An 80/10/10 day

I’m really craving fruits and vegetables.  Whether it’s the fact I haven’t been eating or exercising right as much as I’d like to (which begs the question of why I don’t just do it, but don’t bother me about that) or just the seasonal explosion of fruits and vegetables, it’s just something that I’m craving.  Think of how most people, including me, crave a piece of cake when they go to a nice a nice restaurant.  That’s how much I’ve been craving to just sit down with a watermelon and go to town (yes a whole watermelon), or a big bowl of berries.  Juxtapose that with a serendipitous exposure to some stories and podcasts on the 80/10/10 diet and I’ve decided to give it a shot for one day…tomorrow.

What is the 80/10/10 diet?  The name comes from the fact that 80% of your calories come from carbohydrates, 10% come from fat and 10% come from protein.  What that means practically is that you eat a ton of vegetables and fruit throughout the day.  Well, not literally tons.  It’s actually “just” pounds of fruit and vegetables.  As a point of reference the recommended daily allowance of fruits and vegetables are about 10 ounces each, so let’s just say that’s 1.5 pounds.  On a day of an 80/10/10 you will eat upwards of ten pounds of fruits and vegetables.

Like any other day I’m going to log what I eat, but because this is a rather extreme amount of eating, even for me, I decided to plan out what my day will look like.  I figured I’d lay out a reasonable amount of calories, about 2000, and then figure out what volume of food that looks like and what nutrient deficiencies I’d have for the day.  The good news, surprisingly, is that I won’t have any.  On the DV scale I hit or exceed 100% of the recommended levels.  On the RDA scale the only ones under 100% are Selenium and Zinc (at the 75% level).  The sheer volume of food is another matter though, and one I’m struggling to get my brain wrapped around:

  • Two pounds of strawberries
  • Two pounds of watermelon
  • Two pounds of tomatoes
  • One and a half pounds of bananas
  • Half a pound of kale
  • Half a pound of mushrooms
  • Half a pound of broccoli
  • One pound of carrots
  • Two ounces of almonds

The almonds, with some of the strawberries and maybe some lemon juice will go into making dressings for salads of the kale, broccoli, etc.  I figure I’m going to eat lunch out with people at work so that’ll be one big salad.  Dinner will be another enormous salad.  Honestly, as much as I love salads the idea of having it without one of my olive oil and vinegar dressings isn’t as appealing to me.   I’m not even sure how I will carry that much food to work!

The shear volume of eating and cost seems astronomical to me for an every day diet thing, but it is something intriguing and interesting for me to try for a very short period of time anyway.