Food log

[trixtah]

I've been reading the Shapely Prose back-posts, as I may have mentioned earlier, and one of the things that has struck me is how people who have been fat most of their lives often get brainwashed as to how much people in general actually eat, or how much they exercise. Also, I've been amazed at just how little food people on diets are allowed to consume. 1300-1500 calories a day? Holy shit. And it goes to show that the strictly thermodynamic concept of calories consumed, energy expended, and the left-overs being converted to storage (fat) is really not the story at all. How else to explain how women who eat 1300 calories a day and exercise can be still well over 100 kilos, when people like me, who stuff their faces, are just somewhat "overweight" (according to BMI standards. I just call myself "average")? Or are we all liars or delusional? Or is it the fact that our genetics make us metabolise food in wildly divergent ways - some are "burners", some are "storers", and what's healthy for you is quite possibly not healthy for me (at least in terms of the number of calories consumed)? If it isn't obvious, I go for the latter explanation.

So I'm going to do a food log for a week. I think people who might look at themselves as having unhealthy eating habits because they are fat or overweight might need to think about the fact that fatness is often decoupled from what anyone might conceive of as an average way of eating. Sure, as some fuckwits say, you didn't find fatties in concentration camps. Anyone can starve down to emaciation. But someone's point where they start losing weight might be 1800 calories a day; others might find that point is 1200 calories a day; or, conversely, even 2400. But subsisting on 1200 calories a day in order to maintain some arbitrary "ideal" weight is not sustainable, nor is it particularly sane.

I've been eating quite a bit lately, since it's cold. I also feel that I'm towards the chubbier end of my weight range, but I don't know what I weigh. Since my clothes still fit (if a little snugger), I would say I'm about 80-odd kg. That makes my BMI 28. My waist is about .76 the circumference of my hips (and probably about .5 the circumference of my bust, heh). I've never been on a diet, although at times I make efforts to reduce the amount of crap I consume and eat "more healthily". This consists of me cooking for myself more and eating more veges and protein, rather than restricting calories or portion control. I'm exactly mid-cycle right now, and I am not doing very much exercise (I'm doing a wee bit, but I should actually be doing more). I also hardly drink water, not even the fizzy stuff, at this time of the year. Anyway, leading off, here's what I've eaten today.

Breakfast:
2 pieces of wholemeal sourdough toast with butter and Vegemite
Cup of tea with one sugar and soy milk

Lunch:
(slightly strange because I was running off to an exam, but the pie shop didn't have any chicken pies, which was my first choice)
2 pieces of cheese-on-toast
2 gherkins
Tea as above

Dinner:
Madras curry made from a few tbl of curry concentrate (spices, tomato, coconut cream), root veges, cauli, beans, fried tofu
White rice
All up, at least 2-2½ cups of rice and curry.

Snack:
(still hungry - feeling cold and light lunch)
2 pieces of toast with butter and plum jam
Tea as usual

Comments

[ironed_orchid]

as I may have mentioned earlier, and one of the things that has struck me is how people who have been fat most of their lives often get brainwashed as to how much people in general actually eat, or how much they exercise.

That's struck me, when reading various forums.

My maintenance calories are 1800ish a day, so when I do diet, I eat between 1100 and 1400 calories a day, with one day a week where I can eat whatever I want. But I don't ever diet for more than 8 weeks at a time, and I often start tapering the amount up so that over a 6-8 week period, I start out at the lowest number per day, and end up back at my maintenance calories. This way I'm likely to continue eating an appropriate amount when the regime is over.

The thing that really troubles me is the idea of people consistently eating less than they need, for really long periods of time, as that will mean they are operating at less than full capacity. Dieting makes me tired and sometimes grouchy and sometimes seems to make my immune system less effective. In short, a feeling of been run down.

The other thing that worries me are people's idea of normal, as opposed to desired size an weight. A friend recently wrote about going to look at wedding dresses, where all the samples were size 10s. But most women who are a healthy size and weight would likely fall into the 12-16 end of the dress size spectrum. And yet many fashion lines won't make clothes in sized bigger than 12, and often it's hard to find 14 in department stores, because they get the same number of each size, and those will go quickly.