Variety May: doing 30 in a bulked up area

I have to say, sharing a blog with Mike who obviously missed his calling as a monk in a silent order when it comes to depriving himself of things is looking tougher by the minute, but anyway...

Two things to do here: share my learnings and give you my top tips for food variety.

How did I go?
Here are my food variety counts for the 16 straight days I tracked and some notes where useful: 18 (just starting), 20(on a plane), 36 (in harness!), 31, 31, 26, 28, 14 (followed my dad's diet - see below), 30, 30, NA, 18 (missed a meal), 21 (no snacks), 19 (missed a meal), 30 (thai meal), 30 (salad lunch and curry), 18 (traveling). (These scores are 'raw' scores, not using the Food Variety Checklist. I will post about that in the next couple of days).

Not bad, hitting the magic 30 about 50% of the time. I am feeling well, I have energy for training and I have found that a focus on variety has no downsides and a surprising side-benefit: one of the great things I learnt is that if you aim for variety, you never eat huge calorie loads of pasta etc so this is compatible with calorie control if that's what you are after.

A big challenge this month has been that I have been in the UK looking after my dad who is on chemo. My main job there is to feed him up with hi-cal (fatty) foods and while this was problematic as I am trying to lose some weight it also presented challenges with variety. I deliberately followed his diet one day and it gave me my lowest food variety. The worrying thing is that our diet that day was pretty typical: fish, chips, steak etc. Without adding the fruit that I did my food variety would have been in single digits. I realised that loads of people eat this diet evry day and without varying it over the weeks and months: high calorie, high salt, few micronutrients - a time bomb...

Top tips
Here's what I learnt this month.
- Eat well! Sounds obvious but when you choose health you choose variety (see note on my dad's diet). Striving for food variety should be part of every lifestyle.
- Put nuts, fruit and live yog on your cereals
- Eat muesli! With yog, milk and banana on top you can be over 10 on variety before you get up from breakfast.
- A smoothie could also be good: add wheat germ , spirulina etc and you could be into variety heaven.
- Don't skip meals - we know that, right?
- Snack healthily: a great chance to get different fruit, veg, nuts and seeds into you. We know that too, right?
- Eat Thai and other foods that focus on variety and the abundance of veggies.
- Have a meal where you eat from the fridge: huge variety and delicious!
- Beware of repeating days - I think it's worthwhile trying to eat different stuff through the week rather than repeating the same 30 day after day.
- Eat with the seasons: for real variety through the year, eat what's in season. This is also cheaper and you can eat from local suppliers thus saving the planet as you tuck in!
- Travelling makes things tough so pack some varied snacks and seek variety.

Final tip is: live a varied life. Eat with vegans, visit the ocean and buy fish, go into an area of the supermarket you don't normally visit, when you see odd foods - buy them, go to some ethnic areas of your city and get into the local nosh. It has been great to see Mike also discovering this on the Vegan diet. If we are what we eat, then let's be varied, different and exciting!