Excellent! Now I can test out my new Indonesian Frog Diet I’ve been working on!
The dirty little secret is that low carb, high fat diets are the key to a healthy long life, but they don’t want people to know about this, they don’t want you to eat aminals, and want you to only eat grass and roots. Also if everyone really knew the truth there would be shortages of high quality foods, such as meat.
Indeed. Just one question: are they the Jews, the Trilateral Commission, our alien overlords, or just the voices in your head?
Daniel
It’s Major League Baseball. I thought everyone knew that!
It’s not that complicated, really.
Fat intake for dummies:
Try to limit your total fat intake under 60g per day, and “bad” fat intake to under 20g per day.
Recognizing the “Evil Kirk” fat:
Animal fats, except fish. Dairy. Cocoa butter, palm oil, peanut oil, coconut oil. If you’re looking at a processed food label, watch out for saturated fats and trans-fats.
Try to include some fat from “approved sources” in your diet:
Fish. Fatty vegetables. Nuts. Vegetable oils except those in the “Evil Kirk” camp.
If you don’t want to spend any time trying to work out exactly how much fat you’re looking at, just don’t make it a habit of eating chicken-fried steak, french fries, and a bucket of ice cream every day. Be moderate with those kinds of fatty foods. It’s easy to be moderate with the “good” fats, unless you’re on a steady diet of crap. (Eg; Lay off the Oreo creams!)
The standard question: do you really think that those numbers are appropriate both for 5’0", 95 lb. woman who works in an office and a 6’5" construction worker who’s built like a brick shithouse? What about as her cardiovascular fitness changes and he reaches retirement?
Even beef has poly- and monounsaturated fats in it. And coconut oil, while saturated, is a medium chain triglyceride, so it doesn’t behave the same way.
Anyway, that’s not what I had in mind. Take a look at this book if you want to understand just how complex nutrition is.
Complicated fad diets (like Atkins, for example) are popular because while they’re complicated, they have rules and a structure. “Eat less crap and eat more vegtables” is actually too simple. Immediatly you get into question of what constitutes as “crap”, and where do you draw the line? What can you have sometimes, and what can you have not at all. What’s a proper portion? What does “in moderation” mean anyway? These seem self evident to people who are healthy eaters to begin with, but are mystifying to many people who were raised on a junk food diet.
It’s like being disorganized. I’m disorganized, and you can tell me “just have a place for everything and put your stuff away when you’re done with it.” Only, I genuinely don’t know how to put that into practice. I need an organizational “system”, which thankfully there are a lot of out there that work great. That’s all diets really are, they’re systems for people who don’t have the skills to make one on their own.
Sadly, human nutrition is not as easy to wrangle as a filing cabinet.
We’re talking rule of thumb, here, right?
Maybe we’re talking past each other, but I read your first post as saying that discerning between “good” fat and “bad” fat (stupid terms,) in the most general way, is beyond the ken of your Average American. I don’t buy that.
Thanks – I’m glad to know that. (I do loves me some coconut curry.)
I totally get that – but people don’t need a degree in nutrition to make some choices that can help manage cholesterol levels and have a positive effect on their cardiovascular health, right? We’re not talking about micromanaging anything. Just, you know, if you’re worried about a heart attack, avoid the fried egg and cheesecake diet, and try to include some good stuff in there, and you’re liable to be better off. That’s probably within most people’s grasp, isn’t it?
Oh, click. If this is so, I think that helps me to understand what ultrafilter is saying, and why so many people “diet” instead of just eating sensibly.
You put it like that, and it’s at once obvious and incomprehensible. (If that makes any sense.)
Yep, pretty much. It’s amazing the things that come naturally to some people, and the amount of micromanaging others need just to achieve the same result. A naturally tidy person would certainly think I’m ridiculous.
(Like while cheesecake may be obvious, it can quickly disolve into nitpicking which side of the line carrot cake falls on)
People need clear, detailed rules to follow. Especially because the people who buy into the latest diet craze are trying to lose weight, and are esentially doing something against what their body is telling them (by eating less than they burn). It’s a mistake to just write everyone off as “looking for a quick fix” because they don’t want to do it the hard way. Many of these people are just in search of structure.
What do you mean which side of the line carrot cake falls on? It’s freaking cake. Don’t eat it very often. It’s common sense.
Except that you are making major assumptions about it’s nutritional profile based on it being called cake. Sure it’s got sugar in it, but it’s also got shredded carrots and walnuts as well. What if it’s made with whole wheat flour? It’s certainly going to give you some nutrition that you won’t get from chocolate cake or even white bread. And does the same go for pancakes? Oatcakes? I have a snack cake I take to work whenever I make it. If I eat one slice a day I start losing weight. Because it is high in all sorts of good stuff, low fat, and not sugary - just sweet enough to be enjoyable.
