The Southern Problem Pt. I - Observations
There is a reason that food tastes good. If food were meant to just be nourishment, and nothing more, taste buds would be unnecessary. Fruit would not exist. Instead of a there being a smorgasbord of cuisines to help define cultures all over the world, humans would be content to subsist off of generic pastes or nutrient wafers; real-life food would be like Soylent Green.
However, it just so happens that food is so much more than the sum of its nutrients and energy potential. Food is delicious. Food is meant to be enjoyed and embraced for both health and taste.
The problem I see in the food culture of America, is that we have succeeded. We are a wealthy nation, and our abundance of food, the plethora companies providing food and food products on a grand scale and the quality of our healthcare reflects just how well we have done as a nation.
We have plenty of food with which to make other foods, allowing for companies to make a tidy living selling variations on food, some naturally of higher quality or nutritional value than others, but the point still stands.
And as to our healthcare system, we can get by eating pretty much anything, because medications and technologies exist to do damage control over both the short and long-term problems brought on by an unhealthy diet. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in my home region of the American South. I watched a few minutes of Blazing Saddles on the CMT Network last week. It was presented through the program Southern Fried Flicks, with each segment of the film introduced with an celebrity interview or correlating food item by "southern goddess," Hazel Smith.
The presentation of otherwise good films through a program like this is abhorrent to me on several levels. The immediate pairing of "Southern" with "fried" is a descriptive term long devoid of charm in my own mind. Furthermore, the presentation of a grossly overweight woman peddling cheaply-prepared, fried foods is a gimmick which one would assume would yield diminished returns in most markets for the visual depiction of cause-and-effect, especially in the post-Paula Deen era. To present Hazel Smith as a "goddess" because she has an accent and a country music background is an affront to every healthy, beautiful Southern woman I have ever known.
These are some fairly petty grievances to take with a show I would not have even turned on had Blazing Saddles not caught my eye in the channel guide. But it brought to mind an issue which has been germinating in my mind for a while: Southern image problem.
As a native Floridian from the non-Disney wasteland of northwest Florida, I honestly resent the popular image of a typical Southerner as a paranoid, racist, homophobic and uneducated cretin, one generation removed from the Deliverance crowd but still marrying within the family. Country music, once an honest expression of working-class emotion, now an American Idol-approved industry capitalizing on the image of plaid shirts, denim shorts and cowboy boots, is certainly no help, either. But one of the biggest issues to me is our food.
Southern cooking is loved and hated in one way or another all over the country. Every native Southerner, from Kentucky to Florida, has memories of at least one relative (usually aged and female) who disappeared into their kitchens and engaged in culinary magic resulting in savory and sweet dishes that combined any and all comforting foods into bakes, casseroles, pastries and side dishes. My own memories along these lines concern my Mississippi-born grandmothers. They both moved to the Florida Panhandle from the Mississippi Delta and combined the best of Delta fare with Florida's seafood offerings to create dishes which left indelible memories.
Now, the problem with Southern cooking is that, due to the hardscrabble economic circumstances which surrounded many of the Southern States, our cooking traditions, which persist to this day, resulted mostly from poverty. The ingredients available to agricultural communities of lesser means defined the food which came from these communities.
The impacts of economics, agriculture and ingredient availability and population demographics are visible in much more detail than just the broad spectrum, Cracker Barrel image of Southern food to the country at large. The ubiquitous practice of frying chicken became prevalent in the South because it was a common practice for many of the Africans who were kidnapped into slavery and whose descendants carried on the traditions in their own kitchens and those of their owners across the South. Familiar, regional crops such as rice, beans and yams defined the dishes which arose out of the Carolinas and Louisiana to produce such distinctive branches of southern fare as Creole and Gullah cuisines. The availability of seafood in coastal states led to the incorporation of fish, shrimp, crawfish and oysters into the definitive dishes of Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana. The cheapness of lard, cornmeal and flour was responsible for biscuits and cornbread becoming such an identifiable pastry in the South, much more than its Scottish grandfather, the scone, which remained more common in the north.
All of these varieties, and many others, are the components which make up the whole of southern food. Southern food was born largely of poverty, it is very carbohydrate-based, and was made to be filling and satisfying to meet the needs of people who worked hard labor their entire lives. As anyone who has ever spent a holiday in a traditional Southern home, where all the classics tend to converge at a single meal, the food coma concomitant with such heavy fare is not unfamiliar.
