Bad Habits #5 – Don’t Drown Your Food

When I was younger, my brother and I would wake up early and watch Saturday morning cartoons.  That might give away how old I am.  Saturday morning cartoons were kind of a weekend fixture in the old days.  By that I mean before the mid-90s or so.  They tended to last until noon, much to my parents despair, since we held the television hostage all morning.  But often what I remember is not the cartoons themselves, but the various commercials directed at kids that were interspersed between them.

Between all of the toy commercials and Ronald McDonald spots, there were a variety of rather cloying public service announcement commercials which involved a fair amount of paternalistic finger wagging about things we should or should not do.  This included spots on bullying, exercise, studying, and more than a few about eating right.

One in particular involved a rather peculiar lifeguard character surrounded by weirdly anthropomorphic vegetables lecturing us at great length about putting too much sauce and other stuff on our food.  “Don’t drown your food!” the goofy little man would sing.  As I noted in my last piece, it wasn’t the first time I encountered dietary propaganda.

Naturally, I ignored this.  The foods we put stuff on are barely edible without something on top of them.  This includes salad (which is really just a compost pile of it has no dressing), potatoes, and eggs, amongst others. I wouldn’t dream of eating these without some kind of topping.  But as I’ve discovered before, this annoying agitprop did actually have a point.

It’s not the first time I’ve talked about putting too many high-calorie adornments on food.  I’ve noted before the dangers of putting too much salad dressing or cheese on the things we eat.  But the impact of salad dressing doesn’t actually affect me.  Another thing I noted in my last piece was that cooking vegetables is better for us than eating them raw.  So I don’t really eat salad any more.

But I do eat other things which present a temptation to douse them in sauces and things.  Anyone who’s passing familiar with my Instagram feed knows that I’m a big fan of breakfast/brunch.  And my breakfast or brunch almost always includes a bagel or an English Muffin.  Two things that practically scream for toppings.  And now that I’m tracking the calories of these things, I’ve discovered how I definitely can get too much of some good things.

One obvious go to add-on for the assorted breads of breakfast is butter.  A tablespoon of butter comes in at 100 calories or so.  With very little other else to show for it.  It has a chunk of vitamin A (about 10% of my recommended daily allowance), but vitamin A is actually very easy to get.  Eat almost any vegetable, and you’ll get most or all of your RDA.  And since English muffins tend to have about 100-150 calories, you’re nearly doubling the calories by putting butter on it, and the only payoff is a marginal amount of an easy to obtain vitamin.  The same amount of butter will increase the calories in a bagel (which has about 250-300 calories), by a third or more.  So butter is something to keep to a minimum.

And butter’s more compassionate, vegan cousin (margarine) is about the same when it comes to overall healthiness.  I noted before in a piece on hamburgers that vegan alternatives for hamburgers aren’t noticeably healthier than their animal-based relatives.  The same goes with butter and margarine.  Margarine isn’t a healthier option, and neither are very healthy at all.

Cream cheese, the other common bagel condiment, is a better option, with about half the calories.  It, surprisingly, also has very little nutritional value.  It doesn’t even have that much calcium, which is weird for a dairy product.  Whatever processes are applied to this stuff apparently rob it of anything beneficial.

And cream cheese isn’t the only spread that appears to have been cleansed of all things healthy.  Another strange discovery was the lack of nutrition in a tablespoon of jelly.  It’s about the same as cream cheese, calorie-wise, but also has very little in the way of micronutrients.  Which I thought odd, since these are typically made with fruits.  But I guess whatever soulless automatons work in the stygian recesses of the fell processing plant that makes these things somehow suck out any of the benefits when they work their evil, corporate black magic on otherwise healthy ingredients.

Peanut butter, on the other hand, is a pretty good option.  It’ll have a chunk of magnesium, phosphorus, niacin, and vitamin E.  Not a lot, but a tablespoon has roughly 10% (give or take a few percentages points) of each of these, while the calorie count is about the same as butter or margarine.

As I’ve noted before, peanuts aren’t really nuts, and there are other nuts that are much better for us.  Such as almonds, cashews, and especially sunflower seeds.  All of these can be made into “butter”, and those variants have nutrients comparable to their raw form, for roughly the same cost in calories as peanut butter.  So these may be the best choices.  But in order to get them, I usually need to shop at a more pretentious, snobby grocery store, like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s.  But venturing into the dark heart of overly grandiose grocery stores to extract this stuff is worth it.

Breakfast isn’t the only meal that I occasionally feel a temptation to inundate in something seductively unhealthy.  This is because my cooking is mostly disgraceful.  Although I have gotten to the point where it actually tastes good, and only looks awful.  My early escapades in cooking produced food that looked like crime scene evidence.  After a while, I got it to the point where it resembled dog food or food that got dropped on the floor and then stepped on.  Now I’ve advanced it to the point where it looks like prison food.  But even though presentation isn’t my strong suit in food, the flavor is usually fine.  This is often because I introduced some sort of bottled garnish to the dish.

Some of these additives are Italian in origin.  I used to use the old Italian trick of carpet bombing my food with cheese in order to cover up my offenses to dietary decency.  And when I realized this added a few too many calories to my meals, I switched to the other Italian trick of decimating the meals with tomatoes.  A noticeable healthier alternative.  And it turns out that this is true with the Italian sauces too. 

Classic marinara sauce only has a handful of calories per tablespoon.  This means that even a full cup will only result in about 150 calories or so.  And a full cup is a bit much for anyone.  And marinara is all-around healthy.  Most essential vitamins and minerals are available, between 10% and 30% of RDA in most cases.  So this is the guilt free selection of the Italian offerings.  There’s a problem, though.  I don’t particularly like marinara.  In my experience, flavor and healthiness are inversely related.  And marinara may have okay nutrition, but also only has okay taste.

A much tastier pick is Alfredo sauce, which is the liquefied equivalent of dousing food in cheese.  Except without the micronutrients.  Alfredo has 50 calories per tablespoon, but actually very little in the way of vitamins and minerals.  I was surprised to note that it had very little in the way of calcium, which one would expect with a dairy product.  But there’s not much here, unless you get it in large doses.  And you shouldn’t.  A full cup of this stuff would be about 800 calories.  That alone is more than most of us should eat in a single meal.

And what about that most fancy schmancy of Italian condiments, pesto?  The stuff that’s loved by people who spend entirely too much time at Starbucks?  Hard pass.  It has 80 calories per tablespoon (which translates into over 1,200 per cup) and very little else of value.  Pesto probably explains why fat Italians are such a firmly ingrained stereotype.  

So instead of the Italian stuff, I occasionally go full #Murrica and try putting buffalo sauce on my food.  The tart, sassy stuff used to make wings that the snootier amongst us turn their noses up at and the awesome amongst us wolf down with reckless, carnivorous abandon.  This is only about 20 calories per tablespoon.  Not much in the way of nutrition, but it’s a low cost way to cover up a horrific kitchen-born nightmare.  Which I do often.  So buffalo sauce is a good move.

Of course, there are a variety of alternatives of various ethnic origins as well.  Since my wife occasionally talks me into going to Japanese Hibachi places (That’s one of those joints where they cook on the table and do crazy Karate tricks to your food while they cook it),  I’ve developed a fondness for Yum Yum sauce.  Which is one of those hilarious names Japanese people attach to things when they’re trying a bit too hard to market it to Americans.  Although, even more hilariously, it’s not really Japanese.  It’s Japanese-American.  Anyway, it’s a bit sweeter than and not so tangy as buffalo sauce, it does wonders for seafood.  But not for the waistline or my overall health.  This stuff has 80 calories per tablespoon and not much else.

But if you want something that actually comes from a foreign country and is not so fattening, you should look to southern Africa.  My wife introduced me (as I noted in a previous piece) to the wonders of Nando’s, a South African grilled chicken chain.  They also sell their famous Peri Peri sauces in stores.  This stuff is only about fifteen calories.  A cheap solution to bad cooking.  Which almost all of my cooking is.  When the comestibles of my kitchen become so obnoxious that they are violations of international law (and by that I mean the treaties on chemical and biological weapons), I can douse them in this stuff.  And also I can feel like a pious, self-important “citizen of the world” by using exotic, multicultural condiments.

Of course, there’s an even cheaper way, in terms of calories.  And a far less high and mighty, holier-than-thou way.  Just use good, old fashioned American made pepper sauces, like Texas Pete or Tabasco.   They have almost no calories.  This is by far the cheapest way to cover an obscenity that comes from my kitchen.

And there’s one last thing I’ve occasionally used to make my cooking taste like actual food and not something that was dug up from a prior geological era.  Something I’ve started making myself recently, even though it’s a hoity toity, high falutin’ thing that is enjoyed too often by people who think that caviar would be a good topping for a hot dog.  Something laughably effete elites pour over their eggs while brunching.  And that is, Hollandaise.  

Despite my tendency towards nose-thumbing at the yuppier amongst us, this highbrow delicacy is actually really good.  If a bit ostentatious.  And it’s not hard to make.  Two egg yolks, two tablespoons of butter, and the juice of one lemon carefully cooked in a saucepan.  I just have to be careful to stir it regularly, or I’ll just end up with really runny scrambled eggs.  

This stuff has about 90 calories per tablespoon.  The eggs and lemon juice provide a decent assortment of vitamins and minerals, too.  So this is not a bad option all around, if I’m inclined to take the time to make it.

As I mentioned above, one disappointing trend I’ve noticed with food is that taste and nutritional value have something of an inverse relationship.  Nutritious things are just not as tasty as naughty things.  But sometimes to eat the virtuous things, it’s necessary to put a dollop of something wicked on top.  Healthy food is medicine, and like some medicines, we don’t always like taking them.  So putting a little tasty something on it can encourage us to take our medicine.  But I’ve learned now that it should be just enough to make the medicine go down.  

So that lame cartoon spot had a point.  Many of the things that make food delicious are just not good for us.  But we can have them in moderation.  It should be just enough to make us eat our vegetables, though.  Too much naughtiness turns the medicine into a myocardial infarction.  

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Good Habits #5 – Popeye Was On To Something

When I was younger, I was exposed to a form of blatant, shameless propaganda.  A form of animated brainwashing I’m absolutely convinced that a shadowy cabal of American mothers had produced to slowly osmose nefarious and wicked ideas into the brains of young children.  An elaborate and sinister plot to make us…eat vegetables.

The hateful source of this childhood indoctrination was an innocent seeming cartoon, a shockingly Orwellian method used to promulgate dietary dogma on unsuspecting toddlers.  The cartoon starred a strapping sailor who would constantly be thwarted in his attempts to save his lady love from another sailor, a bearded behemoth of a man who would frequently toss our hapless hero around like a rag doll.  Until, of course, our hero popped open and inhaled (literally inhaled) a can of spinach.  Which immediately made him super strong, able to clobber his arch-nemesis into a pulp.

The insidious attempts to condition me didn’t stop there.  One of our hero’s friends was a gluttonous, obese man who constantly ate hamburgers.  And was apparently a derelict who was constantly broke, because he always offered to pay Tuesday or Wednesday if someone would buy him a hamburger today.  So the spinach eater was a winner and the burger eater was a loser.

