I am a voracious reader and considered “Omnivore’s Dilemma” not long ago. I didn’t buy it and I forget why. Maybe I’ll get it and find out more about what I’ve been trying to say here.
And speaking of trying to say, I can’t believe how serious people are taking my feeble attempts at joking. I don’t care about dolphins any more than tuna. Isn’t Mahi Mahi related to dolphins? I’ve eaten that.
But thank you anyway Begbert2, I know you’re not my enemy. Kudos to you for changing your habits for the better.
It’s a mite hard to detect sarcasm in plain text - especially when it’s pretty much masquerading as an actual position on a subject. For any position that’s so ridiculous that it must be parody, there’s a completely serious position that even more ludicrous…
Heh, don’t congratulate me yet, I’ve only been at this for a month. Historical precedent still argues that I’ll be back to stuffing down pizzas and potato chips by this time tomorrow. :smack:
A small portion of meat can easily satisfy if one also eats complex carbs with it. For instance, a three ounce portion of steak can be placed on top of brown rice, with grilled mushrooms and onions topping it. Or that same portion of steak can be cut up quite small and made into a curry or stirfry.
Today’s meats are actually leaner than they used to be, not fattier, as someone said upthread. I am glad of this. My father ate and enjoyed the fat on any steak we had when I was growing up. He told me that I was too picky when I cut the fat off my steak and refused to eat it. I didn’t do this because of health issues, mind you, I did it because I didn’t enjoy the taste or texture of pure fat. Now my father chooses leaner steaks, and cuts the fat off them. But he regrets not being able to eat that fat, or the chicken skin.
Corn is bred to have more sugar because it tastes better that way, at least IMO. While I’m a big fan of heirloom vegetation, I also know that some areas need hybrids in order to grow some sorts of veggies.
Most first world humans can get more than enough food very easily and cheaply. Since we evolved to gorge ourselves on sweet and/or fatty foods, this sends our bodies in conflict with our common sense. On the other hand, we now have photoshopped images of perfect bodies thrust in front of our faces every day.
I have an incredible urge to make and eat some canned beef ravioli with cheese right now. I know that I’m not hungry, and that it won’t taste nearly as good as I remember it tasting, but yet the urge is there. The advertising industry, our parents, and society as a whole has conditioned us with food triggers. I don’t have the answer to this, wish I did.
I haven’t read “T.O.D.”, but I have read “I.D.O.F”, and I loved it, it was one of the reasons I’ve been getting more heavily into growing my own food, yes I do live on a small farm (50 acres, most of them growing Timothy and Alfalfa hay for the local horses and cattle), but up here in Maine, we have a very short veggie growing season, so I’ve taken to growing things indoors
“I don’t have a yard to garden in” is not exactly a major excuse, if you have south-facing windows you can grow some veggies and culinary herbs indoors, lettuce is particularly easy, as are Basil, Mints, and some of the dwarf species of cherry tomatoes, if you want to invest a little more, you can set up a grow system using flourescent lights for relatively cheaply
get two 4’ long twin-bulb flourescent shoplight fixtures, get two Warm White and two Cool White 4’ flourescent tubes (40 watters) put one of each warm/cool tube in each fixture, each fixture will have a warm balance and cool balance bulb, keep them about a foot from your growing medium and raise them as the plants grow, get a simple mechanical timer and set it for 12-17 hours of light, this will work with dirt pots or with a homebrew hydroponic system, dirt is cheap but slow, hydro is more expensive but dramatically faster
as I said in my last post, we haven’t even gotten to the outdoor growing season yet, but using some simple dirt pots in the sunroom, and flourescent rigs upstairs, I have a bountiful amount of lettuce growing, plenty of ripening cherry tomatoes, some snap peas on the way, and even some bushing cucumbers, nothing has been planted outside, this is all grown indoors
plus it’s fun to watch your food grow from a tiny seed to a full grown plant laden with tomatoes, or to watch a veritable jungle of lettuce and herbs emerge from seed
once you’ve tried a fresh, vine ripened tomato, you’ll be horribly dissapointed in the (lack of) flavour of the force-ripened and refrigerated blandness that passes for tomatoes at the grocery store
Now, if there was only a convenient way to grow steaks (a Filet Mignon bush would be great ) cows take up too much room and are too messy to grow indoors…
I do think that the proliferation of cheap, high calorie, large portion foods are a huge part of the obesity problem. Humans, in general, have poor willpower. So if you have a big plate of delicious food, it is difficult to stop after only eating half. It’s the same reason many of us don’t have a big bowl of our favorite snacks sitting on our desk–we’d eat the whole thing before noon.