However satisfying it might have been intended to be, for most people, food is not so hard to come by, nor our daily workload so difficult, that we need to eat massive amounts of biscuits, gravy, potatoes and fried cuts of meat on a regular basis. The following graph was a self-assessment in which the sampled population rated the quality of their diet and the amount of money they spent on food. Take a look:
This graph was part of a larger study, but was the segment of it which I found most interesting. Whether people think they are eating well or eating poorly, they are spending about the same amount of money on food. This seems to communicate that healthy food and unhealthy food are both in ready supply, but if the restaurant choices and belt-straining waistlines of my hometown are any indication, Southern-influenced comfort foods, "soul food," fast food and pre-packaged foods continue to reign as the options of choice for dining both out and in.
Part of this is resultant from the forty-year miseducation of the public as to what constitutes a "healthy diet." This is worth its own post, and is already the stated purpose of multiple books and blogs. But viewed as a whole, the shortcomings and detrimental effect of American food culture are showing themselves more every day.
In pop culture, the likes of Paula Deen and Hazel Smith are presented as womanhood's Southern norm. The average southern man is far more likely to watch football than to ever pick up a pigskin himself after high school, and his appearance tends to reflect that fact. And don't even get me started on Nascar.
In short, Southerners have a immediate connotation with obesity, and I'm sorry to say, the facts back it up. Diabetes is more prevalent in the American Southeast, and has been for years. Southerners do it to themselves through a historical nutrient-deficient diet, which continues in the modern day in correlation with the national trends of increased overall caloric intake (see diagram 2-1).
The problems are evident. For the next few weeks, I plan to continue with this theme and post a series of entries about the history of southern food, agriculture and health. Everyone knows there is a problem, but I want to dive in and find the root cause, focusing on the South. Whether it be simple correlation or as concrete proof of cause, I want to see what is available. I find food history interesting and this is a good excuse to dive into some research.
I will still be posting lighter fare to keep the blog from becoming a one-note stream of data, but you can count on at least one sizable post a week about Southern food culture for an indefinite period of time. Stay tuned!
External Links:
Southern Fried Flicks - CMT
Paul Deen and Diabetes - Diabetes-Warrior.Net
"Hogs and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America," by Frederick Douglass Opie - Google Books
Louisiana Creole cuisine: Overview - Wikipedia
"Low country Gullah/Geechee Soul food" and African based cuisine - CravesSoulFood
What's the Difference Between Biscuits and Scones? - YumSugar
The Best Way to Get Diabetes: Follow the Diabetes Dietary Guidelines - Mark's Daily Apple
Profiling Food Consumption in America - USDA Factbook (PDF)
The Superhuman50!
If you haven't done so yet, now is the time to head over to LivingSuperhuman and get started with the first Superhuman50 Challenge! Run by Andrew and Anthony Frezza, the Superhuman50 Challenge is a chance to jumpstart your fitness and health goals alongside many others, under the constructive and encouraging coaching provided by the Frezza brothers. I've been following their site for a while now, and I can vouch for them without reservation. I'm looking forward to getting started.
I went through a very dramatic personal transformation over the past year. Last summer was when it hit me that I had let myself go. I could feel my stomach moving at odds with the rest of my body when I walked. Running was impossible. I could still crank out a decent number of calisthenics, but I would be out of breathe for several minutes after each set.
I made the decision to overhaul my entire life via the Primal Blueprint, and have been transitioning toward a stricter, paleo approach to eating. I eat heartily of real, whole foods (including plenty of red meat and butter!), and exercise a few times a week. This is the transformation:
I'm actually reluctant to post the transformation photo; I've enjoyed some relief in the anonymity provided by my change in appearance...
The status quo I mentioned above has been enough to maintain my new, healthy weight. Another plus has been that by eliminating grains from my diet, I no longer have seasonal allergies to boot.
But it's time to take it to the next level. I look damn scrawny in the latest photo. I can do pushups all day and run a 5k any time, but I want better body composition. It is my goal, with the encouragement of the Superhuman50, to burn through that last bit of subcutaneous fat around my middle and build up my upper body's lean mass. I want to have well-defined musculature. I want to be Captain America, goshdarnit!
In fifty days, I will post another photo and we'll see what I will accomplish.
