Lightweight Eats

Since neither Dan nor I is currently working, our food budget is super tight. Being vegan and generally health-conscious, it's easy to get carried away. Give me an unlimited budget, and we'd be eating marble potatoes, organic miso paste, extra fancy black lentils, and heaps of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Alas, life has dealt us a different hand for the time being. And we decided to take our lemons and make lemonade.

I wrote last week about cooking for leftovers, and in it I defined some basic amounts it takes for us to cook enough for lunch and dinner for two, from one meal. If you did the same thing, you should now have a general idea of how much starch, protein, veggie and sauce you need for each meal. That's a great place to start for a grocery list.

Starches: pick 7 of the following
4# potatoes ($0.40/lb)
1# pasta ($1/lb)
1# rice ($1/lb)
12 ounces bread ($1.50)
1# polenta ($1/lb)

Proteins: pick 7 of the following
2 packages tempeh ($2 each)
2 packages tofu ($2 each)
1 package Tofurky sausage ($3)
3 cans beans ($2 total)
2/3 # dried beans/lentils ($1)

For sauces, we have many of the ingredients on hand (soy sauce, oil, vinegar, etc) and replace these as they run out. We also buy cilantro, green onion, 1# peanut butter, 2-3 avocados, 1# onions and garlic.

For breakfast, we eat oatmeal, and we go through about 5 pounds of oats a week.
We also eat twenty bananas, 1# walnuts, 1# sunflower seeds, 1# of raisins, 10oz. of coffee and a quart of soymilk with breakfast.

We try for two to three 150 gram servings of fruit per day per person, so about 12 pounds of fruit per week.
Similary, we try for seven or eight 75g servings of vegetables per day per person (slightly more than the recommended amount), so between 15 and 20 pounds of vegetable.

We split our shopping between stores to get the best prices, and to source some weird ingredients like nutritional yeast. We're also considering buying some of our grains online in 50# bags (especially oatmeal) since it's been difficult to find tolerably priced steel cut oats.

However, that forms the basis of our weekly shopping list. All told, it puts us at around $100/week, including some frivolous purchases like cooking wine and organic jam. Hopefully our costs go down over the summer as fresh garden produce and herbs start filling out our meals. In the meantime, we'll be enjoying lots of frozen produce, beans and rice.

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If you follow me on Twitter, you've probably noticed a lot of recovery-related tweets. As a rower, I've had difficulty balancing training load with recovery.

Unfortunately, coaches often avoid discussing this topic. For example, see the following conversation from a recent USRowing Twitter chat:


In my experience, coaches and athletes fall into two camps.

This article is a great representation of the first argument: push through fatigue to become a faster athlete.

On race day, these athletes have no doubt that they have put in the work. But did they do more work than they needed to for the results?

There are a lot of articles about overtraining, like this one and this one.



A scientist at heart, I fall firmly into the recovery camp, but I'm often left doubting my commitment to training programs. Fortunately, I have found some ways to help me find a better balance.

First, although you reduce the physical gains, I am beginning to understand the importance of the mental gains from workouts performed fatigued. Finding a training partner to help you get through these tough workouts is invaluable.

Training partners and coaches help gauge normal fatigue. Are you a over trained or just training hard? The eyes of a coach can help decide.

Second, if you don't want to do a workout, work on your motivation to do the recovery work. Certainly there are Saturday nights when I want to go out dancing and drinking, or Sunday mornings when I'd rather eat pancakes with syrup than fruits and veggies. Those times test your motivation more than your desire to do an extra 90-minute workout.

Finally, if you're exhausted, considering rescheduling a key workout instead of skipping it. If you have a tough workout every other day, this can be challenging. Still, it may be worth your while to make a swap to execute your key workouts better.


Although I'm getting better, I still have a lot to learn. So I'd like to ask the audience:
How do you find the balance? When do you skip a workout? Any advice or tools that I should be aware of? Articles to read?

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Ask a vegan what they eat for lunch and they'll probably answer 'leftovers'. It's easy, healthy and inexpensive—what's not to love?

But when you eat like a champion (by which I mean 3000+ calories/day), it's hard to cook enough for leftovers. We've finally figured out a system to make sure we make enough.

I eat about 3000 calories per day. Dan eats around 2000. Between the two of us, we need 5000 calories per day. I figure we eat about 2000 calories between breakfast and snacks, which means we need 3000 calories for a lunch and a dinner.

If we break that down into starch + protein + veggie + sauce, it's easier to get a sense of how much to cook. For us, that ends up being about 1000 calories of starch and protein, plus 3-500 of veggie and 5-700 of sauce.

For reference:
1000 calories is approximately 4# potatoes, 2/3 # pasta, 2/3 # dry rice, 20 corn tortillas, 1# of bread
1000 calories is approximately 2# tofu, 1# tempeh, 1 package Tofurky sausage, 3 cans beans
500 calories is approximately 3# broccoli, 1.5# peas, 2.5# butternut squash
500 calories is approximately 5T peanut butter, 2c teriyaki sauce, 2c ketchup, 6T tahini,

That's a lot of food! No wonder we didn't have enough leftovers before. That means a typical dinner, we're cooking 2/3# of rice, with two bricks of tofu, three pounds of broccoli and 2 cups of teriyaki sauce. Or making 20 tortillas, with three cans of beans, a large head of cabbage, two avocados, and two cups of salsa. Or four pounds of potatoes dipped in a cup of ketchup with a whole package of tofurky, and 2.5# of butternut squash slathered with 3T of tahini.

Of course, that's lunch and dinner for two people, but it certainly adds up quickly. We're also looking at needing 5 pounds of oatmeal a week, and countless pounds of fruits. Good thing there are only two of us to feed, or we'd need to buy bigger pots!

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Is your New Year's Resolution to lose weight? Or eat better? As a lightweight and athlete, both of those things are key to my success. Over the past year, I've gotten much better at eating the right amount of the right foods.

We arrived in Connecticut last week, and have been making ourselves at home. There's a lot to do, moving across the country: registering to vote, changing car registration, updating addresses, finding jobs and more. We've made a nice long list, and we're slowly checking things off.

The drive was, with the exception of a few mishaps along the way, an absolute blast. I got to run along the Grand Canyon, we biked the strip in Las Vegas, Dan went diving in Florida, and so much more. We also got a much better sense of what we're looking for in a home.

My teammates drove south to Oklahoma just before we arrived for a winter training trip. We're using the time to settle into an empty house. It's also a great opportunity to wake up my body after two weeks in the car! Although I did a fair amount of exercise on the road, it was nowhere near the volume I put in this December. Most of it was running and biking, so erging again was a shock. My numbers are slowly approaching their pre-trip levels.

Expect more regular updates soon, as we settle in, stock a pantry, get jobs and more!

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