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on eating better;
So, I've mostly been deliberately not talking about losing weight except to a few IRL friends, but then lately a few other people on my internets have been discussing it, so I figured I'd at least gather a linklist together instead of typing the same comment over and over again.
Why have I not done this before?
-it's like being a fandom n00b; you read all the wank, get to know all the common varieties of tinhattery, batshit and fail and form an overall impression of what canon is and whether or not anyone likes it. I am a total n00b and don't have a lot to go on other than self-experiments, balance of published evidence and smell tests. Those self-experiments have only been going on for a few months so I could easily be wrong even about what works for me, being as hubris is a huge bitch. And being such a n00b I am sure that anyone who's remotely interested must know way more than I do, right, so why am I even saying anything? (genuine apprehension here.) And all the wank brings out my antirealist streak and gives a hard time regarding any of this as true in any case.
-a sort of sj aesthetic purism; most diet writing is bad and exists to make people feel bad, therefore I hesitate to associate myself with it. This is obvious bullshit on my part, I mean, it ought to be like sex, in that the fact that so much of the writing about it is bad doesn't stop me from trying to write better things from my own limited experience and knowledge. But it's so totally my bullshit. (Silence is passagg with clean hands, it's passpass, it's voidspeak for 'shoot me'.) I talked to Ting about this feeling that I should be withholding comment, and she pointed out that when people do want to talk about losing weight it's largely in the spirit of hugboxy mutual encouragement, which does no harm to anyone. She is right but there are a few things in this post that I do not feel hugboxy about, notably cooking. Oh my god do I ever not feel hugboxy about cooking, sorry guys.
-weightloss has this bizarre distinction of being such a socially acceptable (even pressured) conversation topic that no one ever, ever warns for it, yet it's triggering to many people for a wide range of reasons and of all triggering topics it is the one that is most likely to actually maim or kill someone. Engaging with it is just weird, truly. [ETA: if you want me to filter you out of posts like this, or out of any other kind of post, please drop me a PM or something. It's okay, I have bizarrely normal do-not-want topics too.]
So everything else will be cut.
(seriously, read these if the topic interests you, skip the rest of the post which is just me navel-gazing)
The Fat-Positive Feminist Skeptical Diet from Greta Christina - this is a series of which I habitually link to the fourth part, because it's a good place to start and the others all neatly branch off from there. The series is a little repetitive but it covers a lot of research and goes into the mental depths of it very well, and I used it as a primary starting point.
The Fat Trap from NYT (if you hit the paywall, reload and then hit the stop button once the article text has loaded. I guess someone in the NYT web design department hates the revenue department because the paywall is the last piece of javascript to load, wtf). I've seen a fair bit of wank over this one, mostly from NWCR paleo types who swear they can keep weight off just fine, but they would say that wouldn't they? And this is interesting and the writing is good. [ETA: see also Yoni Freedhoff's response.]
The Perfected Self from The Atlantic - about rehabilitating Skinner via behavioural apps, with a focus on healthy living. It also notes that, contrary to the oft-quoted 90% fail rate statistic (more on this later), something like 30-40% of people can keep weight off successfully if they have medical support, which is what apps are now trying to replicate. I've been using the free version of LoseIt since July myself, along with four friends; three of them flaked out after a month or so, but the two of us who kept at it are still very much on track; this is nothing more than an indication that some people like counting things.
Cooking Isn't Fun But You Should Do It Anyway, self-explanatory from Slate.
DIET score from Weighty Matters - "Weight lost through suffering will almost certainly be regained." Also, Weight Ain't About Exercise.
Obesity and the human brain on BoingBoing - the tone is overly simplistic but it's interesting if you want to know about what happens when you feed human junkfood to rats (it is amazing what researchers can get paid for!)
I read a whole lot else, being as I am inclined to binge on information, and decided that amid the whole fascinating maze of wank there are only two things that are universally held to be canon; people should eat way way more vegetables than most people do, and way way less refined carbs - that is, white flours and sugar - because they are devoid of nutritional value and essentially addictive. All else is neverending, delicious war.
