My Diet

I’ve been get­ting a lot of requests for my per­sonal diet, so I’m going to share all that with you in today’s post.

My diet changes with the sea­son and in between based on what my body wants. About two months ago, I was eat­ing a lot of brown rice and rice milk, but that came to an end when I started want­ing more juicy, light­weight foods like fruit. I don’t stick with one dietary ideal, and I no longer give myself a dietary label either. I only cement myself to some basic guide­lines, which is to eat organic, whole foods and in the case of ani­mal prod­ucts, humanely raised and grass-fed. I also love to cook, so I make about 95% or more of my meals at home, and when I go out to eat, I love sushi, Japan­ese and Thai food, and Mediter­ranean food. Maybe my diet will give you some ideas, but don’t fol­low it exactly — lis­ten to your own body, make sure you see what it’s try­ing to tell you and give it what it needs.

So I gen­er­ally eat when I am hun­gry, which is about every 2 or 2 1/2 hours because I eat small por­tions (about 1 or 2 hand­fuls of food) at one sit­ting. I don’t like to feel full or stuffed, so that’s why I eat smaller meals and space them out dur­ing the day, which means I don’t have a “break­fast, lunch, din­ner” rou­tine. Graz­ing through­out the day is what I’ve done since child­hood, and I feel best doing that.

Please keep in mind this is just a gen­eral idea. For instance, I eat a vari­ety of fruits, not just melon and apples (which I men­tion a lot below). ;D

PRE-BREAKFAST
{ALL SEASONS}
Glass of plain water or lemon water; or herbal tea like Yogi Detox or dan­de­lion root

BREAKFAST
{FALL & WINTER}
Erewhon brown rice cereal with almond milk or rice milk; or oat­meal with blue­ber­ries and raw honey; or 1–2 apples with 1–2 Tbsp. almond but­ter; or 2 per­sim­mons
{SPRING & SUMMER}
Fruit! Usu­ally 1/2 a can­taloupe, hon­ey­dew, or watermelon

SECOND MEAL
{ALL SEASONS}
A tall glass of green juice, 14 – 16 oz. I rotate what I put in the green juice so it’s never the same for more than 3 days in a row. I like to use cucum­ber every day, how­ever. A typ­i­cal juice will look like this: cucum­ber, cilantro, kale, tiny knob of gin­ger, apple. Another juice might be: cucum­ber, cel­ery, pars­ley, red leaf let­tuce, apple.

LUNCH
{FALL & WINTER}
Brown rice with steamed broc­coli or spinach; or home­made fried rice cooked in olive oil with gar­lic, greens, and local family-raised eggs; or some kind of fish or grass-fed meat
{SPRING & SUMMER}
More fruit, per­haps the other 1/2 of the melon I had for break­fast; or a fruit smoothie; or a green smoothie (a mix of fruit, water, and greens — like a green juice

FOURTH MEAL
{FALL & WINTER}
Penne alla vodka fam­ily recipe made with brown rice pasta and steamed greens; or an apple with 1 Tbsp. almond but­ter; or 1–2 per­sim­mons; or 3–4 oz. steamed or poached salmon with steamed greens
{SPRING & SUMMER}
Fruit with almond but­ter; or home­made tuna salad made with grape­seed oil Veg­e­naise, cucum­ber, and sweet onion served on romaine let­tuce; or cold tuna rice pasta with a home­made olive oil/raw honey/lime/vinegar dressing

DINNER
{ALL SEASONS}
Usu­ally some­thing I made ear­lier in the day — I like to make a big batch of one thing and eat that through­out the day or eat the rest the next day

SIXTH MEAL (2–3 HOURS BEFORE BEDTIME)
{ALL SEASONS}
Some­thing small and with pro­tein and/or fat so I don’t get super hun­gry right before bed or wake up starv­ing. In fall/winter it might be 3–4 oz. of goat yogurt with 1 Tbsp. of raw honey or a pinch of pow­dered green ste­via leaf; or a small apple with 1 Tbsp. almond but­ter. In spring/summer I might have some left­over salmon or tuna salad from the day, or a small smoothie of some sort.

You might have noticed a few things are absent from my diet, and that is inten­tional. I do not eat the fol­low­ing foods because after much trial and error (and research), I dis­cov­ered that these were not good fuel for my body and often caused prob­lems, includ­ing diges­tive upset and skin issues. They also came up as minor food aller­gies on my test­ing, so I can have them once in a while with­out a real prob­lem. Gen­er­ally I just avoid them. ;P I don’t think of it as restric­tion, it doesn’t bother me at all that I don’t eat these foods. Now, if I want a brownie or ice cream, you bet I’m going to eat it, but that is a rare occur­rence and there’s noth­ing wrong with a lit­tle indul­gence now and then.

• No wheat/gluten (some­times I will have home­made, hardy whole-grain bread)
• No cow dairy of any kind
• No corn
• No refined sugar, e.g. white sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, rapadura
• No soy milk, tofu, or soy sauce (wheat-free tamari is fine)
• No pork or chicken
• No shell­fish, e.g. crab and shrimp
• No choco­late
• No caf­feine
• No hydro­genated oils or margarine

I don’t mea­sure my food and I don’t count calo­ries, I just eat a hand­ful or two of food 6–7 times per day, and I don’t stuff myself. Almost every­thing I get is organic cer­ti­fied or raised organ­i­cally, which isn’t super expen­sive because I eat a lot of fruits and veg­eta­bles and (in fall/winter) brown rice, which is about $40-$60 every week or so, or I buy it locally or online in bulk which keeps the cost down.

Part of my diet includes sup­ple­ments, which are very impor­tant for every­one because today’s food is much less nutrient-dense than our food from years ago. So unless you’re grow­ing your own food and enrich­ing the soil with min­er­als and eat­ing pounds of veg­e­ta­tion every day, I would def­i­nitely rec­om­mend whole food based (non-synthetic) sup­ple­ments. I take the fol­low­ing sup­ple­ments daily:

• Gar­den of Life Vit­a­min Code Raw One for Women (1 cap­sule per day with food)
• Gar­den of Life Vit­a­min Code Raw Vit­a­min C (2 cap­sules, 3 times per day, with food)
• Carl­son Labs Cod Liver Oil in Lemon (1 tsp., 2 times per day, in a glass of water with a lit­tle fresh lemon juice) or Gar­den of Life Beyond Omega 3 (2 cap­sules, 3 times per day, with food)
• Par­adise Herbs 1,000 mg MSM (1–2 cap­sules with break­fast, 1–2 cap­sules with din­ner, taken with Vit­a­min C and/or lemon water)
• NOW Foods Lutein 20 mg (1 cap­sule with food)
• Var­i­ous Pure­Caps anti-aging sup­ple­ments such as alpha lipoic acid, l-carnosine, and astax­an­thin (I pur­chase mine from PureCaps)

So I hope that was help­ful! If you have any ques­tions, def­i­nitely ask.
~Stephanie
xx