However, that doesn’t excuse the weight gain. It is up to each of us to manage our diet. I’m not saying it’s easy to manage, but it is your responsiblity. You can eat a proper amount of calories even in a fast food restaurant. A kid’s meal is just about the proper number of calories an ideal-weight person would need. So it’s up to you to order a small burger instead of the half-pounder.
The other thing is that your idea of looking healthy and being healthy are two independent things. You may like the way you look at 200, 180, 230, or whatever. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean anything in terms of your actual health. To find your ideal weight, you need to see how much you’d weigh when you have the ideal amount of fat. For men it’s ~12% and women ~18%. Go get your body fat tested, see how far off you are from that, and compute your ideal weight. That’s the weight where the weight-related health issues will be minimized.
So many people discount weight charts and BMI numbers by saying they’re big boned, muscular or whatnot. If you really believe the chart is inacurate, get your body fat tested, compute your ideal weight, and see if the chart is off the mark. “Big boned” is mostly a myth. “Being muscular” throwing off BMI is generally not true unless you are an actual powerlifter. For example, Lance Armstring is just about spot on for BMI and he works out like crazy.
And one of the points made in TOD is that the agro-industrial complex has every motivation to make sure you have plenty of cheap (because you buy more) food - and to make it as unsatisfying long term, but satisfying short term as possible. (You know the thing about Chinese food and you are hungry again an hour later - that’s the ideal place for someone who sells food. ‘Boy, that was good. And I’m still hungry. I’ll have another one.’) A bag of potato chips - cheap to produce, high margin, not filling. The high calorie thing, that is mostly a byproduct of food being tasty (short term satisfying) and cheap.
The OP is right. It is cheaper and more convenient to get fat than to stay thin, due to how food is grown, processed, packaged, and marketed. There’s really no logical argument against that, so I don’t understand why some people are piling on the OP.
Actually, I think the OP is false. The chicken of tomorrow did not cause the obesity of today. The cause of obesity is from eating too much and exercising too little. Cheap food and sedentary life makes it easier to gain weight, but that’s not the cause.
If anything, I think the cause is the attitude demonstrated by the poster. She seems to have the attitude that it’s too hard to figure out portion control and inconvenient to store part of her food, so she’s not going to do it. She doesn’t want to exercise unless it’s fun and convenient. So she just throws up her hands and lets her weight equalize wherever it ends up. Those attitudes when combined with cheap food and a sedentary life contribute to the obesity problem.
I think people pile onto these threads because people tend to externalize the reasons why they are overweight (processed foods, cheap foods, no time to exercise, big boned, etc, etc) rather than take responsibility for the problem themselves. The real reason they are overweight is that they are eating too much and not exercising enough and they don’t have the willpower to change. It doesn’t matter if they’re eating lentils, donuts or super-chicken, they’re eating too much and need to cut back and/or exercise more.
At last! A critical voice that’s reasonable and not insulting! Thank you filmore, you are absolutely right. I have not joined the cult of weight loss, and to some who are sacrificing and working out and denying themselves, it is blasphemy to think that someone might be happy at a heavier weight.
Actually, I have been working at this. My highest weight was 217. I am now fluctuating between 200 and 205. I avoid fast food. The colas in my fridge will be my last, which I’m actually quite sad about. I’ll probably replace those with pure fruit juices, hot teas and coffee. I’m also eating homemade “soups for weight loss” instead of full dinners. I’m walking more, and as soon as I can afford it, I’m buying a bicycle.
Yes, I’m upset with the way food is packaged, enriched, (or adulterated, take your choice.) I’m upset that healthier choices are more expensive. And no, I don’t hate myself for my size. Sorry, but I don’t. Does that make me a heretic? According to some people, yes it does.
You keep insisting over and over that you are happy being obese, that you like that idea that your size “intimidates” others, that you won’t join the “cult” of weight loss, etc etc etc. Then you follow that up with proof that you are following the latest diet craze*. If you don’t care about your weight, why are you dieting?
fads and crash diets like “the cabbage soup diet” don’t work because you aren’t changing your eating habits for life. You’ll go right back to overeating once you “go off your diet”.
Oh and also, pure fruit juice has just as many calories as full-sugar soda. You really don’t bother to read labels, do you?
Perhaps because she says she is 200 lbs and would like to be 170 - and the way to drop 30 lbs is diet and exercise - her point seems to be that people want her to be 150 - or 130 - or 112 - and she would be happy at 170.
I think her position on this, at least, is reasonable - and in fact might be healthier than saying “I’m 200 lbs and my target weight is 125.” Thirty pounds is a reasonable goal. If she looses that (and maintains it - another struggle) the next step might be ‘I wonder what 150 would feel like.’