This was clearly an attempt to make me eat spinach and other variously healthy things.  The types of things that anyone under the age of ten agrees are disgusting.  And not eat hamburgers, which are ostensibly bad (Although I’ve pointed out in the past that those really aren’t that bad for you) according to the promoters of this animated agitprop.  Fortunately, it didn’t work on me.  Although I guess maybe it’s not so fortunate.  It turns out, these things are quite good for you.

A half cup of spinach will get you all of the vitamin A and vitamin K you need for a whole day and then some.  And a variety of other things, including various B vitamins, some vitamin C, calcium and various other nutrients, including magnesium and vitamin E, which, as I’ve noted before, can be hard to come by.  It’s basically a super food that I don’t have to search the obscure corners of the grocery store for or import from another continent. 

But Popeye’s secret weapon isn’t the only leafy green thing that does good things for you.  Residents of the Holy Land south of the Mason-Dixon line (like myself) know that collard greens, in addition to being an excellent side for barbecue (something I think I mentioned when discussing how to combat COVID-19), are extremely good for you.  It has everything spinach has, although slightly less overall.  One exception to this is that it does have more calcium than spinach.  And unlike spinach, it is an excellent side dish for the blessed burnt offerings that come from a barbecue pit.  

Another thing I discovered recently was beet greens.  It was a bit strange, because my mother threw the greens away when I was a kid and just kept the beets themselves.  I guess her dark sisterhood of vegetable propaganda didn’t know about the nutritional value of beet greens.  It’s not quite so high on vitamin A and K as spinach or collards, but a little bit heavier on various minerals, like potassium, magnesium, and calcium.  

Another healthy thing that grows on top of other things we eat are turnip greens.  They, like most greens, are pretty good all around.  And they have a good chunk of calcium and vitamin E.  This is a pattern I noticed with the root vegetables we eat.  The part of these plants that’s above ground is better for us than the part we dig up.  Turnips themselves aren’t particularly impressive, both in terms of nutrition or taste.  And this is true with beets too, by the way.

My adventures in dieting have also led me to discover assorted green things from foreign lands such as chard and endive.  These are exotic things from the mysterious lands of clockworks and waffles.  And by that I mean Switzerland and Belgium.  I always passed on these, because they seemed like bourgeois things eaten by people who spend entirely too much time at Whole Foods.  But they’re very nutritious.  Chard in particular has a decent chunk of the relatively hard to come by vitamin E.

I also discovered Bok Choy, which I’d heard of before, but always thought was a type of ramen or some such.  It’s…not bad.  I mean, in terms of nutrients, not taste.  All of the vegetables I’m listing here taste like a compost pile.  Anyway, Totally Not Ramen is not as good as spinach, but it does carry a nice chunk calcium, in addition to the vitamin A and K present in almost all green things.

Then there’s Kale, another thing eaten by fancy, pretentious people who think that hollandaise should be a topping for hamburgers.  Not that I’m bashing hollandaise.  I mean, anyone who is familiar with my Instagram feed knows that I’m fine for using it on Eggs Benedict, but not hamburgers.  That’s going too far.  And yes, I know Eggs Benedict is a bit snobby, but some things are so good that I can deal with the fact that eating it makes me seem a bit pompous.

I resisted Kale for a long time, but relented when I discovered it’s pretty good for you.  Not the same way spinach is, because it’s actually a bit light on micronutrients.  But I noticed a secondary benefit you don’t see much in vegetables.  Unlike the other greens, it has a decent chunk of the vaunted supernutrient that prevents heart attacks and allows alcoholics to live longer by reducing their triglyceride count.  By that I mean, Omega-3 fatty acids.

Two other things in the leafy green category which I didn’t object to so much as a kid are cabbage and romaine lettuce.  These…aren’t so great nutritionally.  They have some A and K, but not so much of anything else. And then there’s the least objectionable green leafy thing, iceberg lettuce.  The one green I could eat as a kid and not complain at all.  Unfortunately, it’s basically useless.  It has very little in the way of nutrition.  

This may explain why the vast mom conspiracy exists.  Things that are good for you apparently taste gross to a child’s palate, and the things that were edible were mostly useless.  So any green, leafy thing you were willing to eat as a kid should get a hard pass in adulthood.

So, eating your greens is something you should do.  A lot.  Overall, greens are high on things like vitamin A and C and have a nice chunk of various other vitamins and minerals.  They’re a little light on B vitamins, but that’s what dead animals are for.  And most importantly, they have minimal calories.  So you get a lot of good nutrition with no guilt.

And if you still think greens are gross, just try adding them to other stuff.  I frequently stir in a little spinach into the bizarre amalgamations of scrambled eggs and bacon and cheese that I eat for breakfast.  My Instagram is full of these.  They may look like crime scene evidence, but they generally taste good and the leafy part makes them good for me.  

Other options exist too.  A wily Italian once came up with the idea of Margherita pizza, which includes foods mimicking the colors of the Italian flag.  These include mozzarella (white), tomato sauce (red) and spinach (green).  This is quite edible, to the point where you don’t even taste the spinach.  You can also mix greens with mac and cheese, douse them in vinegar or hot sauce, mix them in stew or with potatoes or rice.  Or maybe put them in some gumbo.  Anyone who’s ever had gumbo knows that leafy greens would probably be the least strange ingredient in it.  Cajuns have peculiar ideas about what counts as food.

One other bit of advice when eating green things.  Cooked greens tend to provide more nutrients than raw greens.  Although it may reduce the vitamin C content slightly, so eat an orange or something.  This has to do with the cooking process breaking down the cell walls in the plants which your body has difficulty digesting.  Heating them a bit unlocks some of the nutrients trapped in them.  Or so I’m told.  I’m not an expert, because I mostly slept through high school biology.  But those people who are experts confirm that cooking these things generally improves nutrition.  Also, you’re less likely to get E. Coli and die.

So, I guess Popeye was on to something.  And I guess the byzantine plot behind the cartoon, which was clearly orchestrated by sneaky moms, was well intentioned.  Although I can never approve of their duplicitous methods.  But you might as well eat those green, leafy veggies like Mom says.  They are really good for you.  And if you try to ignore the advice of your dear mother, she and her clandestine network of devious matriarchs will probably just find a way to trick you into it anyway.

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Uncle Sam Wants You To Save The Republic By Losing Weight

In honor of Independence Day, I’ve decided to share one way everyone in America can be a true patriot.  To do something that will hugely benefit your country.  To rise to the occasion and make your country a truly glorious and wonderful place, more so than ever before.  A way to increase productivity, happiness, well being, and also balance the budget.  This is a call to destiny, to a brighter future.  To the next stage of human greatness.  To finally realize what we can truly be.  Now is the time for all good men (and women, #woke) … to stop being such giant fatties.

A little less than three quarters of Americans are overweight or obese.  About seven out of eight are in poor metabolic health.  Meaning they don’t get the right amount of nutrition, exercise, and sleep.  And this puts a fair amount of strain on literally everyone.  And I’m not just talking about the strain on their lumbar vertebraes that’s caused by the overwhelming weight of their protruding guts.

Healthcare costs in the United States are about $3.5 trillion dollars.  Which works out to be about $10K per person.  Twice the average per person costs of other OECD countries.  Of that $3.5 trillion, maybe $1 trillion are paid for with Medicare and Medicaid.  And a wildly disproportionate amount of these costs are because of entirely preventable diseases.  Like diabetes.  Or all of the things that can lead to.  Like cancer and heart disease, just to name two.  And by “two” I mean the bane of American existence.  Our top two killers.  The sneaky boogeymen that kill us by the millions and rarely get mentioned in the news, because murders are more interesting.

And it’s not just about that.  Being a blimp (something I had experience with until recently) can lead to all sorts of mental health issues.  Depression is probably the most common.  Staring at rolls of flab in the mirror can be kind of a downer.  And depression (amongst other mental illnesses) can lead to imbibing non-nutritional plant-based or science based things that really don’t help.  I mean stuff like meth and opioids and whatever.  

Of course, even if you’re not a drug addict, there are other problems.  It can slow you down at work.  Being fat, sick, and depressed can kill your motivation.  Next thing you know you’re in a dead end job, you hate going to work and do the bare minimum to survive, and you barely are able to talk to your family.  Ten or twenty years later, you discover that your daughter is a stripper.

If we got our diet and exercise regimen under control, it would save billions in healthcare costs, and produce billions in productivity.  And make us happier and less likely to engage in self-destructive habits that slowly kill us. 

And let’s not forget the viral elephant in the room.  Being metabolically healthy prevents the onset of the bat-originated Captain Tripps disease.  People with chronic diseases caused by weight, lack of nutrition, and lack of sleep are vulnerable to the Disease Which Shall Not Be Named that has us all sequestered in our houses.  And gradually starting to hate our families and anyone else that we’re cooped up with.  Not being a bunch of behemoths could produce a certain amount of herd immunity amongst Americans, which might allow us to avoid a disease-induced holocaust.

I’ve mentioned before that my dad yelling at me motivated me to lose weight.  Fat shaming actually does work.  He yelled at me and I pushed myself to get skinny.  So now I’m going to do that to anyone reading this.  Y’all need to get your act together.

As I’ve noted before, lack of exercise is probably the primary cause.  The problem is, you slackers are only doing about two hours per week.  You need two and a half hours of activity (walking, at least) and an hour and a half per week of vigorous exercise (running, bike riding, etc.) per week.

And y’all eat crap, too.  Too many French fries, too much beer, too many hamburgers, too much pie, too many things covered in cheese or drowned in dressing.  But another thing I’ve pointed out before is we are eating too much, but not way too much.  If we laid off just a little, we’d be better off.

The good news is it doesn’t take much work.  It takes maybe four to six weeks to get back to good metabolic health.  If we’d have started down this path when the End of Days Virus started, most of us, if not all of us, could have already done that by now.  And being stuck in your house because Gotterdammerung approaches in the form of Coronavirus is no excuse.  

For starters, you should have no difficulty whatsoever getting plenty of sleep if you’re on full lockdown.  And the truth is, you should have no difficulty getting sleep on normal days.  You can save that next episode on the Netflix playlist for tomorrow.  You can put down the phone and read a book until you fall unconscious.  It takes only a slight bit of self-control. 

And being trapped on your own property is also not an excuse.  There are plenty of ways to add a little physicality to your life.  You can fix up the house or the yard.  You can do various calisthenics.  You can pick up and put down heavy objects.  Or, if you get a little cabin fever and need to get out, there are plenty of activities that allow you to maintain social distance.  Things like hunting, fishing, golfing, or camping are good ways to exercise and stay away from other people.

Not everybody is working right now, but being short on money is no excuse.  You don’t need money to go running, or jogging, or any number of other things.  Besides, being healthy is cheaper than not being healthy.  If you don’t believe me, take a look at your last few medical bills.  There’s a pretty easy way to make most of those go away.

