Last weight post. I promise! For a little while, anyway. This post is going to cover some ground covered in my previous post about Inulin. This one was written first and Inulin became a hot news topic before this went up.

I wrote twice before about how people that have never really, truly struggled with their weight (losing 10 pounds to look good for your high school reunion doesn’t count) don’t understand how complex the process of losing weight is. At least from a psychological perspective. Another factor is that people lose weight in different ways. What works for one person does not mean that it will work for another. For instance, if you have one guy that loves cheese and pork and doesn’t have any real use for bread and crackers and put him on the Adkins diet, he’s much more likely to succeed than a bread-lover with a fondness for pastries. Even though they may have will-power, self-control, and discipline in equal measure, the results won’t be equal.

I have personally found that a couple of minor tweaks made all of the difference. What matters most for me is simplicity. Anything that requires me spending a whole lot of time counting points is likely to lose me. I’ll lose track of how many points I have for the day, get frustrated, and put the diet off for another day. Likewise, anything that requires of me to not eat cheese isn’t going to happen. Or a diet that says that if I drink a coke, I’m screwed for the day. I need room for a little bit of sin, lest I end up settling for a lot of sin.

I decided after moving up here to make one and only one major, written in stone change: I will eat my daily allotment of fiber at least five days a week. My initial thought was that I would try to do this, see if it did any good, and then if not I would find some other simple rule. I figured that by then I would have the habit of eating fiber and therefore taking the next step (whatever it might be) might be easier. Turned out that the fiber created a cascading effect of virtue.

Partially, I think, because of how I chose to get those calories: High-fiber cereal. Really high fiber serial. I eat 80-90% (or more) of my daily allotment for breakfast. That has the benefit of getting breakfast into my system at the beginning of the day. As everyone knows, it’s better to eat more meals of smaller quantity than fewer meals of greater quantity. I always knew that, but could never manage to do it. But breakfast set the stage for that. And it prevented me from going out and getting breakfast of a much worse sort. I did have to strike out a compromise and created a compromise: I get to eat breakfast at McDonald’s on Wednesdays. I gave in on this so that I would always have McDonald’s to look forward to without eating it on too regular a basis. To say that I’m never going to eat there is to set myself up for failure. Knowing which day I will be eating there helps solidify the thing to look forward to.

In addition to preventing greater dietary sin, the cereal keeps me full until lunch. For lunch I really lucked out. Another example of how an external circumstance can make all of the difference in the world. Mindstorm, my employer, has a great employee cafeteria. A wide selection of food at reasonable prices. But the biggest thing is that it’s a very short walk away. That’s how I learned something about myself: One of the problems in the past is that I have a psychological fixation on the notion that if I invest time and energy to go some place for lunch, I am going to do some serious eating while I am there. Since going across the street to the cafeteria is no great inconvenience, it’s incredibly easy to just get a quick, relatively small thing.

Sometimes I do get hungry later in the day, so I try to keep a box of cereal at work that I use for snack food. I did this after I realized that I was starting to go to the vending machine to satiate that end-of-day hunger. Plus, Mindstorm has free milk. So that works out. But the important part of this is not what I eat, it’s that by having fewer dietary problems (now I’m eating a good breakfast, eating a smaller lunch) I am better able to identify what the problems are and come up with solutions. It’s not so overwhelming anymore. The more changes you have to make and urges you have to fight off at once, the exponentially harder it gets to make them. I know someone that quit smoking this way, by-the-by. He just got rid of one cig a day per week (the third after lunch, the second in the morning, etc) until it wasn’t worth bothering anymore.

Dinner varies pretty wildly. When Clancy’s not on a horrendous rotation, she cooks and she makes enough for two. Otherwise I usually open something canned or in some cases just have a snack at night. The canned foods are generally not very healthy. But they’re not ridiculously unhealthy either, unless you count sodium. If I’m really hungry it’ll be some sort of pasta like Beefaroni or maybe spaghetti. Chili and/or a burrito is also an option. If I’m less hungry, I’m more likely to eat soup or just get a snack. The snacks are usually not of the healthy sort. They often include Spam.