Everyone who participates in the Superhuman50 fills out their own personal goal sheet, including their goals, foods to avoid, and foods to include more of in daily intake. Mine looks like this:
The note about sitting might seem odd, but now that I'm about of school and catching up on a lot of personal written projects, I can easily get lost in a train of thought (seewhatididthere?) and go hours at a time without budging from my desk. Sitting isn't good for the body, and I need to spend more time working upright when possible. And yes, that is what she said.
What I love about LivingSuperhuman, and why I encourage everyone to check out their website, is that the Frezzas are incredibly encouraging in their advice and approach to overall health. They espouse paleo nutrition 99% of the time, but they also freely acknowledge that indulgences are not something to be criticized and posted on some sort of scorecard. A "cheat day" now and again is necessary to stay sane, and on that point alone they rise high above some of the more dogmatic health and nutrition writers. They want all their readers to embrace life to the fullest at every level of existence, from the physical to the emotional. I'm excited to participate in this latest project.
So, will you join the Superhuman50? Don't wait another second!
External Links:
The Superhuman50 Goal Sheet - LivingSuperhuman
Standing Desk: Its Benefits and History - Art of Manliness
Maybe it's not just the carbs...
Last year, I went Primal. No regrets. Mark Sisson's book got me going and his blog remains inspirational.
However, Mark isn't the only person who writes on primal living and ancestral health. Through expanding my knowledge of health and fitness, I have been exposed to the the ideas of other writers and bloggers who talk about the paleo and primal schools of thought.
The Primal Blueprint is a title. It is a structured "blueprint," written by Mark Sisson, for getting into good health and losing weight.
Bear in mind the meaning of the word "blueprint"--A plan, a map, a diagram. I most readily associate the word "blueprint" with house-building. But as we all know, there is more than just one way to build a house.
The Primal Blueprint is Mark Sisson's blueprint. It is based on sound research. It is effective for weight loss and body maintenance. It is, above all, a healthy way to live.
However, promoting this style of living is how Mark Sisson makes a living. His books are written by and large for people with bad habits and addictions to break. His meal plan is strictly regimented to bring the greatest results out of the greatest number of people. He tends to use a lot of general guidelines in his blog. That keeps his material well-reviewed and ensures that people like myself continue to refer other newcomers to his body of work.
I have followed the Primal Blueprint quite faithfully for the past six months. But as I wrote before, Mark's books and web essays are not my only source of information. If you read enough material, it becomes apparent that, although Mark is a larger-than-life figure in the primal/paleo movement, he represents only one school of thought. I do not say this to denigrate Mark or his work. Quite to the contrary, I believe that Mark has done more good than possibly any other individual in the paleo community. But I want to explore some thoughts of my own.
If one explores the "paleo diet," The Primal Blueprint is a fairly standard first encounter. But beyond the body-repairing information it offers for someone who is insulin-resistant and overweight, questions are rising that the paleo movement has not yet done research to answer fully. I have a few of my own which I would like to pose at this time.
Once the body has had time to repair itself, that is, for insulin sensitivity to be restored and for the body to adapt to the ideal fat-burning state for its energy needs, are natural carbohydrates still a problem?
I ask this because Richard Nikoley has done some extremely interesting self-experimentation lately, purposefully including extra starch in his diet in the form of potatoes. However, he has not increased his caloric intake, he has simply changed the fat : protein : carbohydrate ratios of his daily meals. And he has had good results, actually seeing beneficial changes in body composition.
This is one factor which increased my curiosity on the subject. Another was a point raised by Angelo Coppola in the last episode of his podcast, Latest in Paleo. He has also been eating more starch each week in the form of sweet potatoes and rice, and has reported results similar to the "leaning out" described by Richard Nikoley: looser pants, increased muscle definition.
This comes after the mainstream paleo community's applying a long-standing mantra of "lower = better" in reference to carb intake. But the movement is still relatively new. Its influence is creeping into everything from 60 Minutes to celebrity fitness, but there have yet to be many serious studies done to provide new baselines with which to measure more specific effects. More on that in a minute.
Is it carbs on their own, or the kind of carbs that are the problem?