Time is no excuse either.  Even if the COVID-induced Ragnarok weren’t happening, we’d have time.  It doesn’t matter who you are, you can set aside thirty to forty minutes a day.  That’s all you need to hit that four hour a week mark.  You can do this with an hour four days a week, or maybe forty minutes a day, taking Saturdays or Sundays off.

And you definitely have time to cook healthy meals now.  Cooking for yourself might take another thirty to sixty minutes per day.  But even if you are a bit pressed for time, there are ways around this.  Like the bachelor casserole, which is just throwing random things into a casserole dish and baking it for an hour.  These take maybe fifteen minutes of prep, then you pop it in the oven and do other things while it’s cooking.  And pray that the results are edible.  Although if you have enough hot sauce in the house, you can cover up any culinary catastrophe that may come out of that oven. 

The point of all of this is, you have time to be healthy, and in the long run it’s worth it.  Not only are you better off, but everyone is better off if the country gets healthy.  We just need to focus on it.  And stop making excuses.

Remember the words of the wise (albeit somewhat frisky) President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, when he said “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”?  Well, here’s some good news.  You can do something for your country that’s also doing something for you.  And it’s far less than has been asked of us before.

Previous generations struggled, starved, fought wars and disease, and did a number of other things that sucked.  All you need to sacrifice is that extra piece of pie.  And maybe forty minutes to an hour a day to take a run.  Small potatoes compared to your forebears.  And you’ll actually be the biggest beneficiary, because it will result in you not dying.  OK, you’ll eventually die, but it’ll take longer.  And you’ll be a lot happier during the time between then and now.

And this doesn’t just apply to America.  Obesity isn’t just a problem here.  It’s a growing problem all over the world.  Literally everyone in the world can make an effort to be less fat.  All we need to do is be slightly less gluttonous and slightly more active.  It’s not a lot to ask.  So whoever you are, get moving and stop eating garbage.  Your country, your world, and you will be better for it.

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Exercise #5 – Neolithic Exercise

I saw some food documentary awhile back about nutrition or health or whatever.  I forgot which one.  It was one of many that find their way onto my Netflix feed, and I really don’t feel like going back and looking up the name.  But one thing that did stick with me from that documentary was a particular study that an Australian woman did with aboriginal people in Australia.

There were three or four young men who had moved to the city for work and, like many city folk in Western societies, promptly started gaining weight.  So this scientist had them go back to live in the wild in the traditional ways that they’d grown up with.  And they promptly started losing weight.

This particular documentary seemed mostly focused on the fact that they were eating more meat and fewer processed foods, but what I picked up on was something else.  The documentary claimed that they “exercised less” and still lost weight.  This is almost certainly not true.  What this probably meant is they didn’t go jogging or bicycling as much.  But they certainly got plenty of exercise.

I’ve pointed out in a previous piece that some of the things we do outside, like hunting or fishing, may not seem like exercise, but they do burn a decent number of calories if you do them for extended periods.  I have a hunch that the exercise these fellas were getting was this kind of exercise.  Spending all day trudging through the woods to kill a kangaroo (or whatever Australians eat), drag it back, cut it up, and eat it is a lot of work.  Well, maybe not eating it.  But everything else.  Also, building campfires, erecting tents, and the other tasks that come with outdoor living tend to require at least moderate exertion.  And I’ve tested this theory myself on many occasions.  

My wife and I occasionally like to band together with friends from college and work and find our way to the assorted state and national parks in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.  There are any number of parks in the woods, swamps, islands, and mountains that are an escape from city life.

Normally, when people band together with old college buddies and so forth, this involves indulging in the most unhealthy of activities.  And we do that.  Since grilling is the only option when camping, there are naturally large numbers of burgers, hot dogs, steaks and ribs involved.  And, like many of our getaways, there is a fair amount of drinking.  At least, at the national parks.  State parks in these states outlaw alcohol, so we instead drink other things out of red solo cups which are totally not alcoholic.  But despite all of this carousing and debauchery, we always lose weight.

Of course we do.  This type of excursion involves humping a bunch of gear to a remote campsite, setting up tents, tarps, hammocks, and so forth.  Then it involves doing things like spending time gathering wood for a fire, which may involve chopping it to pieces with an axe.  As I’ve pointed out before, chopping wood can be great exercise.  There are a million little tasks necessary to set up a campsite.  And that’s before we actually start having fun.

And there’s plenty of fun to be had.  Most recently, we went canoeing down the Little Manatee River in Florida at the state park of the same name.  Often, we were alongside the enormous sea creatures for which the river is named.  Except that they’re not “little” at all.  They are immense, majestic animals.  Although I still don’t understand how sailors hundreds of years ago seeing them for the first time lead to the myth of mermaids.  They must have been hammered.  You need serious beer goggles to think a sea cow looks like a pretty girl with a fish’s tail.  Although I guess if they were sailors hundreds of years ago, it was rum goggles, not beer goggles.

Canoeing is good exercise, and an hour of that is about four hundred calories burned.  And we did it for two hours.  The second half was upstream.  Because we saw a horrifying thing downstream.  We rounded a bend in the river and came to an area where the local fauna were engaged in a peculiar social ritual.  Specifically, a bunch of shirtless rednecks having a keg party by a trailer.  Many of whom seemed larger and less in shape than the manatees we’d seen earlier.  Some people should really keep their shirts on.

So we turned tail and paddled furiously back upstream.  And when we returned to the campsite, we tried to blot out the memory of the horrible event with judicious application of fermented liquids and roasted meats.  Then it started raining, and we had to hustle to cover the gear and the food up.  

Since it was Florida, the rain subsided in about fifteen minutes.  That’s normal in Florida.  One minute you’ve got a bright sunny day, followed by sudden, end-of-days level torrential rains, followed by sunlight.  Which immediately evaporates the water and turns the environment into a sticky, sweltering cloud of water vapor.  So in addition to the calories burned, we lost about five pounds of water weight in this outdoor sauna.  

And to top it all off, one of my wife’s dopey friends decided it would be funny to dress up as Swamp Thing later that night and scare everyone at the campfire.  My wife and her friends scattered and shrieked (I would have, but I couldn’t stop laughing) as the immense beast charged the campfire.  This probably added to the calorie burn.  Running from characters from horror movies is good cardio, I guess.

When we’re willing to go a bit further, we go to Devil’s Fork State Park in the mountains of South Carolina.  This involves hiking through magnificent mountain vistas and swimming or kayaking on the immense lake there.  Or just diving off of the cliffs on it’s edge into the water and swimming around.

And if we’re feeling a little more adventurous, we can make our way to the nearby Chattooga River and go whitewater rafting.  For those of you who don’t know, the Chattooga is the river from the movie Deliverance.  If you’ve never seen Deliverance, don’t.  It’s disturbing.  But rafting through the rough and occasionally violent rapids is an experience.  And good exercise.  Somewhere between walking and running in terms of effectiveness.  And unlike Deliverance, there’s no risk of getting sexually assaulted by inbred hillbillies.  Like I said, don’t ever watch Deliverance.

And while we’re there, we always stop at the world famous Dillard House in nearby Dillard, Georgia.  This is one of those restaurants where a surprisingly small menu is posted out front.  But when you are seated you realize that the reason the menu is small is that they bring you the entire menu.  They bring bowls and plates of fried things and buttery unhealthiness and you eat it all.  Then they bring more when you’re done.  You leave barely able to walk or stand up straight.  But despite this mad plunge into abject gluttony, we’ve never gained a pound.  The caveman living and outdoor activities work it off.

If we’re really wanting to get away from everyone, we go to Cumberland Island, Georgia, just north of the Florida/Georgia border on the Atlantic coast.  An island only accessible by boat, and the only civilization nearby is the tiny town of St. Marys.  After a forty-five minute boat ride and a fifteen minute trek to the campsite, laden down with all of our camping gear, some people might have already had enough.  But not us.  The island is a wonderful place.

The beaches are spectacular, and the island is inhabited by sea turtles and wild horses.  And, of course, raccoons that try to take your food.  I remember one day sitting on the beach and marveling that my friends and I had the whole beach to ourselves.  Without this park, you’d have to be a billionaire to have this experience.  I know this, because the island used to belong to the Carnegies.  You can still tour the ruins of the old Carnegie house there.  But thanks to the setting aside of these lands as national parks, literally anyone can enjoy them.  Not just industrial age robber barons.

But if we don’t want to go too far to see beaches, we can also go to the campgrounds of Fort Desoto, just southwest of St. Petersburg, Florida, on the Gulf Coast.  This offers beaches, and also campsites along the coast where you can watch the sun set.  Just don’t go onto the sandbar when the tide is low.  We made that mistake.  The seemingly solid sand is just a bog that we sank into.  And you discover the hard way exactly what kind of things settle to the bottom of the ocean.  Basically, everything that has ever died.  The smell is astonishing.  

When we’re not hiking through the woods and running wild on the beaches or exploring the old Fort (which dates back to the Spanish-American War.  I think.), we spend the rest of our time fending off the local wildlife, like raccoons and seagulls.  I’ve discovered the hard way that both animals really like hot dogs, and once they know you have food, you’ll spend a lot of time defending it.  Being the neolithic man (or woman) who defends your food supply from pesky rodents and larcenous birds can burn off a lot of excess fat.  Except I don’t think they had hot dogs in the Stone Age.  They probably just ate actual dogs.  But that’s beside the point.

And even if we don’t feel like staying overnight, there are options near our house.  Maybe a ten minute drive away from us is Weedon Island State Park, where we can take long hikes through the mangrove trees, or along the boardwalks out into the marsh.  Or we can put kayaks in the water and kayak through the little streams that run through the mangrove trees.  Or go fishing for the enormous fish that inhabit the intracoastal waterways nearby.  We can do all of this and still go home, get cleaned up, and have a night on the town later, if we’re so inclined.

These are just a few of the many parks throughout the country.  Camping (or even a day trip to a park) is a cheap vacation in terms of dollars, but very costly in terms of calories.  In the good way.  I always come back skinnier, no matter how much I ingest or imbibe.

This is actually a great idea right now.  A great way to social distance and avoid the bat-virus-driven armageddon we’re currently in the middle of is to leave civilization altogether.  It’s virtually guaranteed that there is a national or state park within a short drive of where you live.  So go act like a caveman (or cavewoman) and get back to nature.  The pounds will fly off.

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Bad Habits #4 – Big Sides Can Give You Big Sides

I learned fairly early on that eating out was not the healthiest thing I could do on a diet.  Like, not at all.  Just today I got a free iced cinnamon biscuit at Maple Street Biscuit Company because it was my first trip there.  It was over 500 calories.  The portion sizes are so ridiculous at American restaurants that I’m starting to believe that the food service industry is deliberately fattening us up to serve some nefarious end.

Well, maybe not.  But when I started keeping track of what I was eating, I was a bit surprised to see just how many extra calories I was getting eating some things.  I learned the hard way one day at the beach.  My parents were in town about a year ago, shortly after I started using Cronometer.  I was taking a nap in the condo my parents had rented only to be rudely awakened by a voice that said, “Wake up!  You’re snoring like a damned animal!”  

