One of the most common questions associated with fast food restaurants is: “Do you want fries with that?” The response is almost always in the positive. In fact, most fast food meals are “Meal Deals” designed to get the customers to eat the fries and to consume the soft drink (with unlimited refills). Is it any wonder that we Americans are experiencing the largest obesity problem in our history? Fast food restaurants – for the most part – produce garbage in unending amounts and then offer it to the public as an easy way to eat when there isn’t time to prepare anything at home. So, let’s see how this works. We are too lazy to prepare a simple sandwich at home to carry to work, so there is a company (actually many companies) that will encourage us to stay lazy by making that sandwich for us. All we have to do is pay for it (dearly in money and in wrecked health) and pick it up at the local Choke ‘n’ Puke restaurant. Or, if that is too much bother, it can be delivered right to your cubicle. You wouldn’t get up to change the channel on the TV, why would you travel to get your lunch? Yes, I’m being facetious.

The regular restaurants are no better. They may have some real food on the menu, fish, vegetables, and such, but they usually serve the meals with so much food that one meal is enough for a family of four. I imagine that this is their way of justifying charging those exorbitant prices. And desserts. Why can’t they get the idea that a piece of pie, or a dish of ice cream should be small, just enough to give a palate cleansing taste to an otherwise healthy meal? Instead, one dish of dessert is enough to feed the aforementioned family of four. Most of us learned at home that it is polite to clean one’s plate, so we may keep eating until we finish all that is put before us. To waste food by leaving it on your plate is an insult to the person who prepared it. This is a dilemma; do we maintain our manners and finish our meal – which we ordered – and ruin our health, or do we maintain our health and insult the cook? Many times I have requested a “small” amount of food when dining out, the waitress records my instructions, and when the food comes to table, I still look for people to share it; there is much too much food. To try to remedy this situation, I always order one portion and two forks, in hopes that I will only have to eat half of what I know will be too much food.

Eating At Home

Obviously eating at home is the better solution to eating at restaurants. There is no doubt that the food prepared at the average American home is better than almost any meal prepared at a restaurant; and cheaper, too. With the price of food going up every week, feeding your family is now probably more expensive than paying your mortgage payments. Why are the restaurants always full? Have the diners not heard that food is expensive? You can eat at home for a fraction of what it takes to eat out. Besides saving money at home, the preparer of family meals would take care not to feed his/her family anything to endanger their health. Certainly the meals would be balanced at least in a rudimentary way, desserts would be measured, and drinks would be healthful. Even the Bible points out that a parent would not feed his child a stone, but bread. But there is a problem at home too.

We are not immune to the constant advertising that bombards all of us daily; ads that show the typical American family (all of them looking slim and trim and happy) wolfing down Big Macs and mounds of fries and gallons of soft drinks. The ads tell us that this is “fun and nutritious”. They are lying. There is so much of this deceitful chicanery going on that it is difficult for anyone to separate fact from fiction. Our society has seen to it that the real information is carefully hidden away in books too difficult for the average person to understand. Instead we are given cartoons and coloring books and clowns who tell us those soft drinks and juices (which rot your teeth and encourage diabetes), fried beef (which clogs your arteries and leads to heart disease), and sugary pastries (which unbalance our insulin production and lead to obesity) are the “fun meal of choice”. Only the extremely ignorant will make a steady diet of such unhealthy fare.

Is There Any Hope?

In the quest to get/stay healthy, there is a way. That way is education (not schooling which is tantamount to brainwashing; our society has much too much of that already) in how to eat for health. The intelligent person will eat to stay alive; she will consume only that which will nourish her body. It is like breathing air. Would you breathe more air than you can handle? That would be impossible; too much air will cause us to faint – as in hyperventilation – so we breathe at a rate that will provide only what the body needs for the activity in which we are engaged. It is a good thing that breathing is an automatic function of the body; there is no way that we can fool with it. Why can’t we do that with food? Eat just enough food for the proper levels of nutrients for perfect health. Most people in our society – because of lack of education and constant brainwashing by the advertisers – live to eat. That is, they make a hobby out of eating. They eat something just because it tastes good. They fry their food because it is easy to do and because all that extra fat tastes good to them. How many times do we have our business meetings in restaurants and bars? The more sugar and fat and alcohol that is in the food, the better we think that it tastes. We are wrong on several counts.