The paleo diet, in its broadest definition, is simply eating the foods which our spear-weilding ancestors would have access to. Meat, fish, fowl, vegetables, fruit, nuts. Basically, this is a "whole foods" diet. Foods which can be consumed in their natural state without the need for processing. Grains are excluded from this list (yes, even whole grains) because not only do they require husking, grinding and the addition of extra ingredients to be eaten at all, the grains of today are not the same as what existed a hundred years ago, much less thousands of years ago. And it goes without saying that the recent phenomenon of mass gluten intolerance is yet another reason to avoid grain. I have personally found going grain-free to be the cure for my seasonal allergies.
With the exception of fruit, the paleo diet is grain-free and fairly low carb by its very nature. But when following a regimented eating plan like The Primal Blueprint, it has been my experience that it becomes easy to demonize many natural and pleasant foods like fruit and potatoes; relegating them to "once in a while" treats. But these foods occur naturally. Yes, they contain sugar, and, yes, that sugar is fructose. But, as even Dr. Lustig will readily state, fruit delivers its fructose load amidst naturally-occuring vitamins, minerals and fiber. They contain enough caloric weight that it is simply unpleasant to gorge oneself on fruit to the point of the sugar's affects on the liver, blood sugar and deposition of fat being worse than concurrent nutrients of the fruit delivering it.
If someone is breaking long-standing food addictions, that is where The Primal Blueprint is instrumental.
Speaking from experience, when an individual changes their entire lifestyle to eat natural foods instead of processed foods, it is hard not to constantly seek out "cheats" while there is a lingering addiction to processed sugars. Until the individual's palate returns to its "natural" state and can appreciate the full taste of natural foods, as well as the unbelievable sweetness of natural sugars in fruit, a structured meal plan, with "approved" foods and a carb count is not only helpful, one might say it is catalytic to long-term success.
The physical results of an individual's eating habits show themselves fairly readily and obviously. But what is too often overlooked, or under-discussed, is the unhealthy mental relationship that overweight individuals maintain with food. A popular Lao Tzu quote states that "mastering yourself is true power," and one could easily extrapolate that into an argument that if you can't master your own food consumption against the influence of a very flawed and unhealthy food culture, that is weakness. People declare this weakness every day; telling someone about your own grain-free or paleo diet is usually met with the knee-jerk response of "I could never do that."
It takes guidance and encouragement to help people overcome the onslaught of it, and sometimes a well-written book or a blog are all the only good influence an individual has in their life. For beginners, a blueprint is necessary.
After the initial stages, there comes a certain point in the primal/paleo journey in which it becomes obvious to you and everyone who knows you that you have made a decision to change your life permanently toward a whole-foods approach. This point is usually apparent when you realize that you no longer crave dark chocolate to "complete" a meal, and dairy products are seen less and less on your plate. It is something which I would describe as a mature relationship with food. It is a state of no longer being attached to or craving foods which are culturally mandated as "fun" or "special." Heck, you might be so in tune with your daily needs that you ignore the old standard of "three squares a day" and only eat when you're hungry, regardless if it's a regularly-timed for breakfast lunch or dinner. That is taking the idea of ancestral health beyond ingredients into the re-creation of habits and conditions--worthy experiments, but I digress.
Back to my point. If one has a established a healthy relationship with food, then the allure of sugar should not spark a binge if one chooses to eat some fruit or cut into a sweet potato. The whole idea of "ancestral living" is based on eating healthy food, and eating it according to need. This isn't your mom's low-fat crash diet; it is not about eating healthy food "most of the time" so as to feel better about a weekly nosedive into pizza, nachos and cheap beer.
Claiming a mature relationship with what and how you eat also implies that you are not going to habitually overeat. If natural sugar or starch is part of the meal, it should be factored in as part of the meal, not a superfluous addition that puts one "over the edge" of being full. Remove the desire to binge by including rewarding foods in daily meals.
Finally, if grain-free, whole foods are your first choice, regardless of carbohydrate content, this means that many of the studies which have been conducted about carbohydrates and weight gain no longer apply to you. To my knowledge, the accepted baseline studies have never been conducted from subjects who have lived any significant part of their lives on a whole foods diet. Therefore, their carbohydrate intake was largely from grains and sugars. The kinds of carbohydrates offered to the body by a sandwich bun or a sack of Fritos are much different than those offered from a berries, bananas or yams. The last three all have benefits to the human body that extend far beyond quick energy or post-workout glycogen replenishment. Furthermore, they are not full of synthetic, compound ingredients. The only ingredient in the last three foods are the foods themselves.