Not to mention, what is “often”? Once a week, once a month, once a year? One of the problems with the human psyche and efforts to lose weight in general is if we are told to NOT do something, we are very hard pressed to stick to that.
*I didn’t mean that the vast majority of people are eating properly, I meant that it isn’t difficult for them to do so if they actually wanted to. … Just cut down on the amount, eat some veggies, skimp on the processed crap. *
So what do you do when you aren’t eating enough to stay full and you’re still overweight?
What do you do when you can’t stand the flavor of veggies?
How do you balance a busy schedule with eating well?
Try to limit your total fat intake under 60g per day, and “bad” fat intake to under 20g per day.
How do I know when I’ve had “60 grams” per day?
Do I have to take a diet scale with me everywhere I go?
I read your first post as saying that discerning between “good” fat and “bad” fat (stupid terms,) in the most general way … is beyond the ken of your Average American
Thirty years ago, cholesterol was not common knowledge. People bought margarine because butter was expensive, not because it was lower in saturated fat. Thirty years ago, no one used “high glucose corn syrup” for a sweetener and sugar was expensive. Twenty years ago, I was arguing with a guy over whether HDL cholesterol was bad for you or good for you. Twenty years ago, no one had heard of lycopene. Ten years ago, no one had heard of trans-fats. Ten years ago, nuts were thought to be bad for you because they were so high in fat.
Thirty years ago, eating out was expensive and you made food at home because it was cheaper. You didn’t deep fry food because that was expensive.
Nutritional knowledge is a fast moving target, and the majority of people get their information from product packaging, menus and commercials. No company in their right mind is going to put on their packaging “Recent scientific research shows that our food is bad for you.” But you can bet that if they found out that pork fat showed some sort of nutritional advantage, it would be be on every package of bacon and sausage within three months.
Just for grins, here are some more questions for you:
Are avocados good for you or bad for you?
What about HDL cholesterol?
Shrimp?
Is the saturated fat measurement in margarine done before or after they make the oil into margarine?
A fried chicken salad is good for you, right? It’s salad, after all.
Iceberg lettuce is good for you, right?
I meant that it isn’t difficult for them to do so if they actually wanted to.
So I’m overweight because I’m just self-indulgent? Thanks a lot, dude. When was the last time you had to choose between food you could get some enjoyment out of and food that wouldn’t make you gain weight?
You remember the Yoda line “There is no try, there is just Do or Not Do”? That may work when we are talking about a single incident. But it’s bullshit when you are talking about something like changing your eating patterns, when you are making dozens of decisions every single day and most of them involve and argument between the part of you that needs to enjoy food and the part that needs to eat nutritiously. And you don’t get the choice of saying “I’m tired of making arguing with myself, I just won’t eat today”.
You know the term “diet” itself has become a liability in the fight against obesity. It originally meant just “what you regularly eat”. But in common use, it means an eating program to lose weight that you will quit once you reach your goal. And everytime any person comes from that approach, they gain weight in the long run. The people who keep the weight off are the ones that found ways of maintaining the habits they learned.
What is often? I have some personal rules for my very favorite foods, some of them rather flaky: Fried chicken, once or twice a year. Cake and other sweets like that? I have to make it or it has to be something someone made for me. That cuts down on those items.
I try to not let myself get hungry, and I try to not use junk food to fill up. The challenge is when I get ravenously hungry in the afternoons and the only available foods are from a vending machine. I try to keep food available for these occasions. Still, sometimes it’s just not worth the stress to be hungry because I don’t have a healthy option.
Veggies – I have a few that I like but I burn out on those easily. I work on finding new ways of eating them and I’ve finally found some salad dressings I like. But every meal is an uphill struggle to get more veggies in. My SIL who likes veggies has a hard time getting the current recommendations in.
Balancing my time vs. my eating? Right now, Bob does most of the cooking. 
Sixty grams of fat? I don’t bother weighing or counting. I try to keep an idea in my head of what is fatty. I have done this by looking up foods I prefer, but I just remember generalities; I don’t try to count each days worth of fat grams. I don’t buy deep fried foods or breaded and fried foods as a general rule, I am fortunately not a big fan of chips or bacon, but I do like my mexican food. :o
Are avocados good? High in fat, but also high in certain nutrients.
HDL cholesterol is good for you, at least where I’ve read good detailed articles. The HDL part is sort of a hook that grabs cholesterol and doesn’t let go until it’s in your liver. LDL is a hook that grabs the cholesterol and then the walls of blood vessels!
Shrimp is high in HDL cholesterol. And yet I see current articles saying that shrimp is bad for you.
The margarine question I would love to hear the answer to.