I’ve recently expanded my attempt to include a morning workout. The workout is actually not entirely for weight. It’s partially an issue of general health and partially in anticipation for my next chore. One thing I don’t mention above is that I still drink three cokes a day and that’s not good. So I’m going to try to make a change there, too. But I know that I have to actually be ready for it in more ways than I currently am.

So for all of you I don’t know how many of these tricks might work for you. I think that it is really important to recognize that overweight people generally have bad habits in different ways. I really don’t think that there is any diet out there that is right for anyone. I think that boosters of one diet over the other (say low carb vs low fat) often mistakenly give people the impression that the way that they lose weight is the only way to do so. According to low carb people, I should be ballooning up about now when in fact it’s my low-fat diets that have historically proven to be more successful. When my wife diets, she has to go all-in. Whenever I go all-in, I burn out and fail.

Of course, what works for me may not work for anyone else. Indeed, what worked for me in the past stopped working five years ago. It used to be that I lost weight by going all-in, spending a couple days eating scratch and then slowly working my way from there. When I lost 70 pounds at the end of high school, that was how I did it (albeit not completely with intent).

Last week I ran across an MSN list about weight loss with a mathematical oddity. In the process of trying to track it down, I read just about every diet-related thing that they have. What struck me as I was reading was how many of their “tips” just didn’t apply to me. It warned against monotony, for instance, but for me monotony is a powerful thing. Creating “defaults” so that if I’m not in a particular mood for something else, I’ll eat the same thing every day. For the author of the article, though, it was a recipe for failure.

Ten years ago little changes were hard for me. Now they’re the only way that I can make changes. Ten years ago eating a little bit of cheese meant that I would go hog-wild. That’s not the case anymore. Ten years ago I could completely steer clear of cheese and sweets. I can’t anymore. Some people need carbs and others need fats and asking them to go without is completely counterproductive.

It seems to me that the best way to go is with an eye towards knowing what your limitations are and what your strengths are. My strength (and weakness) is that I am a creature of habit. I don’t get tired of foods. There are also some ubiquitous foods that I can almost completely eliminate from my diet such as french fries. There are others that I can’t. My wife’s diet includes sacrifices I could never make. Sacrifices I’ve made without little effort are things that would require the world of her.

For me, right now, the path to success is replacing one bad habit at a time.

One danger of forward-dating posts is that between the point when you write it and when you post it, something hits the news that changes the reader’s perception of everything. Seriously, what are the odds that in the week in between my writing of a post involving fiber and it’s scheduled posting, that fiber would be in the news? Particularly the exact kind of fiber involved in the post?

Slate has an buyer-beware article on faux-fibers such as polydextrose and inulin. These don’t constitute real fiber, Jacob Gershman says, and Megan McArdle agrees. The implication, of course, is that people reading this need to go eat raw roots, nuts, and berries if they want to be healthy.

Unfortunately, I think this attitude has precisely the opposite effect. Instead of telling people what the true and good things to eat are, they sort of lead us to throw our hands in the air and say “What’s the point?” It’s sort of like that guy that, whenever you say so-and-so is bad, points to the alternative and says “that’s bad, too!” And we sort of end in this no-man’s land of nutritional post-modernism wherein whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Boiled roots and steamed beans are good for you. No one really contests that. And I get it. I get the notion that as long as I’m not eating things that I have no use for, I am a dietary sinner. I might as well be eating pig lard covered in triple-refined sugar.

One of the problems I have with the medical establishment in general is that they often have the perfect tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good. I tell my phys ed coach that I’m drinking orange juice, and I’m warned about the sugar. People get excited by new games and game systems like DDR and the Wii that encourage exercise and they go out of their way to say that the exercise isn’t as good as the exercise you might get on the treadmill. I half-expect them to complain that the treadmill isn’t as good as jogging, which isn’t as good as carrying logs, which isn’t as good as pushing boulders in persuit of building a cave.