Like politics, religion and virtually everything else in any human culture that exists simultaneously in the areas of philosophy and process, the paleo movement has become fragmented into contrasting ideas.
"Paleo" does not strictly mean "low-carb, ketogenic diet."
The definition of the word "paleo" literally means "old," and is most often combined with geologic or biological terms. Hence the "Paleolithic Diet," referring to the eating habits of early humans.
This simple definition (and it truly is appallingly simple compared to many of the other ludicrous options offered to the weight and health conscious) only became fractured into its present, multi-faceted form as various new-school health and nutrition professionals have written and spoken to educate the masses on the subject.
Most books are written with weight loss in mind. Weight loss requires insulin sensitivity. To ensure insulin sensitivity, low-carb is ubiquitously recommended among paleo writers as the surefire way to go.
But once sensitivity is restored, and the decision has been made to eschew grains and processed non-foods, the old damage will not return. There is also the assumption that moderation is a way of life and that food will be eaten when hungry until the individual is not hungry any more.
So are natural carbs a problem?
I've been eating right for a long time now. At this point, it seems much more natural to eat right than it does to eat poorly. I was at a business meeting the other night where the dinner provided for attendees was a stack of delivered pizzas. I won't name the franchise, but I will say that I have never seen anything quite so repugnant as the overcooked slabs of dough with their scant population of cheese, sauce and toppings. And there was a time in my life when I would have eaten an entire pizza by myself in one sitting, washed down with a sugary beverage. Never mind the relative quality of ingredients or preparation...it's pizza, and pizza means good things are happening, right?
That was a long time ago. My entire life is different now. Now that the psychological chains are broken, even milder attractions don't appeal to me any more. I readily admit to indulging occasionally, but I reserve those times for foods that are truly unique and well-made, like when a friend brought home-dipped, chocolate-covered bacon to a movie party. With such exceptions accounted for, the other 99% of my diet is made up of naturally-occuring fats, proteins, starches and sugars.
So, last paragraph. let's see if I can make it good for a change...
Should we give some respect to our day-to-day preferences, eating a little more starch or fruit on some days and little-to-none on others? If one is not simply stacking extra calories on top of regular intake in their starchier meals, it does not seem like an unbalanced way to live. This is especially true when intermittent fasting is involved and leptin and insulin sensitivity is optimal. A mature relationship with food and not fretting over natural carbohydrate consumption seems a lot more fulfilling than avoiding something as tasty and refreshing as a piece of mango because of its sugar content.
Thoughts?
External Links:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-book/the-primal-blueprint/
http://freetheanimal.com/2012/03/the-moderate-carbohydrate-flu.html
http://www.latestinpaleo.com/blog/2012/4/27/latest-in-paleo-56-who-you-gonna-trust.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57407294/is-sugar-toxic/
http://hwbfitness.hubpages.com/hub/matthew-mcconaughey-workout
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-to-intermittent-fasting/
Internal Links:
Eating like adults.
When I start thinking about health, food and culture, I have a hard time stopping. Within minutes of posting about intermittent fasting, I had to go ahead and start a draft of this entry. There will be some anger.
Most of my acquaintances are maintained on a fairly transient basis. I keep very few close friends, and outside of that small sphere I often go weeks or months without seeing many other people. Given these circumstances, my dramatic weight loss last summer surprised a lot of people when they saw me again in the fall. The inevitable question came often: "how did you do it?" And they still come often. The questions have come for so long by now that my response is barely more than a grunt and an email containing a link to Mark's Daily Apple.
Americans' general lack of culture-wide health consciousness is revealed in the way that people almost always follow the same script with the questions they ask. And it drives me batty. Everyone is still influenced by what "authoritative" sources have told us about low-fat and heart disease, but this leads to worry and confusion when confronted by the success seen in high-fat diets like Atkins or the Primal Blueprint/paleo lifestyle.
For the latter half of the twentieth century to the present, Americans have been steadily gaining weight and making concerted efforts to lose it. And, in our defense, our culture does not help this pursuit. Our entire system of food business, subsidized grain crops, additives, long-term shipping and storage of produce, factory farms, processed foods and the fructose industry all work in concert to create an environment which lends itself much more easily to an unhealthy population than a healthy one. The icing on the cake is the misinformation that, for forty years, has dominated weight loss and nutrition advisement.
