I see a lot of pizza in this list. Interesting, because it’s one of the easier things for me. Pizza and donuts are, like, staple office foods. If you stick a breakfast food in the kitchen, it’s probably donuts; if you have a lunch meeting to discuss, I don’t know, health insurance or something, pizza is provided. Since you’d be grabbing this food around other people, I grew very accustomed to not grabbing the food, because I didn’t want to be seen eating unhealthily in front of my coworkers.
Another one that I’ve heard frequently (at least from friends IRL) that I don’t much relate to. Aside from half-and-half in my coffee, I’ve given up dairy. I’ll even sometimes buy pizza without cheese, or like last Sunday, I went to Chipotle and got a rice bowl without cheese on it. The only time I run into issues is when I’m ordering off a menu and it seems like every damn thing has cheese in it. Sometimes I don’t feel like being that difficult customer asking for special dietary accommodations.
Oh yes, tortilla chips! Not a problem at home, but if I’m at a party or a restaurant and they sit those things down right in front of me, reaching out and taking one is practically an unconscious thing. Not to mention that once you eat one, going back for a second and third and fourth … feels equally unconscious.
I was with you right up until you mentioned cake. Macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, and garlic bread are all some of my favorite foods ever. Cake I can do without. Maybe for the same reason as pizza and donuts: it’s another one of those classic foods-mainly-eaten-around-other-people, where I feel self-conscious eating it so I forego it.
The first time I tried Death by Chocolate I felt a bit dejected that it didn’t really kill me. Hey! This thing was supposed to be deadly! Hello? Need more chocolate!
Best bad news a doctor gave me: blahblah low blood pressure blahblah… best remedy is salty snacks. Hooray! An excuse to keep salted peanuts handy! I can eat a small bag of potato chips when I’m low! Sadly in recent times the salted peanuts are being replaced with sugary versions and the chips have all gone lo-salt and gotten Og-knows-what flavored Couple weeks back we were joking that soon we’ll need to learn how to cook potato chips if we want to be able to have chips that taste like chips.
In my case the problem isn’t so much types of food as stopping before my stomach goes from “feed me more!” to “oops. Full. BURP”. If I’m the one plating I’m pretty good at controlling portion size (if I cook for myself only I weigh the ingredients); too often, when other people are plating they’ll add “one more spoonful” after I’ve already said “stop”. Reminding myself that leaving that amount in the dish is perfectly ok and no little African children in India will starve because of it needs a serious act of will.
My hard-to-resist foods are sausage, cheese, and potato chips (crisps). Yes, there is a theme of salt and grease there rather than sugar. Also, chocolate covered nuts (there’s the sugar!). Salmon nigiri. Smoked salmon. But really, for some reason I seem more inclined to binge on protein, fat, and salt than sugary stuff. It’s not so much they’re unhealthy as I want to eat unhealthy quantities of them.
Ah, just about everything I find tasty, it seems. Seriously, to a good approximation, everything I like is gonna kill me faster, everything I can do to stave off death a few years more, I hate doing. How do I find the sweet spot? If I only do the stuff that’s good for me, it’s like torturing myself to get more time to torture myself. If I only do the stuff I like, I probably won’t reach 40. It’s the ultimate proof that this universe was created by some trickster demiurge: it’s not directly evil, more like hugely annoying. Forces you to do things like ordering diet coke with your burger. And that’s just not right.
Fresh bread. Even though I just ordered a $30 entree I’ll have some more of that fresh bread, please. And some butter. But if you don’t have butter I’ll have some more bread. Are we having a heaping helping of spaghetti-carbs? Well I’ll just have one more piece of bread anyway. Garlic bread? Sounds good. Naan? Mmmm! Are you going to eat your roll? I’ll take it off your hands. Can I order an extra biscuit with my chicken dinner? I’m down.
Ugh, really. I think I could pass up almost any food, any time. But bread with dinner, man…I gotta eat it til it’s gone.
Potato chips
Doritos - nacho cheese
Tortilla chips
Pizza
F’real chocolate malts from Kwik Trip - I would love to eat one every day!
Donuts
Chocolate - good chocolate
Cheeseburgers
Hot dogs
You’re right, they are. Certainly compared to so many other things.
Only I try to eat low glycemic – not because I have diabetes, but because I’d like to keep it that way. So I mostly gave up all the things Mace listed below and more: Potatoes, yams, starchy vegetables like corn and peas… anything that gooses insulin production in spikes. No biggie. I miss my homemade bread, but I don’t obsess about it.
