Minerva Rouge Posted January 20, 2013 Share Posted January 20, 2013 I am 19 days into my whole30. To encourage my other paleo Facebook friends I post pictures of my dinner creations and recipies. I recieved a message on one of the pictures from a girl I know from my jiu jitsu gym who is now serving our country in Afganistan. She was lamenting at how impossible it is for her to maintain a healthy diet. I want to send her some paleo snacks but I need help thinking of recipes that will survive being shipped to Afganistan. Please share your ideas! Thanks! :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aberrantatavia Posted January 20, 2013 Share Posted January 20, 2013 It would be tough to send "real" food, but yo u could send nuts, dried fruit, beef jerky, Lara bars. These items might not be ideal choices if she were stateside, but while she's over there, it would be much better than anything the military provides. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
habitualpurpose Posted January 20, 2013 Share Posted January 20, 2013 What about primal pacs or paleo kits (she might be interested to know that there is a military discount for paleo kits)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Minerva Rouge Posted January 21, 2013 Author Share Posted January 21, 2013 Thanks guys! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrsStick Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 Having been to Afghanistan, a few things she can probably find in her dining facility that I existed on while I was there: 1. Hard-boiled eggs. They're horribly done, over cooked, and you will lose half of the white when peeling them, but if you slice them in half you can use a spoon to scoop out more than you'd get if you peeled it! And if she smiles (I hate saying this, but it's true!) and asks for a number of eggs instead of just "hard boiled eggs" she'll probably get it. That goes for guys too, but the smile isn't as necessary. 2. Salad bar. Enough said. She may need to buy vinegar to have it there for a salad dressing, or just buy a paleo salad dressing pre-made, but it can be done. I usually just went with the highest fat dressing available as, again, I wasn't W30, just trying to make sure I was getting enough nutrients (it was usually a blue cheese one). 3. Steak night or seafood night. You can usually get crappy-but-still-shrimp on seafood night, and while the steaks are terrible, they're still meat. Not very well seasoned meat. 4. There was always a good variety of veggies. Not all of them involved corn. As for what she could use there: 1. A good quality jerky is necessary there. All they have there is MSG-filled crap. Same thing with any bars - they usually had Clif bars (hello, soy!) so compliant Larabars would have been nice. 2. If you make your own zucchini or other types of "chips" as snacking is huge when you have a bunch of people sweating that much daily. 3. Real salt. Not the iodized table salt crap that is available. 4. Fruit powder (vs. gatorade powder or whatever Crystal Light is available) to flavor water. No one likes drinking water that's over 100F if your fridge has broken. Adding a flavoring hides the taste of warm plastic bottle. Is fruit powder ideal? No, but if it's just dehydrated, ground fruit, it's at least healthier than juice because it has the fiber missing to help mitigate the blood sugar spike from juice. 5. Coconut wraps (so if she does get a sandwich, she can take it off of the bread) and paleo-friendly condiments (because trust me, the stuff they have is HFCS and canola/soy-filled! That's just off the top of my head. I was on a pretty large base while I was there so I did have the option of 2 different (German and American) dining facilities. I loved the German personally, but most of those ideas are based on an American dining facility. Different countries' facilities are all so different from each other that I couldn't begin to guess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emily Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 This is super cool... I wonder if we could turn it into something bigger? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrsStick Posted January 24, 2013 Share Posted January 24, 2013 How do you mean, Emily? It was just frustrating that all of the boxes contained horrible stuff - cookies, brownies, candy of all shapes and sizes, MSG-filled stuff - that I didn't want to eat. No, I wasn't even Paleo then but I was trying to limit my sugar. I ate plenty of food, but limited grains and sugar. Fruit was my go to for a while, until my shoulder crapped out and then the sugar demon took control of me. Came home, it was still in control. That's part of why I'm doing the W30. I did have two coworkers whose boxes sometimes had decent stuff...yogurt covered almonds from either TJs or WFs, somewhat "healthier" cookies with dried fruit and nuts instead of crushed oreos and chips of every kind, etc. But packages like that weren't the norm. And a lot of the huge packages we got were just chock full with cheap candy. People could only eat enough lollipops and they'd sit there tempting me. Just my two cents, though, based on where I was when I was there. My husband's location has some of the same issues, except his dining facility is even worse. He's NOT doing any of this, so I just cringe when his dinner consists of french fries because everything else was inedible. Oh, yeah, and he's training for a marathon while he's there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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