Fried chicken salad is a good example of where making decisions based on one word will steer you wrong. A battered and fried chicken breast has nearly 4 times the calories, fat and saturated fat. (http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-B00001-01c20BC.html) And yet I’ve known intelligent people to eat this as diet food. :rolleyes:
The rule on veggies is that the more intense the color, the higher in nutrition the veggie is. I swear that iceberg lettuce is basically water with some shape to it.
No, I’m not. Have you ever looked at a recipe for carrot cake? Because the recipe to make a carrot cake is pretty much exactly the same as a standard white cake except it has carrots in it.
The meager nutritional value you’ll get from the quarter of a carrot and three nuts that are in each slice is far outweighed by the other crap that’s in it. Not to mention the frosting that goes on top of it. This isn’t rocket science. It’s only people actively trying to make things difficult that make it tough.
No, immature people do that. Other people are perfectly capable of deciding on their own whether they want to do something or not.
Depends. Consult a doctor and make sure you don’t have any medical issues causing it. Make sure you’re getting roughly enough calories for your weight. Otherwise, ignore it and see if the hunger goes away.
Turn 6.
I plan ahead. I leave my apartment at 7:30 each morning and don’t get back in until about 8:30 or 9, go to bed around 10:30. I have my fridge filled with broccoli and other easily steamable veggies, that takes about 7 minutes to make. I also precook a big load of chicken/fish on the weekend so I just have to heat it up and eat with my veggies. Or sometimes I’ll have some spaghetti. That only takes a couple of minutes. I also pre-pack my lunches for the week so that I can just pull one out of the fridge and pop it in my briefcase for work in the morning. For breakfast I’ll have either some oatmeal or some eggs or some fruit. Maybe snack on some pretzels or an apple during the day.
Look, it’s not difficult. You know what’s bad for you and what’s good for you. This hemming and hawing over whether or not “carrot cake” really counts as cake is good for you or bad for you is a front. If you’re trying to split hairs like that, then you aren’t interested in losing weight or getting proper nutrition. You’re interested in lying to yourself to make yourself feel better, but you still want to indulge as much as before.
I am with you yet I see people that I know are smart pulling this same kind of thing. Is nutrition something like colorblindness that some people really can’t see? I get really confused when I see person after person acting like they have little idea about what to eat or how to eat without consulting a chart or a fad book.
It is really bizarre. I don’t always eat well but I always know how to eat well and I am always aware that I am making a choice. It is like telling the difference between red and blue.
Nutritional studies should be refinements on the obvious and common sense. They are trying to explain how things work at a detailed level and maximize nutrition for specialized applications. That should say little what an average person in Boston is going to eat tonight. The basics took care of that a long time ago.
…but it still helps with other diseases such as diabetes, hypertension…
Ok, carrot cake is a bad example. I agree that you’d have to severely rework a carrot cake recipe to make it anything close to healthy. And if **Neurotik ** had said “carrot cake” I wouldn’t have even said anything about it. The original statement was just a little too absolutist for my taste.
Well, I was talking about the “don’t think of elephants” trick. You know, where you’re not supposed to think of elephants so that’s all you can think off. But I’m sure that never happens to someone like you.
And of course I’m immature. After all, I don’t conform to your standards of behavior, obviously I’m the one whose wrong.
You know, there was supposed to be a certain rhetorical quality to these questions, as issues that people who have problems controlling their weight have to face. Not a problem for you to attempt to correct.
I’ve had this body 43 years. I’ve talked to doctors about this. I know what happens when I get hungry and don’t eat. Sometimes I get headaches, sometimes I get dizzy, and sometimes if I wait long enough, I get nauseous enough that I can’t eat anyway. Or I throw up.
I assume the first line is some statement about maturity.
I am so glad that you can eat all those foods that you can barely stomach and never eat anything you enjoy. An I am sure that I am excessively immature for wanting to eat food that I actually enjoy. Probably for not jumping out of bed the minute the alarm goes off, too. And I’m sure that I should listen to Bach, because only immature people like Rock and Roll and pop music.
IOW, I resent being told I’m immature just because I have different tastes than you and your tastes happen to align better with what is healthy.
And it’s not that I don’t like healthy food. I prefer brown rice and multi grain bread. I will usually choose chicken over beef. I prefer the reduced sugar strawberry jam to regular. I don’t like french fries or burgers. I’m so-so on ice cream, and don’t like super-sweet sweets. I like complex flavors such as curry. I like shrimp but don’t like the flavor of mussels.
I also find lamb tastes “dirty”. And I find broccoli and many other vegetables very, very bitter. I suspect that you don’t find vegetables all that bitter. (BTW, most veggies are actually better for you raw, which I also prefer) I can taste the chemicals in a lot of processed foods. For example, Campbells new cream soups taste nasty to me.
I think you and I also have different emotional reactions to food. It doesn’t sound like food for you is anything more than something to stop hunger. OTOH, food is (or can be) a great source of pleasure for me. That’s not something I’m willing to give up, and judging me for that is rather presumptuous.
