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On Food: Enlightenment, and a healthy side of veggies, can make for an eye-opening experience

On Food: Enlightenment, and a healthy side of veggies, can make for an eye-opening experience

A few extra pounds were the last things I expected to bring home from a weekend of rest and rejuvenation at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y., a new New Age kind of place where the food was promoted as natural and vegetarian.

I admit to having some less-than-favorable, preconceived ideas about healthful food. After all, I was around in the 1970s, and the acid I saw being consumed wasn’t in the form of a flavorful vinaigrette. And, frankly, over the last 30 years I haven’t discovered much delicious cooking of that type.

So I stashed a half-dozen breakfast bars in a duffel bag, not wholly believing my friends who had been to an Omega retreat before and claimed great meals were served there. The “all-natural” peanut butter at the institute needed some more salt, but otherwise this dining hall food was excellent.

Because my agenda for the weekend was to diet and practice yoga, the first day I studied the nutritional information on many of the dishes, which seemed to be purchased pre-made. It was my first buffet with calorie counts and I know it would be a nightmare for restaurants to label all dishes, but as a consumer it was helpful to see the calories.

For instance, I picked the vegetarian meatballs with tomato sauce rather than cream sauce, because I like both and the latter was about double the calories. It’s scary to me how observant I am about calories, but after taking off 20 pounds from hard work at yoga, I want to keep that weight off. The thing is, I don’t think I’m alone. Many of the Omega attendees also examined the calories listed on the buffet.

Many of the individuals at Omega also shared an interest in raw food—a topic that came up twice in my little circle of conversations. One woman asked if the next big restaurant trend would be raw food.

“No,” I sort of snapped. “Why would folks go out for what is basically a buffet of the produce aisle from any supermarket?”

“Because more complex dishes, like almond cheese, need to be prepared by experts,” she pointed out.

“But can’t you purchase that sort of ingredient at a health-food market?” I stood my ground. “And raw food already fizzled out in fine dining years ago.”

The next day a “raw-food chef” introduced herself at one of the communal tables. “Isn’t your title an oxymoron?” I wanted to say. But I bit my tongue, as we were at an all-accepting kind of place. This undercooking specialist, a Barbie doll lookalike, then pointed out some benefits of raw food, such as that she had lost close to 30 pounds eating her own “cooking.” By the way, she looked fabulous and she had the energy to do hard-core yoga.

It seems yoga has become mainstream. Some of my young and hip colleagues at NRN do yoga, and, not being young or hip, it puzzled me before I started.

A former boss, who used to smoke cigarettes regularly and enjoyed frequenting bars with her husband well into her 50s, says she, too, recently became a yogi and after sessions she feels like she just consumed two drinks.

It turns out that many skinny chefs and restaurateurs, including Dallas’ celebrated Stephan Pyles, say they stay fit by practicing yoga. Another chef told me he got through his divorce partly by dealing with stress on the yoga mat. Since cooking in a restaurant is stressful and fattening, yoga is an ideal release.

So with not eating meat, exercising and calorie watching, how did I gain weight during the R&R weekend? I’ll just blame it on Omega’s talented chefs—who changed my perception of healthful foods—and the fact that those calorie counts gave the illusion that the food wasn’t fattening. And it wouldn’t have been, if it had been consumed wisely.

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