It was my father.  This is normal behavior for him.  He’s a retired Army vet, so he bellows a lot.  He continued to tell me in no uncertain terms that I needed to lose weight to cure myself of this ungodly snoring.  I had already started my diet, but this only made me more determined.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you that fat-shaming doesn’t work.  Unless it’s some rando yelling across the street.  Screw those guys.  They’re about as effective as catcallers.  But when someone you know and respect does it, you tend to pay attention.

Anyway, we made our way down to one of our favorite beachside restaurants and ordered some food.  It had the normal fare one would expect in an American restaurant (burgers, barbecue, etc.), but also had fish, since it was a seaside joint.  So I ordered that, figuring it would be healthy.

The waiter brought out a sizable portion of fish in a basket, surrounded by an overgenerous, bordering on ridiculous, number of fries.  I plugged the fish into my phone, estimating it was about six ounces, and was pleased to see that it was only about 300 calories.  Not bad.  Then I plugged in the fries, which appear to be maybe a cup and a half’s worth.  And got back 330 calories.  The fries were worse than the main course.

I think this is one thing I was getting wrong for a long time.  We think of side dishes as little bit parts of the meal that don’t count.  But if we’re not careful, they can do more damage than the piece of meat on the plate.  Fries can sneak up on you.  Potatoes by themselves aren’t bad, but fry them in a vat liquid made of the crushed lifeforce of murdered plants (cooking oil), and they can be really fattening.

I realized that the accountant in me was making me fatter.  I tended to go for the most cost effective solution at the restaurant.  I admit this knowing full well how lame and unsexy it sounds.  But I like to make my money go as far as it can.  Why spend $16 on the nine ounce steak when the twelve ounce steak is only a couple of bucks more?  I can always get a doggie bag.  Except, I never got a doggie bag and scarfed the entire thing.

And I made the same mistake with side dishes.  This would catch up with me at, say, McDonald’s.  Why not Super Size it?  It’s only a buck or so more.  At least it used to be.  I don’t really go to McDonald’s any more, so things may have changed.  But way more food for only slightly more money seemed like a good idea.

The small fry at McDonald’s is about 220 calories, which isn’t that bad.  But Super Size fries?  Actually, I guess they just call it “Large” now ever since that Morgan Spurlock guy made that movie.  Which was fourteen years ago.  Which makes me feel old and decrepit just for saying it.  Anyway, “Large” or whatever is 490 calories.  Which is almost as many calories as a typical hamburger.

And it gets worse if we get cute with the fries and put other unhealthy things on them.  Want cheese fries?  Add a couple hundred calories.  Want chili cheese fries?  Add another couple hundred calories on top of the cheese fries.  And probably a day’s worth of incontinence and flatulence.  And if you want to try that Canadian fry dish called poutine (Which they pronounce “poo-tin”, for some reason, which is probably really confusing to the Russians), that’s even worse.

For those of you that don’t know, poutine is french fries, gravy, and cheese curds.  It’s supposed to be made from fresh, unpasteurized cheese curds which are illegal in the US.  This is why the snootier of the Canadians (i.e. Quebecois) will pompously inform you that the stuff you get in America isn’t real poutine.  Shortly before they die of E. Coli poisoning.  But even if you don’t get the food poisoning variety of poutine, the calorie count can be anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500.  This is probably why Canadians are almost as fat as Americans.

And the french fry’s distant cousins aren’t much better.  Tater Tots on the side will be about the same as the small fry.  So will potato chips.  And if you get mashed potatoes (which are almost always doused in butter), that’s almost as bad as the Super Sized fries.  Or “Large”.  Or whatever.

So instead of fries, I’ve learned to go with just…potatoes.  A regular baked potato only has about 160 or 170 calories.  Which is not bad, if you don’t douse it with butter.  Or bury it in cheese.  Or sour cream.  Or bacon.  Or all of the above.  And a twice baked potato has maybe another 60 calories on top of that.  Don’t let my warnings about french fries imply that I’m against potatoes.  They’re just fine.  You just need to make sure you don’t overdo it.

I ran into a similar problem at the local barbecue joint.  Nobody born and raised below the Mason-Dixon line can go more than a week or so without having a pig that was mercilessly sacrificed and slowly roasted over an altar of fire producing blessed hickory smoke.  Although I guess it is weird that people who live in the Bible Belt would do something resembling a pagan animal sacrifice.  But once you’ve had ribs cooked to the point where the meat falls off of the bone, the unholy magic of the barbecue smoker steals your soul and you can never go back.

Most of the sides that come with barbecue actually aren’t bad.  Like collard greens and steamed carrots and corn on the cob.  But the all time favorite barbecue side is homemade mac and cheese.  But a half cup of this has about 220 calories.  And any self-respecting barbecue joint is going to give you more than that.  If they don’t shorten your life by at least a year, they didn’t do their job right.  So expect more like 500 calories.

And if you’re really feeling adventurous and want bacon mac and cheese or mac and cheese with pulled pork, you can expect to pack in 750 calories.  If you’re feeling snobby and bourgeois and want to go for lobster mac and cheese, it’s about the same.  And I’ve seen cajun shrimp and mac and cheese that’s over 1,000 calories.  The only advantage of this option is that the hot peppers clear your sinuses even as the meal clogs your arteries.  But they also fill your eyes with tears, making you weep for the time you’ve lost on the temporal plane for daring to indulge in this seductive extravagance.

Seriously, mac and cheese isn’t bad, but it shouldn’t be a full meal.  Because every time I’ve only had mac and cheese, even the kind with meat in it, I’m hungry again after thirty minutes to an hour.  And it’s not a good thing to eat 500 to 1,000 calories only to be hungry again not long after.  There are some diet folks out there who use this word “satiety”.  Which I hate with an absolute passion, because it’s so trendy and pretentious sounding.  But when they say this, they mean what normal people mean when they say “full”.  Your meal should make you full.  And mac and cheese doesn’t.  A little on the side of something that does make you full is fine, though.

Since not eating barbecue is not a serious option (that would be heresy), I decided to switch to different sides, thinking I might avoid some of the downsides of mac and cheese.  One time, I thought I’d go with baked beans, thinking it would be healthier.  I’m fine with beans, because I’m not one of these weirdo bean-hating diet bros you see online.  Strange people exist on Twitter.  A statement so obvious I feel slightly dumber for writing it.  Anyway, the problem is, beans are still not much better than the fries.  And since the barbecue restaurants around here tend to brutalize their beans with bacon and pork and … well, you get the idea.  

Most of these barbecue joints will also throw some sort of innocuous seeming bread on top.  Now I’m not one of these anti-grain science bros (another type of weirdo I see on Twitter), so I have no problem eating carbs.  But a roll adds another 180 or so calories.  And if I substitute a couple of hushpuppies, I only save about 20 calories.  And the all time greatest bread of all, cornbread, adds about 200 calories.  And there’s a way to make it worse.  

Those culinary apostates who make the sweetened variety of cornbread that is preferred by dark-hearted, diabolical heathens who dare to blaspheme by abusing the most sacred of all breads, will find that the extra sugar will add as much as 100 calories.  And this is before you start slathering butter on it.  So think carefully before you pop one of these things in your mouth.  Don’t be a culinary apostate.  Your waistline and your immortal soul will thank you.

Danger is everywhere, though, not just at McDonald’s and the local barbecue joint.  Some sides are served at almost any American restaurant.  Some of the more dangerous ones (unsurprisingly) are the fried sides.  Don’t be taken in by the fried things, even if they appear to be vegetables.  Onion rings, for example, are one of the most popular sides in America.  And onions themselves have negligible calories.  But the way some restaurants fry them up, you might be in for 200 – 500 calories.  And if you try fried okra or jalapeno poppers, you’re not doing any better.  And by all that’s holy, just forget about the Blooming Onion at Outback Steakhouse.  That’s 3,000 calories.  Besides, it’s not real Australian food.  Which an Australian guy snootily told me once.  Although less snootily than the guy from Quebec.  Probably because he wasn’t French.

Now, I should point out that these aren’t all bad in small doses.  Fries and fried things have some nutrients, and sometimes the oil they’re fried in will bring in some Omega-3s.  And I’ve mentioned before that mac and cheese is not necessarily unhealthy and has some key nutrients in it, like Vitamin A.  And beans and bread obviously aren’t bad for you, despite what the kooky diet quacks may tell you in the darkest, deepest recesses of Twitter.

I guess the point is, we need to have a care for what comes with our meals.  Some of those sides are going to pack on more pounds than you realize.  It doesn’t matter if you get a healthy piece of salmon or trout or catfish.  Too many fries or fried things or cheesy things on the side will definitely give you expanding love handles.  Big sides give you big sides.  So pick side dishes that aren’t fried or drenched in some other form of fat.  Or at least come in sensible portions.

Also, don’t eat out much.  Have you been seeing a pattern here?  Restaurants totally overfeed you.  I’m convinced restaurants are really engaged in a modern day eugenics project and are slowly trying to cull the human race of the unwanted.  It’s an elaborate Bond villain plot by the food service industry.  If we don’t take care of ourselves, one day, most of us will die in a plague of chronic disease, realizing the sinister plot of the restaurateurs.  Then, after most of us have been killed off, the few who remain will find that the mastermind behind it all was Gordon Ramsay who will emerge as God-King and rule with an iron fist over the remnants of humanity.  He’s already tipped his demonic hand.  His show isn’t called “Hell’s Kitchen” for nothing.

So be careful what you have with your meal.  Especially when you eat out.  The most tempting looking sides are the dangerous ones.  Ignore their siren’s call as best you can.  Otherwise you’ll be contributing to the evil plot of the tyrannical chef of Scotland, and he will rise to power and darkness will fall over the world.  Also, you’ll get fat and die.

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Good Habits #4 – Blessed Brown Water of Life

So I’ve been spending the past few weeks writing about assorted things COVID and a few other random topics, but I think it’s time to get back to some of the basics.  Actually, it’s been months.  The lockdown is causing me to lose track of time.  What day is it?  Anyway, the original purpose of this blog was to write about what I’ve discovered about the benefits of exercise and how to squeeze it into my schedule, the good dietary habits I’ve acquired, and the bad ones I’m trying to get rid of.

So today, I’m writing about my favorite thing.  The murky, caramel colored stew beloved by the denizens of cubicles everywhere.  The dark liquid of alertness and heart palpitations.  The caffeinated rocket fuel that powers the greatest economy in the history of the world.  The Blessed Brown Water of Life.

I’m talking about coffee, of course.  The drink that keeps truckers awake on long hauls, cops awake on long shifts, and desk jockeys like me awake during the mind-numbing banality that is our daily work.  The drink so American that Sons of Liberty leader Sam Adams declared it preferable to drink coffee because tea drinking was unpatriotic.  This was probably right after he and his guys culturally appropriated outfits from American Indians and dumped all of the tea in the harbor.  In order to show our patriotism, we would stop drinking things imported from China and drink things imported from…Columbia.

