I get this question a lot. Sometimes from guests at the cafe, sometimes from team members, a lot from friends. What does a Registered Dietitian actually eat?
Here’s what an actual recent Tuesday looked like.
Morning
First thing, every morning, is our All Greens juice or a large glass of water mixed with a greens powder. This gets me hydrated after a hopefully long — lately very short, with four very young kids — night’s rest.
I usually don’t eat much before 9 or 10 a.m. Not because I’m fasting on principle, but because I’m generally not hungry. I’ll have black coffee or cold brew from one of our cafes — we use Purity Coffee, which is independently tested for mycotoxins. I drink it with a splash of our scratch-made cashew milk if I want something a little softer and full of great fat, or top it with our Salted Maple Cold Foam if I’m feeling like something a little extra.
Mid-morning is almost always a smoothie or a smoothie bowl. My current go-to is The Pro Bowl with flax seed and creatine added in the base, and almond butter and pumpkin seeds added on top. The additional fiber, fat, and protein fuel me for most of the day. It’s built with real food that fills me up and yet makes me feel light.
Midday
Lunch is rarely planned. Most days I’m at one of the cafes, which means lunch is also something off the menu. I typically rotate between our wraps and smoothies, and tend to go on roughly 30-day trends of having the exact same thing. Lately the Ginger Greens with collagen, creatine, and pumpkin seeds added has been my go-to. All of our items are built from real ingredients I trust, and I eat at E+ROSE every day — sometimes three or more times a day.
I tend to go on roughly 30-day trends of having the exact same thing.
Often I’ll grab a cold-pressed juice from the case for a snack, or a shot for a quick boost. Cold Snap is my pick when I want something that really tastes alive. If I want sweetness, I try to get it from fruit.
Afternoon
Around 3 or 4 p.m. is the moment that wrecks most people’s eating. The vending machine is right there. The granola bar in the desk drawer is right there. The Starbucks pastry case is right there. And so most people grab something engineered to be hyper-palatable, full of seed oils and stripped-down sugars, and end up not actually fed.
I keep booster bites in my bag and on my desk. We make six flavors at the cafe; my favorites are the Peanut Butter Protein and the Cookie Dough Bites. They’re built from dates, nuts, seeds, and real ingredients. No spike, no crash, and I’m great until dinner.
Evening
Dinner is the meal I almost always eat at home. It’s a time to come together and spend quality time with my family, and it’s the meal where I most often don’t consume an E+ROSE item. Last night was wild salmon, roasted broccoli, and sweet potatoes with sea salt and avocado oil. Other nights it’s a one-pan chicken dish with whatever vegetables and rice we have on hand. Most nights it’s one of my wife’s many wonderful recipes — always with real, whole-food ingredients we source as well as we can. We routinely make pasta with homemade vodka sauce and meatballs from local pastured animals. Sometimes there’s wine.
I have dessert occasionally. When I do, it’s a square of dark chocolate, or one of my wife’s many specialties.
The thing I want you to take from this
None of this is heroic. None of this is hard. None of this requires a special grocery store, a meal plan, or a supplement protocol. It’s just real food, in whole forms, eaten when I’m hungry, mostly home-cooked or made by people I trust at a place I trust.
That’s the whole framework. Everything else — the seed-oil position, the no-cane-sugar position, the pasture-raised dairy position — is downstream of one decision: eat real food. If your meal is built from ingredients your great-grandmother would have recognized, prepared in a way she would have recognized, you’re probably doing fine.
The people I worry about aren’t the ones occasionally indulging. They’re the ones whose entire week is built from boxes, bags, and bottles — and who’ve been told by an industry with a lot at stake that this is what eating looks like now.