So at my last checkup last year, my cholesterol was much increased (though still within reason) from my previous visit. I was advised that this was probably due to eating habits, especially during lunch. So I changed said eating habits, and when I got a cholesterol test sometime in (I think) February, my numbers had gone back down to closer to where they were two tests ago. So far, so good.
But now I’ve been working from home since March, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Eating out has become the only thing that separates one week from the next, sometimes one day to the next. But still, I try to be good. I only eat at the places I like with the highest fat (fried chicken, two different sources of burgers) once a month. Otherwise, I try to stick with meals that are much lower fat than a basket of tenders and fries by either having an appropriate Lean Cuisine frozen meal for lunch or by getting takeout that’s not SO loaded with oily, greasy goodness.
So now I’m wondering: obviously I can have high fat foods “in moderation.” But what exactly does that mean, practically? If I have fried chicken again tomorrow, is that not moderation? What if I have burgers as well later in the month? How strict in my “deprivation” should I be?
For eating out, when you aren’t enjoying classic fast food (burgers/fried chicken), what do you eat? IME, it can be pretty challenging to find tasty restaurant food that’s also relatively healthy.
Exercise also matters a lot. ISTR a foot-based arctic expedition some years ago, in which the participants were basically eating sticks of butter; they were in fine health when it was all over. So…whatever you’re doing with your diet, exercise will also help.
As for how strict your diet “moderation” needs to be, that’s certainly going to vary on a case-by-case basis. Some lucky bastards can chain-smoke and eat fried chicken and live to be 100; OTOH, some people afflicted with severe familial hypercholesterolemia can die of a heart attack in their teens. A middle-aged friend of mine recently discovered that despite eating a reasonably healthy diet, their triglycerides were off-scale high. They have a family history in which several members have died from heart attacks in their 50s and 60s, so now they are modifying their diet even further, eschewing refined carbs to a severe extent.
In your case, it’s down to cost, benefit, and feedback. Cholesterol’s not low enough? adjust your diet and exercise regimen, as long as such changes would not make your life miserable. Is your cholesterol satisfactory now? If not, make further changes. Repeat feedback loop as necessary.
If such changes would make your life miserable, then there’s not a lot of point. It’s your life, so you get to decide how to best balance a healthy lifestyle, a pleasurable lifestyle, and a long life.
‘In moderation’ means not to an extreme extent. For instance, if you’re hungry for hot dogs, eating 75 in a short period of time like Joey Chestnut did at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest earlier this month would be extreme. So don’t eat more than 74 hot dogs in one meal. At the other end of the spectrum eating nothing is extreme, so to eat in moderation requires constant eating to avoid the extreme of eating nothing at all.
I think in general, the idea is that you don’t make stuff like big greasy hamburgers a major part of your diet, and they’re an every now and then sort of indulgence.
The problem is that “every now and then” and “in moderation” is very indefinite- one person may interpret that to mean once a month, another may think once a week, and a third may think once every 3 months.
It’s one of those you know it when you see it sort of things. Clearly having burgers every day of the week isn’t in moderation, and nor is once a year. But in the middle, there’s a lot of room for interpretation.
When eating unhealthy foods I try to pay attention to serving/portion size. It’s too easy to overeat unhealthy foods otherwise. Ice cream by the scoop not the pint, 2 oreos not 1/4 of the pack, 1 ounce of chips not open the party size bag and eat till I’m satisfied, 2 slices of pizza not all you can eat, etc.
For me, I feel like eating an unhealthy meal once or twice a week is still a moderate amount, but I’m also in pretty decent health in my mid-30’s, and eat fairly healthily for most of my meals (eg. home cooked from whole foods most of the time, with lots of vegetables). I agree with Machine_Elf that what constitutes “in moderation” is going to vary a lot individual to individual. When you had higher cholesterol levels last year, what were your eating habits like back then? Are the drastically different than they are now?
You’ll know by the results. If your eating patterns are causing you health problems, they aren’t in moderation. Of course, this can vary from individual to individual: For me, a “moderate amount” of alcohol is none at all, because I’m alcohol-intolerant, and even a sip makes me sick. But for most folks, anything up to a serving per day can be moderate, or more for some people.