Consider this - if it would be better for your health to give up orgasming, would you do it?
BTW, none of my arguments are meant to show that I don’t even bother to be healthy, or that it is impossible. I try to make most of what I eat healthy, and make the most of what I eat that isn’t necessarily healthy. (By which I mean that I try to get all of the enjoyment I can out of it)
I’m just trying to explain that there are issues for quite probably a lot of us that people who have never had a weight problem have never had to deal with.
And if you have never dealt with a problem, why on earth do you think you are more qualified to fix it than those who have dealth with it all of our lives? :mad:
For those of you who have weight and healthy eating issues, I suggest you check out this link: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
So when you go to the zoo and the sign asks you not to tap on the glass to the gorilla enclosure, do you immediately start pounding on it? If I were to say, don’t drink that capful of Dran-o, you’d immediately chug it? There’s a difference between a silly mental trick like “Don’t think of elephants” and not being able to control your own behavior.
So, what would you call someone who immediately had an overwhelming urge, to the point where they could barely control their actions, to do something they were told would be bad for them? Mature?
That’s fine. But my point wasn’t about people having difficult time with their weight. My point was that proper nutrition in their diet isn’t a difficult concept for the average person to attain. Weightloss may be.
See? Then my advice doesn’t apply to you.
:rolleyes:
So, in other words, you do what is healthy, what isn’t and what should be contained in a proper diet. You just choose to eat differently. That’s fine. Just don’t tell me that understanding how to eat healthy is difficult, that’s all.
Very true, but I don’t like a lot of vegetables raw - except for carrots and peppers - so I eat them how I like them. Broccoli’s OK raw if you get something to dip them in like a creamy dressing. Oh, and tomatos.
Bullshit. It’s funny that you come down on me for “presuming” but you presume lots of things about me. I love food. A lot. I’m always looking out for nice cheeses, wines, etc. And I can’t keep cookies in the apartment because I’ll go through them rather quickly. And don’t get me started on ice-cream. I grab a candy bar if I’m at the convenience store or CVS routinely. And I’d knock an old lady over for some homemade turkey stuffing. In fact, I’m sipping a mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows right now.
I have to work damn hard to maintain my weight, and a lot of that is through dietary discipline. I know what’s good for me and what’s bad for me, and I limit my intake of what’s bad for me and make sure I get enough of what’s good for me.
No, but I’d recognize that it was a choice that I made and I wouldn’t bitch about it.
So, again, you’re saying that proper nutrition isn’t difficult. You know what’s good and you know what’s bad and you don’t generally need all these bizarre fad diets to tell you which is which, right? Which was my point all along.
Angry face yourself. What makes you think that I’ve never had to deal with weight issues. I was overweight all my life until college, when I started rowing and keeping to a diet. Then I ballooned up again after I graduated and stopped rowing, then dropped 60 pounds 2 years ago to get where I am now and I look better than ever. It was worth every drop of sweat and every sacrifice I made to get here.
I don’t know that anyone has really done any measuring of degree of difficulty of losing weight. (I guess you could compare it with things like quitting smoking.)
My personal experience is that losing weight isn’t all that easy. If it’s not one of your top three goals at a given time, you’re probably not going to succeed in losing weight - and most of us have complicated enough lives so that it can’t always make the top three.
And as someone who’s almost entirely given up fast food and non-diet drinks, and doesn’t eat that much preprocessed food, and who thinks that a 30-mile bike ride is a pleasant way to spend a summer morning, I can tell you that even sustaining a certain weight, let alone losing weight, isn’t easy.
We’ve got bodies that want to store calories. We’re living in a society of abundance, and one that doesn’t require much physical effort in our normal routines. Keeping one’s weight down is work, there ain’t no two ways about it.
I’m sure I’m already doing the former; I’d have to check on the latter.
Don’t eat fried foods, except when my wife and I split an order of fries. I’d say that happens maybe half a dozen times a year. Can’t remember the last time I’ve eaten ice cream. No Oreos, no donuts, really just don’t do that much junk food. Definitely don’t get as much fruits and veggies in the winter as I should, but that’s because it’s all crap at this time of year. That changes during the summer, when I’m growing my own tomatoes, and picking raspberries in the woods.
I mean, I’m not doing everything right, but I’ve shed a lot of crap from my diet over the past however many years, to the point where there’s not that much ‘junk eating’ left. But I still struggle to keep my weight down.
It’s just not that simple.
The local news analyzed the results of the study, and it turns out that most participants in the study actually didn’t eat a low-fat diet, indicated in this study as being 20% or less of your diet by calories; most also did not reduce calorie intake. The diet also did not distinguish between types of fat.
So the headline should probably have been something like “Just trying to reduce fat but not really accomplishing it doesn’t help prevent certain diseases in women.”