Orthorexia, Food and/or Grocery Store Nazis, Fat Acceptance and Mindful Eating

I do triathlons. Long distance triathlons. Ironman and beyond. I've been told I'm a badass, but I believe that one should not call oneself a badass. I always say that I am just doing something I love!

Speaking of things that I love, I love food. Not in a "I will eventually weigh 400 lbs." sort of way, but face it, food is...tasty. And when you are eating for performance, as I do much of the year, pretty much anything that goes in my maw is tasty. What I mean by that is go ride 150 miles and then eat kale with turd sauce. It will taste awesome because your body craves the calories, and when they hit your bloodstream all that wonderful insulin is secreted, beginning the process of replenishing the glycogen in your muscles. Although I hate kale. To me it tastes like grass, and not grass growing on a tropical island--grass growing in my neighbor's shitty, weedy lawn.

I grew up in a family with 5 children, and Mom and Dad did not make very much money, so we tended to eat rather frugally. Mom was a decent enough cook, and she could bake some great bread and cookies--although her pie crust left something to be desired--but we didn't care because the filling was always good! When she returned to the workforce when I was in 7th grade, I took up helping her prepare meals, and then when I was in high school, I completely took over making the family dinners, including a really nice dessert. My older sister was already off to college, but my 2 brothers, younger sister and Mom and Dad really liked my cooking, and I took to reading cookbooks and expanding my repertoire.

Fast forward to me being done with college and living on my own and deciding I wanted to sort of specialize in Italian cooking. So since I'm a tad OCD, I bought some cookbooks, studied them and had at it. I expanded into some Chinese and Mexican. Cooking is basically following instructions, and from repeated following of instructions, learning how to alter the basic recipe and then progressing to creating your own variants or completely new things. I still cook a lot of things from recipes, only because I believe they were already spot on! Some I have memorized, but many not--there's not enough room in my brain for all that in addition to everything else I need to keep on top of.

My love of Italian cooking and cheese got me in trouble once upon a time, because I was just eating too many calories for my activity level, and that combined with an adverse cholesterol test result spurred me to change my diet. Well not so much my diet, but my approach to food. What I really needed to learn was...wait for it...how to eat anything I wanted in moderation. At some point, either through deliberate action, or through serendipity, everyone realizes that you can't just eat with abandon, and either counts calories or uses some method of keeping the calories in/calories out in balance. I'm assuming here a person who has a realistic definition of what constitutes a healthy weight/body composition. Last night, I watched about :15 of a program about BBW women and I found it extremely sad that these women saw absolutely nothing wrong with carrying around an extra 100-300 pounds! But that's another topic for another day.

It took me a number of years to get the whole moderation thing, and along the way, I discovered a key aspect of my personal weight management methodology: many foods should be categorized as treats, and you can't have treats every single day and expect to maintain health/healthful weight unless you are exercising a shit ton. Whenever someone approaches me to discuss weight/dieting (and this happens frequently enough at my Y because I guess I look like someone who would know about this), this is one of the first truths I cover with them. You can't eat cheese burger and fries today, pizza tomorrow, huge dessert next day, and so on, and expect it to have no impact on you when you are barely exercising.

And that's the second shocking fact I give them--you are barely exercising. Your 30 minutes or 1 hour a day isn't much at all, and it's certainly not enough to give you free rein to eat whatever the hell you want all the time.

But, if you start to accept that you can't have everything you want to eat all the time, but you can have it sometimes as a treat, then over time, you will come to actually enjoy the core healthy foods: fruits, vegetables, lean protein, nuts, seeds, and less refined grains.

I don't espouse any particular "diet" like Paleo or Atkins. I focus on eating an appropriate amount of carbs for your activity level. That's it. I came to this revelation from a sports nutrition book I read years ago combined with an exercise physiology book and of course, lots of Internet reading. My Mom had Type II Diabetes, so I learned about that, and all this heart disease and weight management basically comes down to one thing: carbohydrate consumption. You eat too much for your activity level and your body (because it's really good at it) tries to put the excess someplace for immediate or future use. That will be fat--subcutaneous at first, then intramuscular, and finally within your organs (which is how you end up with fatty liver disease just by eating excess carbs!). And oh by the way you will have excess sugar floating around in your blood and become diabetic at some point. Oh joy! It's not a question of if, but when. It doesn't matter what type of carbs were eaten in excess, but usually it's not vegetables. It's usually processed crap which is nutrient deficient yet calorie rich.

