Food Fanatic

Michael “Nanny State” Bloomberg is at it again! Except this time he’s really trying to create a nanny state, literally. If you haven’t heard, starting next month New York City will implement new policies in city hospitals to encourage women who have just given birth to breastfeed rather than use baby formula. At first glance, this may seem like just another instance of government sticking its nose into places where it doesn’t belong, but if you read past the headlines, you’ll see that it’s an effort to promote breastfeeding, not mandate it. As the Mayor said, "Most public health officials want to encourage women to breastfeed at least for the first couple weeks because the outcomes are better. And if they can do it, that's great. And if they can't, they can't. We're not making anybody do it. We're suggesting."

What seemed to get lost in all the hoopla was this little tidbit, namely that manufacturers routinely provide formula to hospitals for free, to be included in “gift bags” for new mothers to take home. Really? We all know the lengths that food manufacturers will go to to entice us to buy their products, from verging-on-pornography advertising, to strategic product placement in television shows and movies, to celebrity endorsements – the list could go on and on. Many have decried food marketing aimed at children, but my goodness, marketing aimed at babies just a few hours old?

There’s been a bit of a backlash to the Big Apple’s plan to eschew rubber nipples in favor of the human kind. The primary objection should be no surprise. Who is Mayor Bloomberg to tell us what to do??? He’s not the boss of us! First he took away our big sodas and now our big bottles! While I can understand the opposition to the ban on 32-ounce servings of sugary drinks (though I think it’s much ado about nothing), I cannot grasp why anyone would disagree with promoting breastfeeding. Yes, of course, adults should be free to eat themselves sick. It’s their God-given right to abuse their digestive systems anyway they please, in fact I think it’s in the Constitution, immediately after the rights to vote, drink ourselves silly and shoot the place up. But can we get real about the food we feed newborn babies?

Lord knows I’m no expert on the best way to feed a baby, but I do see a pattern here. It starts with formula and then moves on to Gerbers and Beechnut. As soon as the wee ones can sit up, introduce Chicken McNuggets and Fruitables. Once adolescence rears its ugly hormone-soaked head, add in Dominos Stuffed Cheesy Bread and Starbucks Smoothies. When middle-aged spread makes its appearance, call in the Lean Cuisine. And in your golden years, don’t forget to drink your Ensure! You see, it’s now possible to live your entire life without eating a single food in its natural form. And of course, everything that’s added to these industrially produced edibles is completely safe. How do I know that? Because the manufacturers say so!

It seems that in this new millennium simply eating a food in its normal, unadorned state can be the most radical of acts. You mean, you ate an apple? A plain apple? Not applesauce, or apple pie, or Apple Toaster Strudel? Egads! You must be one of those food fanatics.

Guilty as charged.

Decisions, Decisions

As George W. Bush famously said in 2006, “I’m the decider and I decide what is best.” I love that quote because it combines an unapologetic bluntness with a childlike naiveté and so seems a quintessentially American thing to say. But back to my point, that pithy phrase makes me wonder something. When it comes to deciding what to eat, how many of us could actually say those words and mean it?

Not too many, I think, if I believe what people around me say. On a regular basis I hear all kinds of stuff that leads me to the conclusion that chocolate in any form cannot be resisted. Nor can pastries, cookies, ice cream, cake, pie, potatoes, corn chips, pizza, and grilled cheese. Or wine. (Don’t get me started on wine.) And this, by the way, is not the complete list. It seems that each of us has a litany of foods that we are powerless against. If they are in the house, we must eat them. Period.

Funny, but we don’t say the same thing about other foods. No one appears to have any difficulty whatsoever resisting broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, spinach or peas. In fact, these items can only be eaten if they are drenched in a magic elixir such as butter, bacon fat or melted cheddar cheese. Sometimes I think the resistibility factor of any specific food is inversely proportional to how healthy it is – that which kills us must be eaten, that which heals us must be shunned. It’s the law.

Well, I don’t buy that we are as powerless as we claim to be. Most people I know are pretty stubborn about what they do and don’t want, so I think the average Joe (or Joanne!) is capable of resisting anything, for no other reason than because they can. Consider this: if I were to tell you that you must eat an entire apple pie – every day – and you had no say in the matter, would you submit to my demand? My guess is that the majority of people would refuse to comply. Not because they don’t like apple pie, but because you’re not the boss of them!

