diets

The Sad Life of Conventional Dieters
08/30/2010 - 11:54

There is no question that it's possible for some to lose weight on the diet food sold in the grocery store and touted in Women's magazine's like Self. Most women don't lose weight, but we all know at least one slim woman who eats an austere diet of whole grain cereals and low-fat yogurt, punctuated by coffee. Most of these women seem a little grumpy to me. Grub Street profiled one of them: Mika Brzezinki, host of Morning Joe. What does she eat? Not much, mostly things like Kind Bars (full of sugar), coffee, egg whites, and sad green salads without anything but greens. She is going to host a show called Cook Your Heart Out, which will feature "heart healthy" recipes. Let's bet on how disgusting and devoid of goodness these recipes will be?

Grub Street blog is a favorite of foodies, so the comments were not favorable.

Typical of such dieters, like Mimi Roth, Mika has plenty of hate for delicious food, as well as for people who don't fit her standards of thinness. According to the Village Voice:

She supports a tax on all red meat, and often makes comments about overweight people on Morning Joe: "All I want you to pay a little more so I don't have to pay for your big butts, okay?"

Yuck. Me? I'm working in a cafe, just had pastured pork belly with yuzu marmalade. You don't have to be miserable and eat horse chow to have a good relationship with food. Mika's probably a bit malnourished and you don't have to do that to have a healthy heart.

Comment?: 10
You can't have the cake, but you can have the bacon
04/21/2010 - 22:01

In the dim light, the red walls glowed the pictures of various delicious animals. Brown paper tablecloths were stained with tiny conspicuous spots of grease. We had waited a long time to be here, and we were rewarded with course after course of succulent meats with vegetables whose sole purposes were to soak up the salty fatty drippings that tasted of rich flavors- savory black pepper, piney rosemary, lemon, and garlic. Of course the meats were delicious, but what the meat did to the vegetables was even more impressive. Ramps wilted in brothy sauce melted in my mouth. Asparagus fried in lard had been morphed into a pork rind-like delicacy that crunched pleasantly as it dissolved into fat. The waitress asked if we wanted dessert- we ordered another plate of ham.

The rich flavors of that night haunted me for days, until I bought some asparagus and fried it in lard with my friend's home-cured pancetta, garlic, black pepper, and a splash of lime juice since I had run out of lemons. It was incredible and I can't wait to make it again.

It is in these moments that I'm glad I didn't chose the paleo diet's rival- the low fat diets of Ornish and his ilk. With both high-fat and low-fat diets getting similar results in studies, I don't see any reason to give up my fatty treats in favor of bowls of barley and steamed carrots. My stomach is flat and free of pains it suffered with I ate loads of gluten and sugar every day, avoiding fat like the plague.

Sometimes I miss things like the cinnamon rolls in Sweden or the buttery biscuits from my native land, but on a low-fat diet I would have had to give up these....AND bacon/pancetta/lardo/fatty steaks/lamb shank. Yeah right. Life is too short for eating rabbit food. Maybe I'm just too much of a foodie, but how can a diet that purports to improve the quality of your life exclude the best foods in the entire world? 

Comment?: 10
De gustibus non est disputandum
02/12/2010 - 21:34

 

Occasionally I will hear from someone who does badly on a paleo diet or whose health improved when they gave up meat. It's very interesting to me. I guess I' shouldn't really surprised then by Matt Stone's latest post which is a rant about how paleo kills your sex drive (WTF?????* Lierre's assertion that paleolithic is a diet for a smaller population is about economics, as obviously grains allows us to feed more people) and also a letter from a woman who experienced horrible digestive and other problems on paleo. It's so bizarre because paleo cured the exact same problems for me. 

But then again, I've rarely been 100% paleo. I have this fantasy that if I were I would suddenly become super woman or something, but the errant bowl of grits with butter never has made me feel terrible enough to make me stop having cheat meals. I know people who are 100% and honestly they seem no healthier than people who eat butter or an occasional beer. 

But I also see a pattern in people who don't do well on paleo. I'm not blaming people...it's hard to do a paradigm shift and admittedly my first foray into low carb wasn't so successful either. I think it started working only when I stopped thinking low-carb and started thinking about food quality. Some Purdue chicken beasts and steamed broccoli isn't quality in my opinion. Grass-fed beef, oysters, seaweed, purple yams, blueberries, kale...these sort of things form a nutrient-dense nucleus for my diet. When I'm really craving grits or bacon lentils, I personally don't sweat it. Gluten, vegetable oil, and sugar free + high nutrient density seems to solve most of my own problems, the rest was just tweaking. So my own experiences can't refute Matt's assertions. 

But I just don't buy that low carb is dangerous. Plenty of arctic peoples ate low carb their entire lives and reproduced and didn't keel over and die! I think people should work on removing the worst offenders like sugar from their diet and simply do what works for them. 

*In Robb Wolf's podcasts he talks about many women in his gym getting pregnant while doing paleo, but he has also had some questions from people who lost their period...I would be curious to know the nutrition intake numbers of people who that happens to. 

Comment?: 11
Syndicate content