Bento Challenge Week 11: Healthy/Low Calorie

So I’ve got opinions when it comes to healthy food. Variety is better than restriction. Fat is necessary for satiety. Complex carbohydrates are better than simple ones, but a life without simple carbohydrates is no life at all. And, most of all, the more quickly you lose weight, the more likely it is that your body will kick into famine mode and increase your hunger cues for up to six years after you’ve lost the weight, trying every trick it can to return you to your former set point. So yeah, I could stand to lose a few pounds, but I’m making sure to lose that weight as slowly as possible (around 10 pounds a year), mainly by reducing the amount of out-and-out junk food that I eat and by increasing my physical activity (which currently equates to about 40 minutes of laid-back biking a day, though I want to incorporate some more strenuous activity into there at some point). It’s intended to be a permanent rather than a temporary thing.

So I don’t have any interest in eating only low calorie lunches, per se. They’ll just make me hungrier when I get home after work. But since that’s the theme of the week, I figured a vegetable-and-fruit-only bento (with a bit of homemade balsamic salad dressing to keep things marginally interesting) would be a relatively painless way to go. I do really enjoy eating fruits and vegetables, and this theme gave me a reason to engage in one of my favorite hobbies: going to the specialty produce market and picking up some weird-ass plants. Yesterday’s haul included kumquats, green almonds, and kiwi berries, plus some extremely tiny sweet peppers, radishes, and multicolored grape tomatoes. I also got fiddlehead ferns and sea beans, but didn’t have time to cook them last night, so they didn’t wind up in the bento.

Then I used one of my slick new cookie cutters to imprint the OSHA Health Hazard symbol on some sorrel and called it a day!