I think I said this earlier; I essentially had to look for the dietary reset button due to the sudden disappearance of any force of scarcity in my life. There's very little drama here, other than that chocolate and alcohol were always the only two mediums through which I found it easy to use money to comfort myself. As a rule, I do not like accumulating things; I'd rather have excesses that pass too fast for me to start hating them. Obviously while my issues are particular to me most (not all) people who want to lose weight have essentially the same problem; building sane limits in an environment of abundance that we are not equipped to deal with.
Also obviously, there are a few reasons why this is all incredibly easy for me (so far) compared to most of the dire testimonials one hears about:
-I'm in good physical health with no medical dietary restrictions and have been normal-weight for most of my life, though I've been overweight for most of the last five years. It was progesterone that started that - helllo, drug that makes your body think you're pregnant - but the progesterone weight whittled away while I was working a physical job that didn't pay me enough to sustain a decent gin and cake habit. It then came back in the last yearafter Ting started feeding me (I would stop blaming Ting for things that are not even kind of her fault if it wasn't so much fun). Also, I grew up in Nowheresville, Europe, and tl;dr while I did acquire a good few food complexes in the course of my batshit childhood, I'm old enough to have grown out of most of them and I had some helpful underlying frameworks like square evening meals eaten with family being the only possible option (hence my most obvious complex; I'm prone to eating too fast); plus I dodged some of the common batshittery (eg. food as a gendered moral purity issue) because there was no one around to instil it into me.
-I had an extremely good starting point in terms of having the ability to feed myself & being used to eating square meals prepared at home. However I am really not inclined to cut anyone much slack on this count unless there is some kind of literal impediment to them being able to have & use a kitchen. I learned to cook in really shitty circumstances, when there being food on the table was a) the only reliably stable factor in my domestic life, and b) solely my responsibility. If I could cook nine family meals every week when I was 13 and had a younger kid to look after, in a kitchen with bare concrete walls that was chronically infested with flies and weevils, you can do it now.
Yeah this is somewhat fucked up on my part, because learning to cook was an entirely miserable experience for me and I still find that it can be an emotionally unpleasant task in certain circumstances, and I refuse to be the only cook in a household of more than one (my rule is, on a routine basis I do not cook for people who do not also cook for me. Nobody is allowed to rely on me to give them food for longer than a houseguest length of time). But, see the above Slate article; it doesn't matter if you like it or not, cooking your own food is still a basic part of being an adult. If you're not doing it you're either paying someone else to do it, which is a waste of good money, or relying on someone else to do it [I just typed my opinion on that, hedged it, then deleted it. Twice.] Besides, eating is particular enough that the only way you're going to get everything the way you want it is to learn to do it yourself. (note that this is a general rule and does not apply to eggplants. Why do I fail at eggplants.)
-I have enough money that I can choose what I eat; HOWEVER, because the main shift I've undergone is to rely more on veggies and less on other foods, I've been saving money on balance, which is the normal experience as healthier food costs less than overprocessed food. (again with the obvious but this is especially true for what you drink - as a student I took to drinking little except water and green tea, a habit I have got back into lately). But it's not always about pure arithmetic; imo being able to easily afford obscenely unhealthy things makes it easier to not focus on them in the sense of rewards/comforts, and being able to cook meals at home is a wayyyy bigger health factor than the exact dollar cost of that cooking (which will be less than the cost of not cooking at home in almost any circumstances) - seriously, day to day the main determinant of 'how well' I am doing according to my food diary metrics is whether or not I ate food that was not prepared at home. Not everyone has the opportunity and leisure to have this much control over what they eat.
opinions I have formed about this canon:
-first up, it is an internet truism that dieting does not work, in at least 90% of cases. This gets more interesting when you know the definitions of 'work' and of 'dieting'. 'Work' is usually held to a gold standard of successfully losing weight and then keeping it off for over five years. Okay. So let's talk about 'dieting'. I have read, sadly uncited so I can't even judge how much selection bias went into this bizarre but allegedly true and I-can-honestly-believe-it fact, that the average American woman goes on two diets a year, which last for an average of five weeks and which cause her to lose 8lbs (I forget if this is each or an annual total), which are regained and then some because they never intended the change to be permanent. The social practice of 'dieting' aims for a temporary quick-fix, and successfully produces one. (As do most studies of 'dieting', though they're typically a very different quick-fix - as the above NYT piece indicated many feature starvation-level diets imposed on participants kept in a hospital environment, not anything that the above WeightyMatters piece would have rated as remotely liveable).
