No, sorry. Including some protein (and even some fat) in most of your meals did not make you fat. Your body needs both protein and (some) fat to function properly. You just ate too much for the amount of exercise you were getting.
The problem is not nutrition education, although a large part of the problem is probably inadequate and inaccurate nutrition education; the biggest problems in my mind are:
Ubiquity of relatively inexpensive and very calorie-heavy and fat-heavy food; see chain restaurants and fast food restaurants.
No notion of portion control; again, see chain restaurants like TGI Friday’s for insanely large portions, and fast food chains for super sizing, and making that seem like the normal. See also the enormous packages of pre-packaged food where no-one pays attention to what “1 serving” is supposed to be.
Any person’s ability to kid themselves about how much they are really eating.
And finally, nutrition education which is so lacking in information about how the body metabolizes food, and the effects of too much simple carbs.
My recipe for weight-loss or weight control (if you don’t have to lose) is plenty of lean protein, a modest amount of beneficial fats, lots of vegetables (not potatoes) and fresh fruit (not grapes!), and as few carbs of any kind as you can manage to do without. Plus regular cardio exercise. Count your calories in and your calories out if you have any kind of weight problem, it will really open your eyes.
Well, tonight I am making stir-fried tofu with diced red pepper, hot peppers, snow pea pods, and pineapple mixed with a spicy chili sauce, all over brown rice. Spicy with a nice mix of flavors. Tomorrow we are having tacos with black beans and texturized vegetable protein substituted for the beef. Throw the usual “taco seasoning” in with the “beans” and it tastes pretty good.
Exactly. Look at the backlash against Michelle Obama’s healthy-eating initiative. It comes down to “don’t tell me how to feed my kids – I’m their parent, I know best!!”
I’ve always been a little incredulous of the claim that I’m supposed to eat 10 fruits or vegetables a day. That’s like an entire 3-pound bag of apples or oranges. If the number was something more attainable like 4 (one with breakfast, one with lunch, two with dinner), I’m sure people would take it more seriously as a goal.
Not only that, but education isn’t the solution. You can’t teach someone how to lose weight and permanently keep it off. (Well, you can teach them. But it won’t work.)
“The people who told us about sun block were the same people who told us, when I was a kid, that eggs were good. So I ate a lot of eggs. Ten years later they said they were bad. I went, “Well, I just ate the eggs!” So I stopped eating eggs, and ten years later they said they were good again! Well, then I ate twice as many, and then they said they were bad. Well, now I’m really fucked! Then they said they’re good, they’re bad, they’re good, the whites are good, th-the yellows - *make up your mind! *It’s breakfast! I’ve gotta eat!”
Around these parts, a salad is something that has lettuce - iceberg probably, romaine potentially, baby greens if you insist and you think you’re better than everyone else. If you’re in a restaurant, it probably has carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes. If it’s a “good” restaurant salad, some bell peppers, sliced red onions and sliced mushrooms. Good salad bars include broccoli florets, cucumber bits, peas, chickpeas, sliced beets, hard boiled eggs and a whole bunch of fatty/carby toppings like croutons and nuts and bacon and cheese.
A plate of steamed fennel would not generally be called, nor thought of, as a salad. It would be a side dish, served with, perhaps, rack of lamb and risotto. And yeah, I agree with the OP that the “three point landing”, or now, the four point mealwe see on posters from Da Gov’ment contribute to that notion.
I’ve been experimenting with “salads” at home, and come up with some combinations which probably wouldn’t garner a second glance from a European, but have my SO and kids asking me if I’m going to eat “real dinner” with them later. Tonight it was some left over blanched (but basically raw) broccoli spears, coarsely chopped tomatoes and cucumbers with diced onions and salt, pepper and half teaspoon each of balsamic vinegar and olive oil. (I’ve tried sans olive oil, but end up unsatisfied and looking around for bread or something else to fill the pit.)
I call it a salad. To my American family members, it’s “Mom’s eating weird stuff again.” If I put some lettuce in there, they’d probably recognize it as a salad.
I’m from Canada and the nutrition information we got was based on what to eat daily rather than each meal. Does US education really say that about each meal rather than the meals taken in a day as a whole?
In any case, even if you would never eat just vegetables for a meal, you can lose weight. Add chicken or fish and voila, you’ve got protein and fat. You could even go to McDonald’s and get a salad and McNuggets.
