I suck at eating healthy! Any tips? :P

sytchequeen wrote: »

all the comments already contain what I wanted to say about YES to the batch cooking, Nothing wrong with frozen veggies, What do you think Healthy Eating is - it might not be what you think, and Why not look at your food like a science experiment.

I just wanted to add I am a fan of your Bacon Tray, and would be interested in using one myself

Long story short - Healthy eating is not eating junk food. This is a problem because junk food tastes good!

I will use a biochemical definition of "healthy" - which is a cold and calculated definition - "healthy" is whatever you need to provide you sufficient (but not excessive) calories and nutrients (in a manner that does not cause morbidity (disease)).

So - to summarise]- "healthy" means eating what you require - which means:
1) Sufficient calories to maintain desired weight
2) Sufficient nutrients to avoid deficiency

Note - I'm including "fibre" as a nutrient - even though you don't absorb it and barely digest it; I'm using a very loose definition of "nutrient" here - to just mean all macro/micronutrients and minerals, and fibre - in other words non-caloric things in your food that you require to avoid morbidity. I am also using "sufficient" to exclude an excess - id est, sufficient is the optimum amount.


---At this point, I go onto ramble for a bit. Feel free to ignore this part! If you require citation for any of my claims, feel free to ask and I'll endeavor to provide (though you may have to wait for me to search it all up again!). The only reason I didn't provide citation is because I couldn't be bothered - also this isn't exactly a scientific journal I'm posting to :P


So - by this definition, McDonalds can be healthy - provided you know what is in it, and don't overconsume. It has excessive salt - so you'd need to make sure you aren't getting too much salt from the rest of your diet. It has excessive calories - so again you'd need to make sure you aren't getting too many calories elsewhere. Conversely, it doesn't have a great deal of nutrients - so you need to make sure you get that from the rest of your diet.

In other words, it's easy for high-calorie foods to be unhealthy - from an evolutionary perspective they are a superfood - extreme calorie density - if I got a 12" calzone from the indian: greasy, cheesy, chicken and beef goodness ::drools::. That's about 3000 calories. That's more than a day's worth of energy. SHEESH.

Nature would LOVE for that to occasionally crop up - one of them a day and you don't have to spend the rest of the day hunting for calories.

Of course, humans don't spend their days hunting for calories - in developed countries, for all practical intents and purposes, we live in a post scarcity society. We do not have a lack of calories; we have the exact opposite.

Evolution hasn't caught up with the environment - it works by traits that contribute to a better reproduction rate being passed on by virtue of that increase reproduction rate. If high calorie diets killed you before you reached reproductive age, you can bet that evolution would very quickly result in a population of people who have a propensity to not overeat.

Evolutionarily speaking, we like junk food as we can detect that it has lots of calories - and we attempt to eat as much of it as we can because, evolutionarily speaking, we don't expect there to be a supermarket next door with all the food you could ever want. Evolutionarily speaking, every meal is the last meal you will have that week!

This is a base drive - it is not insurmountable. It is a foundation that you build your lifestyle atop. If you put a baby on it's own in a room full of every food, it will naturally prefer the junk food - the body reckons it has the highest calories (and it usually does) - so it will naturally gravitate towards them on the basis that they won't be eating again soon: evolutionarily speaking, food is scarce.

Modernistically speaking, it is anything but! We have pretty much enough food to feed all humanity - we just suck at distributing it. Logistics are hard - ask any army!

As I said, this is not insurmountable - it is merely a foundation - you can build whatever you want atop those foundations! Sure, the foundations will shape what you build - you'll be constrained in that if the foundations slope a particular way, you'll need to build to compensate for the slope. You can't build too far off the foundation boundaries - nor can the foundations support a terrifically tall building - but pretty much everything else can be whatever you want it to be... provided you put in the effort.

As a result - we have a tendency to enjoy junkfood, and want more junkfood - by which I mean high calorie density foods with nutrient densities lower than the calorie density.

Evolutionarily speaking, vegetables aren't great. You need to eat a lot of them to get calories: because humans aren't great at digesting cellulose. We suck at it in fact. In fact, most mammals suck at it - cows need to chew the same food for ages - and even then still need bacteria to help break it down after that. Rabbits again enlist the help of bacteria. Horses, you guessed it - lots of chewing, and then bacteria. Humans... just chewing! Most of the veggies you eat aren't digested... in fact, most veggies are mostly water.

Now meat, ooh - meat is great! Evolutionarily speaking... what you do is you grow lots of veggies - and you get animals to eat those veggies - concentrating the energy and the nutrients as they do so... and then you eat the meat! It's limited in scale though - you can only have so many animals eating other animals in a single chain before the energy density has decreased to the point that it's no longer worth it. Meats have pretty much everything you could ask for though!

