As I recently mentioned, we've been kind of obsessed with eating in our house... but not obsession as in gorging, but eating healthier.
I have 'fessed up to my "not entirely bad, but a tad too much" 30+ lb weight gain over the past year or so. While I always needed to put on some weight (I know!), it just seemed like it kept on going to a point where I wasn't really happy about it. For awhile I didn't feel like doing much anything about it, "wallowing" would indeed be the perfect word. But a couple things finally lighted a spark, Todd having some high cholesterol #s... and me somewhat jokingly deciding to "play along" with his food diary, that he had been keeping for his dietitian... and the shocking results of my first day of doing that!
The amount of information we've absorbed over the past couple of months have been amazing and I think we've really made positive steps towards a healthier life. I thought I would share some of those things... with the caveat that I am not a doctor (nor do I play one on TV) and that works for us (Todd has lost 15 lbs, I have dropped 3 lbs in 2-ish weeks) may not work for you... but still I think this is still stuff that is beneficial whether or not you are trying to lose weight.
Given all the directions this advice has come from, I don't really know who to give credit to... obviously there is Todd's dietitian which has provided a lot of direct feedback to what he (and thus, indirectly, myself) are eating right/wrong... Todd has read two Michael Pollan books lately ("In Defense of Food" and currently "The Omnivore's Dilemma")... and a lot of it is common sense and/or stuff you've heard over and over again, but here's just some quick stuff we're doing (which Todd may have to correct me on):
Eating 5 times a day - My metabolism had enough and even though I know "it's the most important meal of the day" it was no longer OK with not having a steady breakfast for much of the past 2 decades. That worked for awhile, not more. The trick for me was to not make it work-intensive... yogurt, a fruit/nut bar, etc. Snacks are usually fruits, nuts, a cheese stick.
Keeping a food diary - As I said, this started as kind of a joke... but when my first logged day exceeded 3,000 calories... well, that was an eye opener... though that certainly wasn't a typical day (lunch and dinner out on the weekend). There are a lot of website that you can keep track of this (and for free)... and I can't imagine anyone won't be surprised by the results. My first change was the # of calories I was drinking in the morning... there were probably days I was drinking 200+ calories of Coffemate... which leads us to...
Food Your Great-Grandmother Would Recognize - Pretty sure this is from Michael Pollan, but the advice is not to eat anything that your grandmother (or great or great-great depending on your age) would not recognize as food. This was a light bulb kind of moment... and CoffeeMate was one of these things, I have a feeling Grandma would give you a blank stare if you mentioned stuff like: sodium caseinate, dipotassium phosphate, and sodium aluminosilicate. Other quick advice: the less ingredients the better. That's why I've made the switch to half-and-half!
And we've come to the realization that food has its parallels with smoking and global warming... the dangers having been long ignored and corporations more interested in making money than people. Stuff like high fructose corn syrup is today's version of nicotine of the 1950s.
Read, read, read - We've been doing a lot of reading lately, stuff like the Pollan books speak of things like I just mentioned (we plan on seeing the documentary "Food, Inc." - doesn't open here in Phoenix until late July)... we picked up a couple of those Eat This, Not That books, that looked kind of cheesy, but really offer up some great advice in a very accessible way. And just read nutrutional labels, it'll take you a bit longer to get thru the grocery store... but there is good (or at least) better food options out there if you look.
Eating In/Out - It's challenging to "eat right" at home, but we've learned it virtually impossible when you eat out... and there are just some crazy things out there. Again, taking a worth looking at one of these nutrition tracking websites to see what a typical meal at a fast-food (or heck, even a regular chain restaurant like Applebee's or Outback) adds up to and quite quickly.
Balancing and Linking - We're not on a food diet per se, but we are watching what we eat and in what combinations. We try to eat protein at every food session ... and monitor the carbs, which is the closest it ever it feels to being a "diet"... but not totally depriving ourselves of carbs, we strive for a 2-to-1 carb/protein ratio... the more protein the better. Also, we have found not to get too caught up with "fat" or "cholesterol" ... granted you don't want to go overboard, but those words are really not as bad as their reputations. Dietitian advice was to only go low or no fat on dairy products.
So that's pretty much some of the very basics... but it's been very interesting making this change and really not as traumatic as expected... drinking (or trying to) drink those 8 glasses of water each day, left little time for a soda (diet or otherwise) and after being a multi-soda a day drinker pretty much all my life, it was quite a surprise that I didn't miss it. Or that something like an orange for post-dinner dessert was just as satisfying as a handful of cookies. Well, not exactly or on every night... but more often than not it is.