Few Absolutes

True confession – I, the vegan of nearly 30 years, ate a marshmallow the other night. I didn’t plan to. I’d thought I’d just eat a graham cracker as my treat when everyone else ate s’mores. But I actually ate a marshmallow inside the graham cracker for the first time in decades. Marshmallows have more sugar and corn syrup than anything I ever eat, and gelatin which I “never” eat. It tasted ok; it tasted like nostalgia for childhood. It isn’t something I’ll do again for decades, but it was a fun evening and the marshmallow was part of the fun. Following up on my last blog, my choice wasn’t too much or too little, it was just right for the time.

Few food choices should be absolute. Most people know how they should eat but when they eat without being mindful of their choices their diets don’t reflect what they know. A little extra sugar at a party is fine as long as one makes the choice to eat that cake and ice cream mindfully, enjoying each bite, because it isn’t a daily indulgence. Less healthy options can be part of a healthy lifestyle and treats should be included in one’s diet as special, not regular food items.

Healthy diets need balance and moderation. It isn’t accurate to classify foods as either “good” or “bad” with two exceptions. No person should ever consume trans fats or processed meats. The former is indisputably related to heart disease and the latter to cancers of the pancreas, stomach, colon, breast and prostate. Those are two absolutes that should undeniably be avoided. But other food products are not as absolute, certainly not the way fad diets suggest. (Tobacco products are a third absolute as they are irrefutably related to oral and lung cancers and heart disease but it they aren’t food products.)

If it were easy to select healthy foods to maintain a healthy diet, then diet programs and products wouldn’t be a billion-dollar business. Still, informed consumers can make choices and will know to be skeptical about any diet plan that relies completely on absolutes. A program that requires “only” eating their packaged foods is as much a red flag as a program that requires completely cutting out an entire food group such as carbohydrates or eating only raw foods.

A diet that cuts out carbohydrates cannot be sustained so these dieters regain the weight they may have lost when they begin the program. Carbohydrates do not make people fat, in fact, they are necessary for a healthy diet. People gain weight by eating too many calories. People that are overweight tend to eat more carbohydrate calories than are necessary mostly because they are prominent in prepared foods and chain and fast food restaurants because they are inexpensive and easy to produce. Carbs are not bad! They just need to be eaten in moderation as a part of a balanced diet.

Non-fat diets are a fallacy. It is impossible to completely cut fats. Nor should one want to. Fats are necessary to metabolize vitamins. In fact, vitamins in tomatoes are unavailable without added fat. Although trans fats are not good choices, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats in the forms of canola and olive oils, nuts, and fish are healthy and even reduce risk for cardio vascular disease. Saturated fats in the form of beef and dairy are no more caloric than the healthier fat options but are less healthful and increase cardiovascular risk so should be eaten more sparingly.  

Raw diets are not all good! Many vegetables need to be cooked for the nutrients to be available to humans. Broccoli, kale, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage are among the vegetables that offer little nutrition when eaten raw. Raw diets aren’t necessarily all bad, but the diets need to be considered part of an overall nutritious diet, including healthy foods that are cooked to make them nutritious.

With few exceptions, foods aren’t all good or all bad. Most are just right and even less healthful options can be part of a healthy diet when eaten sparingly as treats. Consider a few of your indulgences and plan on fitting them into a healthy lifestyle without remorse.

Choices

We are presented with choices every moment, some of which are better for our bodies than others. Although we can sometimes be overwhelmed by the number of options available to us, we always are in control of the choices we make when we eat something and when we select activities to fill our free time.

Some people choose to diet but I suggest they decide instead for the non-diet method of maintaining and losing weight. This means making choices all day long but it is a lifestyle choice that offers many options to feel satiated rather than denied food. People that maintain a healthy weight simply select the healthier foods each day. The choice is to reach for a candy bar or melon slices and berries when energy is low mid-day. People that use a healthy lifestyle approach to eating don’t alternatively gain and lose weight the way dieters do. They don’t migrate to the newest fad diet, reading about rules for the diet of the month. Instead they eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Choices are numerous for snacking when the snacks are nutritious!

People that maintain a healthy weight over their lifetime choose a leafy salad as a side rather than fries when they dine out. Fried food is the food choice most associated with weight gain. Potato chips, sugary drinks including sodas and juices, red and processed meats, desserts, and refined grains are other food selections that are likely to lead to weight gain. Healthier options, particularly fruits and vegetables, can replace these less healthy options and reduce the chance of unwanted weight gain. A green leafy salad is an alternative side to French fries that offers more vitamins and less risk for weight gain. Vegetables dipped in hummus and plain stove-popped popcorn are alternatives to potato chips for a healthy crispier snack. Yogurt and nuts are healthy sources of protein and fats and consuming these foods is related to less lifetime weight gain.  If people do choose to eat red meat, they will want to choose to eat it less often and select lean meats, completely eliminating processed meats.

Counting calories and omitting selected foods based on fad diets has been found to be less effective in maintaining a healthy weight throughout life than eating healthier foods. Other healthy lifestyles correlated to maintaining a healthy weight are sleeping 6-8 hours a night, reducing television viewing, choosing wine if one is going to drink alcohol (although other alcohol is correlated to weight gain), and exercise (the more one exercises, the less weight one gains).

People have limited free time, but often choose to spend it in front of televisions. Healthier choices are to take a walk or a bicycle ride after dinner. Schedules are packed with obligations leaving little time to exercise. However, anyone can choose to use the stairs rather than an elevator when they enter a building. People often spend more time waiting for a parking spot to open up near the store entrance than the time it takes to make the healthier choice of parking further away and walking to the entrance.