I’m sure I’ve used that joke before somewhere on this blog, but I don’t care.  Even the greats reuse material.  Anyway, as I’ve mentioned in virtually every blog that I write, I’m a CPA, and this stuff keeps me going through the day.  And every other office worker who performs humdrum work.  Or, more succinctly, every other office worker.  

The average American drinks three cups a day.  Which means the average American is a weak sauce, caffeine lightweight.  At least, by my previous standards.  A cup per hour used to be the norm for me, from nine to five every day.  It’s necessary in the accounting world.  Without coffee, I’d take one look at a spreadsheet and collapse unconscious.  Out of either despair at the sheer mundanity of my job or abject boredom (also because of the sheer mundanity of my job) or some combination of the two.

And now that I’ve been tracking my nutrients and calories, I’ve discovered, to my great joy, that the stuff provides a pretty decent number of micronutrients.  The seven cups or so I used to drink gave me one quarter of my daily allowance in potassium, one eighth of my magnesium needs (something that is surprisingly difficult to get enough of, as I’ve noted previously), one fifth of niacin and thiamine needs, nearly all of the vitamin B5 I’ll need, and all of the Riboflavin I might need.  

The unfortunate thing I discovered is that it can also cause you to lose magnesium and calcium.  So I’ve dialed it back to four cups, which is what doctors recommend as the max.  This way, I get the benefits, while limiting the side effects.  So, if you want to know the nutrients I get from my current dosage, take every fraction I listed in the previous paragraph and multiply by four sevenths.  I’ll wait.

Now, I’d heard that there are other side effects.  I’d often heard that too much is bad for your heart and your kidneys, amongst other things.  I even heard that this could cause Rhabdomyolysis.  Rhabdomyolysis is a word that makes me thank God and all that is good and right and just that I’m a blogger.  Because I don’t have to try to pronounce that awful word verbally.  And spell check is available when I inevitably misspell it.  Apparently, this is muscle breakdown that releases something into your blood that damages your kidneys.

But according to the National Institutes of Health, Rha- screw it, I don’t feel like typing it again.  The Disease That Shall Not Be Named is rarely caused by coffee.  One lady drank a liter and had bad problems.  Which is less than I used to drink.  But if you limit your consumption to four, the risks decrease, and they weren’t that high to begin with.

As for heart disease and stroke, the risks are not increased.  They’re actually decreased.  Also, risks of certain cancers, Parkinson’s, and dementia are decreased.  And although coffee increases blood pressure when you drink it, the increase is temporary, so it’s only a problem if you suffer from pretty serious hypertension.  So basically this stuff is bronze colored elixir which helps cure all ills.  Unless you drink decaf.  Which is a monstrosity that would justly see you condemned to the innermost circles of Hell.  You need to drink the regular stuff to get the benefits, the higher the octane, the better.

There are a few other downsides.  One obvious one is that it’ll result in a few extra trips to the bathroom.  But I can live with that.  It gives me an excuse to get away from my annoying co-workers.  Besides, it helps with the bowel movements.  This can be great for people who like burritos, like me.  That trip to Chipotle that leaves you backed up is easily cured with coffee.  It’s basically caffeinated Drano.  Except that it won’t kill you like actual Drano.

And there are a few other drawbacks.  It can cause heartburn.  It can aggravate things like acid reflux.  And if I have too much, I might feel a slightly sour stomach.  So if any of these happen, this is when I stop and eat something and drink some water.  It’s important to eat stuff.  Or else bad things can happen.

Such as the worst side effect: the jitters.  This is what happens when the caffeine hijacks your nervous system.  Too much coffee, especially on an empty stomach, sends signals to your brain which results in shakes, sweats, clammy skin, and an urge to eat bags and bags of potato chips or bars and bars of chocolate.  Which is not helpful if you’re trying to lose weight.

I’m told that some people lose sleep when they drink too much coffee.  These people are clearly genetically inferior weaklings, because it never stopped me.  But I’ve been told that even if I seem to fall asleep easily, I don’t necessarily sleep well.  So it probably is a good idea to cut back after lunch.  So now I have one more cup to offset my after lunch drowsiness, then switch to water.

Naturally, all of this doesn’t apply if you have some sort of medical condition. If you’re suffering from osteoporosis (I.E. bone loss that is common in old people, astronauts, and alcoholics), you should not drink something that literally makes you piss away your calcium.  Also, it doesn’t mix well with pregnancy.  You don’t want to make your kid hyperactive before he or she is even born.  And certain prescription drugs or other conditions may interact with it.  Consider this the obligatory “Ask Your Doctor” disclaimer.

So now that we’ve established why coffee is awesome (and also to be used with care), let’s discuss how we should drink it.  Of course, there are so many options out there, the undereducated coffee noob might get severe decision anxiety.  Even regular coffee comes in about a million different flavors.  Then there’s the non-standard options.  

Such as espresso, which is basically just coffee shots.  People who pound these are probably psychotic serial killers, so I don’t.  And if you’re a fancy lad or lass, you might like Cappuccino or one of the many bourgeois variations you get at Starbucks or Panera. But I avoid these too.  The fancy coffee oftentimes has a few hundred calories.  Getting fat off of coffee seems like a pretty pathetic way to get fat.  If you’re going to get fat, you should do it with cake and pie and doughnuts like a normal person.

And in addition to the numerous varieties of coffee, there’s a million possible add-ons.  Any coffee shop has an entire table or booth full of things you can add to it.  For example, you could put creamer in your coffee.  But that’s for the weak.  And you could put in powdered creamer, but that’s basically just sugar.  And it’s also for the weak.  Speaking of sugar, don’t mess with that either.  You’ll just add calories.  

Not all options are bad, though.  If you’re worried about that calcium and magnesium loss I mentioned earlier, you could put milk and dark chocolate in the coffee.  I was thrilled to learn that dark chocolate had magnesium.  It proves the existence of a higher power.  A cup of this type of coffee will replace any magnesium you might lose.

But the problem with all of these is that they’ll make you fat.  Drinking four cups of coffee with cream and sugar, or milk and chocolate, or those cutesy little syrups, is more than a meal’s worth of calories.  Best to stick to low-cal sweeteners, if you must sweeten it.  Despite what you may have heard, they don’t give you cancer.  Although I don’t touch that Stevia stuff.  It’s a travesty.  If a plant could vomit, I think that it would taste like Stevia.  But the other options are fine.  Four cups of coffee with nothing but sweetener (or nothing at all) is less than ten calories.  And given the nutrients and other benefits, it’s a bargain.

So it’s best to drink regular coffee, without too much added.  This isn’t as dull as it sounds, fortunately.  There are all sorts of flavor varieties, but I’ve found an easy way to decide what to get.  Ignore the name and look at the octane.  Most bags have a “strength” label.  Such as mild or medium, which is basically just feeble brown water.  This stuff is so lame, they might as well write “Forever Alone” on the side of the container as a warning to the people who might drink it.  Or “Here There Be Incels”.  Avoid this stuff if you have self-respect.

I drink medium-bold at the very least, which tends to taste more like percolated tree bark than brown water.  You know you’re getting high-powered stuff when it tastes like this.  But when I feel truly fearless, go with the extra bold, dark stuff.  This is hardcore motor oil.  That’s the stuff that keeps me awake through the tedious parts of accounting work.  Which is literally all of the parts of accounting work.

I guess you could drink some other caffeinated beverage.  But face it, soft drinks are for kids, energy drinks are for raving lunatics, and tea is for traitors to the American Revolution and a dishonor to all of the founding fathers.  So do as Samual Adams said and drink coffee.  This can keep you going and does all sorts of good things for you.  Just don’t overdo it, and don’t load it down with too much garbage.  It’ll keep you productive, awake, provide some good nutrients, and generally make the day easier to handle, no matter how dull your job is.  I should know.  Jobs don’t get much duller than mine.

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Pac-Man Made Us Fat

As I’ve mentioned before, Americans started getting fat about fifty years ago.  There have been a lot of theories and debates around this, but I think I know the primary cause.  It’s not McDonald’s.  We’ve been eating hamburgers for over a century.  It’s not pizza.  We’ve been eating that almost as long.  It’s Pac-Man.  Pac-Man made us fat.  Yes, Pac-Man.  The little yellow dude who eats little pellets, fruits, and occasional ghosts.

I remember my dad bringing home the first gaming system I ever owned, an old Atari 2600.  I probably just gave away how old I am.  Anyway, my brother and I were mesmerized by the primitive little thing and the bits of colored light it projected on the television screen.  We would spend hours playing at the thing.  Pac-Man was one of those early games.  And we would plant ourselves on the living room floor, enthralled by the thing.  Until my mother got sick of it and threw us out of the house.

And it’s good that she did.  That time outside was good for us.  And my brother and I both played sports.  Football, soccer, baseball and so forth.  So we weren’t completely inactive.  On the other hand, one of the early games on this primitive system was a football game.  And over the years, the things got noticeably more advanced.  As we grew older, we were playing football on our living room floor more often than the real thing.

When friends came to visit, we were more likely to play games inside than go outside.  The entire dynamic of kids at play changed.  We were less likely to go ride our bikes through the neighborhood.  Less likely to start pickup football or baseball games.  Less likely to go to the swimming pool in the summer.  

Fortunately for us, my mother would insist that we spend some time outdoors.  Although we didn’t appreciate it at the time, like the little jackanapes that we were.  She’d make us play outside for at least an hour.  And she’d take the little black box of sedentarism and hide it in her closet if we complained too loudly.  Which we did, frequently, because we were insufferable little miscreants.  But she was doing it for our own good.

If she wasn’t the one throwing us out of the house, my father would usually make us mow the lawn or some other physical labor on the weekends.  Although I’m not sure he did it because he thought it was good for us.  I mean, sure, he would say stuff about “discipline” and “work ethic” and whatever, but I still think he was just forcing us to do everything he didn’t want to do, all the while watching our backbreaking toil with remorseless, sadistic pleasure.

But this was also ultimately in our best interests, even though I’m still convinced my father’s motivation was almost certainly that of a brutal, ruthless, oppressive taskmaster seeking to enrich himself by exploiting us for our free labor.  The soulless, heartless overlord only paid us with free room and board.  And school.  And cars when we were sixteen.  And college.  Fortunately, my brother and I survived the merciless inhumanity of our chores and derived a side benefit.  We didn’t blow up like many kids.

But this is less common these days.  Kids these days have dads who are nice to them like some cheesy, eighties sitcom dad.  I can’t remember the last time I saw a kid mowing the lawn or trimming the hedges.  The dads are doing it themselves, while the kids stare blankly at games that are leaps and bounds beyond anything I ever had.  This coddling can’t be good for them.  Not just for the health reasons.  They seem infinitely more bratty than my brother and I were.  And we were unholy, demonic terrors.

And even though I don’t play any of these newer systems (unless it’s to let one of my nephews decimate me at something), I gather that it’s changed in another way for younger generations.  The games got more involved.  Some of the things younger people play these days can take days to complete.  And I’ve learned that virtually any game involving Japanese characters with absurdly flamboyant hair can take weeks to complete.  And kids these days (I really sound like an old coot, don’t I?) can play against each other online, something that wasn’t available when I was a kid.  No wonder no one goes outside anymore.  Well, right now it’s because of COVID, but even before, it was rare.

