If you are eating a low-fat, whole-food, plant-based diet — as I try to do — you really don’t need to count calories. You literally cannot eat too much food on that kind of diet. That’s my hypothesis, anyway, and I’ll stick to it until proven wrong.
But I’ll never get to test my hypothesis on myself, because, seriously, who has time to only eat whole foods? I suppose if you are affluent enough to have a personal chef, that’s cool for you, but I am not, so I end up eating some processed foods, primarily pastas and breads.
I stick with fairly healthful options, such as Ezekiel bread and non-wheat, whole-grain pastas. When I consume those foods, though, I like to apply a bit of portion control, because things can get out of hand rather quickly with processed foods, which tend to be more calorie-dense than the whole foods found in nature.
For example, I often eat Ezekiel toast in the morning. I really enjoy it with a thin veneer of single-ingredient almond butter and some sliced fruit — like strawberries or figs — on top. When I say “I really enjoy it”, I am not exaggerating. I am salivating right now just thinking about it.
In fact, I’ll be back in a bit.
[LATER THAT SAME DAY]
Wow, that was good, but it changed the whole direction of what I was going to say here, so I’m going to roll with it.
I recently wrote a post about “consious eating” and, once again, it’s very apparent that I write these posts as much for myself as I do for anyone else who might be reading them.
As I prepared my Ezekiel toast, I thought, “I am hungrier than 2 slices, but not as hungry as 4 slices. Which should I make, 2 or 4?”
2 or 4. For some reason, probably because I generally use 2 slices of bread to make a sandwich, I eat sliced bread in 2s.
You may have quickly and easily come to the conclusion that if I am hungrier than 2 and not as hungry as 4, then perhaps I should prepare 3 slices of toast. That’s logical, right, and not a reach at all. In fact it’s rather obvious.
But that is why we need to be sure we are eating consciously. It is so ingrained in me to eat bread in groups of 2, that I had to work to figure out that, duh, this particular situation called for 3 slices. I am not saying I stood there over the loaf dumbstruck and mouth-breathing for 20 minutes as my caveman brain processed the data, but the answer did not present itself to me immediately.
Anyway, I made my 3 slices, ate them, and that was just enough food for me.
Most of us are very busy. We have many things that use up our time — jobs, family, even leisure — so we try to save time in other areas, and one of those is food preparation. One great way to save time is to eat processed foods. If we are trying to eat right, we may stick to more healthful alternatives, such as whole-grain pasta and sprouted whole grain breads, instead of the usual versions made with white flour.
Those are good choices.
However, when we eat processed foods — even the “good” ones — we need to attend to how much of these calorically dense items we are stuffing into our faces. We can do this by paying close attention to our habitual tendencies, and consciously eating just the right amount to keep us properly fueled, rather than however much we would eat out of habit.
The moral of the story is this: If you have to eat processed foods, choose them wisely, eat them consciously, and be healthy.