Eating right is hard to do

When our daughter C is here, Other and I load up the larder with tortilla chips and mini-burgers and cookies and ice cream and chocolate sauce, waiving our usual sense of obligation to eat like grownups. It's more important that, as skinny as she is, she eat anything at all than that she eat something that's actually good for her. Even so, she will often open the cupboard and complain that there's nothing to eat. Then we rush out to buy her chocolate croissants and bacon. 

After she goes back to college, Other and I spend the next few days acting like giant diabetic mice, surreptitiously scavenging among the staples—cans of organic beans, boxes of whole wheat pasta, low-fat whole-grain seaweed-flavored crackers, raw nuts and seeds and the like—sniffing out any crumbs of fat-filled sugar-laden or salt-laced snacks she might have left behind. Within a few days, we have found and consumed every remaining chocolate chip, and we sadly resume our drab adult diet.

The National Cancer Institute and the Food Guide Pyramid recommend eating five to nine fist-size servings of fruits and vegetables every day. Has anyone in modern times accomplished this feat consistently for, say, a week or more? I have tried and failed many times. 

I'm trying again, but it makes for pretty weird meals. If you include the smallest amount of meat or starch—and the Food Pyramid recommends a staggering 6 to 11 servings of the latter alone—you don't have room for all the fruit and veg. This morning I had a banana and an apple for breakfast. For lunch I had a pint of carrot juice and a falafel with lettuce and tomatoes. For dinner I had a slice of seriously vegetable pizza with half a cup of guacamole smeared on top. I think that gets me into the recommended range but brings with it a touch of dyspepsia—especially since I've also been glugging my way toward my goal of 8 cups of liquid a day. 

Sometimes I catapult myself into the zone by having a kitchen-cleaner salad for lunch, but even if you shovel it in like a glutton, it doesn't give you the warm, sleepy, sated feeling that the humblest bagel does. Sometimes I microwave a yam and carry it around in a baggy like an apple, hoping the starchiness will give me that full feeling. It doesn't. Sometimes I boil up a bunch of beets and beet greens and eat them with brown rice. Oddly, that's my favorite meal, despite the purple poop that results, but a day or two of that is about all I can manage.

With my cancer history, I have a lot at stake in achieving a healthy lifestyle. I earn A's in exercise and abstinence and fluid intake, but my diet is B-minus at best. I've always been a swotter, though, and tomorrow is another day.