Medical science, historically, evolves and changes over time as new research finds the flaws in old research and the accepted standards are amended accordingly. In the 1970s, the research surrounding weight control and heart disease was latched onto by the government and incorporated it into the recommendations on what US citizens should and shouldn't be eating. This occurred at the same time as the creation of farm subsidies and the corn and soy industries. Matters of health were made into matters of business and government policies. Today, far too many doctors still operate off of their med school training from thirty years ago, or longer, while "nutritionists" speak from the same tired script as the docs.
And this is why I grow so angry with the people with whom I come into contact. The food pyramid was tried, and it failed. Low-fat diets were tested for forty years and also failed in their turn. But the morbidly obese, still excusing themselves as "big boned" and "genetically disadvantaged," like the mouth-breathing groupthinkers they too often tend to be, stubbornly cling to the exhausted notion that "heart healthy whole grains" and "low fat" variations on pizza and snack foods are the route to good health and fitness.
In the age of the internet, if you truly care about how look, feel or eat, you have no excuse to be misinformed. When you are still quoting research from forty or fifty years ago and claiming authority on the subject of weight loss, don't be offended when I laugh in your face. To discredit my experience is disrespectful. To deny science is ignorance.
But above all, don't ask for me to waste time explaining my lifestyle to you if your response is going to be "I could never do that."
Hmm. One expresses their desire for a change, but simultaneously proclaims their weakness and pre-accepted inability to execute said change. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy right there.
Think of it this way, and perhaps you will understand my lack of patience. There is a group of people who allow emotion and the pleasure of the moment to dictate their choices. They like sweet things and fun foods sold in brightly-colored packages. In the grand old American tradition of "if some is good, then more is better," they desire their sweeties in large amounts, and they get complain when they can't get them.
In almost any other context, we would be talking about children.
However, in the realm of lifestyle and nutrition, this mentality is an accurate description of most adults. Despite their age and supposed maturity, too many adults are downright unwilling to accept the facts when confronted with evidence that our American food culture is a business which sells poor health in the long run.
Steady weight gain occurs from an unhealthy lifestyle. A short-term diet is a temporary fix. Long-term weight loss and weight maintenance requires an acceptance of these facts and permanent changes in lifestyle. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
We have every resource available to us, and there are people like me who are walking proof that a little bit of time spent researching health can yield amazing benefits in a relatively short amount of time.
If you are one of those people who complained of "those ten pounds" so long that they've had time to multiply into twenty, it is time to stop looking for easy fixes and annoying the rest of us with your repetitive complaints. It is your responsibility. Not your environment, not genetics, not your family history. It is your responsibility. And in the age of endless free resources on the internet, you have no excuse.
Intermittent fasting and the myth of "three squares a day."
Scenario #1 Standard American Life
I wake up in the morning and start my day with a bowl of cereal, toast and a glass of juice.
At noon, I eat a sandwich with chips and a Snickers bar for dessert.
At 3pm, I'm hungry and focusing on work is difficult, so I eat another Snickers and wash it down with a cup of coffee.
For dinner at 6pm, I eat a "real meal" of meat, vegetables and a dinner roll. A piece of leftover cake follows for dessert.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day.
Scenario #2
I wake up in the morning and start my day with some eggs and salsa or a leftover piece of meat from the night before.
At noon, I have a salad with grilled chicken strips, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I eat a few squares of dark chocolate for dessert.
At 3pm, I'm feeling a bit peckish, so I toss back a handful of nuts.
For dinner at 6pm, I eat meat, vegetables and some fruit as a garnish or a dessert.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day.
Scenario #3
Primal Blueprint + Intermittent Fasting
I wake up in the morning. I ate a big meal the night before, so I drink a cup of coffee and decide to wait until I'm hungry to eat again.
At noon, I'm hungry for lunch, so I go out to my favorite restaurant for a bunless hamburger with plenty of onions and mushrooms on top, served with a side salad or some mixed vegetables. A few squares of dark chocolate round out the meal to satisfaction.
At 3pm, the fats and proteins in the burger are satisfying enough so that I am not hungry and can work through the day without loss of focus.
At 6pm, I'm hungry but not ravenous. Dinner is another arrangement of meat and vegetables, light portions.
I go to sleep and repeat the sequence the next day, with variation in schedule and meals skipped based on hunger.