30 lbs will make her feel better and be healthier. Its still heavy for her size according to charts and graphs, but it seems like rather than condeming her for trying for a target weight that is still heavy, its worth supporting her for the goal she has decided is reasonable. Her attitude is a hell of a lot better than “I’d like to be 170, but I’m 200 - and I don’t want to give up anything - if I’m 210 next year, well, so be it.”
Against my better judgement I’ll respond one last time.
I’m not on the ‘Cabbage soup diet’. I have two booklets with recipes for healthy, low-calorie soups which I have been using for over three years now. I don’t intend to stop.
Fruit juices may have as many calories as soda, but they are better for you than soda. I intend to avoid ‘fruit drinks’, or any drink with high fructose corn syrup.
Loose the fruit juice, substitute raw fruit instead. Fruit juice is essentially pretty colored sugar water. Granted made by mother nature, but it is otherwise mostly empty calories for minimal vitamins.
I happen to like ice water, with a single packet of powdered lemon or lime juice. I get it at the grocery store. I do a big mug of coffee with some cream and splenda as my daily treat [as a diabetic i get 180 calories of unassigned whatever each day, and I really love my real cream in the coffee, so I am willing to make my fat exchange and ‘treat’ calories as my morning coffee.] I will have iced or hot tea occasionally during the day and evening but my main drink is ice water. Just like my main snack if I absolutely need to chomp something tends to be celery. I like it with a small smear of hummus.
You can’t replace fruit juice with real raw fruit. Real raw fruit is not a drink. Fruit juice isn’t the healthiest drink ever, but it’s way healthier than cola, and you’re more likely to stick to something like fruit juice, which tastes nice, than something you don’t want to drink, like plain water.
‘Enriched’ foods are not the cause of obesity, but they certainly don’t help people to know how much they’re eating or work out a satisfying portion size - especially since sometimes the ‘satisfying’ part of a portion is in the actual eating of it, rather than just the calories. If each mouthful has more calories, then you end up unintentionally taking in more calories because you’re used to a full plate of food.
It’s a similar problem with alcohol - have three glasses of wine like you’ve always been used to, and you’re now taking in more alcohol than you would have done a few years before, because wines these days tend to be stronger.
I really wish people would lose the smugness about weight loss being a simple matter of willpower. There is nothing simple about it. Body weight regulation is a complex biological process that operates largely at an unconscious level. It’s more susceptible to willpower than breathing, but not nearly as susceptible as you’d think. There is a strong genetic component (confirmed by human twin studies and other genetic research) and clear evidence that at least one controlling factor (leptin) tends to be much less effective in obese individuals. Ignoring for the moment the 5% of obese people who are actually deficient in leptin and who can easily be treated, it now seems clear that a much larger proportion are resistant to its effects. Whereas a relatively low level of leptin in a normal-sized person might cry, “Ugh… no… you can’t possibly eat another bite of that,” much higher levels of leptin are failing to deliver the same message to the obese.
Translated… this means that in the current environment of plenty, it really, honestly is much harder for some people to lose/maintain weight than others. For quite a few, it requires an extraordinary amount of willpower (against dismal odds) that could otherwise be applied to an worthy endeavor with a much greater chance of longterm success. Just because person X can do it with moderate effort does not mean that it won’t be much harder for person Y.
To risk using an analogy, consider chronic pain. A lot of folks suffer debilitating chronic pain, adjust their lifestyles around it, and take ever-increasing doses of painkillers to get by. And yet, in many of these cases, extreme willpower and exercise could help patients tolerate the pain without drugs. We all know people with high pain tolerance. Does this mean we should withhold sympathy for the multiple accident victim who takes Vicodin instead of yoga?
Rather than judging or ridiculing people for the cards they’ve been dealt, let’s sympathize with their plight, respect the challenge they face, offer support if they choose to struggle and acceptance if they opt to spend their energy on other worthwhile goals.
*For those new to obesity research who don’t have journal access, there is a great series of free lectures available through iTunes University. Search that section of the iTunes store for “obesity” or browse in “Biology”.
I’ve never had to loose more than about 20, but one of my tricks (I’m not a big water drinker) is to water down the fruit juice (or the soda - I’m not big on diet pop either). You get the same volume of liquid, but cut the calories and manage to keep most of the taste.
I do this as well. I use unsweetened selzer water, at a ratio of about two parts selzer to one part juice, and it makes a very refreshing spritzer, with pretty low calories.
) cows take up too much room and are too messy to grow indoors…