Just because obesity rates are increasing with access to nutrition information doesn’t mean there’s a cause-and-effect relationship. We don’t know what obesity rates would be without nutrition education.
I know education has benefited me. I discovered nutrition labels during my sophomore year in college, and I was able to halt the accumulation of poundage I’d been in denial about up to that point. Yeah, in the back of my head I knew eating a giant blueberry muffin and a bag of cheese puffs for lunch wasn’t good. But I didn’t know how not good until I realized that the meal represented half of my recommended daily caloric intact.
I just watched a documentary about hunger in America. It made me sad but I also couldn’t help noticing that many of the people discussing how hungry they were (especially the kids) were overweight. Even though I have no doubt those people are chronically hungry, I wonder if perhaps it would have been more appropriate to call the problem malnutrition rather than hunger. Very few Americans are suffering from lack of calories, but lots of people cannot access healthy calories.
Please share the recipes! I’ve got some TVP in the cupboard, and the tofu stir fry sounds yummy.
It’s actually supposed to be five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, with a serving being half a cup or so of cooked vegetables, one cup of raw vegetables, (cooking makes veggies denser) and six ounces or so of fruit. Fresh and frozen are preferred to canned, but canned will do in a pinch.
This is something that irks my Weight Watchers leader to no end. She has to explain on a regular basis that there is no difference between a cookie made with bleached, enriched wheat flour and HFCS and a cookie made with unbleached wheat flour and cane sugar. If you’re going to eat that stuff, go for it, but a) watch the portion size, and b) don’t pretend that you’re doing your body any favors, because you’re not.
It’s not food that is cheap; it’s junk or useless food that is cheap. If I ever decide to get serious about losing this extra 25 pounds that mid-life decided to drop on me, I always thought it’d make sense to figure out exactly what proteins, nutrients and vitamins you need every day, and eat foods to meet that goal. I don’t see how anyone’s stomach would have ROOM for a Twinkie after all that food.
The food pyramid may change, but the basics do not: food is fuel. Crap in, crap out…or rather, crap in your arteries and on your hips. Simply eating as if your life depended on it, rather than on vitamins and miracle-cures, would serve most people quite well regarding health and weight control.
This. This is why obesity is such a problem in urban areas where there are low-income areas which don’t have the means or access to healthier, and more expensive, food options. Combine this with the lack of proper dietary and nutritional education; as well as the ever-increasing sedentary life of the average American (due to the ever-expanding role of technology in day-to-day life); and you have a recipe for an obesity epidemic. Bottom line: we are eating way too many calories, many of which contribute nothing to what is needed to maintain good health, for our lifestyles.
But many people have nowhere to shop to get these products. People stuck in inner-cities often have no fresh produce or other such items available at the establishments within their reach.
The part I quoted was an extremely basic salad (lettuce+tomato), although the American standard would include bathing it in a sauce. You guys would call an Insalata Caprese a salad if it wasn’t for the little detail of forgetting half its name; you guys also have potato salads and pasta salads, so having lettuce isn’t a necessary component of a salad - but I think that often people there think about recipes the way my mother does. She used to refer to “spaghetti, tomato sauce and fried mincemeat” as “your brother’s student cooking”; then I pointed out it’s called “spaghetti bolognese” and all of a sudden it became her most frequent pasta dish… but she almost had a heart attack the day I cooked penne bolognese, because “penne bolognese” wasn’t something she had a mental kit for. Your family needs more flexible mental kits…
A pharmacist once told us about a customer who thought that “slimming drinks” worked by having them in adition to normal meals rather than instead of. I think that’s the mistake many people do when they try to “add healthy foods”: they literally add them to the rest. Eating a fist-sized, ranch-dressed salad in addition to those three burgers is not much more healthy than eating the three burgers with no salad.
And those “healthy” snacks whose fruit content consists of raisins… again, a ton more energy than a pear, minus the fiber and any vitamins pears happen to have.
Seriously. Americans apparently need everything ultra-sweet. What’s ridiculous seeing “lite oatmeal” that still has sugar added, in addition to a stevia/sucralose, because just adding less/no sugar to begin with wouldn’t be sweet enough for the American palate. Even when we “cut back” on the sugar, we’re still eating a ton of it, and supplementing it with fake sugar.