But anyway does that headline number now remind you of anything? Dudes, this is Sturgeon's Law. 90% of everything is done shittily. This is not a reason not to try; it is a reason to look at the difference between the average result and the best possible result and aim for the latter. This is pretty much Greta Christina's approach, and I assume it's also why medical programs are starting to see success rates in the 30-40% range.
-so have an annotated screencap from my LoseIt reports page:
trufax there is wank about all things except the veg. There's people fussing over plant protein being better than animal protein, people who think eating too much fruit is bad for you, and I am seriously prepared to believe the people who say that dairy products do not contain anything uniquely useful and should therefore be regarded as an industry lobby group rather than a food group. But everyone in the fandom likes veg as it is literal orders of magnitude more nourishing than any of the other food groups. We are supposed to eat, bare minimum, three designated US servings of them every day and there is wank about how the minimum ought to be 5+.
This wank is moot as only 28% of Americans eat their three veg a day.
There is a bit of vegwank if you drill down into details - some veggies are more approved-of than others, but most of the fans agree that you should eat as many different kinds as possible and that the skins should stay on (which saves time and effort anyway), so I've taken to regarding every meal as an excuse to cram in as many as possible. It helps that so many of them are so damn cheap - varies, obv, but there are tons of them that cost less than $1 per pound; bread and rice are about the only foods you can get for less than that. Eating more veg is the main ~lifestyle change~ I've made lately.
Fruitwank is lol, but I habitually don't eat that much fresh fruit; it's got much less shelflife than veg and I am better at doing meals than snacks, though I do love throwing fruit into stir-fries (current obsession; RASPBERRIES IN EVERYTHING). I also like buying giant bags of frozen fruit and mixing them in the blender (with water, or a little bit of fruit juice). We snagged the blender for $13 on a clearance rack about a year ago and have barely eaten icecream since. trufax I don't miss it at all.
-there's this one blogger who likes to say that eating without looking at calorie counts is like buying things without looking at pricetags. I like this analogy. Your budget might be anything, and you may or may not be concerned about sticking to it, but if you don't look over the numbers at all then you are basically sailing in the dark. Which is cool, no one has to give a shit about calories if they are not trying to lose weight. I do need to talk about them for a moment, though.
That above diagram, three-quarters filled-in, is what I aim for every day; enough protein, enough fruit, more than enough veg. (I ignore grains - more on that later - and I would ignore dairy but my milky morning coffee allegedly covers it anyway). Vegetables often have negligible amounts of calories; fruits have more but are still the most easily budgetable sweet snacks; protein calories can vary considerably - red meat and nuts are really calorie-dense, as are some kinds of oily fish, whereas shrimp is almost a freebie. But the tl;dr is that I can easily, easily, cover all of those nutritional bases and the cooking oil and flavourings I need to prepare them using under 700 calories, and I've often got them covered by lunchtime. The other more-than-half of what I eat in a day could be entirely gin and cake (nb. I do not really do this).
hyperbole time: remember the part where only 28% of Americans eat a minimally sufficient amount of veg on a given day? Slightly more people get enough fruit - about 35% though that may include non-fresh juices, which a lot of fans say are not canon. Either way, if you're looking purely at the intake of nutritious foods, something like 60-70% of people are effectively malnourished.
The average American reports eating 2100 calories a day, really eats about 2700 calories per day, gets about a third of that from outside the home, and is malnourished.