Humans are most likely evolved from scavengers or hunter-gatherers - and as such, it's useful to have everything. Meat is great when you can get it - but it takes more energy to get than veggies: so from an evolutionary standpoint, humans are most likely adapted to eat a vegetable-heavy diet - oh, fruits too. BUT - this is where the scavenger-side of things come in. We weren't always farmers. That's a new thing. Sure you could eat leafs... but they are high in cellulose and you don't get much from them. So you send out a large group of people to scavenge - the gatherers - you spread them over a wide area and they grab whatever they can - berries - prehistoric brassicas - prehistoric root veggies - and meanwhile the hunters are out - grabbing whatever meat they can - carrion - birds - trapping - maybe a short chase - maybe a terrifically long chase where the human outruns an antelope (this can and IS done in some of the aboriginal places of the world - truly amazing to see a man pursue prey for hours, barefoot!)

But nowadays, we don't need to scavenge or hunt or gather... we cheated and just grow the veggies instead of having to search for them - we even bred them together to make them bigger and better. Same with the meat - we captured some of it and bred it to be bigger and more resilient to the conditions we kept them in - and voila! Modern society: keep it going long enough and you can create superfoods with incredibly high energy value - nutrient value is less obvious for us to taste - calories are what help us reproduce so we selected for high calories! You can lack most nutrients in your diet but as long as you have the raw energy to deal with the deficiency your reproductive fitness isn't significantly decreased (until you reach a certain critical threshold where you start dying).

So we have created an environment where high calorie food is readily available - it is pretty much an inevitable outcome of our evolution - calories = kids. What evolution didn't realise is that our next meal is pretty much guaranteed - so it doesn't have a built-in limiter on the amount you eat... whoops!

The best it manages is "Error #419 - primary digestion vessel full - please wait a while before continuing to stuff your craw". It doesn't say "nope, that has too many calories - it says "WOO! CALORIES! OM NOM NOM NOM"

BUT - recall my analogy of the foundations - this base drive to eat as much as we can is luckily one that can compensated for. You can build around it; avoiding the issue - you can build over it; compensating for the issue - you can build with it; incorporating it into the structure. So which do you choose? Well - that depends - who is your architect!? Are they a good architect? Do they have the knowledge to build over or around or through it? Do they have the knowledge but not the means? Are there design constraints in the rest of the structure that stipulate how you must deal with this particular bit of foundation?

That is the crux of "healthy" eating - from a base drive - it is "what you need to live healthily (without morbidity)" - eat too much and morbidity sets in - eat too little and morbidity sets in. Eat too many nutrients - morbidity - too few nutrients - morbidity. Too many calories - morbidity - too few calories - morbidity.

What is the correct amount? Well, how long is a piece of string? The answer is - "it depends" - it depends on what you're doing with your life - if you're running around all day there's the potential that you're going to need a lot of calories - and a good variety of nutrients to make sure you can support all the infrastructure needed to run around all day. Do you sit around all day? I'm willing to bet you don't need that much energy - still need a range of nutrients though - but most people can get enough without really trying all that hard. Are you pregnant all the time? Oh my god that sounds terrible! But you need more nutrients - there's lots of what I shall loosely describe as "weird chemical stuff" happening. Are you diseased? Ew, stay away from me! You probably need more nutrients too - and probably more calories as well - need to fight that infection, yo - and fighting that infection needs energy to run that immune system, and nutrients for all the inner workings of that system.

Thankfully, nutrient load doesn't vary that much - the person needing the most nutrients doesn't need that many more nutrients than the person needing the fewest; and there is usually a lot of leeway - you can get away with having too many nutrients - most of the time you just get rid of them, or limit the absorption of the nutrient in the first place. If you eat far too many nutrients, then you hit morbidity - but generally speaking it's hard to do - you have to put effort into poisoning yourself with vitamins, most of the time! Of course, vitamin supplements make that side of things easy... but we aren't talking about them just now

On the other hand, the required energy load varies a lot: the person requiring the most energy, requires more than an order of magnitude more than the person needing the fewest. Alice is an olympian - 12'000 calories a day. Bob is a pencil pusher - 1400 calories day. Carol is pregnant, 2000 calories a day. Dave is in the army, 5000 calories day. Eve is a stunt actor, 3000 calories a day. Fred is a bodybuilder, 3500 calories a day. Gwen has a metabolic disorder, 1300 calories a day. Henry also has a metabolic disorder, 5000 calories a day.

As we can see - it depends on the circumstances of the person who is doing the eating!