Gadzooks! Why didn’t I think of this before? For decades, nutritional experts have been advising us that we shouldn’t eat the foods that are bad for us. Which of course just makes us more determined to eat them. But, if we harness the power of reverse psychology… Do you see? We tell everyone that they must eat ice cream at every meal. And not a puny scoop, but something on the order of Ben & Jerry’s Vermonster, a 20-scoop Sundae Goliath that has achieved near-mythic status. What you say, you’re craving a salad? Verboten!

Ah, wishful thinking.

Yet the truth is that you are the decider. Only you decide whether you or the Kit Kat bar is in control. If you think you have no choice in the matter, it is because you have become accustomed to surrendering your power, not because a candy bar is miraculously walking across the room and jumping into your mouth. With a simple locking of the lips, the outcome could easily go the other way. This might sound like heresy in the Land of the Baconator, but trust me, it can be done.

Here’s another quote that I like, from American food theorist Ann Wigmore: “The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.”

Medicine or poison? Poison or medicine? Hey, you’re the decider.

The Fruit of the Vine

Today I’d like to discuss something we all do, whether we admit to it or not – we lie to ourselves about food. What do I mean by that? Well, let me ask a simple question:

Do you believe wine is a fruit?

Of course not, you say. That’s just a joke! Sure it is, but when you say it, do you feel you have permission to skip the shiny red apple and quaff a big old glass of dry red instead?

I enjoy a glass of wine just as much as anyone. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a glass of wine with dinner or any other time for that matter. But wine is not a fruit. And it’s not a substitute for fruit in a healthy diet. (I’m ducking as I write this to protect myself from all of the empty wine bottles being hurled at me!)

There are lots of other food truisms that we use to justify our bad diet behavior. For example, you did know that chocolate is a vegetable, didn’t you? That food eaten while standing up has no calories. That a little itty bitty taste sampled when cooking doesn’t count – even a few (dozen?) itty bitty tastes. I don’t think we really believe these things, but the joke makes it easier to smile and say, “Oh what the hell.”

There’s nothing wrong with eating any way you damn well please. As long as you’re willing to accept the consequences, that is. But mostly, we’re not willing to do that. I know that for most of my life I bemoaned the fact that I “hardly ate anything at all” and still couldn’t manage my weight! It was easy to say this with a straight face if I downplayed all the little nibbles here and there that went on for most of the day, along with the “snacks” that I enjoyed after dinner every night. “It was just a teeny, tiny bowl of double chocolate fudge swirl ice cream. Really, it was.” And so the obesity goes on.

It took me a long time to start telling myself the truth about food. But lest you think I’m some kind of superwoman (you did think that, didn’t you?), I must admit that I still have frequent lapses. Like when I pour myself a rather large snifter of Pinot Noir, knowing that it is way more than five ounces (the official amount of “one serving” of wine) but rounding the calories down anyway. I know I’m full of crap when I do that, yet it doesn’t stop me.

It’s part of our food culture, to kid around with a wink and a nod whenever we want to be bad little boys and girls about how we eat. I don’t think this will ever change. All the intrepid weight maintainer can do is be aware and call themselves on it when it happens. Like right now, it’s a warm summer night and I feel like having a cold beer.

That counts as a serving of whole grains, right?

Dazed and Confused

Pop quiz time!

The question is: what foods would you eat if you were eating solely for optimal health?

Once upon a time, I thought the answer to that question was something that all medical and scientific experts agreed upon. I didn’t know the answer, but I would have guessed that it had something to do with the Food Pyramid and that it included words like “whole grain,” “low fat,” and “high fiber.” But then something funny happened. I lost a large amount of weight and found that, in order to keep it off, I couldn’t consume very much in the carbohydrate category. By this I mean bread, pasta and potatoes, often referred to as starchy foods. Yet when I looked at the Food Pyramid, I saw a recommendation that a significant portion of my daily intake should come from these types of foods.

Huh?

This just didn’t make sense to me when I compared it to my first-hand experience, so I started to look elsewhere, hoping to find the answer to my nutritional dilemma. After four years, I’m still looking. It’s not that I can’t find any data on the optimal way to eat – there is almost too much data out there – but rather that I can’t find any agreement on the subject.

Among the voices shouting out are the traditionalists, advocating a “sensible” low fat approach with plentiful servings of whole grain carbs, the very diet by the way that seems to make me gain weight. Conversely, there is the low-carb crowd, some of whom are quite adamant that starchy foods, especially refined sugar and flour, are the foodstuffs of the devil. Another group of folks are proponents of ancestral eating, sometimes called Paleo or Primal, which is based on the idea that our digestive systems have not evolved as quickly as our technology and so we should continue to eat the way ancient humans ate. And I can’t leave out the supporters of a whole foods, organic, locavore way of eating that rejects all industrially processed edibles. Many of these ideas resonate with me, the low-carb thing for sure, but also the idea of eating real foods that have not had all of their nutrients manufactured out of them. Yet they can’t all be right.

