Category: Nutrition

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3 Slices of Toast

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.

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Conscious Eating

“Conscious eating” — it’s a term that is picking up steam, and it encapsulates a very simple concept: thinking — actually thinking — about what we are putting into our mouths.

Do you think about it, or do you just habitually go to [insert your favorite fast food place here] for lunch every third day? Do you think about it, or do you just buy the [insert your favorite breakfast cereal here]?

“Conscious eating” means knowing what you are eating, thinking about it, and making an informed decision. How many grams of fat are in this? How many grams of sugar are in that? What are the ingredients? Once you know, you can eat consciously.

Eating consciously goes beyond that, though. It also involves taking in what we are told about nutrition and saying, “Hmmmmmm…. Maybe I should explore that further before I accept it.”

For example:

  • All my life I’ve been told that milk is good for me. Now I am not so sure, so I don’t drink it.
  • All my life I’ve been told that the best form of protein for my body is animal protein. Now I am not so sure, so I don’t eat it.
  • All my life I’ve been told that vegetables are good for me. Okay, I think that’s still valid.

I’ve been fed so many lines of crap over the years, from the government and diet gurus alike. Hell, we are all exposed to this stuff, and so many of us buy into the latest diet crazes, whether they involve eating a lot of oatmeal, not eating wheat, avoiding carbs, whatever. Problem is that we need to choose a path and stick to it for a bit in order to see if it works for us.

Nothing drives me crazier than when someone has, for example, high blood sugar. So, they, wanting to take control of their own health — a behavior I loudly and publicly applaud  — start eating a particular way. They give it a shot for 6 months, have a blood panel run, and, oops, their blood sugar is still high.

“I don’t know what else to do,” they say. “My doctor told me to eat this way, but my blood sugar is not improving. I guess I’ll need to take the meds.”

Hmmmm…. I dunno. Maybe, well, just maybe your doctor doesn’t know what she’s talking about? How about that?

“What?” they shout. “My doctor went to med school, which is more than I can say for you!”

Hey, now, come on, think about it. Your doctor went to med school. She learned about diseases and which drugs or procedures to use to treat them. How much did your doctor learn about nutrition in med school?

According to a 2006 study by the NIH (available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430660/)

Ninety-nine of the 106 schools responding required some form of nutrition education; however, only 32 schools (30%) required a separate nutrition course. On average, students received 23.9 contact hours of nutrition instruction during medical school (with a range of 2 to 70 hours). Only 40 schools required the minimum 25 hours recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. Most instructors (88%) expressed the need for additional nutrition instruction at their institutions.

Wow, in that case, I have a lot more nutritional training than your doctor probably has, and I am certainly no expert.

Anyway, the point is that even your chosen authority figure doesn’t have all the answers, so when he gives you advice, think about it. Read and get yourself educated. Try things out on yourself. That is how you figure out what works and what doesn’t work for you.

That’s called “critical thinking” and, getting back to the title of this article, you can apply that same principle to the way you eat. Conscious eating applies critical thinking to how we consume food. Start doing that and your body will love you for it.

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Is soy dangerous?

I have still not looked that deeply into soy, but public opinion seems to be split on it, so I keep my intake rather low to hedge my bets until I can figure it out. Being the cynic that I am, it’s hard for me to believe anything, and, in fact, I really don’t put my faith 100% anywhere, so it takes me a while to get a handle on some concepts, especially one with such a diversity of opinions, all with, of course, scientific evidence to back them up.

I used to drink a lot of soymilk, but a few years ago my friend Hans told me how much better almond milk was for me — he was buying into anti-soy rhetoric, which, as I said, may indeed be valid, but I just don’t know. Anyway, I tried almond milk and immediately switched, primarily because almond milk just tastes a lot better than soy milk.

Outside soy milk, which I used in my breakfast cereal and protein shakes, I didn’t really eat soy, except for soy sauce sometimes, and a little tofu here and there from Pei Wei, which has the best tasting tofu, I think, although I cannot to speak to its nutritional value ;=)

Well, that was then, and this is now. Then I was consuming a lot of animal protein. Now I am eating mostly vegan, so I need my plant-based protein, and soy products like tempeh, tofu, and edamame are really good sources of it. I mean, soy is eaten by a large percentage of the world’s population, so my cynicism tells me that most of the anti-soy rap has been generated by the meat industry, which sees soy as stiff competition.

Soy or no soy, well, life doesn’t really boil down to that, now does it? I mean, how can we possibly know what one particular ingredient does to our bodies? There is simply too much going on inside for one ingredient to be “the one thing” that will either kill or cure us, right?

I fact, I am at the point where I cannot even continue to demonize sugar, because there is a lot of sugar in the good fruits we should eat. Okay, maybe refined sugars and flours are bad for us, but perhaps that is simply a problem of volume, and if we only ate a little of that stuff, we’d be fine, right?

