The word diet absolutely sucks, doesn’t it? When I think of the word, I envision tiny portions of salad, smoothies, and “sensible meals”. That advertising really works!
But, there is a difference between a diet and the diet. The diet, yours or mine, is a summative word meant to cover everything you eat. If you eat sensible pizza, but also salads, and pears, your diet includes pizza, salad, and pears.
This is an important distinction to make because when I write about diet, I don’t mean to say I’m following a specific diet, such as the SlimFast diet in the video. I mean to say that when I analyze my diet, I’m looking at all the things I eat.
Food is often characterized as good or bad. Apples are good, ice cream is bad. It’s true that different foods have different caloric and nutritional properties, but those associations we’ve made to them are psychological. How many times have you heard someone say they’re “going to be naughty” and have a bit of cake? Or heard someone say “I’m trying to be good” while picking off a vegetable platter? What we’re really criticizing is our own behavior. So it’s important to shake off some of those ideas and the best way to start is to look objectively at food, though that’s easier said than done!
The human body processes three main energy sources derived from food: carbohydrates, protein, and fats. Most people already know about these. They are referred to as macronutrients and the human body needs all three to perform. Most of the food we eat contains a mix of at least two but often three of the macronutrients. Those macronutrients contain smaller units of nutrition called micronutrients. These include vitamins, such as vitamin C, and minerals, such as iron, the body also needs.
When I first started losing weight, I didn’t know any of that except for what I had learned from ad campaigns, both corporate and public. I knew about the food pyramid, but I also had more current information from sites like Choose MyPlate, the US Federal Government’s answer to nutrition management. None of these sources of information about the diet provide flawless information and they can be dangerous.
For example, I entered my information into Choose MyPlate early in my journey. The site spit out my Body Mass Index (BMI), told me I was obese, and then told me what my diet should look like. The trouble was the diet it recommended was for someone in the “normal” BMI range for my height. Because I weighed much more than that, I needed more energy than that, much more. And not just the macronutrients. Eating so little made me lack in micronutrients as well. And I could afford to have more too while losing weight. Doing so would have prevented the problems I mentioned in my last post.
But I really believed, for example, that I was supposed to be eating only 4-6 ounces of a protein source per day. Thats startlingly low even for someone in my “normal” BMI range. I suspect this is so because, at the time, the site did not account for activity. A nurse or a restaurant server, who spends their work day running back and forth, could not survive on those diets. And neither could I. Fortunately, it seems the site is much improved from the time I accessed it in the summer of 2015. Users can now select calorie levels and the MyPlate Checklist Calculator now asks for activity levels. It still has flaws though, which I’ll address next week!