As if all this isn’t confusing enough, we develop individual food religions as well. For example, my “no-sweet experiment.” It’s only been about a month since I started my little research project, but already I can feel the orthodoxy of it hardening around me. Just last weekend, I was at a birthday party and I agonized beforehand about whether I should eat a piece of birthday cake. Would it ruin my experiment? Would I bloat up overnight? And would eating it shatter my “no-sweet” integrity? All this over a piece of cake, for a concept that I MADE UP about a month ago.

I’ve come to the conclusion that no one really knows the right way for human beings to eat. What works for me, what keeps my weight low but also makes me feel good, is a low-fat, low-carb approach without too many sweets. If I can keep some perspective on that and not get too dogmatic, I think I’ll be okay.

I think.

I Have A Dream

When I was a little kid, I believed that there would come a day when I would have my act together. Of course, I didn’t put it that way at the time, but I did have a clear picture of myself at maybe thirty years old, confident, knowing everything I needed to know, at peace with who I was, living a balanced and satisfying life. It was what I thought every adult achieved eventually, once the folly of childhood was shed.

Ha!

Here I am, fifty-five years old, still wondering if that day will ever come. Not surprisingly, I thought the same thing about losing weight. That belief led to a vision of me, finally thin, eating with ease, enjoying a diet that was tasty, satisfying and good for me. Food was no longer a source of guilt, failure or agony. As with my dream of being a fully realized adult, I saw myself calm, relaxed, and possessed of a rarified state of being where food was handled once and for all.

Well, that didn’t happen either. I’ve been successful in maintaining a one-hundred pound weight loss for about four and a half years, but it’s never become easy or effortless or “handled.” It’s important that you know this because the diet industry promises us the exact opposite. We are told that each new wonder diet, each breakthrough drug, each revolutionary program, guarantees that on their plan, you will lose weight and keep it off without difficulty or anguish. Success story after success story are paraded before us, each newly slender and jubilant (transformed!), vowing that they will never be fat again.

Hate to be a party pooper folks, but if you think that maintaining your weight loss will be effortless, then you are setting yourself up for a big disappointment. And possibly a big weight regain. I know this from bitter personal experience. I’ve lost large amounts of weight several times in my life and, except for the last time, I’ve regained every last ounce and then some. In fact, that was my pattern. Lose twenty pounds, gain thirty. Lose those thirty pounds, gain fifty. I was a serial dieter for most of my life, losing and regaining too many times to count, until at last I was one-hundred pounds overweight.

So what’s different this time? This time, I’ve abandoned the dream. I’ve accepted that maintaining a large weight loss is no picnic and never will be. I don’t always like what I have to do to keep my weight in this lower range, but in desperate moments, I channel the wit and wisdom of my mother. When I was a small girl, crying over some terrible heartache, how many times did she say to me, “If you’re going to get upset about that, you’re going to have a very hard life.” Indeed. It seems that the best way to deal with the hard stuff is to accept that it’s hard. Be a bit of a stoic. And then move on.

I’m sure this is not what you want to hear. You want to hear that there’s a magic bullet, a cure, an answer to obesity that doesn’t involve a measure of pain. But there isn’t. All I can say is, if you’re going to be upset by that... Well, I think you know the rest.

Restaurant Rag

I’ve been on vacation for almost two weeks now. I didn’t go anywhere, so I guess you could call it a “staycation.” It’s been a chance to relax, plus catch up on things around the house. One thing I like to do when I’m on vacation is go out to eat. It’s a nice change from the regular grind of stopping for groceries on the way home from work, making a quick dinner, cleaning up afterwards and all that. I don’t mind cooking on the weekends, when I have less to do and don’t feel rushed. But in the evenings during the week, cooking seems like such a drag. It’s work and by that time of day I usually feel that I’ve done enough work already. I’ve always said that the ultimate luxury for me would be to have a personal chef (along with a personal chauffeur!).

Since I’ve lost weight, it’s been hard to find restaurants that have food I actually want to eat. I’ve written before about my husband’s favorite restaurant, a neighborhood Italian place that serves LOTS of pasta. They serve salads too, but here’s the thing: salads are not their specialty, so they don’t do salads all that well. Their salads mainly involve chunks of iceberg lettuce (which taste like nothing to me), a few slices of tomato (that are usually pink and mealy), a half a dozen black olives, maybe a sliver of red onion and that’s about it. Why would I go to a restaurant and pay restaurant prices for something as uninspired as that? On the other hand, they do pasta very well, but, alas, I don’t want to eat pasta anymore.