The problem I have with this is that for most people, the alternative to natural orange juice is not prune juice, it’s Sunny Delight or Mountain Dew Livewire. The alternative to the Wii is the XBox. The alternative fake fiber is not a breakfast of… I actually don’t know of any breakfast that they haven’t told us is killing us at some point in the last ten years. Eggs, bacon, oats, orange juice. Maybe a pear and a grass salad is okay. Or eggs, if you strip it of the part that tastes good and don’t add anything to add taste (cause it probably contains sodium, which as well all know will kill you).

The more personal problem I have with it is that more than any other product I can think of, the one thing that has helped my life more than any other is the fake fiber discussed in this article.

When I moved to Cascadia, I made only one conscious dietary decision: to eat more fiber. I decided to do this with fiber-enriched FiberONE cereal. FiberONE contains inulin, which is discussed in the Slate article. Since making that decision, I have lost 35 pounds.

I drink three or four cokes a day. I eat McDonald’s for breakfast once a week. Donuts once a week. If I really want a burger or a couple pieces of pizza, I eat it. I put cheese in the canned pasta I not-infrequently have for dinner. I have not once said “That’s unhealthy. I shouldn’t eat that.” But the weight nonetheless came off.

It would be silly to attribute it all to the cereal. But what happened was the cereal replaced the far, far less healthy breakfasts that I had been eating. It got me to stop skipping The Most Important Meal of the Day. It kept my bowels regular. It suppressed my appetite. It got me started on the right foot. So when it came to lunch, unless I actively wanted something unhealthy, I would continue the trend that I set myself in the morning and get a boca burger. Since I’m less hungry (or have been hungry for less time), I’ll eat less.

If I had read this article before I’d made that decision, I never would have started eating the cereal. I mean, what’s the point? It’s not real fiber. You might get the impression reading the article that there was nothing worthwhile in the product at all. A waste of time. I might as well be eating at McDonald’s.

McArdle makes the comment that the FDA should release a statement saying “If it tastes that good, it isn’t good for you.”

In some people’s minds, it’s as though something tasting good is immaterial. Or that, if they really tried, they’d learn to like brussel sprouts. Maybe, if raised on it, they would.

But things like taste and convenience matter. They matter a great deal. Because without it, people will not continue to eat it. They will likely default to something far, far less healthy. If putting a cheese on a veggie burger makes me like it, it’s worth the added fat because it means that I will have liked my veggie burger and will eat it again. Struggling with no cheese or soy cheese may be acceptable, but it won’t have me coming back for more. That double cheese-burger, which I know will satisfy me, will call to me evermore loudly.

Granted, I am fortunate in that if I do the right things (and even some of the wrong ones), I will lose weight. I recognize that others don’t have it so easy. For whatever reason, they have to sacrifice a lot more to get a lot less loss in return. So for them, maybe these articles are worthwhile if they wonder why their high-“fiber” breakfast isn’t doing the trick.

But I think that a large part of the problem with obesity in this country has less to do with too many people thinking that faux-fiber is actual fiber and a lot more to do with being made to feel guilty any time they eat something that they didn’t pluck from the ground themselves. Diets are notorious for being short-lived and ultimately resulting in weight gain. They tell us that we need to not just go on a diet, but change our lifestyle. But anything convenient or tasty is off-limits.

That’s a recipe for failure.

How you reckon I convince Clancy that our next vacation needs to be to Quebec?

Without mentioning the real reason as to why?

Unfortunately, I let it slip when I recommended New Orleans (See #4) and now I’m not sure if I’ll ever convince her to go…

Slate offers up one of their random weirdo articles; a guy who married a vegetarian, who gets to eat meat once to twice a month “on the sly”, whose wife is one of the militant-veggie “our kids will be raised vegetarian” sorts.

