prep work

All this time, I've been slowly reorienting my kitchen in preparation for the coming switch to the keto diet. This means I've bought all sorts of new flours, sweeteners, low-carb tomato sauces, and other keto-friendly ingredients. 

One area where I haven't prepped enough, though, is meal planning. For pretty much every meal, now, I have to break the food down into its components, then create spreadsheets to track all the calories and macros. It's a pain in the ass, but I think most of this work is front-loaded: once I've created a mass of spreadsheets containing recipes and macros, I can use them over and over again, and I can also mix and match. Another thing I need to do over the coming week is prep sauces that I'll be using over and over. Some of these sauces, such as ranch dressing, often call for fresh ingredients (like dill, parsley, etc.), but to make them last a bit longer, I'll be relying on dried herbs. Not quite as tasty, but I'll have my sauces for longer before I need to make new batches. And depending on how I do my mixing and matching, I can add new foods to existing spreadsheets, as I've already done with my various smoothies: I started off with the template for a basic smoothie, then I created variations on that basic theme, which are also on the same spreadsheet.

None of this is an exact science, of course, but the point isn't to arrive at rigidly exact numbers: the point is to keep myself within a reasonable ballpark of where I need to be, using these stats as a guide. So if I'm on 50 grams of carbs per day, but I end up ingesting 60 grams, I'm not going to beat myself up. I'm not a competition-level bodybuilder. I don't need to be that obsessively exact with my diet.

Autumn Bates, the nutritionist, advises keeping meal plans simple by sticking to simple food. Example: salmon and asparagus, minimally seasoned. I'll be doing some of that as well, but a lot of my food is going to be complex. When I created the macro chart for my keto burger, for example, that took a while because I had to look up the stats for every single ingredient, from the bread to the meat patties to the vegetable trimmings and the sauces. Same for the ranch-dressing chart I made today, which was a side chart that I had to make because my larger chart was for various salads. But now that I have those templates in place, I can create variations pretty easily. All ingredients, all quantities, and all stats are listed. It's a lot of work, but I see this as an investment that is part of a change in lifestyle.

As I keep saying, check back this time next year to see where all this has gotten me. I doubt I'll be a shredded maniac by next year, but I ought to be a lot less doughy.