We’re Closet Eaters (And It’s the Best Decision We Made)

We eat before we go out to dinner.

Not every time. But often enough that our friends have noticed, and often enough that the question comes up. Why aren’t you eating? Why are you just having water? Is something wrong?

Explaining the real answer is more complicated than it should be. So most of the time we just say we’re not hungry, and leave it at that.

Here’s the real answer.

The Cruciferous Family

Our standard dinner: Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and eggs. Tortuga adds whatever came out of the crock pot that week, poured over the top of the broccoli. That meal runs for a full week on one cook. Sunday prep, weeknight execution, no decisions to make when you get home.

Polly likes to call this the cruciferous family. Brussels sprouts and broccoli aren’t related by taste — they’re related by what they do. Dense nutrition, low calorie load, fiber, steady energy. Trail food logic applied to everyday life, in frozen bags from the grocery store.

The crock pot is the actual infrastructure. One long cook on the weekend — chicken, pork, whatever has a good deal this week — sets up every dinner for the next several nights. Shred it, portion it out, and dinner is five minutes of reheating and assembly. We’re not cooking every night. We’re reheating a decision we already made.

Breakfast follows the same logic: old fashioned oatmeal, cooked up with protein added in. Not complicated. Not exciting. Works.

The Shake

The other daily staple is the afternoon protein shake — Muscletech Nitro-Tech, PB2 powdered peanut butter, and a frozen antioxidant fruit blend. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, dark sweet cherries, pomegranate — the Great Value frozen bag does it all in one scoop. Blend it up and you have 30 grams of protein, fruit, and a reason to not eat whatever was sitting on the counter.

The PB2 is powdered peanut butter — lower calorie than the jarred version, blends smooth. It adds flavor and fat without making the shake heavy.

This one falls somewhere between a snack and a recovery drink. It’s usually right after the afternoon WOD, before the evening work stretch. Tortuga calls it the fountain of youth. Polly calls it the thing that keeps Tortuga tolerable to be around by 5pm.

What We Figured Out Separately

Here’s the part that still surprises us a little: we both ate this way before we met. Independently. No coordination, no shared philosophy, no one person convincing the other. We just both ended up at the same place.

Neither of us grew up eating like this. It wasn’t handed down. It’s something each of us figured out through trial and error — through enough experiences of eating differently and feeling the difference — and arrived at separately.

When we compared notes early on, the overlap was almost exact. Same simplicity. Same priority on vegetables as the actual foundation of the meal, not the side. Same approach to protein as an add-on, not the centerpiece. Same disinterest in making dinner complicated.

It made the cohabitation part easy, at least on this front.

Why We Eat Before Going Out

When you eat this way consistently, restaurant food presents a problem. Not a moral problem. A practical one.

The options on most menus aren’t designed around what we eat. There’s a lot of fried food, a lot of heavy sauces, a lot of things that look good and feel bad afterward. And there’s nothing wrong with any of it — we’re not against it on principle. It just doesn’t match the fuel system we’ve built.

So we eat first. Fill the tank before we go. At the restaurant, we can have a drink, enjoy the company, pick something light off the menu if the situation calls for it, and not have to explain to the table why we’re not touching the appetizers.

The explanation is more complicated than the solution. The closet eating approach is just simpler.

Polly describes it as the cruciferous family problem. Once you’ve been eating Brussels sprouts and broccoli as actual dinner for a few years, a plate of cheese fries stops looking like food and starts looking like a decision you’ll feel tomorrow.

The Trail Connection

The reason any of this matters for someone who spends time outdoors: the stuff you put in your body between trips is what your body has to work with on the trips.

We don’t do pre-trail nutritional overhauls. We don’t carb-load the night before. We don’t have a special eating protocol for trail days versus non-trail days.

We just eat the same way every day, and the body gets there already ready.

The morning walk, the WOD at 4pm, the sunset walk — that’s the movement side of the equation. The cruciferous family is the fuel side. Neither of them is complicated. Both of them are consistent.

That consistency is the whole point. When you’re six miles into a twelve-mile day and your legs start asking questions, the answer to those questions was already packed in days before you started.