Ultimately, it’s virtually impossible to know the answers. The body interacts with the nutrients we ingest in so many ways, there are too many factors to determine what a particular ingredient does inside us. We have a hard time knowing whether it ever makes it to where it needs to be, or whether it has the opportunity to do the damage or uplift the health the way researchers claim it can do.

So what I currently do is strive to eat a lot of plants, and even, on rare occasions, some fish or eggs, and that should be me as close to “okay” as I can get. That’s my take on it for today, anyway. As you may have noticed, I am always open to change, if the right evidence comes along.

But I’ll tell you, I’ve been through a lot up to now, and a whole foods plant-based diet, including soy, seems right.

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Are you addicted to food?

I hear excuses from people all the time about how they would like to eat cleaner, but they just don’t feel they can do it. I have one word for those people: ADDICTION.

They are addicted to foods. Either to sugar, or grains, or dairy, or whatever.

Someone recently posted on Facebook that she felt so much better after giving up dairy, but she was unsure whether she could stay off it. There is but one word for that: ADDICTION.

That person is addicted to dairy.

Well, we rationalize, if we even admit that we have an addiction. “At least it’s food I’m addicted to, not some kind of drug.”

And you know what? According to Miriam-Webster online, you’d be right, because a drug is defined as “a substance other than food intended to affect the structure or function of the body.”

The key there, though, is the phrase “other than food”. I would argue that if you are addicted to it, sugar is not really a food. If you are addicted to it, dairy is not really a food. For those of us who are addicted to those substances, they are not foods. They are drugs.

Even if you don’t buy that concept, let’s explore the word “addiction”, which is defined by that same dictionary as “persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be physically, psychologically, or socially harmful”. Hmmmmm….

So you know sugar is harming you physically, by making you fat and generally wreaking havoc on your body, but you continue to consume it? ADDICTION.

You are aware that you feel a lot better without dairy in your system, but you continue to consume it? ADDICTION.

I am not picking on sugar and dairy here. They are just two common examples. Maybe your poison is gluten or alcohol or … you name it.

Many times people feel they cannot give up certain “foods”, so they continue to struggle with their fitness goals. Then they have a heart attack or some other brush with death, and, suddenly, they wake up to the wisdom of a cleaner diet, those “foods” are no longer so important.

Of course, that is assuming they survived their brushes with death. According to AllHeartAttack.com, about 33% of people who have heart attacks in the United States do not survive. That’s 500,000 deaths each year.

Eating cleaner after a brush with death is almost like installing the burglar alarm after the burglary — still effective, but it sure would be nice to never have been burglarized in the first place, right?

One other thing: I am so tired of the “life’s too short” argument. “Life’s too short to stop eating cake.” “Life’s too short to quit eating burgers.”

Life is too short. So I’m going to do whatever I can to make it longer. I may die before you, but it won’t be because I didn’t try.

Don’t let your food addictions stand in the way of your fitness. When you find yourself saying, “I’d eat cleaner, but I just can’t give up [insert ‘food’ item here],” think about what you are saying. Are you struggling with a food addiction?

 

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I don’t trust nutrition research

I read a lot about nutrition, and one thing is very clear to me: No matter what you want to believe about nutrition, there is research available to prove you are right.

What does that mean? Are the researchers mistaken? Are the experiments flawed? Are they lying to us?

Some of the research is surely flawed. It’s just too difficult to experiment on humans, because there is only so much control you can ethically exercise over them. There are always plenty of external variables entering into the equation, so we can never get fully controlled results.

Mistakes can be made, too, even by the most conscientious researchers, but as for whether they purposefully lie to us, well, I’ll just say that some of them may be overly biased.

In reality, though, even if all the research is perfectly controlled and unbiased, it is still only reporting generalities. When you try to apply generalities to individuals, that simply doesn’t work.

Look around? Aren’t there extremely thin people, extremely fat people, and many in between? Do you really think that if you put them all on the same diet, they’d all end up with the same body type? NO! Some people are naturally thin. Some are naturally fat. Some are naturally in between.

We all know the person who went on a low-carb diet and lost a ton of weight. We also have friends who lost weight on low-fat. Calorie restriction. Carb cycling. Food grouping. All those diets work to a certain degree, but some may work better for you than others do.

And that is really the point. You need to try things out, see how they affect you. Did you read that whole milk is the thing that will put your energy over the top? Try it out and see how you feel. Are you enamored with the idea of a vegetarian diet as a weight loss regimen? Try it out and see if it works.

Remember, in any nutrition research, you will read that “75% of the subjects” had this result, or “54% of the subjects” had that result. It’s never 100%, because there is no way that the same diet will affect 100% of people the exact same way.

So, don’t put your faith in nutrition research. Continue to read and learn, but do your own research, on your own body, and figure out what is best for you.