Get Bored, Lose Weight

THRILLSVILLE OFFICE VIEW



I doubt that there's anything on the Intertube that's more interesting than an in-depth examination of my diet. By "interesting", I mean boring, because what I eat is pretty fucking dull.

I used to cook for a living and can make most anything I want but lately I'm too bored to bother- I have filled my cupboard with items that don't require much effort...dry beans, rice, pasta...stuff that keeps.

There's a reason for this. When I got out of hospital after a nearly fatal gastric rupture there wasn't much I could eat- years of drinking and crap diet had driven my HDL/LDL , triglycerides and blood pressure to very unsafe places, I was obese and no-one was willing to bet that my liver would recover ...my doc was reluctant to give me medication, so he suggested that I change my diet and I did.

It worked a miracle. 17 months later I've shed 50 pounds and all my numbers are right where they should be. The trick is not so much what you eat as what you don't eat. Basically, you should avoid processed food- and soda pop in particular- as much as possible and stick with raw, fresh ingredients.

I never cease to wonder at some of the foods I see on the grocery shelves... pre-packaged shrink-wrapped hot dogs that are ready for the microwave?
C'mon. This 56 gram hot dog contains 22 grams of fat- are you gonna eat that?
It's gristle on styrofoam, is what.

We, as consumers, are so helpless and feeble that we are willing to pay someone to put weiners in our buns?

Yes, we are, and in every way imaginable.

Little 6 oz. plastic cups of microwavable chicken soup? For the price of three of those cups you could make an entire pot of fresh chicken soup. What good is 6 oz. of soup? Feed that plastic crap to the Gerber baby and pass the iron cauldron please...

There are tubes in the snack food aisle that look like they fell off the Roswell UFO- they have markings on the outside but nothing that's recognizable to me until I find the fine print. Read the fine print and the first ingredient listed is "Partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil" followed by "dehydrated potatoes" and a half-dozen sodium compounds. This is a popular product- is it on your shelf?

99% of what's on the shelves is alien to me. It's brightly colored, so there's a good chance it may be poisonous- you have a much higher chance of being poisoned at home than you'd face in a less nutritionally-hostile natural environment such as the Amazonian River Basin or SE Asian jungle. The main difference is the jungle toxins kill you dead on the spot and the supermarket venom gives you arrythmia, hypertension and type 2 diabetes and might take as long as thirty years to prove fatal.

But, but , but...it's so convenient to just pop a frozen Foodbrick into your tabletop reactor and press a button.
True.
But why do we need such convenience? It's a drive-thruable , pre-packaged, downloadable, ultra-portable world of convenience we live in- we should have plenty of time to prepare decent meals.

You can put 10,000 songs on an Ipod but can't manage four plates on a table?

Here's a simple day:

- Breakfast of moth-free oatmeal with honey, bananas, cinnamon and dried cranberries; a glass of 100% juice and a lightly buttered toasted english muffin. You can fix eggs if you want- I used to cook brunch for a living so I'm pretty much sick of eggs, but I'll fix you an omelet if you want. It's OK to indulge every once in a while, just not every day.


- A cup of coffee every 15 minutes until noon, then every 30 minutes until 5pm. Maybe one on the way home...in the future, science will discover that coffee, in large quantities, cures everything, so you might as well have another cup.

For a month after my surgery I was limited to none, then one cup per day- first I had to give up booze, then coffee and (temporarily) sugar- when one quits drinking, one gets a savage sweet tooth- son-of-a bitch, I wanted candy...damn,damn, damn...time passes like a kidney stone when you have the sugar jones.

- Lunch? Who has time for lunch? I'm at work- how am I gonna eat and still find time to blog, read the news and answer my radio , blogger and other personal emails?
First, I have pretty much eschewed the idea of working while I'm on the clock- if I put two hours out of eight into my actual job, I'd probably be so numb that I'd have to call in sick the next day. The only thing duller than my diet is my job.
Besides, I've had 16 cups of coffee. I'm not hungry.

If you insist on lunch, bring a green salad, a fresh fruit, bread, cheese and perhaps some homemade tuna salad. You need a recipe? sheesh...it's tuna salad...try grapes, celery, onions , tarragon, maybe dill or mustard, some peppers- pretty much anything works except the traditional base of industrial grade mayonnaise. A dash of vinegar , a little pepper relish, you'll be OK.

-Dinner is vegetarian most nights; rice , beans and whatever's good in the produce aisle, maybe a stir -fry... if I'm lazy I'll just eat a couple sandwiches -cheese, tomato, hot mustard- a couple bananas and a cup or two of yogurt.
If it's on sale, I'll get turkey breast from the deli, sometimes I get fresh shrimp . I'm not a vegetarian, I'm just cheap.
Red meat tends to make my stomach hurt, so I don't eat very much; it's not a moral issue.

That's about it.
Not very exciting, but it's pretty healthy and it's really frugal, except for the splurges.

If you eat well and cheaply most days, you can afford the occasional giant-ass Ice Cream or chicken-fried steak...what's amazing to me is finding that the less I eat bad food, the less I want it- I can't eat drive-thru without feeling very ill- I used to be able to eat Wendy's at 1 am- now I'm too healthy to eat fast food, my body isn't used to it and it reacts badly. We aren't designed to digest Big Macs, fast-food requires a certain acclimation and once you lose it, you don't want it back.


(Disclaimer: Medical advice found on-line might not be good for you- for novelty use only)