(Trying) to Enter the Zone

We began our 8-week experiment with the Zone diet today. Our goal is to integrate zone eating into as many meals as possible, with the understanding that life happens and the point is to move to towards a healthy lifestyle, not a picture perfect one. Over the last two weeks, we have been sampling some zone-friendly snacks and dinners to get a sense of what this lifestyle has to offer. The meals are enjoyable and I can feel a strong sense of healthy energy and clarity in the last week.

We started by designing a seven day meal plan with the help of a website that offers recipes and calculations to “zone” the meals. Prior to this, we followed a popular cookbook that laid out a six-week meal plan using a basic list of items. The final chapter in the book contains neatly printed shopping lists organized by supermarket aisles. The convenience was the key to making meal planning work and I was hoping that this new online meal planner was going to be similar.

The website was quite helpful and after exploring the options, we opted to have the meal plan calculated for us automatically. The results that came back were a little dizzying. Each meal was different and many of the lunches needed cooking. That isn’t feasible with a small baby and simplicity is what we are looking for. I made a few adjustments to simplify the recipes and programmed the breakfast to be the same for most of the week. Voila! The software generated the shopping list. Two pages of it. Hmm… Cheryl looked at the list. Looked at me. Looked at the list.

“Two pages?”

“Yeah, lots of little things. We don’t have capers.”

“I see.” Continued looking at the list.

“Or English walnuts,” I offered helpfully.

“Really? No English walnuts. Huh.”

This was getting complicated. Many ingredients were small amounts, like 2 teaspoons of capers or 2/5 cup of barley. Later, as we scoured the aisles of the supermarket trying to locate some of the items we were not familiar with, we puzzled about how much to buy.

Cheryl was gripping the shopping lists and paging between them. Scowling.

“These ingredients are in ounces, not metric.”

“Oh, I should have set these to be metric and not in ounces.”

“What? You could have printed these in metric?” Laughing. She looked like she wanted to throw a green pepper at me. All 16 ounces of it.

All the quantities were in ounces and package labels in Canada are metric. This turned our ½-hour shopping trip into an hour. By that time, we were both a bit frazzled. When we checked out, our bill was $50 more than usual. Ouch. After some discussion (well okay, bantering) we decided that we should check out the bookstore to see if we could find a Zone meal-planning book that was similar to the one that had worked so well for us before. They had three Zone recipe books, each one offering delicious meals but none of them was as planned and organized as the one we liked. What should we do?

We turned to our trusty friend - The Internet. Running a search for Zone meal planning books, we found a good one that also had positive customer reviews. The style was similar to our previous book and it featured shopping lists in the appendix. Things were starting to look up. A quick browse on Chapters and Amazon showed that the book was out of print but several used copies were available. The price was $29 and a bit steep for an out-of-print used book that we had not even read. That dog won’t hunt, Monsignor.

“What about Abe Books?” she said. The lady is brilliant.

Abe Books is a wonderful resource that specializes in putting used booksellers (you) together with someone who wants to buy a used book (me). They take a small cut of the action and everybody is happy.

So we looked on Abe Books and presto, there was a copy available for the tidy sum of $4. Okay, this was more like it. Adding in the shipping cost, the total came to just under seven dollars. It will be here in about a week.

So our adventure continues. We will eat the food we bought according to the plan this week. Next week, we will take what we learned and refine our approach – looking to make it simpler and more inexpensive. I’ll write updates about how it’s going and share the effect it’s having on our lives and health.

Bon appétit!