The first day was actually pretty decent. I drove up to Dana Point to drop my daughter off with her grandparents for a few days and essentially didn’t really eat anything until after about noon. I did drink almost 50 oz of water, though. We met at a Trader Joe’s up there, so I bought some provisions (peas, tofu, and kale).

I ended up snacking on raw peas straight from the bag for most of the ride home. They were really pleasant and mellow in flavor, not overly sweet, and the texture was great, perfect for snacking.

When I got home, though, I had worked up quite an appetite so I had my first toast of the day. Wholewheat, Powerseed toast, that is. Two eggs, sunny-side up, fried in a cast iron skillet with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, layered on top of two slices of toast. It was a drippy, heavenly mess. I washed it all down with 20 oz of water + 2 tsp of psyllium husks.

The next toast was before just before running out to pray and play basketball with my son. Two slices of toast with half an avocado, some red chili flakes, salt, and lime. It was a delicious boost. Not that it helped, my 8-year-old son beat me 10-8 in one-on-one! I went easy on him…

When I got home, I was greeted with fragrant wafts of an Eastern-European Garden of Eden. My wife, knowing that I had been a bit under the weather, made a giant pot of chicken soup for me. I let her down easy, and thankfully she is immensely supportive and awesome, so she understood (read: She knows I’m crazy and after 11 years of marriage realizes that there’s not much she can do other than roll with it… The first time our parents met each other, I was busy grinding wheat by hand to make flour for another crazy food kick I was on. She knows me and I know she loves me anyway.) While she and the kids enjoyed their Ashkenazi Ambrosia, I went to work in the kitchen.

First pitfall to report: Don’t try making quinoa in the microwave. Although it is slightly less time-consuming and uses one less dish than cooking it on the stove-top, it is certainly more messy and dangerous. The directions call for placing 1 part quinoa and 2 parts water in a microwave-safe dish, heating, covered, on high for 4 minutes, stirring and then heating for another 2 minutes. Suffice to say, I didn’t use a large enough dish, which meant quinoa and water boiling over and spilling all over the microwave + I almost scalded myself with the steam. Next time, I’m cooking it on the stove-top.

With the quinoa cooked, I added some miso paste to it and let it sit and absorb the flavor. I then turned my attention to the kale, eggs, tofu, and remaining peas.

I heated some olive oil in my cast-iron skillet, added the roughly chopped kale* and tofu, letting them take on some color, then I added the peas and quinoa and finally two eggs. I added some soy sauce, sesame oil, red chili pepper flakes, and covered the skillet until the whites of the eggs set but before the yolks did.

I made two bowls worth and it was really yummy.

I had planned to eat another two pieces of toast with the remaining avocado half as a late night snack, so I was feeling pretty good. Until, after putting the remaining kids to bed and cleaning the house, I realized that I still had 8 oz of tofu and 1 cup of kale to eat.

What to do?

I decided to take a cue from the future (at least how it’s portrayed in the movies of my childhood) and blend it all together for a refreshing, nutritious, shake. Yup, the most hipster shake ever: A Tofu Kale Shake with nothing else added. Except for tap water, that is. Oh yeah, and I figured, “Why not throw in some more psyllium husk fiber for good measure?” Make it a shake worthy of all the inhabitants of Brooklyn, whether they be hipsters or aging, constipated zeidehs (Yiddish for “grandfathers”).

True to future food form, it yielded about 1 liter of a gloppy, chewy, chunky, health “beverage” which I wasn’t sure I could really call food. But, I needed the nutrition so I loaded half a liter into my shake bottle and shotgunned it down.

I almost puked.

The flavor wasn’t half-bad, it was bland and needed some punching up, but the texture and temperature were what made it really, really hard to get down. There was still another half liter of the stuff and it needed to be inside me before the day was over. It also needed to stay inside me and I knew that shotgunning another half liter wasn’t going to accomplish that objective. That’s when it hit me. Soup. This stuff was just some flavor and heat away from being a half decent soup.

