What I Eat In A Day

(Since You Asked, With Photos)

Recently I’ve had a number of requests to write up what I eat, in a day. And I haven’t done this topic in years, so here goes.

What I eat has changed a lot in the years since I last wrote a blog post on this topic. What’s awesome about eating a whole-foods, plant-based diet is that the options are endless.

And while you’re going to want to eat what you actually like, of course–within what’s highly nutritious (luckily you’ve got eleventy billion options)--

–I’ll tell you my whole diet, in an average day.

The one thing I eat that I don’t necessarily enjoy that much, if I’m being honest, you may be surprised to know, is also the one constant: the green smoothie.

I always told my kids, “Some foods we eat because they taste good, and some foods we eat because they’re good for us!” When people are wary of how a green smoothie will taste, I ask, “If you don’t want it as food, would you drink it as medicine?”

(Sounds rather Dr. Seuss, doesn’t it? In Green Eggs and Ham, where Sam-I-Am is chased all over the place as the narrator tries to get him to eat green eggs and ham. I may have resembled Sam-I-Am in my parenting, only it was a Green Smoothie rather than Green Eggs.)

I drink a green smoothie every single day, not because it’s my favorite food, but because “food is medicine,” and I don’t know a way to pack more nutrition into a smaller space, and consume it more easily!

I eat a lot less than I did 10 years ago, the last time I did this topic. While I still work out an hour a day, I haven’t been playing competitive tennis lately.

(After being kicked off a tennis team for my medical freedom opinions posted on Facebook. My Park City team was mostly people terrified of Covid, which made tennis less fun, and my Palm Coast team literally just kicked me out.)

Also, I’ve been spending 12 hours a day in front of a screen. So, I eat less, because I burn less. It’s also just normal to need less food as you get older.

I eat twice a day, at 10 am, and again late in the afternoon.

Remember 15 years ago, how eating 6 small meals a day was all the rage? I think “intermittent fasting” is a better idea, not because it’s in vogue, but because people always used to “fast” for lengths of time, and the evidence is clear that giving your body a break from eating frees up energy for “autophagy,” perhaps the most powerful of your body’s repair mechanisms.

Really, what “intermittent fasting” is, is a fancy name to mimic what virtually all of the healthy populations of the world have always done, which is to eat twice a day, and not eat at all, for 16 hours.

Not because they were following some diet fad 200 years ago before there were fad diets and diet books, but because they ate to live, rather than live to eat. Food was fuel–and people didn’t have long shelf-life food all around them in their stay-home life.

My second meal is a pretty big one. If I’m hungry at dinnertime, I’ll cut up a mango, or eat a grapefruit or handful of grapes. (Because those are fruits I like.)

Lately my favorite treat is a pecan and a grape, in the same mouthful. Then do it again, till your handful of pecans is gone. It sounds simple, but I’m telling you–it’s absolutely heavenly! Or, cut up a mango, and with each bite, add the pecan.

I like to be completely done digesting by the time I go to bed. If I do eat dinner at 6 pm or so, like eating out on Saturday nights, I choose plant-based options.

For many reasons, but one of which is that your body isn’t digesting all night, when your body wants to be resting and repairing.

I don’t eat the same breakfast (Hot Pink Breakfast Smoothie) every day because I think YOU need to–but rather, just because we love our breakfast,  we never get tired of it, and it hits the target on every level:

Satisfying and sustaining, raw, plant-based, nutrient dense, don’t forget DELICIOUS–and even has a ferment in it, for a healthy gut, and a chunk of beet and a large raw carrot.

So here’s my average daily diet, including my two favorite lunches lately:

1. Hot-Pink Breakfast Smoothie

Consider getting some kefir grains (choose water, versus milk grains, for this) and letting them ferment your coconut water overnight. Then every day, you’re just draining the fermented coconut water into your smoothie, and replacing it, pouring new coconut water into your jar with the kefir grains. I show you how, here.

1. Late Lunch #1:

A. A pint of green smoothie (whatever edible weeds are in my yard, plus some garden-grown or store-bought greens, cabbages, and a stalk of aloe, sometimes sprouts–and a banana and frozen mixed berries).

We add a scoop or two of Sprouted Flax or TriOmega (sprouted broccoli, chia and flax seeds), and a scoop or two of Bone Broth protein, or Superfood plant-based protein.

B. Southwest Quinoa Salad

2. Or, Late Lunch #2:

A. A pint of green smoothie (see above)

B. Toasted organic, sprouted-grain Ezekiel english muffin, with this on top:

One mashed avocado, with a little muffalata or tapenade (chopped olives, vinegar and spices) and a little organic salsa.

Treat: sometimes the grape-pecan thing above, or mango-pecan, or my one “sin” is some of a pint of cashew-milk ice cream.

That’s about it! My goal, for 25 years now since I got well after being sick for four years, is 60-80% of what I eat, at every meal, being raw.

Raw greens, fruits and veggies are the most nutritious foods, containing their own enzymes, to make whatever else I eat more easily digested. My green smoothie is 100% raw whole plant foods.

We also juice twice a week, so sometimes instead of a smoothie, I might have a pint of fresh juice (we juice a couple quarts, and enjoy it for a couple days stored in pint jars in the fridge):

Cucumber
Celery
One whole lime
Lots of ginger

Hope you enjoy the recipes!

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