Appetite Determines Our Choices

We eat what we eat because we were told to eat it. If we were lucky as children, we had parents who gave us good food to eat (yes, even the spinach, thank you Popeye!) and they explained why this was good for us. These early habits hopefully stayed with us into adulthood and when choosing our food, we would normally prefer the good food that we were taught to eat as a child. Conversely, the unlucky among us would have had ignorant parents who let us choose our own food based on what the current cartoon character was advertising. Television, a marvelous invention, has been subverted into a tool of mass destruction. It fosters the lowest level of trash and the worst of manners and the worst of food choices. And these unlucky people have grown up with these bad habits. Good habits, or bad, whatever we learned when we were young affects us to the grave unless we learn otherwise as we grow.

Education about nutrition must have real life experience, just as all education must be real. Learning in a schoolroom is useless. For food choices we must learn all through life that eating certain foods causes us to feel in different ways. Some food makes us sick; other food choices make us energetic. We have to be shown that thinking about what we choose is the only way to get the nutrition that our body needs. We must be educated to understand that eating is simply one of the basic functions of the human organism. Don’t make a game of it; rather eat for the best health and longevity that you can achieve.

If we were to identify the national pastime of America it would not be any sport or hobby. If sheer numbers would be the deciding factor, then dieting would be number one. There are thousands of publications dedicated to losing weight and hundreds of diet plans written by hundreds of different diet gurus. Why do we need so many different diets? It is rather simple to lose weight – cut down on your eating. We have new diets being produced every day. They are not needed. There must be some other reason, besides wanting to lose weight that people look for new diets.

Starting with the original premise, losing weight, we would naturally want the most efficacious of plans. Therefore there should be only one diet, the one that works. All the others should be discarded. As reasonable as this sounds, there are no takers. It seems that people are not looking to lose weight even though they say that this is their plan. Everybody wants to lose weight without effort, without changing their eating habits, and they want it overnight. Of course this is absurd. Did people become overweight from one day to the next? It probably took many years to gain all the extra weight, so it is reasonable to assume that it will take a while to rid oneself of the extra baggage.

What Do We Want To Lose?

There are two choices, we can lose fat, or we can lose weight. Most people think these two things are the same; they are not. Losing fat, the logical choice, means that we want to rid ourselves of excess subcutaneous fat. You know, the bulgy stuff that is so unattractive. Besides looking better after losing fat, we will be healthier. The internal organs will have an easier time of doing their job, the skeletal muscles will not be overstrained, and you will have less trouble fitting into the seats at the theater. You will have an easier time climbing stairs, and your heart and lungs will last much longer. You will be more comfortable overall.

No one needs to lose weight. If losing weight is your goal, then you need to understand that you will lose fat, but you will also lose bone density, muscle tissue, and energy. You will weigh less, but you will be unhealthy and uncomfortable.

There Is Only One Correct Path

Now that we know that fat loss is the goal, we must alter our eating pattern (because there is no healthy diet). In order to get fat we would have to eat too much and eat too much of the wrong types of food. Even if you eat only the best foods, but you eat too much of them, you will gain fat. This is because the body cannot use all of the food and so it stores the excess as fat. People usually eat the wrong foods – and in excess – so they are getting fat for both reasons. To lose fat, we must reverse the habits. We must eat healthy foods and we must know how much food is enough for our particular body type and lifestyle. Yes, the athlete can eat a higher volume of food because she is active and will burn off the extra calories. The librarian, or computer worker, requires much less food because he is sedentary; he burns very few calories and so he must consume less. Deciding how many calories is right for you is best done by trial and error. Besides a person’s activity level, age is a factor. The young person may still be growing and so he needs more food for his growing. The older person’s metabolism has probably decreased so he needs fewer calories. Each person is unique.

