Yoga food

Yeah, I know you’re not supposed to eat anything before yoga.

But how was I going to make it through an ashtanga class on one bowl of yogurt and one banana, both consumed many hours prior?

I do this. I forget to eat. I don’t get around to it. If there’s nothing ready-made to shove in my mouth, I’ll just put it off for later, and then I wonder why I’m so irritable come 5 or 6 p.m. I will go to bed hungry and then get too busy in the morning to bother with breakfast. (please note that I will never go without coffee, however). I have often been accused of having an eating disorder, mostly by men.

But they’re oh so wrong. Unlike an anorexic, I will, if left to my own devices, happily eat three bowls of Cheerios, wash it down with two glasses of wine, and top it all off with a chocolate mochi. Unlike a bulimic, I will keep it all down.

I digress. I’ve been on this egg and rice kick lately. I always crave eggs, in any form, and I recently discovered pre-cooked organic brown rice in a bag that you microwave from Trader Joe’s. I’ve always been wary of any product that requires microwaving, but this stuff has revolutionized my life. Rice in two minutes! And it’s organic! And Brown!

You know how long it normally takes to cook brown rice?  I hate that this sentiment comes rushing so giddily from my mouth, but it’s just so much easier to microwave that shit…

And how virtuous am I now? My organic brown rice intake has increased four fold.

Which leads me to my yoga food – with my life thusly improved, I’ve taken to zapping a bag of rice and poaching an egg (sometimes two) so that it’s just runny enough to spill over it in a bowl. I season expertly, then fall on it.

With 40 minutes before I had to go to yoga, I had a fit of virtue and decided to heat up some leftover black beans and slice up an avocado as well. And I’d put it all in a zenny Japanese bowl and use my neato chopsticks that look like little twigs.

And since I was breaking the rules by eating before yoga, I’d only eat a little bit. Three mouthfuls. Maybe four. So disciplined! So reserved.

Can’t you hear the wind chimes?

But I guess I was hungrier than I realized, because after the first mouthful I tossed the chopsticks in favor of a fork so I could shovel more into my mouth faster. And my allotment of four bites grew to five, then six, and finished with a desperate lick around the bowl to get at any remaining bit of egg yolk or grain of rice.

Starving! I was starving! And right on cue, the universe sent me a big work-related problem and phone call, which made it clear that I was NOT to go to yoga, but stay home and EAT, which meant I was able to dump the rest of the rice and beans and avocado into the bowl and inhale it, all while trying to sound like a grown-up professional to the chap on the other end of the phone.

I was now too full to go to yoga anyway. I had another chocolate mochi instead. Ommmmmmmm…..

Tagged as: brown rice, eggs, yoga