Convince me Pop Tarts & ice cream are bad.

I'd say eat them if that's what you want to do and you feel healthy. However, my argument against them would just be... tell me why they are good for you? What are they doing to HELP your body? Are there better options? Do you know what all of the ingredients are? Are they good for you?

I used to think pop tarts tasted good .... until I started eating clean & organic foods - now foods pumped with preservatives are never as good to me.

pop tarts are just gross.

I haven't read through the 14 pages of this thread but is OP really eating 4k cals everyday with 300+ g of protein, 100+g of fat, and a lot of carbs each day and thinking it's good? All that'll do is give me fat on top of fat

Pop tarts are bad because they taste horrible.

Ice cream I have no beef with.

Finally someone with some sense!

edited to add: Brown Sugar Cinnamon is the exception to this rule.

There is nothing wrong with any of it. I live on it. The only thing you have to watch for is sodium and blood pressure. Which is why they make blood pressure meds. Inhibit your kidney from retaining water and keep on eating all the pop tarts in the world. Yes, serious.

Does your doc know that you eat that much sugar? Eating a lot of sugar may cause high serum uric acid which is likely a causative agent in not only hypertension, but renal disease and failure. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23439375

You might want to have your uric acid level checked. Google "hyperuricemia and hypertension". Here's an article to start with: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23089272

From the article: "Although more research is clearly necessary, the available data suggest that uric acid is likely causative in some cases of early onset hypertension." If you have hypertension at your age, I wouldn't be so confident that B.P. meds will solve all problems. By the time that B.P. is sodium dependent, there may have already been significant renal damage.

Already answered this the first time you asked. As of two weeks ago 3.2 mg/dL. Low end of average. Thanks.

Actually, this post was directed at trojanBB who is apparently already struggling with B.P. issues. Are you, by any chance, on Allopurinol? That wouldn't be at all surprising in someone who was once a very big boy. Are you on any medications? Hope you don't mind my asking but I think it is pertinent to the discussion of how eating junk food in any quantity can be quite unhealthy.

No meds at all. I don't even take aspirin. I do drink about 1000 mg of caffeine a day on top of all this. I'm sure that will bug you too.

Doesn't "bug" me at all. I just think you are a walking medical miracle and that you should volunteer to be studied by obesity researchers (there's a lot of that going on--check the nearest med school). I will say that it is a good thing that you drink a lot of coffee, as that is associated with lower serum uric acid levels. The likely mechanism is that one of the metabolites of coffee is 1-methyl xanthine and it competitively inhibits the enzyme that produces uric acid (xanthine oxidase). Stay healthy.

No miracle here. Just proper macro consumption, nutritional needs met, proper amounts of aerobic & anarobic exercise, brought together with mathimatical equations and a set of controls.

Do tell. Sounds fascinating.

I'll respond to this when I get back to a proper keyboard. Using my phone currently

As promised, I'm at a proper keyboard now.

It really isn't that difficult to figure out. I follow the minimums of 1 g protein for every lb of weight and .35 g of fat for every lb of weight & 35+ g of fiber. I let the rest fall where they may. Which turns out to be significantly more protein just by the nature of my eating.

I hit my micro nutrient goals quite easily by nautre of my diet, which you seem to ignore. By the time I've finished my third meal I've eaten 2 - 2.5 lbs of vegetables, 1.5 - 2 lbs of lean meat (primarily chicken breast), almonds, cottage cheese, whey, a mutli-vitamin, & fish oil supplement. As well as 16+ glasses of water.

My 4th mean, the one you seem to have a problem with, is primarily used to fill in caloric needs. Then the rest is tempered by an exercise routine that I stick to you monitor with a good HRM. My control sets are quite simple. Same time of day, same equipment, same routes/paths, same days of the week.

It's not rocket science, simple routine, consistency, & planning. That is how I'm able to consume what I do and maintain the health markers that I do.