So, I poured it into a bowl, added some soy sauce, chili flakes, and ginger, and then popped it into the microwave for about a minute. When it came out, I gave it a stir and squeezed half a lime over it to give it some brightness. It was actually really good. It was a little hard at first because, like Prince Charming, I had to get passed the memories of its disgusting, cold, and bland step-sister, but in the end it was actually really good…

As planned, I finished off the night with some toast, half an avocado, and a blog post.

I feel full and happy. How about you?

*For those observant Jewish or strict vegetarian readers, I buy flat leaf kale (AKA Lacinato Kale, Dinosaur Kale, Tuscan Kale, or Cavolo Nero) which is much easier (read: possible) to check and wash for bugs. I save the curly stuff for blending.

I, like most 30-somethings, have been playing around with various diets and exercise plans in hopes that I will be healthy and lose some weight. My wife and I did “keto” for a while – I lost like 20 pounds but never experienced that “keto high” that so many describe. I spent a good few months walking about 5 miles a day while we were living in Jerusalem – I didn’t get in shape. We’ve done Whole30, I’ve kept a food journal, used MyFitnessPal, calculated macros, intermittently fasted, and not-so-intermittently fasted (I’m an Orthodox Jew, it kinda comes with the territory). The problem with me is, I’m not obese, I’m not insanely out of shape, and my health is mostly fine. I’m average, and average is a hard place to break out of…

But, I recently switched insurance plans. That meant a new doctor. And when you get a new doctor, he’s going to want to do a physical. And when he does a physical he’s going to want a blood test. And when he does a blood test, he’s going to discover the other outcome of giving a mouse a cookie. Namely, elevated triglycerides and an above average fasting glucose level.

“Nothing to be alarmed about,” said my new doctor. “Just eat better and exercise more.” He ordered a followup blood test for a few months down the road, gave me an ancient photocopy of some nutritional recommendations, and sent me on my way.

As usual, nothing major. I didn’t have diabetes or anything… At least not yet. So, I did what every good city-dwelling American does in that type of situation. I joined a gym and dropped a bunch of cash on a personal trainer. Yup, as usual, nothing extraordinary, just average. Well, at least average for a city-dwelling American, I guess.

Hiring a personal trainer was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. Meeting with someone at regular intervals who will constantly and consistently push you beyond your previous limits and force you to be better than you were the last time you met – whether it be in terms fitness or anything else – is an amazing thing. After a few sessions, Tim, that’s my trainer, asked me to start keeping a food journal and I, of course, obliged. He was right, I wasn’t eating all that badly. I had really started to turn my eating habits around. Until… “The Holidays”

For the record, these aren’t even Holidays that I celebrate. I’ve got my own set of human-faux-gras-producing food fests, and, believe you me, Jews do it better. Well, better in the sense that we know how to eat and our holidays are more like food marathons rather than sprints. Imagine Thanksgiving dinner for lunch and dinner two days in a row, then a break for a few days, another thanksgiving lunch and dinner, then another back-to-back two days. We do that every few months. It’s like HIIT training for eating.

But, I digress. Getting out of our normal routine is the beginning of all failure and, the Holiday Season was no exception for me. My trainer went out of town, the gyms closed for a full 24 hour period, and I was home with my family. My wife is an amazing cook, my kids are ravenous carb-loving animals, and I eat when I’m bored. Not a good combination. After a few days of this, I felt horrible and decided to do something about it.

I bought some fiber powder, went on a water and fiber cleanse, and tried to reset. That’s when it hit me. Once I reset, what do I do next? What am I supposed to eat? What is good? Resisting the temptation to re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and wallow in the philosophical implications of attempting to define “quality,” I did what we all do when we’re trying to figure something out, I went online…

I realized that every diet I had ever done focused on this aspect or that, but never looked at the whole picture. Humans need a certain number of calories to live. Those calories should ideally be broken down between three main “macro-nutrient” groups: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Within these groups, there are sub-groups which need to be looked at.

Within fats, for example, there are some fats which are “good” (like unsaturated fats and some saturated fats) and others which are “bad” (like trans fats and other saturated fats).