No shit do most people have fuckawful eating habits. Telling people to eat less is a giant irrelevance. This is, in fact, why this post is almost entirely about things I am eating more of (veg) and where they are cooked (at home) because taking stuff away from one's diet in any way is clearly at side effect or irrelevance level compared to the eat vegetables at home part.
By 'side effect', what I mean is that most vegetables are fibrous enough that they're very filling. I've found, and I did not expect this, that if I'm eating enough of them I'm almost never hungry any more, and I completely stopped craving salty things and I've a much reduced need for sugar. I figure this is why there is no marketing plan for the consumption of vegetables; because doing so reduces the consumption of the shelf-stable shit that makes money.
-on that note, gluten; look there were some fun times but I've decided that you and me just don't get along.
As previously mentioned, refined carbs have fuck-all nutritional value and they raise insulin levels, which makes a body inclined to store energy and disinclined to make use of previously stored energy. Fans agree on this so the grains wank is about whether whole grains are either useful or necessary; some fans think those are also bad. I don't feel a need to pick a side in that wank because I don't enjoy them enough to care and I eat enough different kinds of veg that I am not missing anything essential that whole grains contain, except maybe potassium.
Like the entire rest of this post I don't take this seriously on a day to day basis, but the process of recording what I eat, being conscious of it and getting a feel for when I want what, has shown me that if I eat bread or other glutinous things at breakfast or lunch, I am going to be both hungry and drowsy for the rest of the day. I was never that big a fan of glutinous things anyway, except of cake - American bread is still weird to me, and I quit bothering with pasta last year - I'm not that into it and it's one less pan to clean up. I still eat gluten in the evening if I feel like it because I can sleep the drowsy off, but ahahahaa if you are minmaxing calories and going for nutrient density grains are kind of a waste unless they're really tasty.
This has become a pattern with grains; I only end up eating them if they're mixed into things that are inherently awesome, often things eaten out such as pizza and sushi, though I do have a couple of boxes of tortellini in the freezer. (actually I have seven boxes of tortellini in the freezer but four of them are Ting's). I've taken to making cakes & cookies with ground almonds instead of flour even though the markup is absurd (almond meal is at least ten times as expensive as bulk-purchasing white wheat flour) and wouldn't be justifiable if my want for those things hadn't declined so radically (hence why I'm so convinced by the fantheory that all refined carbs do to you is make you eat more refined carbs). This is another area where liking food and being competent at doing it the way I like it interfaces nicely with calorie counting; I refuse to eat boring things any more and I am so asking my brother to bring me like 10 bars of G&B's Maya Gold because I want to contribute gigantic slabs of chocolate almond cake at Thanksgiving & every other winter occasion (EVERYONE has a winter birthday except Chris) and i am damned if I'm paying $4 a bar ughhh.
I did used to default to grains-for-breakfast but I don't have to right now. Back when I was working early-morning shifts I always used to eat either one or two granola bars while I was at work and then make lunch as soon as I got home - as I am currently still being a mooching loser I replaced this fake breakfasting with veg stir-fries and salads with tomatoes and raisins and poached eggs and spiced, broiled bits of chicken and smoothies with gratuitous bonus spinach; if I can plan ahead and box things up, I don't really see a reason to ever stop doing this, though I do still keep granola bars in my handbag as flat-mars-bars (<---a useful term I picked up from my parents, which they picked up from a climbing book; unidentifiable, squidged objects that live for months or years at the bottom of your bag, mostly to assure you that you have something to eat in extremis. A bit like dwarf bread only actually edible. I like having a couple around for roadtrips & unexpected delays.)
I'll reiterate, I'm not pretending to know anything objective, just overviewing stuff that I've been trying out. Apart from the gluten, the weightloss part has all been about minmaxing my way into focusing on more nutrient-dense, less calorie-dense food, but there's virtually nothing I like that I've had to quit eating (except for homemade fries - there is just no way to make them add up with any of the foods I like to eat them with, le sigh - and heavy cream, albeit only because I had two or three crocks of it go bad in my fridge because I wasn't using it often enough). There's a lot of things I'm using less of, but mostly as a response to overusing them in the recent past - alcohol, cooking oil. I've been using WAY too much cooking oil all my life and have only just started measuring it and going 'oh'.