Which of these makes the most sense? The latter two are obviously the more healthy choices of food, as well as in which order the meals are consumed, i.e., starting the day with protein and fat instead of simple carbs...but what's all that nonsense about skipping meals?
Question for your Sunday: Why do we eat three meals a day? Do we eat because we're truly hungry, or because a government-recommended diet high in simple carbohydrates has conditioned us to want three meals a day?
America has an epidemic. It isn't obesity or diabetes or heart disease; those are symptoms.
The epidemic is herd mentality. Blind acceptance of a status quo.
A USDA stamp on a box does not make a food nutritious or ideal as an energy source. It simply means that it has the required amount of certain ingredients or "fortifications" to make it passable to be sold to consumers. 60 Minutes aired a piece several months ago that showed how companies actually engineer processed foods to have the same qualities as addictive or controlled substances. Pre-made food bought in colorful boxes is created specifically to manipulate you into feeling hungry sooner, desire that taste again, and buy more. Think about that.
Healthy foods, that is to say, whole foods, meat and produce, raised or grown without additives, are where true nutrition is to be found. They provide necessary fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals for human life. And most importantly to the human experience, they provide satiety.
When your food is satisfying and provides your body with what it needs to replenish cells and nourish your muscles and organs, there is no reason to eat, unless you are hungry. The problem is, food is so easy to procure in our culture that we often forget what hunger actually feels like, resulting in snacking and overeating. One reason for this is the Western attachment to the idea of three meals a day, and the oft-repeated mantra that breakfast is somehow the most important meal of the day.
However, if your meals are complete and provides actual nutrition, you might not really be hungry first thing in the morning. If so, don't eat! Alternatively, if you are hungry in the morning and eat breakfast, and the satisfaction from breakfast stays all the way until the lunch hour, do you really need to eat lunch?
This applies to any meal, or more than one meal. Modern life often requires a lot of time spent being sedentary, either working behind a desk or, in my case, spending time sitting in a college lecture/regurgitate-lecture-on-paper environment. The assumption that we need to constantly replenish the very minor caloric expenditure of sitting is just silly.
In a hunter-gatherer society, or at the very least, a society that is not dependent on grain agriculture (something that wasn't necessary until humans started congregating in cities and found it necessary to sustain large populations with cheap, bulk crops), food isn't always readily available. That is why primitive cultures who still hunt and gather instead of rely on farming for their food sources tend to be incredibly healthy until "heroes from the West" descend to "civilize" them.
If you're not hungry at one of the culturally prescribed 8am/12pm/6pm meal times, do yourself a favor and just wait. The idea that "one size fits all," that something terrible will happen if you skip a meal, is just silly. What you put into your body is an individual experience, and should be a conscious choice. If you're not hungry, no one has the right to make you eat.
Every now and again, I like to go twenty-four hours without consuming food. I'll drink some black coffee (no sugar) or tea, but I give my body time to reset. It accelerates fat-burning, it sharpens my mind through consequent ghrelin production and restores insulin sensitivity. And when I am between meals, I try not to snack; my liver needs a break now and again. This comes in handy on long flights, where the unapologetically disgusting food served on airplanes actually does more to discourage one from eating.
But, perhaps most importantly, it makes me appreciate food. You have to eat properly before you can skip meals properly. When you eat real foods like meat, fowl, fish, vegetables, fruits and nuts, your palate becomes much more sensitive; the act of enjoying a meal when nobly hungry takes on special significance.
When you choose to set your own schedule, you are no longer one of the herd. Your relationship with food changes. Instead of mindlessly shoving back lab-engineered, factory-assembled crap every few hours, the food experience becomes just that: an experience.
I am fasting as I write this. I indulged in a large meal of Indian food yesterday, liberal helpings of chicken and vegetables topped off by an indulgence in the heavenly Indian dessert gajar halwa. I haven't been hungry since, so I haven't eaten. It's been almost twenty-four hours now, and I feel fantastic. I am awake and alert; the words are flowing freely as I write.
Respect yourself. Respect your food. Eat when hungry or not at all.
Further reading:
- Mark Sisson's "Why Fast?" Series [Mark's Daily Apple]
- I Am a Ghrelin Addict [gnolls.org]
- Intermittent Fasting: A Beginner's Guide [Art of Manliness]
- The Flavorists [60 Minutes Excerpt - Video]