In my life, I’ve known a few vegetarian-ish people, of varying degrees. In the Southern Tech University dorms, there was one girl (a cute redhead who’d had anorexia, who became an absolutely STUNNING redhead when she got treatment and regained about 50 pounds) who’d done enough to her body that she sort-of, kind-of became “vegetarian” because she’d destroyed her body’s ability to digest meat properly (go without for too long, you stop producing the enzymes necessary for digestion, you lose the helpful intestinal flora that assist in the digestive process for meat, and you might even get food poisoning because it can then rot in the intestines).

Two others I know currently I’m interested in dating. One has food allergies galore; peanuts (thankfully not the “it can’t even be around me” kind, but bad enough), pork, and a couple less annoying ones. The other is a partial-vegetarian who doesn’t eat “meat” (in the pork/chicken/beef/etc sense) but still eats fish and dairy products.

The odder question from my angle is: at what point does one start altering habits (should it manage to turn into a full-blown, exclusive dating relationship) to coincide with this? Admittedly, in the one case it’s a matter of real danger (plus the whole idea of “congratulations, you ate something I’m allergic to, now go brush your teeth or else no kiss”), while in the other it’s a semi-moralistic/semi-health-conscious thing. Also, in the one case it’s obviously going to need to be one-way (hard to “compromise” on allergies) while in the other?

And, can I really manage to give up my traditional bacon-and-eggs sunday breakfast?

Annoyance of the Day:

People that seem to like Indian/Dominican/Brazillian/Taiwanese/{insert foreign food that isn’t Americanized Italian or Mexican} food primarily on the basis that it differentiates them from people that don’t foreign foods.

I’m wondering if either the city of Soundview or state of Cascadia passed a law requiring fast food places to post their calories on their menu. I stopped by Jack in the Box on Saturday morning and they’d put stickers with the calorie count all over their drive-through menu. I’m thinking that Jack did not do this as a gesture of good will because it was pretty shocking. That fast food is unhealthy is hardly news, but I figured that Jack was about like the rest of them. Turns out that they stack up pretty poorly with McDonald’s, which is the general point-of-comparison that I make.

The biscuit sandwich I was going to get is 740 calories, compared to 570 for McDonalds. At McDonalds, you can get a sausage McMuffin with egg and cheese for 465 calories. No such tasty sandwich exists at Jack for under 500 calories except a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese biscuit (which is comparable in health content to McD’s). Roughly half of Jack’s breakfast menu is over 500 calories compared to about a third for McDonald’s.

The dinner menu is little better. McDonald’s only has one burger over 600 calories (Double Quarter Pounder, 740) and Jack in the Box had at least a dozen with half of those being over 1,000.

I’ve gotten into debates in the past over whether restaurants should be forced to put up nutritional content. Some say that the motivation behind doing so is to shame fat people and that anybody eating at fast food restaurants is obviously not worried about health content. To some extent they’re right on the latter part, but I’m not sure if that’s sufficient. Some people aren’t overly worried about counting calories, but I think that it is in general a really good idea to remind people how many calories that they’re consuming. One of the most successful dieting maneuvers in existence is simply keeping track of how much you consume in a day. People are notoriously forgetful when it comes to everything that they’ve eaten in a day but they remember better when each thing has a number value assigned to it. Even if you don’t set yourself up with limits and even if you don’t have a calculator with you, it still helps you realize where exactly your greatest dietary sins are and almost always provides easier ways to cut back.

By eating at McDonald’s rather than Jack in the Box, for instance.

It makes the really unhealthy stuff much less enjoyable. It’ll be a while before I eat another Ultimate Cheeseburger, for sure.

The onslaught continues. I can’t remember the last time I had pizza at the cafeteria but it’s nonetheless still a staple of my diet.

Last night there was a little hitch, though. Whoever ordered the pizza seemed to do it with stunning disregard for what kind of pizza people might want to eat. Typically when ordering pizza for a group, you get some variation of four major kinds (cheese, pepperoni, sausage, Canadian bacon) with maybe something more exotic thrown in there for people that want something a little bit different. Tonight’s collection had something like 10 pizzas with exactly one of the above four staples and nine of the exotic kinds.

