It's a loaded word, full of assumption and preconception. To say you are on a diet means losing weight. But I'm 6'2" and 180 lbs, why am I on a diet?
Let's turn the clock back a few years to when I first came to America.Yes I'm British, hence why The Wife calls me The Brit on
her blog. I was overwhelmed by the choice of restaurants in NYC. Name an ethnic cuisine and it was there. However, living in NYC is not always the great experience you see on TV. It costs money to feed yourself and the expensive little grocery store on the corner was not exactly overflowing with quality merchandise. So you naturally gravitate towards eating out or ordering take out. Initially I balked at the huge portions, failing to finish my plate. But I realized recently that more often than not, I was now clearing my plate and walking away bloated and more than full. Something was going wrong.
It seems that the average American treats food like a utility. An onerous bill to pay at the end of the month. If you can get more for less and quicker, even better. And the food industry caters for that demand. Walking down the aisles of the supermarket I see this in full swing with ready meals and manufactured food products. I've also become "that guy" who now looks at the label and shouts down the aisle about how bad it is. Even the "diet food" doesn't look good when you start looking at the label. Sure, it's low fat but look at all that sugar!
Okay, time for another analogy. Have you ever put the wrong fuel in your car? It doesn't run very well does it? Is the solution to keep putting the wrong fuel in but in a smaller amount? No, it's still the wrong fuel! Eating less and exercising more may work for some, but if you are still eating the wrong food is it really fixing anything?
But what is the right food? The USDA has had their food pyramid for years and recently changed to a
plate. It's a step up as it tries to visually demonstrate how much food is right. But it feels like there is a lot of lobbying going on in the background that dilutes any real science there. The recommended number of daily calories apparently has little basis in reality and was pretty much guessed at (see
this link from The Wife's blog). You can look through any number of celebrity/fad diets and again find little basis in science. The reason celebrities stay slim is probably not because of their diets but because they have nothing better to do than work out all day with their expensive personal trainers.
What really seems to ruin diets is when they become popular, let me explain my stages of diet evolution:
- Eureka moment, someone finds out a new way of eating and it works for them
- They write a book or obscure pamphlet that virtually no-one reads
- Someone else reads the book and writes their own book changes a few things makes it more readable
- Suddenly, it catches on, the word spreads
- The businessmen arrive, give it a catchy name, a new book is written, snack products are produced
- The industry takes note and start making their own line of products, but you know it needs to be more shelf stable, more palatable, more colorful, this industrial byproduct will make it sweeter...
So, is our current diet a faddish unscientific whim? I really don't know yet. It is in essence a "low carb" diet. To which you say, "Atkins turned out to be a fad blah blah blah". Well, in my mind Atkins was a bit of a fad and has pretty much gone through all those stages above. In fact I feel the "low carb" movement has rebooted with a little help from the "paleo" movement (eating only things available to cavemen). People are re-examining or re-discovering those obscure pamphlets and books. Looking more closely at the science they are telling us that insulin is the key to a lot of functions in the human body. Primarily the way it regulates fuel use (glucose and fat) and how the body handles essential nutrients like cholesterol which we have been brought up to believe is just bad. In simple terms spikes in insulin cause problems and a "low carb" diet seems to smooth out the body's demand for insulin.
Our diet, therefore has three components:
1) Eating smaller portions - some of this takes a lot of will power, to sit in front of a plate at a restaurant and decide right at the start that some of that is going in a box for lunch tomorrow. Ordering less helps too.
ii) Cooking at home more - take away the temptation of restaurants and eat at home more. The key to this step is menu planning which not only helps us decide what to eat each day but cuts down on food waste and reduces our grocery bill. We still eat out but more selectively.
c) Low carb - no grains, no bread, no pasta, no potato, no sugar, no sugar alcohols (the sugar replacements in step 6 above). Okay this was tough, I grew up on carbs. The first thing you do is look for substitutes and loopholes. The big concession so far has been bran crispbreads for my breakfast peanut butter. I've cut sandwiches for lunch and now have a much more varied mix of salads and omelets and leftovers. Dinners are relatively unchanged except for more salad and veg instead of a starch which as The Wife keeps saying is just a carrier for sauce. We eat really well (see
Greedy Gobbler for some examples). Dessert is the hardest bit, we're still working on that.
Has it worked? Too early to tell. The Wife is seeing some early results. We are enjoying our food and feeling very involved in the process. I'm definitely more alert in the afternoons and not having as many post lunch slumps. We'll see how things progress.
So am I on a diet? Lifestyle change and healthy eating program sound too pretentious. How about I just stop eating wrong?
A continuing mission, to boldly eat what no man has eaten before...
