Video: Eating Like My Wife for Our Anniversary
I celebrated 16 years of marriage by eating whatever my wife ate for a day. Whenever she ate, whatever she ate, I did too. I also created a special workout to commemorate 16 years of marriage, with 32 sets ramping from 1 rep to 16 reps and back down. The full day of eating and the workout are included in the video I made about it, which you can watch here.
Context: Intuitive Eating
My Wife has one of the healthiest relationships with food that I have ever seen. She eats intuitively, has never tracked a single calorie in her life and maintains a consistent, fit bodyweight. She also doesn’t have much of an exercise regime, other than recently she’s begun to track steps and shoot for 10,000 a day.
This style of eating does not work for me. Tracking calories has worked well for me since I began doing it several years ago. It’s enabled me to effectively manipulate my weight both up and down. If I ate intuitively, I would fail to achieve my physique goals.
My wife, however, has no physique goals. She has other priorities, like running the family schedule, making sure homework is done, teeth are brushed and mental health of the children is solid as they enter teenage years.
Typical Diet for the Wife
I thought it would be fun to track what she eats on a typical day and see what she actually consumes. There are some things she eats most days, including:
- Double espresso shot with a cup of foamy 2% milk and some generous squeezes of agave sweetener
- Spelt toast with butter, sometimes guacamole or cheese slices
- A nugo dark chocolate “protein” bar with 200 calories and 12 grams of protein
- Another coffee with foamy milk and agave
- Some kind of treat, usually a small pastry or cake from the local French bakery
- Our household probably accounts for 10% of sales for that place!
- Salad with oil and vinegar, feta cheese crumbled on top, sometimes with chicken
Then a few times a week, she will dine out, typically pizza or pasta.
It isn’t a terrible diet, she gets lots of vegetables and whole foods. But it lacks in protein and wouldn’t work for a middle-aged man who pretends to be a bodybuilder or powerlifter. She definitely has a faster metabolism than I do, because her calorie consumption adds up to more than I eat, even though she weighs 20-25 pounds less than I do at this point. That’s all genetics.
Takeaways
This was a fun day and fun way to celebrate with my wife, but I don’t think I am ready to eat intuitively. My physique goals are too important to me at the moment. That may reflect a misalignment of my priorities, but my passion for weight training is net positive for my mental health. Even if it does make me seem rigid or no fun when it comes to food. Glad she and my family is willing to look past my sometimes unhealthy relationship with food.
For her, I would like to see her cut down on the sugar, oil and cheese in her diet. I’d like to see her eat more protein, but it doesn’t bother me that much if she’s content with the way she’s always done it.
The 16 Workout
I wanted something quick with a lot of volume. The workout is 16 minutes long and involves 32 total sets, with each set repeated in a pyramid fashion.
- Sandbag over shoulder (1)
- Pull-ups (2)
- Sandbag over shoulder (3)
- Pull-ups (4)
- Pull-ups (5)
- Dips (6)
- Inverted Rows (7)
- Dips (8)
- Inverted Rows (9)
- Landmine Press (10)
- KB Swings (11)
- Landmine Press (12)
- KB Swings (13)
- Pushups (14)
- Lat Raises (15)
- Pushups (16)
I finished with around 2 minutes to spare, but it was a good, quick pump.
Hope you enjoyed the video, more to come, comment below if you have any ideas for future videos. Thanks!
