You Are What You Eat

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.

Comments

[Joanna]

Ed,

Good advice - all of it. I am also on a life style change adventure (don't want to call it a diet because I can never go off!). Down about 25 pounds prior to Mexico trip and happy to announce that upon return I was up only .4 of a pound! Pretty darn pleased with that! I ate with everyone else, I had dessert every night after dinner and I drank - a lot more than normal. Keys to success - I was really active; I drank tons of water (bottled 'natch!); and I ate a lot of seafood. Since being home I am struggling with the sedentary day syndrome again - but it is my reality.

Food Inc. opens at the indie theatre right near my house on Friday - hopefully I can catch it over the weekend.

Happy 4th!

Joanna

[Todd]

Woo hoo! Congratulations on the weight loss (Ed and Joanna)! I was kind of in the same boat a few weeks ago when I had to go on a biz trip to Japan and definitely didn't have much freedom about what I ate - I pretty much had to eat what was served (try avoiding carbs on a 12-hour airplane flight across the ocean!). I was as careful as I could be and actually managed to survive the week without gaining any (or much) weight. It's pretty cool to see that it can be done - at least once you figure out a few basics.

[James in Beijing]

Good for you two!! We've also been on a health kick, starting almost two years ago and completely changing our physiques in the process. We were both irregular gym-goers, and while we did not eat a lot of junk, we had slowly but surely gained enough weight to make us both feel uncomfortable. Since then we've lost scads of weight--20lbs or so for me, and about the same for J2--reducing our body fat percentages by really amazing amounts in the process, and now we're slowly putting the weight back on, though this time it's muscle weight.

It's particularly difficult to eat healthily in Beijing, though, so we find that we eat in most of the time, venturing out occasionally only for a splurge. But at least good fruit and veg are available here pretty reasonably!

[Kim Dallas]

Hello,

I enjoyed your post about food/eating. Have you read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miricle? It is another good food book and her and her family's account of living off her land and eating local for one year.