"That's why Americans are so fat."

Big fan of Pollan here.

Bad food choices permeate so much of our external stimuli. I didn't realize the extent of this when it came to broadcast TV until last week. At home, everything is streamed except games. The commercials are pretty narrowly focused. Watching the cable feed portals, there were far more commercials and at least half, sometimes more, were for chain restaurants and processed foods. So much for trying to foster healthier habits. Let that sink in. At a place where so many people are there because of our generally awful approach to nutrition, we're getting messages piped in from Hardees, Carrabas, DiGiorno, et al. I kept sweet with the staff. They had enough to deal with. Personally? I was mad as hell.

 

Probably spitballing here but I wonder what impact social media has had on this in recent years. I follow a guy I used to work with on Instagram where he's tried to position himself as some sort of foodie blogger guy whose whole thing is how much he eats and drinks over a given day or week. He posts endless shots of the beers he drinks every day, not the mass-produced swill I drink on weekends but heavy craft beers, which he uses to wash down the massive meals he gets at restaurants or via takeout at least five days a week (he always jokes you'll rarely see anything green on his plate as if it's a badge of honour).

He isn't monetizing his feed, not getting free meals or jobs through the places he tags incessantly so it strikes me as right now he's living his gimmick, to use a wrestling phrase. His followers expect him to be a guy who eats and drinks a lot every day - and God knows what this costs him - and that's what he gives people. He was a big guy when I worked with him and he looks even bigger now, especially after the endless lockdowns here where all he seemed to do every day was eat and drink a ton, and at his age - somewhere in his 30s - that can't be good. He can't be the only person on the 'gram who lives like this for nothing more than likes every day

 

I finally realized that, even in the years in which I was most fanatical about exercise, I had neither the speed nor endurance to be able to outrun my fork. It’s far to easy to eat more calories than I can burn.

I used to despair and view that as some sort of failing, but no more. Science has the answer. The law of conservation of matter states that it can neither be created nor destroyed – only converted from one form to another. I know I can carry a certain amount of calories, stored as fat, without too much damage to my health, so kind of like planting forests to sequester carbon, I keep those calories from doing harm in the rest of society.

Nowadays, instead of giving a chubby kid or some guy who is overflowing his pants a stern, sanctimonious stare, the Calorie Reservoir Awareness Program has taught me to not be so smug: Perhaps that’s what happens when I don’t do enough of my part.

 

Marketing aside, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It sets your eating for the rest of the day. Whole grains and other slow burning carbs, such as oatmeal, aand low sugar fruit are a good choice as you won't get hungry before lunch and snack on empty calories. And if you drink juice, go for fresh squeezed or non-concentrate. Concentrates are juice that's been boiled down to sugar and reconstituted. And check the origin country of orange juice -- Brazil and Mexico permit higher levels of herbicides and insecticides than the U.S.

Speaking of empty calories, almost all granola-type bars are made with sweeteners to hold them together, adding many calories. Opt for baked bars, if you can find them.

 

Left hand and a bowl of water.

 

I found it amazing how much better I looked and felt when I stopped sugar. I still have an affinity for deluxe baked goods, though.

 

The breakfast advice from goalmouth is sound. A bowl of cereal is actually one of the worst choices, usually loaded with sugar. You'll be hungry again in an hour. I mess with those Belvita breakfast bars, which aren't perfect but provide a lot more slow burning energy. A whole-grain English muffin with peanut butter is another good choice. I usually snack on a yogurt mid-morning, but be very careful with what you get. A lot of them are total sugar bombs. Lots of Greek yogurt options are good. I like either the Oikos Triple Zero or the Chobani half-sugar ones. I also agree with dinner being the smallest meal of the day. Would rather load up on lunch when I'll actually be burning that energy.

 

Something that has helped me, ever since my grandmother's last few months/year of life, actually, was realizing just how little people actually need to eat in order to stay alive, and even relatively healthy, depending on what you take in, of course.

My grandmother lived with my parents the last two years of her life because my mom wanted to take care of her mom, and her mom, frankly, like a lot of people from her generation, expected it. No going into "a home," as she derisively called it, for my grandma. And that's how it went until she began really deteriorating and it became harder and harder for my elderly mom to take care of her even more elderly mom, and my dad finally put a stop to it and insisted they find an elder-care facility in which to place my grandmother.

Anyway, she only stayed in the care facility a few months before she passed away at the age of 98. But while there, her appetite lessened as time went on, and I think for most of that time, she was living, pretty much, on a bottle of Ensure, and a small scoop or two of ice cream (and she really only wanted the ice cream; it seems it's standard fare in senior-care facilities because it's a way to get some calories into people who often don't want to eat, because it's easy to eat, and most people like it). So, with maybe a little something else at another mealtime, she was taking in probably 600-650 calories a day at most.

She was pretty well bed-ridden at the end, so she wasn't doing much, and maybe that factored into things But still, she was lucid, could converse, and was "all there," when awake, even if she couldn't do anything physically. I guess she just wasn't hungry and with her near total lack of activity, didn't require much food. But still, I remember us talking about how little she was eating, and yet, she seemed as good as she could be at that point (up until the last week or two of her life, when it became obvious that her time to go was coming soon).

Now, I wouldn't recommend someone in the prime of life eating so little on a consistent basis, but still, it showed me just how little food we actually really need to get by.

Another "food inspiration" for me was my dad, who had a sweet tooth but otherwise had a very modest appetite. He was very good at controlling what he ate. Sometimes, my mom, an excellent cook and a food-loving full Italian, would even get annoyed at him for what she perceived as not even eating like a grown man. He'd make and eat one egg. One egg! He'd want a cookie after dinner and ask my mom to bring him one. She'd bring him two, and he'd go, "I said a cookie."

Or, he'd just eat his favorite dessert, a slice of lemon-meringue pie, for breakfast.

His eating philosophy was, "You can eat anything you want, in moderation." And he did that, turning it into a veritable art form and literally never straying -- neither upward nor downward -- from his healthy weight of between 170-175 pounds until the last few months of his life, when he was very ill.

 

+1 i.e. Oscar

 

This reminds me of my mother's oft-recited food philosophy. Not that she follows it all the time, but she likes and agrees with the idea of this saying she heard, from somewhere:

"Eat like a king for breakfast, like a prince for lunch, and like a pauper for dinner."