I am sensing that this is the end of this post; I might do an ick post about the food I grew up with? Which was mostly good! Just bundled with the same isolation/control problems as everything else. Not sure if it would be interesting to unpack or just a whiny trainwreck.
Why have I not done this before?
-it's like being a fandom n00b; you read all the wank, get to know all the common varieties of tinhattery, batshit and fail and form an overall impression of what canon is and whether or not anyone likes it. I am a total n00b and don't have a lot to go on other than self-experiments, balance of published evidence and smell tests. Those self-experiments have only been going on for a few months so I could easily be wrong even about what works for me, being as hubris is a huge bitch. And being such a n00b I am sure that anyone who's remotely interested must know way more than I do, right, so why am I even saying anything? (genuine apprehension here.) And all the wank brings out my antirealist streak and gives a hard time regarding any of this as true in any case.
-a sort of sj aesthetic purism; most diet writing is bad and exists to make people feel bad, therefore I hesitate to associate myself with it. This is obvious bullshit on my part, I mean, it ought to be like sex, in that the fact that so much of the writing about it is bad doesn't stop me from trying to write better things from my own limited experience and knowledge. But it's so totally my bullshit. (Silence is passagg with clean hands, it's passpass, it's voidspeak for 'shoot me'.) I talked to Ting about this feeling that I should be withholding comment, and she pointed out that when people do want to talk about losing weight it's largely in the spirit of hugboxy mutual encouragement, which does no harm to anyone. She is right but there are a few things in this post that I do not feel hugboxy about, notably cooking. Oh my god do I ever not feel hugboxy about cooking, sorry guys.
-weightloss has this bizarre distinction of being such a socially acceptable (even pressured) conversation topic that no one ever, ever warns for it, yet it's triggering to many people for a wide range of reasons and of all triggering topics it is the one that is most likely to actually maim or kill someone. Engaging with it is just weird, truly. [ETA: if you want me to filter you out of posts like this, or out of any other kind of post, please drop me a PM or something. It's okay, I have bizarrely normal do-not-want topics too.]
So everything else will be cut.
(seriously, read these if the topic interests you, skip the rest of the post which is just me navel-gazing)
The Fat-Positive Feminist Skeptical Diet from Greta Christina - this is a series of which I habitually link to the fourth part, because it's a good place to start and the others all neatly branch off from there. The series is a little repetitive but it covers a lot of research and goes into the mental depths of it very well, and I used it as a primary starting point.
The Fat Trap from NYT (if you hit the paywall, reload and then hit the stop button once the article text has loaded. I guess someone in the NYT web design department hates the revenue department because the paywall is the last piece of javascript to load, wtf). I've seen a fair bit of wank over this one, mostly from NWCR paleo types who swear they can keep weight off just fine, but they would say that wouldn't they? And this is interesting and the writing is good. [ETA: see also Yoni Freedhoff's response.]
The Perfected Self from The Atlantic - about rehabilitating Skinner via behavioural apps, with a focus on healthy living. It also notes that, contrary to the oft-quoted 90% fail rate statistic (more on this later), something like 30-40% of people can keep weight off successfully if they have medical support, which is what apps are now trying to replicate. I've been using the free version of LoseIt since July myself, along with four friends; three of them flaked out after a month or so, but the two of us who kept at it are still very much on track; this is nothing more than an indication that some people like counting things.
Cooking Isn't Fun But You Should Do It Anyway, self-explanatory from Slate.
DIET score from Weighty Matters - "Weight lost through suffering will almost certainly be regained." Also, Weight Ain't About Exercise.
Obesity and the human brain on BoingBoing - the tone is overly simplistic but it's interesting if you want to know about what happens when you feed human junkfood to rats (it is amazing what researchers can get paid for!)