It wasn’t just video games either that caused us to stay inside.  The advent of cable TV made dozens or hundreds of channels available.  Streaming on the internet made it possible to watch the same channels, watch movies, and order almost anything.  We could never leave the house and have everything delivered to us.  I mean, we kind of have to do that now, but even before we were sequestered in our homes due to a viral apocalypse, kids didn’t get out much.

And lack of activity is the reason we got huge.  More than anything else.  As I’ve pointed out before, my diet really wasn’t that bad when I was gaining weight, and I think most Americans are also not doing that badly.  It’s the fact that we don’t move around as much that’s causing us to constantly split our pants.  Regular, moderate exercise increases our metabolism by over 50%.  Adding enough in can allow us to actually eat more than we do now and still lose weight.  But thanks to Pac-Man and the little Italian plumbers and the strange blue hedgehog and various other characters that came after them, we apparently developed an aversion to exertion.  And we gradually got fatter and fatter.

I guess it’s sort of hilarious that the harbinger of American obesity was a little yellow guy who spends his time absolutely engorging himself.  But this and other pastimes gradually replacing our more physical avocations is what truly made us fat.  So go outside and do something that makes you perspire.  Unless you’re in Florida, because merely stepping into the sun causes you to become saturated.  You need to do more than that. What I mean is, move around.  A lot.  Video games won’t do that for you, unless you have one of those cutesy little Wii things.  Sitting inside glued to a screen all day isn’t good for your physical or mental health.  

And, I know, that absolutely makes me sound like a cranky old man.  But getting in shape only takes half an hour per day, five days a week.  Half an hour of running, biking, or even walking.  You should do more than that if you can arrange it, but anybody can find half an hour a day.  So none of us has an excuse.  Assuming you have legs, of course.  I don’t want to be ableist or anything.

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Despite What Some of the Diet Bros on the Internet May Tell You, Counting Calories Actually Works

When I started blogging about six months ago, I started getting followers on WordPress, many of whom appear to be earnest, decent, lovely people who are also blogging about their interests.  The WordPress community offers many interesting perspectives on a variety of topics, some of which might not even be available in traditional media.

I also decided to link my blog to a Twitter account, and began interacting with people interested in health and fitness there.  Twitter, unlike WordPress, appears to be a place where people have reverted to their base, primate nature.   People unleash enraged vituperative, effectively throwing feces at each other like our great ape ancestors, except in digital form.

I never would have thought that relatively innocuous seeming subjects such as nutrition and fitness could produce so much rage and strife.  A field of endeavor dedicated primarily to good habits and not dying young seemed like something that would produce a great deal of peace on Earth and goodwill towards men.  But I, not as schooled in the mysterious arcane intricacies of the high tech morass that is social media, was terribly naive.

It’s not the first time I’ve noted that the Internet can get a bit dramatic, even in regards to healthy living.  But I noticed a disturbingly large number of shadowy figures lurking in the dark recesses of the Twitterverse who were vociferously, and sometimes viciously, critical to the approach that I’ve taken to lose fifty pounds.  

I count calories.  As I mentioned in my very first post, and several since, I’m a CPA, so a mathematical approach to weight loss (and literally everything else, frankly) comes quite naturally to me.  Carefully monitoring and measuring the things I eat and the exercise I engage in in order to ensure that my intake is less than my outtake is a very appealing approach to me.

But I’ve noticed a fair amount of snark, derision, and snidery (not to mention hostility, antagonism, and hatred) towards my chosen method of not dying young.  Dogmatic followers of this or that new diet descend on heretics like me in cult-like fashion.  Variously, I’ve heard that my methods are junk science, outdated, or perhaps just stupid.

If my particular regimen was any of those things, it would not really explain how I’ve lost the equivalent of a beer fridge in weight.  This doesn’t happen by accident.  So clearly I’m on to something.  And as I’ve noticed previously, there are certain organizations out there whose agenda is clearly dedicated to maintaining top fitness that completely subscribe to the methods I’ve deployed.

And some of the people opposed to calorie counting are people pushing alternative diets and oddball supplements.  In other words, they’re quacks and grifters.  But I don’t pretend to know everything.  And because I’m a big-hearted guy, I think maybe I’ll take a moment to steelman some of the arguments against my preferred method of avoiding diabetes, cancer, stroke, and heart disease.  Before I completely obliterate them with facts and logic, of course.

One of the more valid seeming opinions against this is that calorie burn varies.  Everybody’s metabolism is a bit different.  Have you ever met someone who was annoyingly chipper and happy?  That guy or gal with absolutely absurd levels of energy, to the point where you wonder if they’re medicated in some way?  That person probably burns a lot of calories.  Happy people burn more, which has not only been proven by research, but seems kind of like common sense.

Conversely, some people have the demeanor of an undertaker.  The type of person who appears to practice frowning in the mirror.  The type of person for whom ninety percent of the words they speak in any given day are just exaggerated sighs, followed by an expression so forlorn you seriously consider calling a suicide hotline.  That person probably doesn’t burn so many calories.

And even for those of us that are not at the manic or depressive extreme, our calorie burn can vary widely.  From one day to the next, you may be well, sick, tired, energized, etc.  People who don’t get enough sleep have lower metabolism, as do people who are stressed.  People who are sick have lower metabolism.  When you lie in bed, cursing all of creation for the terrible cold that has laid you low, you obviously don’t burn as much as you would when you go for a jog.

Here’s the thing, though.  For every day you’re tired, depressed, or sick, there will probably be even more days that you’re not.  So maybe on that one day you had a cold, your estimates of your dietary results were a bit off.  But perhaps that’s offset by another day after you’ve recovered where you feel full of energy, and your results on that day are better than you thought.  It’ll all average out in the long run.

And I should note, at this point, that ever since I started tracking my calories and my vitamins and minerals, I haven’t been sick even once.  I used to predictably get a cold twice a year, once after the first chill in November and once in the worst part of the pollen season.  And I would occasionally acquire a bug passed onto me by my coworkers, who obtained it from the infernal imps who constantly plague their existence and slowly suck the life force from them.  I’m talking about their children, of course.

But for the past year, I haven’t been sick.  Not even once.  Good nutrition has fortified my immune system, and I have a hard time not being smug when my coworkers call in sick.  I haven’t needed a sick day for a cold or the flu all year, so now I can save them for when I’m hungover.

Anyway, the second criticism I find is that food labels aren’t accurate.  Apparently, the hordes of mindless bureaucrats who pull the levers of power in the world of nutrition from their headquarters in that little patch of land between Virginia and Maryland allow this.  Food labels can be at least 20% off when it comes to the calories listed.  So the figures you plug into Cronometer or My Fitness Pal or whatever could be inaccurate.

But this can go either way.  Some will be 20% too high, others too low.  Over the course of a year, it all averages out.  By the way, I’m probably going to say something to the effect of “It all averages out” at least five times in this post.

Another thing that I’ve discovered is that some studies show that we don’t absorb all of the calories in food.  So the amount of calories I put into the app is probably an overstatement of what I actually eat.  This would just result in me getting better than expected results, which is kind of a good problem to have. 

Another criticism is that if we reduce our caloric intake while calorie counting, our bodies notice and go into a sort of damage control mode.  Our bodies reduce the amount we burn while at rest because we’re not taking in as many calories.  This can result in short-term weight loss, but after a while the weight loss plateaus, and possibly even increases after that.

This would be a problem if I was eating less.  But I’m not.  By engaging in moderate exercise daily, my resting metabolism increases by fifty percent.  That’s an increase from about 2,000 to about 3,000.  And the direct burn from exercise (400-700 calories, depending on how ambitious I am that day) is on top of that.  With regular exercise, I can eat 2,900 calories a day and see the beer gut shrink.  Without exercise, I would have to limit myself to 2,000 just to not gain weight.  So my body didn’t slow down.  It sped up.  

This is why exercise is important.  You can lose weight while eating more.  And it allows you to be the person everyone hates who eats ungodly gobs of food at parties, but never seems to gain a pound.  Lovers of schadenfreude like me can take great joy at the looks of pure resentment, jealousy, and hatred that this produces in others.

Another criticism I saw was that calories are a crude measure.  This is true.  Calories are measured with a bomb calorimeter (an awfully…dramatic sounding name) that…well I won’t go into the details.  Inundating hapless readers with the intricate inner workings of a relatively obscure scientific instrument isn’t what this blog is for.  But, in a nutshell, a calorimeter measures calories by lighting food on fire and seeing what happens.  Which, by the way, is more or less my primary cooking technique.

People with fancy shmancy medical degrees will tell you (and they’re right) that the ways in which your body metabolizes carbohydrates, fat, and protein are completely different metabolic processes.  So, yeah, just lighting food on fire is probably not an entirely accurate way of measuring your true intake.

But fundamentally, your body is a combustion engine.  You combine oxygen with hydrocarbons to produce energy.  With slightly less nasty exhaust than an actual engine.  The point is, lighting food on fire is also combustion.  So the measurements of a bomb calorimeter may not be 100% precise, but it’s probably pretty close.  And as I’ve said before, when you do this over the course of a year, it all averages out.  Maybe you should take a drink every time I say that.  Actually, don’t.  By the time I’m done, you might have cirrhosis.

The last criticism I see a lot of is that a calorie counter would need to take a scale everywhere to count calories.  This is not quite true.  I can put items in Cronometer using ounces and pounds, but also cups and tablespoons.  Now, I don’t take cups and tablespoons everywhere, so I can’t measure everything precisely when I eat out.  But I don’t have to.  You can look at a side of fries and estimate that it’s about a cup or so.  You don’t have to be 100% precise.

Even though this criticism is not quite right, it does touch on something important.  Some people might not be that great at accurately estimating their intake.  There is a tendency to underestimate how much they ate and overestimate how much they exercised.  And people who are bad at measuring their food and activity are the ones who fail at calorie counting.  And this is common.  I’ve been auditing other people’s rather feeble attempts to measure their financial results for nearly 15 years now, and most people really suck at it.

But those errors are mostly the result of people being careless.  If they were to take a little extra time and care to try to be accurate, they’d be fine.  I may occasionally be off on my count.  But even if my estimates of calories are overestimated some days, it’s likely that I’ve underestimated the count on other days.  In other words, it all averages out.  There it is again.  Seeing a pattern?

I also try to be conservative with my estimates.  If I’m not sure if that piece of meat was five or six ounces, I’ll assume six.  If I get back from a run and I’m not sure if I ran for thirty or forty minutes, I’ll assume thirty.  This way, the figures I put in the app are kind of the worst case scenario.  If I do that and get a surprise when I step on the scale, it’s always the good kind of surprise, because I’ll see that I lost more than I thought I would.

But I think I’m pretty close in my estimates.  I’ve tried to burn 500 calories more than I eat each day, which translates into a pound lost per week.  The fact that I’ve pretty consistently lost a pound or so each week proves that I’m coming pretty close.  But even if I was off by about 25% in the wrong way, that would just mean I’d lose a pound every nine days instead of a pound a week.  That would mean I would lose forty pounds per year instead of fifty.  I can live with that.  