The same thing is mostly true about carbs, although, like characters in a good novel, it isn’t so much about good and bad as much as it is about context, timing, and nuance. All carbohydrates get broken down into glucose so that your cells have energy, it’s a matter of how quickly and how much glucose your body gets flooded with. Some starches, for example, take much longer to break down into glucose and so they provide sustained energy. Whereas most simple sugars are already glucose and hit your bloodstream pretty quickly.

Protein is more like a children’s TV show, no villains, but you need all the characters to make the kids happy. There are 9 essential amino acids (amino acids make up proteins) which the body needs to do its thing and you need all of them when you are eating “protein.” Proteins which contain all 9 are called “complete proteins.” All this is, of course, not taking into consideration the vehicle which delivers the protein. Take red meat, for example, it is a great source of protein, but also lots of other not so good stuff.

Beyond the “macro-nutrients,” there are “micro-nutrients,” otherwise known as vitamins and minerals which your body needs to do all its body things. There are about 13 essential vitamins that your body needs – these are chemicals that humans can’t synthesize and need to take in from our environment. There are also about 10 minerals that we need. Be careful with minerals, though, some of them can actually be toxic if you get too much of them…

Once I started looking at the whole picture, I realized that, while food journaling was great, it was nearly impossible to gather all the data needed on the fly and in a reactive way. What I needed was a proactive plan. I needed a way to calculate what was in the food I was eating, not just the basics, and how much of I needed to eat to make sure I was getting at least 100% of the daily recommendations for everything. That’s a lot of ciphering… There are 3 macro-nutrients (fats, carbs, protein -which need to be in the proper ratio), 9 amino acids, at least 4 kinds of fats, 3 kinds of carbs, 12 vitamins, 10 minerals, and a partridge and a pear tree (I know it’s not my Holiday, but the song is catchy).

I needed a spreadsheet.

So, I made one:

And then I made it do magic:

My beautiful spreadsheet tracked all the nutrients that a human being needed to survive, all I had to do was tinker with it to plan my food consumption each day and ensure (no product placement intended) that I got at least 100% of each and not too much of others. Being proactive felt great. For a while…

I began tinkering and realized that this whole “Perfect Nutrition” thing wasn’t so easy. First of all, the USDA or FDA or whoever forces companies to put those “Nutrition Facts” boxes on their products didn’t mandate that they include all the nutrients I was tracking – ironically these were the same nutrients that they had told me were required for human survival, but whatever. Figuring out what was actually in the food I was eating was a challenge. Beyond that, finding different foods that provided enough of everything without too much of something else all while keeping the three-ring-circus of the macro-nutrient ratio in check was way more challenging than you’d think. I was beginning to understand why in every futuristic movie, whether dystopian or utopian, they always eat some sort of gloppy soylent green type food…

And that’s when The Quest began.

After a few hours of ciphering (no Matrix pun intended), I came upon the perfect balance of good, healthful, clean, food that would provide “everything the body needs” and I decided to eat those foods and only those foods for 30 days and see what happened…

The foods are:

• 6 Slices Dave’s Killer Powerseed Bread
• 4 Eggland’s Best Eggs
• 2 Cups Chopped Kale
• 1 Avocado
• 15.5oz of Sprouted Tofu
• 2 cups of fresh green peas
• 1 1/3 Cup Cooked Quinoa

I decided that since my sodium intake was only at about 50% of the RDA (recommended daily allowance) I would allow myself salt. And, to spice things up a bit (pun very much intended) I’d also allow myself spices, seasonings, herbs, and olive oil (within reason). I would be drinking between 100-200 oz of water a day (the recommended amount for my weight), taking an organic fiber supplement (psyllium husks) to help keep things moving (er, sorry), attempting to go to the gym every day, and getting in 10,000 steps. Just the basics, you know?

What follows is the log of my quest for “Perfect Nutrition.” I hope to include recipes that I invent using only those ingredients (like Chopped, just every day), experiences, pitfalls, and just general musings about nutrition, the human condition, and life.

I hope you’ll join me on my quest and enjoy the ride!