IMHO one unhealthy meal per week count as moderation, maybe two if there is a major special event where passing on unhealthy food would be rude.
ETA: In my experience the challenge to eating healthy is not in trying to determine what the correct diet is, it’s trying to stick with that diet once you’ve made that determination.
This is a tricky question since unhealthy foods can be problematic for many reasons. For some people, eating unhealthy foods can lead to cravings for more unhealthy food. Sweet, fatty, and calorie rich foods activate your reward centers and your brain will seek out more of them. I think because you’re asking this question, you may be able to relate to this. Stuff like fried chicken and burgers is not healthy. We enjoy eating it because of the pleasure it brings rather than it’s a beneficial source of nutrition.
Really, you shouldn’t be eating unhealthy foods in the first place. The pleasure you get from them doesn’t negate the unhealthy effects it does to your body. Ideally, you would eat those foods rarely enough so that the negative effects are completely processed and your body is normalized before you eat those kinds of foods again. So if you ate foods high in calories, you would allow your body time to work off those calories so that your weight didn’t go up. It might be like if you wanted to smoke in moderation. After smoking a cigarette, you would want to give your lungs long enough to heal so that the effects of smoking another cigarette were not cumulative.
There’s also the general issue around obesity. Many people are overweight, which means they shouldn’t be eating these kinds of foods in the first place. With these foods being high in calories and low in nutrition, they are just exacerbating a person’s struggle with weight. So if the person is not able to maintain a healthy body weight, it’s not really healthy to eat these kinds of foods even in moderation. But that doesn’t mean you have to give them up totally. Adding exercise to your lifestyle can help burn the calories these kinds of foods and you can maintain a healthy weight and still eat these rich, pleasurable foods.
But calories aren’t unhealthy. We need calories. Without calories, we would die. It’s only too many calories that’s unhealthy.
With a few exceptions (e.g. trans fats), that’s true of most food. Fried chicken and burgers can be good, nutritious food. It’s just that they provide things that most of us in modern society get too much of already. But (depending on how they’re prepared), they’re not inherently unhealthy.
That’s where the “in moderation” comes in. Maybe for some people it’s easier to give up certain foods totally than to cut down significantly. But for many of us, it’s a much bigger ask to say “You can never have this thing that you really enjoy ever again” than to say “You should indulge in this less often.”
You also have to remember to eat a balanced diet. If you eat a lot of healthy foods you need to balance your diet by eating unhealthy foods too. Now if you really like healthy foods a lot and don’t want to eat unhealthy food it’s not really that bad because unhealthy foods often concentrate the unhealthiness, so you can balance the healthiness of a weeks worth of organic vegetables with just one quart of ice chocolate ice cream and a can of whipped cream.
Absolutely. I totally agree with this. But the problem we have in modern society is that calories are too plentiful. People eat excessive calories and become overweight. If someone is doing manual farm labor everyday, then fried chicken and biscuits may be the perfect meal to eat regularly. But if someone is working a sedentary desk job, the high calories in a that kind of meal is out of sync with the person’s daily caloric needs. It’s totally true that “calories”, in and of themselves, aren’t bad. But too many calories are bad because it typically causes weight gain and the associated health problems that come along with that.
From my experience, one’s cholesterol can decrease if one no longer consumes fast food or fast food-like takeaway. I have replaced it entirely with fruit and vegetable salads.
A healthy diet is not enough though. The good cholesterol can only be boosted with daily exercise.
If all I can eat are vinegar dressed green salads and little chunks of wallet chicken (dry skinless chicken breasts that taste like you’re chewing on a wallet), then I don’t wanna live a long life.
Live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse, I say.
I guess I’m past dying young, and I don’t suppose I’ll make a good looking corpse, but the sentiment stands.
On the other hand, if you eat greasy burgers (or whatever your downfall is) less often, and you live longer as a result, you might end up getting to eat more greasy burgers total over the course of your lifetime.
From a medical standpoint, people who abuse alcohol, tobacco, drugs or diet in a major way typically live fast, die slowly in late middle age and leave a ravaged-looking corpse.
Can you explain how you’ve come to this conclusion? If I “eat healthy”, then I’d better add a quart of ice cream to my weekly diet to “balance” it out?