the increased meat and seafood consumption, and considering I seem to have been doing at least OK, if not fine, before, I’m not going to worry about lack of protein in my first plateau for the Endurance Diet.
Another regular shortcoming will be in fruits. My daily smoothie accounts for 2 of the 4 servings in the fruits category before I can max out the points there. My challenge is I rarely consume fruits otherwise, with a half serving of blueberries added to Greek yogurt being a newly added routine. I will see if I can work to amend this after I take care of some routines and new things I foresee myself incorporating better than I have just started in the past two weeks, like maybe adding dried fruits (no sugar added) for snacks in a nuts mix. I’m not sure about doing two smoothies per day as they pack quite the punch for me to be filling. I might well lose out on other things I might consume instead in doing that, in which case, I’ll take the current balance.
Another regular shortcoming will be in high quality beverages. This is a minor, and slightly iffy, part of the Endurance Diet. I think people would do fine without having to rely on this if they got their hydration and nutrients from these high quality beverages like 100% fruit juice elsewhere. They just wouldn’t be able to get a maximum DQS daily as a maximum of 2 points per day is allotted to it. I’ll just accept that as a pass I will take for now.
I will continue to overeat vegetables, and add beets and potatoes. Thank goodness there is no penalty for consuming too many vegetables, is all I can say. I have a lot of vegetables of all colours (many leafy and crunchy greens, white mushrooms, red grape tomatoes) with practically everything. I’d be eating a lot more grains for carbs without them, and you can get penalized easily for that. Beyond the DQS, though, vegetables gives you a lot of vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, and other valuable nutrients that grains or anything else can. Hence, no penalties for eating too many vegetables. Aside from the usual green suspects I go through at the Asian grocer, including most nutrient dense vegetables of watercress and bok choy sprouts but not chun ho that’s too stringy for my liking, I will also add potatoes as a base on some days, and beets to pasta salad and my smoothie. The latter may be too small to count to start with until I figure out my tolerance for it, never having bought beets until now, but I’ll get what I can of what is labeled a super food by the Endurance Diet book.
I will continue to “overeat” whole grains. I’m not actually overeating it, though I can do 5 servings a day. I just max out my points at 3 and could get more points if I diversified better. However, I like my whole grains in my basmati rice, quinoa, and like 8 types of organic whole grain noodles that often substitute for actual pasta, or is mixed in with pasta as I never use just one type of string pasta or noodles when I make string pasta dishes. The potatoes as a new base will help with swapping out “excess” whole grains, occasionally, though.
I will allow myself mini-treats daily that won’t add up to 0.25 servings daily, and not count them towards penalties. Since I keep track of things by half servings instead of the DQS tracking full servings, I think this is more than allowable without being considered cheating. Mind you, I’m not saying I will do that often. I’ve got to get some treats in the house first!
So those are the conditions I am choosing to accept and adapt to at this time with my optimization of the Endurance Diet for myself. It’s all good because the Endurance Diet meets me where I am with the “eat individually” principle, rather than berate or judge me for it, despite the DQS assessing things all the time. I get to set the threshold and range I want, not have it set for me. Just one of the many reasons why I like this “diet”, or as I prefer to think of it, a set of eating guidelines.