What are you eating?

So I was thinking about two things: the BBC show “You Are What You Eat” and the book The 120 Year Diet.

The 120 Year Diet is the basis of the Calorie Restriction thing and most people have probably written it off because all anyone every pays attention to is the part about restricting your intake by 60% or whatever. The other equally important aspect of the program is nutrients. You want a huge nutrient to calorie ratio. Also, any food has nutrient deficiencies. The more you eat that food, the more the deficiencies are magnified, so it is important to VARY your food sources. The most useful parts of the book are the tables where high-density sources of all kinds of nutrients are listed. Did you know white mushrooms have huge amounts of certain amino acids? Here I thought mushrooms were the marshmallows of the vegetable world.

The recipes are not the “Salad: combine 14g lettuce and ½ a diced radish. Enjoy!” which you might expect. You actually have to eat a monstrous amount of food to get your calories in. They use a lot of ingredients, are vegetarian and low on protein, but if you throw a bison burger on top, you have a super healthy PN meal idea.

YAWYE is where a bony nutrition harridan puts obese Britons on a terrible 8 wk detox diet and they end up losing a lot of weight, become visibly healthier, and gain an appreciation for nutritious food and activity. Anyway – one method YAWYE uses to shock the chubby is to pile a table full of everything they ate over the course of the week. The culprits are horrified over how much food they crammed into their bodies in just 7 days.

I thought it would be fun to start my own virtual table and make a list and then add it all up at the end. A few cookies and sweeties per day look innocuous, but at the end of the week it’s a whole carton. It’s also a new way to record my food which makes me really conscious again of what I’m eating. The goal is also to be increase the variety of foods I eat because it’s too easy to get on autopilot and live on the same few easy recipes over and over.