Nutritional analysis for the day

NUTRITION - FRUITS AND VEGGIES
A few thoughts on recent nutrition.

FRUITS
I've been making several "smoothies" (similar to Jamba Juice) every day. I use a variety of fruits and fruit juice to make them. Typical juice (base): Orange Juice, apple juice, pinneapple juice, cranberry juice and grape juice. The fruits used in the smoothie are typically what's on sale, which recently, my fruit list has been roughly: 1) Strawberries; 2) blueberries; 3) blackberries; 4) bananas; 5) Mangos; 6) oranges; 7) pinneaples; and 8) pears.

So, for example, just today, I ingested (via smoothie concoctions)
3 smoothies:
1) 1 cup of strawberries;
2) 1/2 cup of blueberries;
3) 2 mango;
4) 1 banana;
5) 1 cup pinneaple;

So, roughly, 5.5 "servings" (unsure of what constitutes a serving, but I'll use the term loosely here), today. I think the guideline is something like 3-5 servings of fruits per day. Of course, those are the servings of the pure fruit within the smoothies: Potentially more "fruit" servings via: the juice base (i.e., OJ) and the frozen yogurt bars (whole fruits evidently) that are used in the smoothies.

[Typical smoothie: 2 pieces of fruit; frozen yogurt bar, 1/2 cup ice, and some sort of liquid juice (OJ typically) -- all of it goes in a blender and it (hopefully) comes out thick. They're super delicious and seem to be working quite well for me.

This is a pretty typical day, I would say I've had two smoothie a day (need to check the food logs for sure) for most days in the past few weeks.

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I've noticed that I've been eating fewer apples though. Nonetheless, it's probably a good trade, because I now typically make a smoothie (fruit shake) as I'm leaving the house and it keeps my stomach full for several hours.

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The other thing I've noticed is this: bugs and garbage. The bugs love the left-over fruit peelings and are all over it. Also, I'm doing more dishwashing, because in order to make smoothies it really messes up multiple dishes and there's lots of spillage on the counter (I could definitely "straighten up" the house (apartment) a bit too!)

VEGGIES

As for vegetables I seem to be doing OK here as well. I typically eat a salad for lunch (either I go purchase one from the local vons, or I will bring one in with me from home). The other option is to buy a salad at Subway, which also seems to work pretty well (I often get the tuna salad, though sometimes the meditteranean salad).

My guess would be my typical evening salad is about 3 cups of vegetables (typical salad ingredients: iceberg lettuce / spinach; cucumbers; tomatos; mushrooms; celery; red peppers; green peppers and some croutons and dressing (either something like balsamic vinegar or honey mustard [I'm such an animal I literally squeeze bbq sauce and mustard into salad bowl and just eat it]. I often have croutons as well. I've measured caloric content before and it hovers in teh 400-500 calories sort of range, all in. Except when I use avocados then it goes higher.

I also sometimes make a fertuda (sp?) sort of thing: where I use the egg white product thing-ies and mix it with frozen veggies. My ex girlfriend made fun of me forit, but I subsequently learned that typically those frozen veggies are "flash frozen" and retain much of their nutritional ingredients, so it's not as vapid of nutrition as some may tell you.

FINAL THOUGHTS
In the end though, the most important thing for me to do (health and otherwise) is to drop weight. I'm a bit obsessed by it at this point, and while that's not perfect, it's probably not all together bad as well. I suppose the real problem is maintaining this sort of focus for the long term is not a very realistic notion.