Calories may be a bit of a crude measure, but if you apply a little conservatism and are honest with yourself about how much you actually exercised, it does work over time.  You just have to take time to input the foods you ate and the exercise you did.  There is a learning curve, and you need to wrap your brain around how this works and get into the habit.  

But maybe it’s just people like me who can do this.  Not everyone is wired this way.  I’ve mentioned before that I’m a CPA, so crunching numbers is natural for me.  And the guy who told me about Cronometer is a guy who works in finance; another mathematical field.  So maybe we’re good at this because we’re hardcore math nerds for whom this is a breeze.  Not everyone has the same skill set, and they may not have the patience for it either.

Which is part of the reason I write this blog.  Just as my work as a CPA requires me to handle some of the more humdrum details of running a business for people who have better things to do with their time than fumble around with numbers, my research into the nutritional numbers around diet and exercise might allow some of you to glean a few tricks and tips about how to stay healthy, without having to do a deep dive into the details yourself.  

Calorie counting definitely works, but maybe it works best when people who are heavy on the left brain usage employ it.  Someone who isn’t so good with numbers might be better served just reading the advice of someone who is and acquiring their habits.  So, if you and many of your friends are not mathematically inclined, my suggestion to you is (Trigger warning: Flagrant act of self-promotion ahead) that you should read, like, and share literally all of my posts on this blog.  And every other one I write from now until the end of time.

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Americans Don’t Suck Nearly As Badly As The Health And Fitness World Would Have Us Believe

I hear a lot about how Americans are crazy overweight. And we are. About a third of us are overweight and another third of us are obese. But there are certain parts of the media and certain denizens of the Twitterverse (especially those that spend a lot of time covering health and nutrition) that seem to go out of their way to remind us of this. They seem to take unholy glee constantly reminding us that we’re a bunch of decadent, fat slobs. But I’m not so sure it’s quite true. We tend to overdo it, but analyzing what I eat and burn in the way of calories has shown me that I, at least, wasn’t completely out of control.

In the years before I got married, I was hovering around 200 pounds, which for someone of my size is overweight, but not obese. My story about attempting to lose weight was a familiar one. I got plenty of exercise (I would run five miles a day), but the weight never seemed to come off. Like many people, I told myself that I was just having trouble burning it off because I was getting older. Naturally, I was completely deluding myself. My problem, like many bachelors, is that my food regimen was an atrocity. An affront to all that is right and good and decent. An abomination in the eyes of God and nature. A caloric crime against humanity.

I was doing various things wrong. For example, I’ve pointed out in a previous piece that I tended to put cheese on everything because many of my attempts at cooking ended in disaster. This tended to add 200–400 calories. I might also inundate the food with some sort of sauce. Usually very fattening sauce. Dousing food in some sort of tasty thing in an attempt to cover up the evidence of my culinary contravention was hurting me more than I realized.

And every now and then, I’d get a craving for the unhealthy and down a bag of potato chips. A single portion of potato chips is only about 140 calories. But the whole bag usually has seven to ten portions. And I would frequently impulse buy french onion dip or ranch dip, compounding the problem. And that spinach dip that’s right next to the other on the rack two isn’t really healthier. The spinach part is a trap. It’s like putting spinach on a pile of lard and convincing yourself that it’s healthier.

And like any good bachelor, I spent a lot of time carousing. And since my town is chock full of microbreweries, I tended to guzzle high-calorie IPAs on the regular. I’ve already written about how alcohol can mess up a diet. A night or two tearing up the town with your pals can really wreck your waistline. Which can, in turn, wreck your clothes. I started to realize one of the hidden costs of being fat after I split a few pairs of pants.

One upside was that I was unintentionally offsetting these calories a bit. The day after a night out, I was frequently so hungover that I didn’t want to get out of bed until mid-afternoon. Or so poisoned with alcohol that I was afraid I’d upchuck anything I ate. So I didn’t eat anything until the evening. I’d inadvertently discovered the benefits of intermittent fasting. Although frequently it was more like involuntary bulimia when I lost the battle with my sour stomach.

But by far, my worst vices of all were at the grocery store. You know how people tell you not to go grocery shopping hungry? That’s good advice because if you do, you buy all of the worst stuff. And my supermarket posed a particular problem.

The Tampa Bay area, where I currently reside, is the birthplace of Publix supermarkets. Which has all sorts of temptations. There’s a deli, you see. A deli of food both great and terrible. Massive hoagies loaded with mounds of lunchmeat and slathered with mayo and mustard. Racks of rotisserie chicken. Pulled pork and ribs that are to die for. And I mean that literally. If you eat them, they probably will kill you eventually, say, from stroke, heart disease, cancer. Pick your favorite chronic disease.

But the most epic of all selections was their fried chicken. Because I’m from the southeastern United States, eating fried food is a quasi-religious experience for me. And Publix has the most epic fried chicken there is. I don’t know what they put in it, but I suspect it’s infused with the ambrosia of the gods and fried in a vat of oils made from the Tree of Life itself. No fried chicken chain has food that remotely compares to Publix fried chicken. It’s rare that I could walk by the deli without succumbing to the dietary lust produced by it’s overpoweringly delectable smell.

Of course, as is usually the case with things that taste good, it came with a high cost. And I don’t mean in dollars. One full chicken was 2,750 calories. So even just eating the wings could be an entire meal. And if I got the coleslaw and mashed potatoes or mac and cheese to go with it, it was a rather heavy meal. And this was typical, since cooking for myself was something I was rarely in the mood to do.

So my bad eating habits were washing out my good exercise habits. A combination of unwillingness and inability to cook for myself combined with inability to restrain myself from the enticements of the least healthy of foods in the grocery store was preventing weight loss. Still, I was maintaining my weight, so I wouldn’t say that I was terrible. I just needed to improve the quality of what I was eating a bit. Which happened when I got married.

After I got married, the quality of the things I ate improved because my wife started cooking things that were actually healthy. And that didn’t taste like a failed science experiment. The kind of failed experiment that produces supervillains. The type of lab accidents that turn people into homicidal lizardmen and whatever. This is probably why I bought so much precooked stuff. My wife was a much better cook than I am (an admittedly low bar), so we were more likely to eat home-cooked meals after we tied the knot.

But there were plenty of other changes that went along with marriage that didn’t help. We spent a lot of time going out. The idea that married people don’t have lives is nonsense. We went out constantly. And as I’ve pointed out before, eating out is generally not all that healthy. Restaurants these days have a tendency to pile obscene amounts of food on your plate. And my natural frugality didn’t help. If a 12-ounce steak only costs a dollar or two more than a 9-ounce steak, I’d get the larger one, assuming I was getting a deal. But I wasn’t considering the calorie cost, just the dollar cost.

And as our circle of friends increased, we’d go to house parties. These were generally a cross between a potluck dinner and a keg party. And I always felt the urge to eat a little of everything. I told myself that I didn’t want any of the people who brought food to feel unappreciated. This is utter nonsense, of course. I just couldn’t resist the urge to graze. The cornucopia of sinful delights lured me back again and again with its seductive siren’s call. This is why I avoid all-you-can-eat places like the plague. There’s a risk that I’ll eat until I pop.

Other times, when we ate in, I’d cook the only thing I was good at, aside from hamburgers and hot dogs, which any real American can prepare. And that is…giant ribeye steaks on the grill. Publix tends to sell these in one pound slices, which, although I didn’t realize it at the time, can contain over 1,000 calories. Add in a baked potato and some other side, and I was eating the equivalent of two or three meals.

But the main problem with married life is that the exercise mostly stopped. There were a few things we did while we were out, like dancing (which I hate) that burned a few calories. But, especially early on, our days were full of work and our nights were spent on the town. So I never really went running or anything. And I gained fifty pounds in five years.

When I started measuring what I eat and what I burn, I realized what I’d been doing wrong. When I ran five miles a day, I probably burned about 3,400 calories a day. But the atrocious bachelor diet and hard-partying with my buddies probably equaled about the same amount. 

After I got married, when I became mostly sedentary, that burn probably dropped to about 2,000, although my intake dropped too as the meals foisted on me by the self-proclaimed queen of all creation (or at least the house we live in) caused me to eat more healthily. With the exception of the nights out I mentioned above. So I went from good exercise and bad food selections to the exact opposite. And my waistline slowly expanded.

Even though I was getting crazily obese, I realized recently (after I crunched the numbers) that my consumptive choices weren’t that bad. As I mentioned, I gained 50 pounds in five years. To do that, you need to eat about 100 calories or so more than you burn per day. 100 calories more than you burn isn’t good, but it’s not evidence of uncontrolled dietary debauchery. And it’s really not that hard to cut 100 calories a day.

So what I’m doing now is my bachelor exercise routine with my married diet. And I made up for those five years in one year. All it took was the elimination of a few bad eating habits, the addition of a few good ones, and a moderate amount of exercise, maybe thirty minutes to an hour per day. If a few small changes put me on the fast track to good health, it means I wasn’t an incorrigible lazy bum. I was just slightly off course.

This is why it irritates me when someone on the internet imperiously lectures the general public about how horrible our lifestyles are. The internet is awash with hundreds of dismal stories about Americans being giant fatties who eat garbage. These pious pontifications often lecture us about the “SAD” or Standard American Diet. Which is a BS term, since people in various parts of the country actually eat radically different things. This is just a pejorative term used to sneeringly berate us for our occasional dalliances with fast food or fried food. It implies that we are haplessly self-indulgent. But this is an exaggeration.

Even though most people are overweight, only about 8% are extremely obese. That means most people are in the range I was or less. And America didn’t blow up all of a sudden. The average American weight (for men and women) grew by about 40 pounds between 1960 and 2010. That’s not that fast at all. This suggests that most of us aren’t abysmal gluttons. Most people are, as I was, probably only slightly overdoing it.

For most people, it’s probably not about the food at all. This has everything to do with Americans not being active. Since the 60s, our jobs and recreation have become increasingly sedentary. The food doesn’t help, but Americans have been eating hamburgers and for over a century. Fried chicken and barbecue have been consumed here since before indoor plumbing was a thing. But we only got fat recently. Our food choices aren’t the real source of the problem.

It’s all about physical activity. Most people don’t work in factories or warehouses or farms or construction sites anymore. And we tend to be more likely to play sports on a gaming console than in real life. Which doesn’t burn anything, unless you have that cutesy little Wii thing. We work long hours behind a desk, drive through miserable rush hour traffic, and get home and don’t feel like moving at all.

This is where the discipline comes in. I may feel drained when I get home, but it’s important to do something active as quickly as possible. I’ve discovered that doing thirty minutes of exercise when I get home improves my mood noticeably. And if I manage to drag out of bed early (I’m really not a morning person) and work in thirty minutes of exercise, my mood is better for the entire day. Even the humdrum mundanity of the accounting profession which fills my daylight hours can’t diminish the good mood I’ve acquired from morning exercise.