It’s not just this one restaurant though. Go to a diner, or a chain restaurant, or even a cozy, local pub, and what will you find? Club sandwiches stacked three inches high. Bacon cheddar burgers. Quesadillas and enchiladas and burritos slathered with guacamole and melted jack cheese. Enormous plates of French fries. In fact, most restaurant entrees are enormous. Why is that? My husband will say, “But, look, they also have salads.” Yes, every one of these restaurants has a salad with grilled chicken. I wish I had a dollar for every salad with grilled chicken I’ve eaten since I’ve lost weight – I’d be quite wealthy by now!

I’ve found a few places that serve food I actually want to eat. Maybe it’s a nice piece of grilled salmon with asparagus. Or an egg-white omelet full of veggies. Or a restaurant that is very flexible and will allow me to customize a dish, have it without butter, or substitute steamed broccoli for the rice pilaf. Every now and then, my husband even agrees to go with me to one of those “good” restaurants. So, you see, there is still reason to hope.

Sometimes I wonder, could the average restaurant survive if it offered only healthy food? It seems to me that most restaurants thrive on promising an indulgent experience and I think they definitely deliver on that pledge! What else can you call an 1,800 calorie hamburger? But my real question is this: why does indulgence have to mean gorging on fattening food? Couldn’t indulgence also be defined as paying more attention to how a dish is seasoned, cooking it just right, or pairing foods whose flavors complement each other perfectly? Taking the time and care to prepare a meal that is truly delicious, as opposed to what I do most evenings, which is cook as fast as possible so I can eat and get on to whatever else I have to do that night.

We’re ordering takeout from a local pizza place tonight. I will ponder these questions as I eat my salad with chicken.

How Sweet It Is - Part 2

About a month ago I decided to try something new: I eliminated sweet foods from my diet. My motive was frustration. I had gained ten pounds over the last year, mostly due to an increase in snacking at night as a way to deal with work stress, and no matter what I did, I could not get those pounds off. I couldn’t seem to eat less either. Then one day, I noticed a connection between my appetite and eating things that were sweet, and – voila! – the idea was born. It seems only fair that I give you an update on how this very unscientific experiment has worked out.

As might be expected, the first few days were awful. I felt so DEPRIVED. I drank tea without sweetener. Ate my morning oatmeal without sweetener. I gave up Diet Dr. Pepper. Let me repeat that. I GAVE UP DIET DR. PEPPER. Believe it or not, that was the worst part of the deal, giving up my afternoon diet soda habit. And everything tasted so blah. I thought I would have to abandon the experiment but I told myself I would stick it out for at least a week. At the end of that week, a funny thing happened.

I stopped thinking about sweetness.

It was a subtle shift. My evening food cravings seemed less intense. I started noticing the actual taste of the foods I usually added sweetener to. Plain yogurt was suddenly pretty yummy all by itself. Not only that, but water quenched my thirst way better than a carbonated soft drink. I continued to eat fruit, which was the only sweetness I allowed in my diet, and it began to taste fantastic. I remember one particular peach that left me moaning in gastronomic ecstasy. And my weight dropped two pounds. I don’t think I lost those two pounds because sweet calories are more fattening than non-sweet calories. I lost them because I ate less without that non-stop sweet rush to stimulate my appetite.

Now after about a month, my weight is down five pounds and I don’t miss sweetness at all. I did have a piece of cake for my birthday last week, and then another piece for my husband’s birthday two days later. They were good and I enjoyed them, but they seemed like a special indulgence, nothing more. I had stopped drinking wine for the first few weeks also, but I’ve had the occasional glass of dry red recently without a problem. I think I’m going to keep doing this for a while.

We are told that the way to keep a healthy diet sustainable is to allow yourself a regular treat; often the advice is to work in that treat on a daily basis. (By the way, the word “treat” is usually code for sweet.) I think that’s wrong. If you eat too much chocolate, for example, and decide to deal with that by eating just a little bit of chocolate every day, you are keeping alive your beliefs about how much you need chocolate and the temptation will always be there. I don’t think we humans do so well in a state of constant temptation.

I’m sure some of you will read this and think it’s complete nonsense. After all, what is life without chocolate? But it works for me. Maybe someday I’ll be evolved enough to handle a daily dose of sweet tooth. Until then I say: How sweet it ain’t!