...About nutrition, that is. I'm in the process of developing a nutritional plan tailored to my training, and things aren't looking so good.

The good news is my body fat is lower that I'd expected: 14.8%, which is at the upper end the zone I want to be in, and I'll only lose it from here. I'll want to try to maintain around 13-14% for my training, which is centered around developing extremely high levels of endurance and strength. The reason I want to carry that much fat is simple: fat is critical to endurance activities such as distance running and marching or hiking with a heavy load (road marching, cross country rucking). You can't rely on carbohydrate intake for energy, especially if you're talking about burning 2000+ calories in a run or march. Fat already stored is much easier for your body to use up than recently introduced carbohydrates.

Now, the bad news is the kind of food I'm going to have to eat. I love meat, and I'm not a big fan of most vegetables; fruit is alright but I prefer grainy food. I like eating a meal that actually fills me up, which fruit and vegetables don't. I love cheese—which is unfortunately extremely high in fat—but I'm going to have to eat a lot less of it. All of the food that makes my mouth water is going to have to go, except for the occasional indulgence. No more ham and cheddar omelettes, no more 20% fat hamburgers (it's amazing how much flavor the extra fat gives it), no more scrambled eggs that are as much cheese as egg. No more red meat at all, pretty much; I love my chicken and turkey but I can only eat so much poultry before I start craving some good old ground beef or ham.

The other big sacrifice I'm going to have to make is no more soda. At all. Ever. I'm not concerned with the calories, since I drink Diet Coke 99% of the time, but I am concerned with caffeine and aspartame. One's a diuretic—terrible for water retention—and one breaks down into formaldehyde (a carcinogen) at room temperature. Hell, I'll probably gain weight just by drinking more milk and juice.

Abstaining from food you like is somewhat easier than forcing yourself to eat food you don't like at all. I've starved and I've force fed myself in the past, and I recall the former being more pleasant in the short term. Get up at 6 AM, go run a very hard 4 mile run right away, and then come back and try to eat breakfast. I, at least, always felt sick at the sight of food at that point, but I had to force myself to eat for the rest of the day, which was either a 9 hour hike on challenging mountain trails or 8 miles of various hard running. I had to fight a gag reflex almost every swallow those days.* Anyway, the point is it's going to be somewhat unpleasant for me to force myself to eat vegetables that I don't like unless I get very creative. Of all the vegetables out there, the only ones I really like that aren't 90% water (cucumber, lettuce, etc) are carrots, potatoes, and uncooked green beans. Sigh.

*In case you don't know why it was such a big deal to eat, almost everyone at the camp (It was a week at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid for distance runners one summer a few years ago, for high school athletes. We saw the US men's volleyball team there; they were about 8 feet tall each. The bobsled team was there as well, all huge guys. The Iron Man Triathlon was there the week after, when I stayed for vacation with my family. Cool stuff.) was carrying very low body fat index (sub 10% for me) and the workouts were so intense, in no small part thanks to the heat, that if you didn't eat right you could lose two or three pounds overnight. I did, so this isn't hyperbole; with such low body fat that could be a serious health risk.