Max Pain

I ate way too much bread on my recent NY trip for my own liking. Need to fix health now

I got back from the US on Monday night. I was there for two weeks, spending most of my time in New York, apart from one dash to Indianapolis and finishing the trip at my sister-in-law’s place in rural Massachusetts.

In terms of nutrition, this trip wasn’t great. I mean I had a lot of good food - I had Ethiopian twice (at Meskerem, which I’d discovered back in 2010), tacos from a truck, at Chinatown, at Koreatown, at an Uyghur restaurant and even Khachapuri at a Georgian restaurant (awesome stuff).

But the problem on my trip was that I ate way too much bread. And there was no getting away from it.

Ever since I wore a CGM in 2022, bread is one food class that I’ve avoided. It is fundamentally made out of pulverised flour, which my digestive system absorbs way too easily leading to a massive sugar spike (and subsequent crash). I’ve also found that I’m allergic to some kinds of gluten - especially stale gluten - and that causes a stomach allergy, and that has been yet another reason to avoid bread.

In New York, though, I found that there was no getting away from it. It is possibly to do with how it started - my first day in Manhattan, I had a deli breakfast. Omelette with bacon and cheese (I think) and home fries. They also offered a plate of buttered toast, which in a moment of weakness, I decided to take. And that’s where the trouble started.

Lunch was at an office cafeteria, where food was largely salads and sandwiches. I reasoned that I’d already eaten bread that day, and so could eat again, and ate a sandwich. The same logic continued at dinner that night, at an Italian place where a friend ordered a side of bread and I dug in. And the next morning when I went to a sandwich shop close to my hotel and had a sandwich for breakfast.

I think this also set me up on a “high insulin mode” for the rest of the trip, as I felt frequently hungry and (being busy with work and other troubles) kept bingeing.

I ate breakfast on almost all days, and a lot of those breakfasts came with bread. I’d succumb to desserts after lunch on some days, and those would invariably contain flour. I ended up in burger shops, and burgers obviously come in buns. A friend took me to a Vietnamese restaurant and highly recommended their Bahn Mi, and that came in bread. The occasional pizza, a random croissant at a coffee shop - it all added up.

Also contributing to the lack of good nutrition on the trip was that my hotel rooms on the trip didn’t have fridges (and I changed rooms a fair bit). On my SF trip in February, I had brought milk, Greek Yoghurt, cheese slices, nuts and salami and stored it in my room. That meant a pretty good “high density” and low carb breakfast on most days. When I felt I hadn’t enough I could simply supplement with healthy stuff - something that was more complicated on this trip (though Manhattan is fantastic, and there was a Whole Foods 5 mins walk from the hotel).

I’ve returned a kilogram heavier, and it’s worse because two weeks of not working out means I’m likely to have lost muscle as well. And I’m jetlagged on the way back and need to reset my eating to a more balanced (for me) diet.

And I’m still trying to make notes from one meeting last week, of which I remember nothing because I’d chosen to binge on dessert earlier that afternoon and was in an insane sugar rush!