The pepperoni was gone within ten minutes and the rest had not more than a piece or two taken out. Now I do sometimes like variety. In fact, except when my options are limited I’ve stopped eating tomato-sauce pizza almost altogether. When my wife and I order pizza, we almost always order pesto sauce. I’ve also somewhat reluctantly come to like BBQ sauced pizza (in small quantities) and always love Alfredo sauced pizza. I’ve never been big on tomatoes anyway and while I tolerate the sauce, it’s the tribute to all the cheese that I get with the pizza.

There was one type of exotic pizza in the line that I did eat. It had artichokes, onions, and feta cheese on it and it was pretty good. I’m not entirely an unadventurous eater. I’ll really try just about anything once. The thing is that I have to know what it is. The pizza we got last night was full of stuff that I couldn’t identify and that’s about the worst kind of stuff that there is! I did give one new kind a try that didn’t look like it had anything too exotic, but it had something in lieu of the tomato sauce was so dreadful that I threw away my first piece of pizza in living memory.

It’s hard not to realize what a prick I am for complaining about free food, but I never claimed not to be a prick.

My wife can take away my Velveeta, but she can’t take away my Spam!

I’ve been on the strangest Spam kick lately and I have no idea why. I got some Lite Spam a few weeks back and ever since then I have not been able to stop eating the stuff. In some ways it really is the perfect food. It doesn’t taste particularly good, so there’s no temptation to just keep on eating it. I like foods that are self-limiting. Eat too much of the sugar free candy and you will regret it. Sharp cheddar is better than mild if for no other reason than that the taste buds tire of (or get annoyed by) it sooner. And so it is with Spam. I can eat turkey pepperoni all day, but not so much for the spam.

Yet… yet… I crave it. I crave it more than I enjoy eating it. It really makes me wonder if they have some sort of addictive substance in there. Something to make your taste buds say “Hey, remember that? You didn’t think it was all that good at the time, but I just way you to know that it was, in fact, awesome. Get more now, please. Now. NOW!”

My doctorly wife of course does not approve. Partially she’s just confused about it. Why would anyone eat it voluntarily. She’s started buying Deli ham as a substitute. It works somewhat. Unless I’m having an all-powerful craving I’ll go for the ham. Partially cause my wife wants to, but partially because I know that the ham will go bad in relatively short order while the Spam will kick molds in the ass for a considerably longer time frame.

According to the New York Times, Spam has been making a comeback in a big way because of the economic downturn.

Spam, a gelatinous 12-ounce rectangle of spiced ham and pork, may be among the world’s most maligned foods, dismissed as inedible by food elites and skewered by comedians who have offered smart-alecky theories on its name (one G-rated example: Something Posing As Meat).

But these days, consumers are rediscovering relatively cheap foods, Spam among them. A 12-ounce can of Spam, marketed as “Crazy Tasty,” costs about $2.40. “People are realizing it’s not that bad a product,” said Dan Johnson, 55, who operates a 70-foot-high Spam oven.

Hormel declined to cooperate with this article, but several of its workers were interviewed here recently with the help of their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 9. Slumped in chairs at the union hall after making 149,950 cans of Spam on the day shift, several workers said they been through boom times before — but nothing like this.

Spam “seems to do well when hard times hit,” said Dan Bartel, business agent for the union local. “We’ll probably see Spam lines instead of soup lines.”

I had been wondering why Spam prices have been going progressively up over the past few weeks. Looks like we might be facing a Spam shortage. Maybe that’s what it’ll take to shake me loose of my current addiction.

MSN offers up a “10 things” list – they erroneously tagged a “10 Commandments” list on the link I found it at – on “how to lose weight.”

It’s an interesting collection of “conventional wisdom”, some of which are correct and some of which aren’t.

Anyone here notice a difference in how long plastic milk gallon jugs keep milk fresh versus cardboard half-gallon cartons? I just bought the latter and I swear it’s been fresh for two weeks now. Or at least it neither smells nor tastes funny. Usually it seems that it starts to go bad after maybe a week after you open it, regardless of the expiration date. Anyone else noticed anything like this?