Fuck, I completely digressed. The point of this post is that I don't have a list of "foods I should never eat." Now, there are many processed foods I just have no desire for (what the fuck is "Texas Toast?"), but hey, if I really want gas station brownies because my blood sugar is plummeting, then I'm going to eat them.

Recently, in a Facebook group containing triathletes (mostly Ironman level, although for some reason they let in those loser sprint people--ha ha, just kidding), someone who was stepping up to Ironman distance asked for people's nutrition recommendations. And she was smart, in that she said her biggest concern was eating enough for performance. Someone else posted about how Paleo eating is the best thing since sliced bread.  I posted my handy carb calculator spreadsheet, and added comments about how when I'm training a lot, I add in things like Pringles, Cheetos, Twinkies and candy.

Well someone got all bent the fuck out of shape and went on a rant about how those things are horrible junk food that nobody should ever eat. Like I'm stuffing my face with huge amounts of those things! Um...no. I have personal rules about certain treat items and my starch consumption that I have found help me to keep my weight/body fat in check throughout an annual training cycle:

• Under 10 hours of training per week (which is rare for me), I'm a fucking rabbit--dinner is lean protein and a big salad--no starch. 
• 10-14 hours of training per week and I get to have rice more often than not at dinner time, because I am needing more carbs. But no pasta. And rarely Coke.
• 14-17 hours of training per week and I pretty much need starch at dinner every day, and pasta 1-2 times per week. Coke becomes necessary once or twice a week, either to wake the fuck up (from boredom at work) and pre-load for a workout, or to keep from killing myself while I'm doing hard bike or run intervals.
• 17+ hours of training per week and all bets are off--pasta, rice, and that's when I buy Pringles and candy. And if I feel like it, Cheetos, Twinkies and anything else.

So I get a kick out of someone going all nuclear on me for saying I eat certain foods when they have no clue about exactly when I do it. I also like Coke. A LOT. It's training fuel for me--all that luscious sugar and caffeine!  I smile whenever I see a semi-trailer carrying Coke, and if I'm close enough to it, I will wave at the driver!

Well a number of other people chimed in to support my POV on nutrition, including one guy who said he "eats like a goat." That's a good way to think about it. Now, I have complete respect for people who want to maintain a pristine diet, either Paleo or some other variant that includes zero processed foods. That's fine. I personally don't have 4 hours a day to spend on food obtainment and preparation, so I do utilize some processed foods. But in general, at dinner, I am eating home cooked goodness.

I know a couple who shops only at Whole Foods (yeah, them I'm sure you know them, too) and has at times gotten on my case about some of the things I eat. Oh but so why are you fat and I'm not? I guess it's better to be fat from eating only shit from Whole Foods than it is to be appropriate weight and eating like a goat? The thing about food is that once you eat it and burn it it's out of your system!  Who knew? But sometimes when people say "you are what you eat," I respond that, "then I'm a can of Pringles with a side of Coke and Gummi Bears." Even if you are eating your so-called organic food, it's being grown in the same air that the Pringles grow in. I know this.

The other component to my nutrition plan is that I can review at the end of a day and recount everything I ate. So while I don't count calories, I know whether I've been good or not. And I've been not great lately, but with just a little bit more focus, the 3-5 lbs. I want off of me will be gone. I know it's shocking that I can get overweight, right? When I'm up even 2 lbs. I start telling people I'm fat, and I know it makes them nuts. But then I say, "well if I don't care about 2, then I'm not going to care about 5, and then 10 and so on." There was a time long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, when most of the US population thought the same way that I do--that 5 extra pounds was something that needed to be taken care of right away. I remember it! But that attitude has degenerated into "fat acceptance" and blaming the food industry for making us fat.

I don't buy into that. Sure the food industry compels us to purchase their cheap carb-laden products, and they are tasty. But unless you have some standard about the way you maintain your machine (i.e., your body), much as you probably have standards about how you perform at your job, then you are going to blame all sorts of external factors for why you're fat.

This blog is and always has been about the mind-body connection. If you do anything mindlessly, you will suck at it. When it appears a person is doing something in a state of flow, you can bet that they have put in countless hours to get to the point where they can be on autopilot. When you introduce mindfulness into eating and consider your perception of pleasure vs. sustenance, you either learn that pretty much any food is OK, or if you feel you need to control it precisely, that's OK, too. But don't get on my case and I won't get on yours. Both ways are OK.