No more food guilt for me!

[gettheweightoff]

Yesterday I was feeling particularly binge like. It is my normal pattern to do well (green) for 4 days and then fall off the wagon but I didn't. I really didn't!

Now I didn't make the best choices yesterday as I had lasagna for lunch and I normally stay away from white pasta and for dinner in a rush I had McDonald's after my daughter's ballet class and I normally don't eat like that (though I had it a month ago and that is out of character for me as well and it's just because her ballet runs late and the Mcdonald's is right there but I'm not comfortable giving myself this kind of food let alone my children... sorry sidetrack). I had a Mac Snack which is a burger in a wrap with a yogurt parfait and 1/2 cup orange juice. I would NEVER have eaten this in my "diet mode" as I have been led to believe that white flour, juice and any sugar in your diet is awful for you. But you know what... I felt great. I felt full. Yes I felt guilty but it soon subsided when I considered I really felt binge like yesterday and I stayed the course and even if I consumed more calories than I would have liked I stayed on track and if I look at my 3 meals they actually weren't all that bad. It's only my "diet head" that makes me feel guilt about food.

So you know what... NO MORE FOOD GUILT. As long as I'm not having sweets, seconds or snacks I am fine.

I will aim to eat as healthy as possible because it is good for me but I'm no longer going to micromanage every piece of food, and worry if I eat white flour or white rice or juice. I think it's probably way better to have some juice with a meal than to drink coffee all day anyways.

Sorry for the rambling it's just that I'm discovering so many new feelings, food choices and realizations now that I am trying to free myself of diet head.

I've been in diet prison for way too long. It is exhausting being in my head and I think I just might be breaking free!

[wosnes]

I won't eat pasta other than that made from white flour. If it's good enough for the Italians, it's good enough for me! I saw this a couple of years ago and agree with it.

I also agree with Martha Rose Shulman, who wrote:

Rice is a thoroughly sustaining food. According to Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid in "Seductions of Rice," a beautiful, well researched survey of rice traditions around the world , "Rice has the highest protein digestibility and energy digestibility among all the staple foods." In most rice-consuming cultures, rice is supplemented with vegetables and legumes, small amounts of meat and fish, and oil.

I don't share the current national aversion to white rice. True, nutritionists prefer brown rice because the high fiber content slows down the carbohydrate absorption rate. But you can get the same benefit by combining rice with high-fiber vegetables and legumes.

Mr. Alford and Ms. Duguid make another interesting point about the nutritional quality of brown rice:

"It is true that brown rice has more calcium and iron as well as higher protein levels and significantly more of the B vitamins [and] more fiber than white rice. But brown rice is less digestible than white . . . rice. The aleurone layer and embryo, still present in brown rice, contain phytate phosphorus, which seems to interfere with the absorption of calcium, zinc, and iron."

Bottom line: if you prefer white rice, just make sure you're also eating lots of vegetables or beans with it.

They may eat other whole grains, too. It's all about balance (though I'll admit that I eat few whole grains except for some breads. I just don't like them -- even oatmeal). I eat white rice, too. And I do eat a lot of vegetables and beans.

I'm tired of the dietary extremism that's come about in the US. I'm tired of "healthy" food. Real food is healthy. Chemically enhanced, fake food is not (that does not include white rice or pasta). The heck of it is, it hasn't seemed to help us.

[Nicest of the Damned]

Yesterday I was feeling particularly binge like. It is my normal pattern to do well (green) for 4 days and then fall off the wagon but I didn't. I really didn't!

Now I didn't make the best choices yesterday as I had lasagna for lunch and I normally stay away from white pasta and for dinner in a rush I had McDonald's after my daughter's ballet class and I normally don't eat like that (though I had it a month ago and that is out of character for me as well and it's just because her ballet runs late and the Mcdonald's is right there but I'm not comfortable giving myself this kind of food let alone my children... sorry sidetrack). I had a Mac Snack which is a burger in a wrap with a yogurt parfait and 1/2 cup orange juice. I would NEVER have eaten this in my "diet mode" as I have been led to believe that white flour, juice and any sugar in your diet is awful for you. But you know what... I felt great. I felt full. Yes I felt guilty but it soon subsided when I considered I really felt binge like yesterday and I stayed the course and even if I consumed more calories than I would have liked I stayed on track and if I look at my 3 meals they actually weren't all that bad. It's only my "diet head" that makes me feel guilt about food.

So you know what... NO MORE FOOD GUILT. As long as I'm not having sweets, seconds or snacks I am fine.

I will aim to eat as healthy as possible because it is good for me but I'm no longer going to micromanage every piece of food, and worry if I eat white flour or white rice or juice. I think it's probably way better to have some juice with a meal than to drink coffee all day anyways.

No S isn't about always making the theoretical best food choices every time you eat. And that is one of its great strengths. No S works for people who can't always plan to have the best foods available at meal times. No S works for people who are sometimes too busy or tired to cook. A lot of diets don't. They pretend that you can always avoid those situations. In the real world, you can't.

I'm not organized. When I'm working, I'm doing well above average if I manage to pack a lunch twice a week. This was one of the things that held me back from trying to lose weight, before I discovered No S. I know that a diet plan that demands that I be a lot more organized than I am just isn't going to work for me. If I have to pack a lunch every day, or always have a food journal or calorie counter along with me when I have meals, that just isn't going to happen. Sorry, I'm just not that organized.

I'm not working now, but when I am again (hopefully soon), No S doesn't require that I have anything along with me if I'm going to eat a meal. If I'm running late in the morning and don't have time to pack a lunch, or am too tired to think of what to pack, I can eat out, and that's not breaking my diet.

