Cruising Diet Experiment - or, How to Accidentally Starve

[wind_magic]

I had the best of intentions ...

Stop eating fast food and other convenience foods and start eating the things I expected to eat on the boat while cruising. Canned corn, beef ravioli, dried lentils, rice, bake my own bread, make soups, etc. And it started of well enough, I was cooking, eating what I thought was a good diet, and I was even thinking how easy the switch had been and how much I was going to enjoy feeding myself like this.

But then things went terribly wrong ....

After about two weeks I got a little tired and was feeling a bit blue. Then I didn't feel as much like cooking and my appetite wasn't very strong. None of the convenient canned food really inspired me and I didn't feel much like baking. Instead of things leveling out I eventually lost my appetite altogether, and then it all got really weird. I started feeling frustrated, then things kind of spiraled out of control and I started getting depressed and I wasn't very objective or clear minded. The unusual thing is that I didn't even associate any of it with the way I was eating, I just thought I had gotten sad for no reason at all. Anyway, at some point I started shaking (literally) and that's when I figured out it was because I wasn't eating enough and abandoned my little experiment ...

I went out and loaded up on fast food and bottled juice and things for a few days and returned to normal - happy, hungry, full of energy, and back to the old me.

I guess switching over to a full time cruising diet is going to be a little more work than I thought it was going to be. I really am going to have to bake bread on a regular basis, I really am going to have to cook a few meals a day, etc, I can't just eat a few cans of corn and expect to stay strong and sharp. Who knew that you had to eat so much rice to feel okay!!

I think eating well while cruising is going to be a fair amount of work ...

[sailingdog]

Not really... it really depends on setting up the right type of meals. If you have the right meals... you can have fairly good, nutritious meals that are fairly simple to prepare and don't take that much time. I'd recommend you look at some of the pressure cooker-based one-pot recipes... many are quite good and really simple in terms of both prep and actual cooking.

[jboatjack]

I have a simple rule for racing, no peanut butter sandwiches and I must sleep in my own bed, at home.

[MARRSY]

Try throwing in some boost or ensure and vitamins

[PBzeer]

I didn't notice any fruit in there. There's nothing wrong with having some junk food. You're out there to enjoy yourself, not torture yourself.

[Sapperwhite]

Sounds like a college student undergoing rigorous medical testing for beer money, but without the beer money

I'm a big supporter of MREs. Lots of calories and nutrition in a single meal, easy to make and some actually taste good. The only drawback with them is the high volume of plastic trash. You can take snack food with you too you know, tasty cakes, boxes of little debbies, cookies, all those things have a decent shelf life and are loaded with sugar (stops the shakes from low blood sugar). Unless you plan on being a minimalist, pack some goodies. Junk food can be purchased almost anywhere in the world, even if it is just little hard candies.

Someone out there thinks you can eat been sprouts for 1000 days, and you might be able to, but I wouldn't recommend it.

[Raggbagger]

Try looking at how to store fruit and veggies , dry em , jar em and such
we allways had a tripple tier fruit basket hanging in our galley . You may want to look at macrobiotic diets and high energy food and their values.

After some research turns out that apricots are super high energy source so we kept a bag of dryed on hand for our midnight watch junk style munchies, rather than hackin away at a bag of tater chips , that does nothing but put you to sleep .

A little investigation into what works and what doesnt may take up some time but thats half the fun . Just bear in mind that the reason Limeys are called so, is because of their discoveries of disease prevention during the golden era of sail . IE chomping into a lime or any type of citrus for that matter prevented scurvy .

Yarrr scurvey dawg .

[jerryrlitton]

Canned food is notorious for having all the vitamins and minerals leached out of the food. No wonder you felt like crap. Stock up on the dried things and expect to cook now and then.

Jerry

[xort]

Did you any meat? How about fish? You are planning on catching some, yes?

Nuts make good snacks.

I didn't catch whether this was a plan for a slow cruise across an ocean or island hopping. How long do you plan on being at sea?

[sailaway21]

Windy,
Whew! After that second paragraph you had me worried-I thought perhaps you'd fallen in love. (g) You'll have to admit the similarity of symptoms.

One other thing on diet. You have to adjust yourself to the lag time of preperation. Fast food means you eat when you're hungry. Preped food means you eat 1/2-3/4 hour later and are even hungrier-or seem so. Also, if you are in the habit of eating at odd times for your meals it can create some of the same symptoms and worse. Your body does best when each meal happens at the regularly scheduled time. On ships, mealtime is inviolate and if the crew doesn't get fed as scheduled all kinds of quirks in personality start to emerge-miles from any escaping them I might add.

I'll also second the veggies recommendation. Dried fruit is readily available along with decent munchies at your backpacking outfitters. "some parts are actually edible" (I've just been waiting to work that into a thread for awhile-probably nobody remembers the commercial)