It isn’t easy to maintain a healthy weight over one’s lifetime. But it is possible by making daily choices. Everyone is more in control of their choices than they realize. In fact, it is easier to control and maintain a healthy-choice lifestyle than to maintain fad diets. It is more liberating to know it is healthy to eat any of the colorful fruits and vegetables in the produce section than to think I need to limit myself to items on a fad diet list. And better, I get to choose.

Balancing Diets

There is certainly room for treats and sweets in a balanced diet. It just requires strength to keep the balance from tipping in a direction that is both unhealthy and likely to lead to weight gain. Eating a balanced diet is similar to parsva bakasana (side crow pose) variation in that way. Yoga students tend to think the pose is all about strength when in fact it is more about maintaining a precarious balance.

 There is a role for desserts in a balanced diet as long as they are eaten in moderation and planned carefully as a component of the entire days’ calorie intake. I enjoy nice wines and friends of mine serve fantastic wine. I know that when I plan to dine at their home in the evening I will need to balance my anticipated extra caloric intake through a careful meal plan for the rest of the day. Another friend bakes incredible desserts and I enjoy her vegan fruit pies. But I have trouble deciding between the choices when she invites me to dinner parties. So I plan for the dessert as I eat my other meals for the day then eat a very small portion of two different pies. These are realistic strategies to plan for sweets. It is neither realistic nor balanced to never eat desserts or fine wine at all.

Treats need to be considered special, not eaten with each meal. The problem with calling a food “good” (vegetables) or “bad” (desserts) is that we lose sight of a balanced lifestyle based on moderation. Once a dieter deprives herself of a certain type of food that she has labeled “bad”, she finds she craves it even more. The strength to resist is less important than a balanced plan. She will be more likely to over indulge on the forbidden food and spiral into a diet that is further from her goal. A meal plan that includes less healthy options as part of one’s lifestyle is more likely to be sustained than dieting that excludes any one type of food.

It has become more difficult to be mindful of portion size because food manufacturers have increased the packages of familiar treats. Coca Cola had been bottled as 6-ounce servings in the 1950’s. That is a moderate portion of a sweet treat. A single 6-ounce serving every now and then as Coke products were consumed in the 1950’s would not be a diet catastrophe. The problem now is that people consume 28-ounce bottles even several times a day. That is when a reasonable indulgence becomes catastrophic for a healthy lifestyle.

Tiny bite-sized candy bars can be a solution to curb a sweet tooth as long as we eat only two or three of them and put the rest of the bag in an inconvenient location (maybe in a box in the garage for the serious Snickers fan). To take time to enjoy the sweet makes it more satisfying than mindlessly polishing off the huge theatre-sized bar that will unbalance any meal plan.

Candy bars do not happen to tempt me; I’m more of a crunchy/salty type. So I don’t often purchase corn chips. If I do, I grab a handful and put the bag back in the pantry before I start to mindlessly plow through more chips than I needed. Another solution to control portion size is to purchase single-serving bags of chips.

We cannot sustain a diet that has drastically cut sweets, fats and salts without eventually feeling hungry and deprived, leading to later gauging. However, a diet high in sweets, fats and salts will lead to unwanted weight gain and potentially unhealthy insulin and lipid protein profiles. We each need to find balance by developing strategies that work for ourselves to reduce unnecessary calories (a number greater than the calories we burn in a day) without feeling deprived. It is a balance of consuming fewer calories from treats while enjoying each small portion.

Today I’ve enjoyed my lunch salad without rice crackers. I’m saving my sweet calories for some Ben and Jerry’s Berried Treasure sorbet. And when I do eat it on this hot evening I will take out only a couple of spoonfuls and enjoy each taste. Perhaps I need a little strength to resist eating the whole pint, but it’s really all about balance.

Empowered by our Choices

Evidence has shown that having too many choices is not always a good thing. I think this is most noticeable in food choices we find in grocery stores. Eating a wholesome diet is easier when one shops at a farmer’s market where most offerings are real foods, but more of a challenge at a supermarket where so many of the products on the shelves are highly processed fake food.

Consider the obviously healthy breakfast option: oatmeal. This whole grain has been associated with a healthy diet for its ability to lower cholesterol and leave the diner feeling satiated after just 150 high-energy calories. But when I pick up rolled oats from the cereal aisle at the supermarket, the non-processed real thing is on the lowest shelf. Items on the shelves at eye level (known by marketing experts to be most accessible and more likely to be selected) are labeled oatmeal but they are processed, instant, and flavored products. These options have the fiber, low saturated fat and low cholesterol that make oatmeal a healthy breakfast option, but added sugars (16 g) and salt (319 mg) make it less healthy compared to unadulterated oatmeal (1g sugars, 0mg sodium). The instant option also adds approximately 28 calories (depending on the flavor).

Instant packets seem like a good breakfast choice – oatmeal is healthy after all. They are popular choices because they are convenient. However, preparing the “quick 1-minute” oats mixed with water still takes only 90 seconds in the microwave. No need to stir and cook on the stove then wash the pot. Adding fresh or dried fruit and seasonings of choice adds more flavor and nutrition than the simple carbohydrates and sodium that the packages add.

One concern I’ve heard several people voice is that eating whole foods cost more than processed foods. Sometimes that can be so. However, this assumption does not always hold true. When I priced a popular national oatmeal brand in my supermarket I learned that the container of rolled oats cost 19 cents per ounce. The brand’s box of packets of instant oatmeal cost 44 cents per ounce.

Wholesome food – natural, convenient, healthy, and even less expensive – can be a real option. Choosing wholesome food empowers me to care for my body, taking control of my health.