[gettheweightoff]

Thank you ever so much for posting this. I agree wholeheartedly. I have always tried to be that "healthy girl" but always ended up binge eating after all the protein shakes, brown rice and eskiel bread. Honestly I don't feel much better eating it, it hasn't helped things in the washroom any and it doesn't make me any fuller.

Since doing no-s I have been going a lot by how I feel after I eat so I can remember what makes me feel happy, full etc. Yesterday's meals made with white flour made me feel good and happy and full so I'm starting to think all this brown food is a bit of hype. I don't think I need to eat it exclusively or feel badly about eating white stuff here and there.

Do you know how many chinese meals I have not enjoyed because I wouldn't touch steamed white rice which I love?

Now I'm craving some rice and vegetables for dinner!

Again, thank you so much. I really needed to read that at this time.

[wosnes]

There's nothing wrong with brown rice, if you like it, but I think whole grain pasta is an abomination. Believe it or not, I've never had a protein shake or Ezekiel bread.

I always go back to what Michael Pollan wrote:

Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

And...

No wonder we have become, in the midst of our astounding abundance, the world's most anxious eaters. A few years ago, Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, and Claude Fischler, a French sociologist, began collaborating on a series of cross-cultural surveys of food attitudes. They found that of the four populations surveyed (the U.S., France, Flemish Belgium and Japan), Americans associated food with health the most and pleasure the least. Asked what comes to mind upon hearing the phrase ''chocolate cake,'' Americans were more apt to say ''guilt,'' while the French said ''celebration''; ''heavy cream'' elicited ''unhealthy'' from Americans, ''whipped'' from the French. The researchers found that Americans worry more about food and derive less pleasure from eating than people in any other nation they surveyed.

Compared with the French, we're much more likely to choose foods for reasons of health, and yet the French, more apt to choose on the basis of pleasure, are the healthier (and thinner) people. How can this possibly be? Rozin suggests that our problem begins with thinking of the situation as paradoxical. The French experience with food is only a paradox if you assume, as Americans do, that certain kinds of foods are poisons. ''Look at fat,'' Rozin points out. ''Americans treat the stuff as if it was mercury.'' That doesn't, of course, stop us from guiltily gorging on the stuff. A food-marketing consultant once told me that it's not at all uncommon for Americans to pay a visit to the health club after work for the express purpose of sanctioning the enjoyment of an entire pint of ice cream before bed.

Perhaps because we take a more ''scientific'' (i.e., reductionist) view of food, Americans automatically assume there must be some chemical component that explains the difference between the French and American experiences: it's something in the red wine, perhaps, or the olive oil that's making them healthier. But how we eat, and even how we feel about eating, may in the end be just as important as what we eat. The French eat all sorts of ''unhealthy'' foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules: they eat small portions and don't go back for seconds; they don't snack; they seldom eat alone, and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs. A well-developed culture of eating, such as you find in France or Italy, mediates the eater's relationship to food, moderating consumption even as it prolongs and deepens the pleasure of eating.

''Worrying about food is not good for your health,'' Rozin concludes -- a deeply un-American view. He and Fischler suggest that our anxious eating itself may be part of the American problem with food, and that a more relaxed and social approach toward eating could go a long way toward breaking our unhealthy habit of bingeing and fad-dieting. ''We could eat less and actually enjoy it more,'' suggests Rozin. Of course this is easier said than done. It's so much simpler to alter the menu or nutrient profile of a meal than to change the social and psychological context in which it is eaten. (There's also a lot more money to be made fiddling with ingredients and supersizing portions.) And yet what a wonderful prospect, to discover that the relationship of pleasure and health in eating is not, as we've been hearing for a hundred years, necessarily one of strife, but that the two might again be married at the table.

Bold and italics mine.

[Nicest of the Damned]

We feel more guilt about eating "bad" foods than the French or the Italians do. If that kind of food guilt were helpful in keeping weight down, we'd expect to see a higher rate of obesity in France and Italy than we do in the US. In fact, that is not what we see:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_o ... th-obesity

The obesity rate in the US is 30.6%. In France, it's 9.4%, in Italy 8.5%.

[gettheweightoff]

Amen Sister!

[Nicest of the Damned]

Now I'm craving some rice and vegetables for dinner!

Have it, then. There's nothing in No S that says you can't.

[wosnes]

We feel more guilt about eating "bad" foods than the French or the Italians do. If that kind of food guilt were helpful in keeping weight down, we'd expect to see a higher rate of obesity in France and Italy than we do in the US. In fact, that is not what we see:

I'm not going to say that they don't feel any guilt (I really don't know), but they don't seem to classify foods as "good" or "bad." There are things one eats more often (vegetables, for instance) and things one eats less often (heavy cream). They're all to be enjoyed.

[Blithe Morning]

There's nothing wrong with brown rice, if you like it, but I think whole grain pasta is an abomination. Believe it or not, I've never had a protein shake or Ezekiel bread.

I prefer brown rice as I do seem to burn through white rice pretty quickly. I don't like whole wheat pasta nor do I enjoy those veggie pastas either. I've not had Ezekiel bread but since I like whole grain bread, I think I might like it. Actually, my favorite bread is sourdough with white flour, so there you go.

And I confess to liking whey protein drinks. Vanilla. Not chocolate, not strawberry. I'm in the minority though. It's what I drink in lieu of milk (which I REALLY don't like) when I'm feeling peckish and dinner is still hours away.