I read a whole lot else, being as I am inclined to binge on information, and decided that amid the whole fascinating maze of wank there are only two things that are universally held to be canon; people should eat way way more vegetables than most people do, and way way less refined carbs - that is, white flours and sugar - because they are devoid of nutritional value and essentially addictive. All else is neverending, delicious war.
I think I said this earlier; I essentially had to look for the dietary reset button due to the sudden disappearance of any force of scarcity in my life. There's very little drama here, other than that chocolate and alcohol were always the only two mediums through which I found it easy to use money to comfort myself. As a rule, I do not like accumulating things; I'd rather have excesses that pass too fast for me to start hating them. Obviously while my issues are particular to me most (not all) people who want to lose weight have essentially the same problem; building sane limits in an environment of abundance that we are not equipped to deal with.
Also obviously, there are a few reasons why this is all incredibly easy for me (so far) compared to most of the dire testimonials one hears about:
-I'm in good physical health with no medical dietary restrictions and have been normal-weight for most of my life, though I've been overweight for most of the last five years. It was progesterone that started that - helllo, drug that makes your body think you're pregnant - but the progesterone weight whittled away while I was working a physical job that didn't pay me enough to sustain a decent gin and cake habit. It then came back in the last year
-I had an extremely good starting point in terms of having the ability to feed myself & being used to eating square meals prepared at home. However I am really not inclined to cut anyone much slack on this count unless there is some kind of literal impediment to them being able to have & use a kitchen. I learned to cook in really shitty circumstances, when there being food on the table was a) the only reliably stable factor in my domestic life, and b) solely my responsibility. If I could cook nine family meals every week when I was 13 and had a younger kid to look after, in a kitchen with bare concrete walls that was chronically infested with flies and weevils, you can do it now.
Yeah this is somewhat fucked up on my part, because learning to cook was an entirely miserable experience for me and I still find that it can be an emotionally unpleasant task in certain circumstances, and I refuse to be the only cook in a household of more than one (my rule is, on a routine basis I do not cook for people who do not also cook for me. Nobody is allowed to rely on me to give them food for longer than a houseguest length of time). But, see the above Slate article; it doesn't matter if you like it or not, cooking your own food is still a basic part of being an adult. If you're not doing it you're either paying someone else to do it, which is a waste of good money, or relying on someone else to do it [I just typed my opinion on that, hedged it, then deleted it. Twice.] Besides, eating is particular enough that the only way you're going to get everything the way you want it is to learn to do it yourself. (note that this is a general rule and does not apply to eggplants. Why do I fail at eggplants.)
-I have enough money that I can choose what I eat; HOWEVER, because the main shift I've undergone is to rely more on veggies and less on other foods, I've been saving money on balance, which is the normal experience as healthier food costs less than overprocessed food. (again with the obvious but this is especially true for what you drink - as a student I took to drinking little except water and green tea, a habit I have got back into lately). But it's not always about pure arithmetic; imo being able to easily afford obscenely unhealthy things makes it easier to not focus on them in the sense of rewards/comforts, and being able to cook meals at home is a wayyyy bigger health factor than the exact dollar cost of that cooking (which will be less than the cost of not cooking at home in almost any circumstances) - seriously, day to day the main determinant of 'how well' I am doing according to my food diary metrics is whether or not I ate food that was not prepared at home. Not everyone has the opportunity and leisure to have this much control over what they eat.
opinions I have formed about this canon:
-first up, it is an internet truism that dieting does not work, in at least 90% of cases. This gets more interesting when you know the definitions of 'work' and of 'dieting'. 'Work' is usually held to a gold standard of successfully losing weight and then keeping it off for over five years. Okay. So let's talk about 'dieting'. I have read, sadly uncited so I can't even judge how much selection bias went into this bizarre but allegedly true and I-can-honestly-believe-it fact, that the average American woman goes on two diets a year, which last for an average of five weeks and which cause her to lose 8lbs (I forget if this is each or an annual total), which are regained and then some because they never intended the change to be permanent. The social practice of 'dieting' aims for a temporary quick-fix, and successfully produces one. (As do most studies of 'dieting', though they're typically a very different quick-fix - as the above NYT piece indicated many feature starvation-level diets imposed on participants kept in a hospital environment, not anything that the above WeightyMatters piece would have rated as remotely liveable).
