Sunday, July 10, 2016

Going NUTS for snacks

Quite often, I have conversations like the following:

randomPerson1: so you can't eat [a long list of foods] and it must be hard to prepare all of the food you bring... and.. can you have potatoes?

kiwi WITH THE SKIN, plum, and pepper
me: It is not so hard to wash and cut fruit and throw nuts into a bag. Yes, I can have potatoes but I despise them.

randomPerson1: but you can have potato chips!!! Why don't you just bring some potato chips everyday- it is so convenient to buy them and they are a real snack!

me: I remember saying that I despise potato chips. And who says it is a real snack? Just because everyone else eats them it doesn't mean it is healthy for you or tastes better than my awesome container of kiwi (with the skin because yes, you can eat the skin). Real snacks should be real food.

So yes, I usually get interrogated, and then the person comes up with a bunch of unhealthy stuff that there is no point in eating because they are just full of stuff that you don't want to put into your body... the reason to have a snack is to keep you full of energy between meals. A lot of the time I don't even have "meals" but have snacks every hour or two throughout the day. But these snacks are something along the lines of fruit, veggies, nuts, or hardboiled eggs... sometimes dark chocolate covered almonds because I need my cocoa fix. Also found RXBAR, which is a simple food bar that is substantial, with clean ingredients and no added garbage.

Today after going to an Bikram yoga class [35th day in a row], I felt inspired to change up my nut choices and bought sprouted almonds instead of regular (not sprouted almonds)! This is exciting because I had no idea what sprouted meant, which really meant that this was way out of my comfort zone ;) 
I found out that sprouted nuts allow you to easily digest the minerals in the nuts, which is a plus.
RXBARs and SPROUTED almonds!!!

hardboiled egg in Central Park
On my morning walk across central park from the upper east to upper west side, where I am an instructor counselor at an engineering/math/science summer program, I usually have a bag of frozen fruit and nuts. One day I was too low on nuts so stopped by the tennis center cafe conveniently located in the park along the way, and I found that they sell hard boiled eggs, which saved my morning! They have a good source of choline, which boosts brain function. When I was in high school, my mom used to encourage me to eat a hardboiled egg, cucumber, and pepper in the morning before a test because an Israeli newspaper wrote an article (aimed for students) about this healthy combination. I still try to eat this because it's like a test everyday when I have a group of 1st-3rd grade, curious, intelligent, and imaginative future engineers (and one future time warp specialist). And I must have enough energy because we build something like robots that could draw, model dams, or program a video game in the morning, and do math scavenger hunts, play capture the flag, or have intense water balloon fights in the afternoons. It is a lot of fun. 
filling up water balloons like it's my job... oh wait...