on road trips

I used to look forward to road trips because they came with a built-in excuse to eat quick, on-the-run, fast food. Not that we needed an excuse to eat fast food, but in my mind there was absolutely no guilt attached to road trip eating – because you’re on the road! What else you gonna eat?

Yesterday as we packed up to head out for Spring Break, we knew that we didn’t want to stop and grab something from McDonald’s. We already had a lot of fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grilled chicken on hand to pack for the trip, so we made little lunch bags for everybody. We took sandwich bags and loaded them with:

• Red Bell Peppers
• Cucumbers
• Strawberries
• Almonds
• Grilled Chicken (cut into bite sizes)

It went over well for the most part, although our younger kiddoes are still not as thrilled about this new way of thinking. The key? Planning ahead. So far that’s the been the difference between eating well and eating junk this Spring Break.

on block conversions

One of the more frustrating thing for me about how Dr. Sears presents The Zone is that it’s not really designed for people who are trying to make recipes. What good does knowing that 4 cups of cooked cauliflower is 1 block when I need to add cauliflower as part of a recipe before it’s cooked?  Also, something like cauliflower is irregular in shape, so the idea of trying to measure a “cup’s” worth is neither easy nor exact.

Most of us In the Zone already know how to read labels and determine how many blocks are presented using the following calculations provided by Dr. Sears:

• 1 block of protein = 7 g
• 1 block of carbohydrate = 9 g
• 1 block of fat = 1.5 g

For example, if we pick up a Snicker’s bar, this is what we’ll see:

Snicker's bar Nutrition Facts, courtesy of calorieking.com

By applying the block calculation amounts above, I can deduce that a Snicker’s bar is a) not a significant source of protein, b) has 9 blocks of fat and c) 4 blocks of carbs. Yikes! Not a very zone-friendly snack, but then, you already knew that.

But what about something like green beans? Where’s the nutrition facts label for that? If I’m going to prepare a side dish to feed five people, knowing that 1 1/2 cups of cooked green beans doesn’t really help me know how much to throw into the wok for, say, the stir-fry recipe from earlier today. By using a site like calorieking.com, I can look up raw green beans, enter a serving size of 1 oz. and see the following displayed:

Raw green beans Nutrition Facts, courtesy of calorieking.com

According to this, 1 oz. of raw green beans is 2 g or carbs. Because we know that it takes 9 g of carbs to form a single block, the math is simple: 9 g / 2 g = 4.5 oz. of raw green beans.  For a family of five, that’s 22.5 oz., which is much easier to calculate when you’re at the store buying fresh ingredients for recipes. When eating In the Zone, you don’t have to settle for “a cup and a half of cooked green beans” if you don’t want to. The idea of eating that for dinner does not make me a happy gastronomer.