But anyway does that headline number now remind you of anything? Dudes, this is Sturgeon's Law. 90% of everything is done shittily. This is not a reason not to try; it is a reason to look at the difference between the average result and the best possible result and aim for the latter. This is pretty much Greta Christina's approach, and I assume it's also why medical programs are starting to see success rates in the 30-40% range.
-so have an annotated screencap from my LoseIt reports page:
trufax there is wank about all things except the veg. There's people fussing over plant protein being better than animal protein, people who think eating too much fruit is bad for you, and I am seriously prepared to believe the people who say that dairy products do not contain anything uniquely useful and should therefore be regarded as an industry lobby group rather than a food group. But everyone in the fandom likes veg as it is literal orders of magnitude more nourishing than any of the other food groups. We are supposed to eat, bare minimum, three designated US servings of them every day and there is wank about how the minimum ought to be 5+.
This wank is moot as only 28% of Americans eat their three veg a day.
There is a bit of vegwank if you drill down into details - some veggies are more approved-of than others, but most of the fans agree that you should eat as many different kinds as possible and that the skins should stay on (which saves time and effort anyway), so I've taken to regarding every meal as an excuse to cram in as many as possible. It helps that so many of them are so damn cheap - varies, obv, but there are tons of them that cost less than $1 per pound; bread and rice are about the only foods you can get for less than that. Eating more veg is the main ~lifestyle change~ I've made lately.
Fruitwank is lol, but I habitually don't eat that much fresh fruit; it's got much less shelflife than veg and I am better at doing meals than snacks, though I do love throwing fruit into stir-fries (current obsession; RASPBERRIES IN EVERYTHING). I also like buying giant bags of frozen fruit and mixing them in the blender (with water, or a little bit of fruit juice). We snagged the blender for $13 on a clearance rack about a year ago and have barely eaten icecream since. trufax I don't miss it at all.
-there's this one blogger who likes to say that eating without looking at calorie counts is like buying things without looking at pricetags. I like this analogy. Your budget might be anything, and you may or may not be concerned about sticking to it, but if you don't look over the numbers at all then you are basically sailing in the dark. Which is cool, no one has to give a shit about calories if they are not trying to lose weight. I do need to talk about them for a moment, though.
That above diagram, three-quarters filled-in, is what I aim for every day; enough protein, enough fruit, more than enough veg. (I ignore grains - more on that later - and I would ignore dairy but my milky morning coffee allegedly covers it anyway). Vegetables often have negligible amounts of calories; fruits have more but are still the most easily budgetable sweet snacks; protein calories can vary considerably - red meat and nuts are really calorie-dense, as are some kinds of oily fish, whereas shrimp is almost a freebie. But the tl;dr is that I can easily, easily, cover all of those nutritional bases and the cooking oil and flavourings I need to prepare them using under 700 calories, and I've often got them covered by lunchtime. The other more-than-half of what I eat in a day could be entirely gin and cake (nb. I do not really do this).
hyperbole time: remember the part where only 28% of Americans eat a minimally sufficient amount of veg on a given day? Slightly more people get enough fruit - about 35% though that may include non-fresh juices, which a lot of fans say are not canon. Either way, if you're looking purely at the intake of nutritious foods, something like 60-70% of people are effectively malnourished.
The average American reports eating 2100 calories a day, really eats about 2700 calories per day, gets about a third of that from outside the home, and is malnourished.
No shit do most people have fuckawful eating habits. Telling people to eat less is a giant irrelevance. This is, in fact, why this post is almost entirely about things I am eating more of (veg) and where they are cooked (at home) because taking stuff away from one's diet in any way is clearly at side effect or irrelevance level compared to the eat vegetables at home part.