What Food Is Good?

In general, eating food directly from Nature is the best for everyone. Fruit should be fresh, not canned or bottled, vegetables should be eaten raw or lightly steamed, and there should be no preservatives, no gravies, no sauces, and no excess seasonings. The closer you can get to eating like our caveman forebears, fresh meat, berries right from the bush, and vegetables dug from the ground and eaten raw, the better. It would be impractical to try to eat this way in our present society, but the closer you can get to this way, the healthier you will become. More realistically, choose your meats with the lowest fat content, buy your vegetables and fruits from a farm that uses no chemicals, and use cooking at a minimum. Excessive cooking destroys many of the natural nutrients in food. Not all nutritious foods will be available in all areas all the time. We must choose from what is available.

The foods that should be avoided are all the pastries, pies, and cakes that we all love so well. Add to this list anything that can be purchased in a convenience store, all prepackaged foods, and soft drinks. Processed foods are the enemy of health. And sugar, not fat, is our nemesis. Processed sugar (the kind in the sugar bowl) is pure poison. It makes us fat, it unbalances our insulin production, and it makes children hyperactive. Sugar may aggravate our system to the point of causing diabetes, a most nasty disease. All candies, pastries, most bread, the popular breakfast cereals, and all juices and soft drinks contain either sugar (sucrose) or a sugar substitute. Sugar substitutes are equally bad for our health. Do not believe anyone who tells you that a sugar substitute is okay to consume. That would be an inaccurate bit of information. Stay away from processed sugars and all their substitutes if you want to lose fat and to stay healthy.

Things To Look For In Choosing Your Personal Dietary

Professional athletes have always agreed they we should “stay hungry”. This is good advice. To wisely stay hungry without starving, we would eat several small meals per day rather than three large meals. Eat just enough nutritious food to assuage your hunger. Do not try to eat everything on the buffet table. Belonging to the “clean plate club” is not a goal that we need to shoot for while building better health. So stay hungry just a little. When you eat, eat slowly so that your stomach will be able to tell your brain that you have eaten enough. If you watch fat people eat you will see an eating machine honed to perfection. They eat fast. And they eat by the clock. They let their appetite choose the food. This is a recipe for disaster.

One of the best slogans I have ever heard is: “Eat to live, don’t live to eat”. If we can eat to live then we will eat only what is necessary for good health. Eating becomes a natural function, like breathing. We do it because it is a necessary activity to keep the body in good shape. If, on the other hand, we live to eat, then we are saying that eating is a hobby. Its only function is to see how glutinous we can be. Good health does not enter the picture so we shovel down enormous amounts of food in a quest to experiment to see how fat we can get. Witness the pie eating contests, the hot dog eating contests, and the beer drinking contests that people engage in for prizes. (I have often wondered what the ultimate prize would be for any of these contests. A dozen donuts?) These people are crazy. They are ruining their health and they are providing a bad example for the rest of the population who might be trying to improve their own health. Eating should be a necessary function in order to live fully.

In putting your personal eating method together, monitor your energy level. If you eat properly, your energy level will be high. You will have excess energy for anything that you want to do. If your energy level is down, or you feel sluggish, then you are not consuming enough food. Add some complex carbohydrates, like sweet potatoes, to raise your energy and to keep you alert all day long.

We are given only one life to live, why would anyone desire to ruin it? We can enjoy eating, even adding in a little cake and cookies sometimes. But overall, we want to eat well to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible. It isn’t difficult. Get rid of the excess fat, build some muscle through correct exercising, and keep stress at a minimum. And enjoy life.