But those goddamn all organic, vegan, sustainably-sourced peanut butter cups!! Four and a half teaspoons of sugar per serving!! And I do obsess about them. <drool> I wish I’d never tasted them!
I haven’t eaten anything but all natural peanut butter for at least 35 years. Can’t stand that overly sweet nasty shelf stable stuff. 72% is about as low as I can go on the dark chocolate and still actually enjoy it, I’m afraid.
Thanks for the suggestion all the same. One good turn deserves another: I often substitute quinoa for rice and buckwheat noodles for traditional pasta. Those might be options for you as well, if you haven’t already tried them.
Danishes, pastries, stuff like that. If someone puts out a box of Entenmann’s pastries at the office, the number on the scale is about to increase by 2 pounds.
Ditto if someone brings in a box of assorted cookies. Oh, one more, but this will be the last one. (Then you tell yourself the same thing another couple of times during the day.)
Pizza, of course. Which has a similar problem to that of the cookies: it seems that you can always eat one more slice. It’s like mathematical induction: if you can eat the nth slice, you can eat the *(n+1)*st slice. The only thing that stops you from eating an infinite amount of pizza is when there’s no more pizza in the box.
Since I started eating whatever I feel like, the only two “non-healthy” foods I cannot avoid are ice cream and “dark roast coffee with light cream, a pink sweetner and a yellow sweetner.”
Milkshakes from my local takeout place. Which also has a large selection of healthy foods. So I’ll order a spinach and grilled chicken quesadilla - spinach, grilled chicken, a little cheese grilled between 2 tortillas with lettuce tomato and avocados on the side. A reasonably healthy choice by my standard.
But it’s only $5.95. And I need to make the $10 delivery minimum. And they make awesome old-fashioned milkshakes with just hard ice cream and milk - the way God intended, none of this chemical soft ice cream with flavor syrup. And they’re $4.50.
So I add one to the order. And the idea of the healthy meal goes out the window. But what am I supposed to do - make my own sandwiches? I like “good food” which doesn’t have much overlap with “food I prepare myself”. Even with stuff like sandwiches. What’s a girl to do?
dude, this might come as a shock but that meal as described is perfectly healthy by modern medical understanding.
Red meat is fine
fatty is fine
salty is fine if not done to serious excess
hows this, eggs are healthy for you, 4 a day is fine.
Check out Dr. Rhonda Patrick
that said, sugar is poison, evil nasty subtle tasty delicious poison.
Carbs arent much better but it does depend on what you are eating. Rice is generally garbage but Basmati is a low gi food.
A few years ago I would not have believed I’d write this, but: macaroni salad, IF it is a good batch. Hawaiians eat it all the time so, though I initially thought any mac salad is inherently gross, I finally developed a taste for the good stuff (not the ew-yuck versions with tuna, peas, and gallons of mayo).
What’s good mac salad? Nice semolina elbow macaroni, cooked just to the slightly soft edge of al dente, with a sauce of extremely finely diced red peppers, sour cream, onion powder, and salt. It is comfort food to die for.
I’m pretty sure that if I lived where you lived I would use the exact same reasoning you do, and wind up with the milkshake. So I’m glad I don’t live where you live. Also, just the fact that you can get milkshakes delivered to your house is completely awesome, in an unhealthy sort of way.
I’d eat pizza every day if it wouldn’t be so detrimental to my budget and my girlish figure (shyeah, right). And I keep a pretty short leash on myself most of the time. Hell, I pass my favorite pizza place every day and I haven’t eaten there in probably a year. But the cafeteria at work serves pizza every day and sometimes I find myself walking over there almost against my will. It’s not even that great (better than most chain pizzas, though)but it’s . . . there. So convenient. So easy to say “I can always have pizza” if I don’t have time to pack a lunch.
I try no to eat too much fast food (unless we’re counting Chipotle) but someone at work will eat it at their desk and then the smell will cause me to obsess and stop on the way home.
I’ve been vegetarian for 25 years. If some day I go back to carnivoring, I know what will have broken me: bacon. And not just a nibble for nostalgia. No, I’ll jam a whole plate, piled high, into my mouth. It’ll be cooked just right, too: taken from the pan just seconds before it gets crispy. Yup, bacon.
Wow! 39 posts and no one has mentioned fried chicken? Chicken fried in lard with some country ham pieces in there for extra flavor! Heart attack on a plate but oh so heavenly good! And cold the next day is an extra treat!
Couple weeks back we were joking that soon we’ll need to learn how to cook potato chips if we want to be able to have chips that taste like chips.
Certainly compared to so many other things.