Trying to stay in the zone

I have found that sticking to the zone diet is easy given some planning and preparation (which in itself may or may not be easy). As I've talked about before, I've made a grocery list for 6 days worth of zone meals using the crossfit journal as a guide. So all I do is buy the food on the list, nothing more, nothing less. If I don't have the food around the house, then I have no choice but to eat it. After a couple of weeks, the recipes are so ingrained into your memory that it doesn't take long to prepare. Every morning I pack the deli sandwich and first snack, while eating my oatmeal. I have the most energy in the morning, before work and crossfit wears me out, so I try to make dinner the easiest to make. I come home after a hard day of crossfitting, and I make the easiest meal, the smoothie. It also feels like one of those protein shakes that one takes after workouts, so that's a nice effect. If it's not a crossfit day, I then eat a serving of chili. Since the recipe makes three servings I make it on Sunday, and I'm set for the week (Sun, Tue, Thur). I'm still working on meals for the seventh day; usually I just go to the grocery store and then treat Saturday as Sunday, Sunday as Monday, etc. This was ok since I was injured and not in crossfit. However, now that I'm back to working out, a plan for the seventh day is needed. I'm probably going to just make it another oatmeal/sandwich/smoothie day (adjusting the grocery list is easy with the excel sheet), but I would like to expand my zone culinary repertoire a little bit, any suggestions?

I would also like to note that I understand this is a fairly unforgiving structure, and that rigidity has caused me problems, but it has also had many benefits. In the first three weeks of being in the zone, I didn't have any distractions to cause me to stray, and it was great. I think in that three week span I had only two or three non-zone meals. As expected, however, normalcy called and I had to go be social on the weekends, attending a wedding in Chicago on the on the 21st, a wedding in Bloomington IN on the 28th, and celebrate the fourth in Chicago and attend another wedding in Detroit on the 6th. These trips/weddings have not been very zone-friendly, what with being in airports, away from home, and the presence wedding cake (of course).

Now, you might think that I was totally screwed and just went buck-wild on the weekends. Well, with the exception of wedding cake I was able to estimate my meals to somewhat zone-friendly portions. Because I couldn't know what exactly went into every meal (e.g. how much butter was used in steaming vegetables), I couldn't be as zone friendly as I wanted to be, but I just tried to listen to my body and selected portions of meats and veggies that I felt fit the 40-30-30 ratio. Whether these meals were 5 blocks or not I have no idea, but my point is after getting used to zone-foods, you start to be able to "speak zone", and you look for foods that make you feel good, like the ideal zone meals. I think the body has an amazing ability to tell you what it wants/needs, you just have to understand what it's telling you. After being in the zone for a while, you start to understand what works and what doesn't. I find myself constantly talking about "listening to my body", so I think tomorrow I'll write about it, hope it will prove useful.

Something that also helps learning to improvise zone meals is varying the ingredients of recipes. For example, what if you're tired of eating grapes with your oatmeal (they're not that zone friendly anyway)? Well, the cup of grapes listed in the recipe is 2 blocks of carbs, so I look to the journal's list of carbs and find out that 1 1/3 cup of raspberries would work as well, and Dr. Spears ranks raspberries higher than grapes. You could do the same thing for the cottage cheese or protein powder. Substitutions cause you to learn how much of what is a block of carb/protien/fat, and pretty soon you can just use whatever is around you to create a zone-meal. Hope this helps.