By 'side effect', what I mean is that most vegetables are fibrous enough that they're very filling. I've found, and I did not expect this, that if I'm eating enough of them I'm almost never hungry any more, and I completely stopped craving salty things and I've a much reduced need for sugar. I figure this is why there is no marketing plan for the consumption of vegetables; because doing so reduces the consumption of the shelf-stable shit that makes money.
-on that note, gluten; look there were some fun times but I've decided that you and me just don't get along.
As previously mentioned, refined carbs have fuck-all nutritional value and they raise insulin levels, which makes a body inclined to store energy and disinclined to make use of previously stored energy. Fans agree on this so the grains wank is about whether whole grains are either useful or necessary; some fans think those are also bad. I don't feel a need to pick a side in that wank because I don't enjoy them enough to care and I eat enough different kinds of veg that I am not missing anything essential that whole grains contain, except maybe potassium.
Like the entire rest of this post I don't take this seriously on a day to day basis, but the process of recording what I eat, being conscious of it and getting a feel for when I want what, has shown me that if I eat bread or other glutinous things at breakfast or lunch, I am going to be both hungry and drowsy for the rest of the day. I was never that big a fan of glutinous things anyway, except of cake - American bread is still weird to me, and I quit bothering with pasta last year - I'm not that into it and it's one less pan to clean up. I still eat gluten in the evening if I feel like it because I can sleep the drowsy off, but ahahahaa if you are minmaxing calories and going for nutrient density grains are kind of a waste unless they're really tasty.
This has become a pattern with grains; I only end up eating them if they're mixed into things that are inherently awesome, often things eaten out such as pizza and sushi, though I do have a couple of boxes of tortellini in the freezer. (actually I have seven boxes of tortellini in the freezer but four of them are Ting's). I've taken to making cakes & cookies with ground almonds instead of flour even though the markup is absurd (almond meal is at least ten times as expensive as bulk-purchasing white wheat flour) and wouldn't be justifiable if my want for those things hadn't declined so radically (hence why I'm so convinced by the fantheory that all refined carbs do to you is make you eat more refined carbs). This is another area where liking food and being competent at doing it the way I like it interfaces nicely with calorie counting; I refuse to eat boring things any more and I am so asking my brother to bring me like 10 bars of G&B's Maya Gold because I want to contribute gigantic slabs of chocolate almond cake at Thanksgiving & every other winter occasion (EVERYONE has a winter birthday except Chris) and i am damned if I'm paying $4 a bar ughhh.
I did used to default to grains-for-breakfast but I don't have to right now. Back when I was working early-morning shifts I always used to eat either one or two granola bars while I was at work and then make lunch as soon as I got home - as I am currently still being a mooching loser I replaced this fake breakfasting with veg stir-fries and salads with tomatoes and raisins and poached eggs and spiced, broiled bits of chicken and smoothies with gratuitous bonus spinach; if I can plan ahead and box things up, I don't really see a reason to ever stop doing this, though I do still keep granola bars in my handbag as flat-mars-bars (<---a useful term I picked up from my parents, which they picked up from a climbing book; unidentifiable, squidged objects that live for months or years at the bottom of your bag, mostly to assure you that you have something to eat in extremis. A bit like dwarf bread only actually edible. I like having a couple around for roadtrips & unexpected delays.)
I'll reiterate, I'm not pretending to know anything objective, just overviewing stuff that I've been trying out. Apart from the gluten, the weightloss part has all been about minmaxing my way into focusing on more nutrient-dense, less calorie-dense food, but there's virtually nothing I like that I've had to quit eating (except for homemade fries - there is just no way to make them add up with any of the foods I like to eat them with, le sigh - and heavy cream, albeit only because I had two or three crocks of it go bad in my fridge because I wasn't using it often enough). There's a lot of things I'm using less of, but mostly as a response to overusing them in the recent past - alcohol, cooking oil. I've been using WAY too much cooking oil all my life and have only just started measuring it and going 'oh'.
I am sensing that this is the end of this post; I might do an ick post about the food I grew up with? Which was mostly good! Just bundled with the same isolation/control problems as everything else. Not sure if it would be interesting to unpack or just a whiny trainwreck.