American obesity is entirely reversible. The truth is, you only need to make small adjustments. If I had exercised thirty minutes a day when I got married, or maybe had a beer or two less on occasion, I’d have probably been losing weight. So there’s good news for anyone looking to lose weight. You don’t need massive changes. You just need to add in a few good habits and dump a few bad ones.

If you don’t feel like tracking everything like I do, just try running thirty minutes a day or biking thirty minutes a day. Just try eating more vegetables with your meals. Just try eating fish instead of steak occasionally. Just try eating an apple at snack time instead of potato chips. Any of these would have knocked off at least 100 calories for me, and I’d have been in great shape. And the exercise is probably the most important part. When I was younger, my mother insisted that I spend at least an hour outside every day. She was onto something. Listen to your mother.

We don’t suck as badly as the media would let on. We aren’t hopeless losers. In a year or less, most of us could be healthy. Most Americans are not lazy, fat slobs. There are fat slobs among us, but most of them are very hardworking fat slobs who sit behind a desk all day and don’t get any exercise at night. But for anyone like this who has given up on ever being healthy again, you don’t have to turn into some fancy pants bourgeois health nut who only drinks green tea and only eats kale and collard greens. You just need to clean up your act a little and stick to it. You don’t need a complete, radical change. You just need to smooth out a few of the rough edges of your lifestyle.

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Uncle Sam Wants You To Avoid Shady Quacks And Scammers

So one thing I’ve struggled with observing the diet and nutrition and fitness community on the Internet is trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.  And by that I meant the…bovine fecal matter from the non-bovine fecal matter.  I see dozens of people pimping supplements or little “medical” devices.  I see hundreds more swearing by this or that fad diet. It’s hard to tell who’s right and who’s wrong.

And there is weird internecine digital bloodshed between the supporters of the various diets.  Vegans, carnivores, keto, paleo, vegetarians, and pescuatarians spend a lot of time selling their diet as the One True Way And The Light and dunking on and dragging the ungodly heretics who believe differently.  Truly, even a subject as anodyne as diet and nutrition can be screwed up by the Internet. The brutal, bloody Twitter combat raged by various groups who purport to be followers of the One True Diet is a terror to behold.

Many of these people spend a lot of time placing their superior dietary dogma on conspicuous display so the masses can bask in the glow of their culinary moral rectitude.  Vegans will share pictures of their cruelty free meals. Carnivores will show pictures of them stacking steaks like pancakes in a frying pan. Hardcore keto types will pretentiously remove the toppings from a pizza and just eat that, disdainfully casting away the high-carb pizza crust.  I cringe at this stuff. It’s self-righteous food porn.

I should note, in fairness, that most of them have pictures of tremendous weight loss.  So these diets all appear to work to some extent. But this disproves that their diet plan is the One Plan to Rule Them All.  If they all work, clearly the presumption that any one diet is the diet of the Ubermenschen is false.

The problem with all of this, is it’s hard to tell who’s legit and who’s got an ulterior motive.  Some of these guys are just trying to sell supplements. Others are just trying to get you to pay them for a book, or a gym membership, or a meal plan, or something else to that effect.  

Now, I should point out that the fact that someone is trying to sell you something isn’t inherently shady.  I’ve worked as a financial auditor for 13 years, and can confirm that most people who are trying to sell you something actually think it will help you.  Most Americans are honest. Fraud is actually very rare. Having said that, the nutrition and supplement and diet business does seem to attract more than its fair share of modern day snake oil salesmen.  

Others aren’t selling a product, but are pushing an ideology.  Vegans may make all sorts of claims about how their diet is best, when their ulterior motive is to advance animal rights.  Others might be pushing some all natural, anti-GMO, sustainable food narrative. This doesn’t necessarily make them awful. Maybe they’re acting in good faith, even if they believe something screwy.  But they could potentially be telling you something false in order to advance an agenda. Even if they’re well-intentioned, it’s disingenuous.

And there are a few people who absolutely give away that they’re jerking your chain.  Anyone who tries to sell you on the idea that “this is the diet that corporations don’t want you to know” or that the government has been secretly hiding some dietary secret from you is a con artist.  Back away from these people slowly. Or just run like hell.

But weeding out the nutballs, even the obvious ones, is a time consuming process.  So rather than spend a lot of time trying to interpret people’s true motives, I found an easier way.  I’ve identified a group of people whose motive is well known.  And that is the members of my dad’s old profession.  The United States military. Well, maybe not the Air Force.  Ye Olde Army Colonel who raised me always thought those guys were weak sauce.

The motives of the United States military are pretty obvious.  They need to be prepared to hand an ass-whupping to anyone who may need it.  This requires them to be in peak condition. Even soldiers who don’t serve in combat roles, or at least not ground combat, might have to be ready for this.  So they’re not going to spare any expense to make sure their people have the best nutrition science.  Of course not. The last time the military “spared expense”, electricity wasn’t a thing.

So what does the military say you should eat?  And I don’t mean that ridiculous three day “military diet” that you can find on the Internet.  I’m talking about the DoD diet standards. These standards encourage soldiers to eat high protein and low fat items, like fish, beans, whole wheat pasta, egg whites, skim or 1 percent milk, and low fat yogurt. And they encourage you to avoid items such as: fried items, high fat meats, egg yolks, and whole milk.  Clearly, there are things here that don’t fit the keto, vegan, carnivore, or paleo diets.

I went a step further and found a more hardcore nutrition guide, the Special Operations Forces Nutrition Guide.  It’s a thing.  And it’s not classified or anything.  Although I guess that’s not surprising, since it’s not like they’re going to eat special, top secret, Black Ops broccoli or anything.  I didn’t read the whole thing (it’s 225 pages) but just skimming revealed some things I shouldn’t have been shocked by at all. It’s all very traditional nutritional information.  No gimmicks or anything.  

For example, their perspective on carbs is that you should actually eat them.  Sorry keto and paleo peeps.  You need them.  Not getting enough can result in fatigue, poor sleep, and irritability, amongst other things.  And eating too much protein can be a problem. Excess protein is converted to fat. And they really aren’t fans of eating lots of fat directly too.  I know this could set the hair of a passionate keto acolyte absolutely on fire.  But the guys and gals who wrote this have no reason to lie. Their motive is known.  Keep U.S. troops in top condition. If they aren’t, they could get killed. The writers of this don’t want them to get killed.  They want the other side’s guys to get killed.

Low carb types, like the aforementioned pizza heretic, think grains are the worst thing ever.  But the writers of the SOFNG (not a clever acronym at all, is it?) don’t turn their nose up at bread and grains.  Nor do they exclude things with sugar in them. Nor do they insist on supplements. They encourage people to acquire nutrients through their diet.  As do I, because supplements are totally cheating. Although there is a section for special cases where special operators might use them. But that’s different.  If you’re planning to storm a beach, maybe it’s ok. If not, it’s cheating.

As I’ve been doing in my past pieces, they list a lot of food types which are good sources for particular nutrients.  And all of the lists contain at least one thing that would annoy or enrage a vegan, a carnivore, and all of the other diets in between.  Various meats and grains, for example, are listed and their consumption is encouraged.

There are other items that would be considered apostasy by the fad dieters in this text.  For example, some fad diet pushers scoff at the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and encourage people to fast regularly.  But the SOFNG (okay, that acronym really sucks) writers encourage a healthy breakfast.  You need energy in the morning. Especially if you’re going to do anything active.

Now, some of the stuff in the SOFNG (it doesn’t get better, no matter how many times I use it), like the normal DoD standards, is a serious buzzkill.  Like, don’t eat fast food or pizza. Avoid desserts and things. And avoid alcohol. Which is a literal buzzkill.  Most horrifyingly to me, fried foods are discouraged.  Not that I’m surprised, it just feels like a personal insult to my southern fried ancestry.  In short, never have fun. Fortunately, if you’re not a Navy Seal, you can probably cheat a little.

There’s also plenty of stuff about exercise.  They encourage a balance between strength training and cardio.  Which is upsetting to certain meatheads. There are lots of fitness bros out there who insist that strength training is the only thing to do.  I’ve literally seen some guys push the idea that cardio can be harmful. This is not unsurprisingly not true.  

The other peculiar thing about some of these muscle men is that they often push the more carnivorous diets.  According to the SOFNG (……..barf), strength training requires carbohydrates, and too much protein can actually inhibit muscle growth and cause calcium loss.  So a high protein/fat diet combined with strength training can actually leave you wrecked. This is bad news for the broscientists.

Now, I’m not pushing the idea that you should eat exactly what special operators eat.  This is a diet for someone who is superactive.  When you spend a day running, jumping out of airplanes, carrying an horrendous amount of equipment on a hike, and so forth, you can eat a lot and still keep a healthy weight.

You should eat the same things, just maybe not as much.  The point I’m getting at is that these don’t eschew carbs or meat, and don’t need gimmicks or supplements.  So people pushing supplements or quirky diets as if they’ve discovered some new thing that the rest of the world doesn’t know about are mostly full of it.  Eating carbs is still healthy. Eating meat is still healthy. Anyone who tells you that carbs are bad or meat are bad just isn’t following the science.  

Now I’m not writing this to trash keto and paleo and vegetarian and whatever.  I know that some of these diets are used to treat various diseases and conditions.  The keto diet was designed to treat epileptics. I know that people with high cholesterol, heart problems, or diabetes can bring it under control by eating mostly vegetables.  We know that people have successfully overcome these and other conditions with diet changes. As long as these are effective medical treatments, they can’t be bunk.  

But if all you want is weight loss, you don’t have to do any of these diets.  Sometimes when we’re losing weight on these unusual diets we don’t get all of the necessary micronutrients, because we’re excluding foods that are actually healthy.  You just need to balance your diet and get some exercise, not pick a fad diet. And don’t bother with supplements. That’s cheating.

If you were to choose one of these diets, I’d suggest tracking what you eat.  It is possible to get all of the essential nutrients in any of these diets, as long as you eat the right things.  I’ve learned this by tracking what I eat and totalling up the nutrients in the Cronometer app. But anyone who tells you that you must avoid all carbs or meats or whatever is just speaking from ignorance.  You can pick any one of these diets, or devise your own, and live a healthy life. There is no One True Diet.  

And now, more than ever, people of suspect integrity are pushing questionable diets and supplements, often as a “cure” or “treatment” for the coronavirus.  But this is exactly what the snake oil salesmen in the days of old did. Sell you something claiming it’s the answer and the cure for everything, when it frequently does nothing.

So be careful spending money on health plans and supplements.  Spend time educating yourself. Most of what you need is available for free, or at least for very little.  You can get healthy without spending a dime on nutritional information. And the truth is, the old school stuff that you were taught ages ago, like limiting fat and sugar, eating your fruits and veggies, and exercising, is all it takes.  It’s not really a secret at all.

Uncle Sam isn’t lying about this.  He has no reason to. He’d want his soldiers in peak shape.  So if what he says is contradicting some article I find on Twitter or this or that blog or in this or that magazine, I’d be inclined to side with Uncle Sam.  Do what he says, and avoid the quacks and scammers.

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