Feeling Guilty for eating sweet potato fries

[gettheweightoff]

Ok, I am not eating sugar/sweets but I did have some sweet potato french fries with my dinner. It was a small serving (about 1 quarter of my plate) and I did have a lean chicken breast and steamed green beans with it.

I was proud of myself because the rest of the small box was calling me for seconds and I did not cave BUT it was hardly a healthy choice.

I know Sweets are out but is it ok if we have fries once and awhile on this plan?

[Sharpie]

I've only been here the same length as you, but I'm pretty sure a) sweet potatoes are counted as a veggie by most people and b) fried foods are allowed so long as they are part of a meal (not snacks). They're certainly not sweets. Maybe not as 'healthy' as steamed veggies, but fair game! Good for you for restraining yourself- I'm not sure I could have!

[gettheweightoff]

Thank you so much for the encouragement. They were delicious and they were calling me.

They were supposed to have been eaten by my husband but he decided not to eat them and put them back in the fridge.

If they get too tempting I'll just throw them out but for now I look at it like I had a nice meal... and now... it's over!

[wosnes]

I think one of the worst things we've done to ourselves is to label food, especially real food, as "healthy" or "unhealthy." I don't know if you baked them or fried them, but either way, they're not a bad choice.

[osoniye]

Hey, if it fits on your 1 plate and it's not a sweet (I know it has "sweet" in the name, but I'm thinking it's really more of a potato) it's OK.
You may find in time that you want to limit foods that set up cravings to S days, or not at all, but don't do that till a few months down the road. My 2 cents.

[NoelFigart]

No Sweets, No Snacks, No Seconds, except (sometimes) on days beginning with S.

That's IT.

You didn't cheat. Are sweet potato fries the world's healthiest choice? Nope, not really.

Get past perfect. (F**k perfection, to be a bit crude). Go for "good enough". This is a lifetime thing. Mostly good is really enough.

The level of perfectionistic tweaking we apply to food is (I think) a lot of how we get into this mess. It's kind of like housekeeping. If you clean the house absolutely perfectly down to the baseboards every three months, you're going to spend most of your life in a messy house.

If you spend a relatively short period of time being absolutely "perfect" about a diet (always assuming we know what that IS) and then fall off the wagon frequently, your weight is going to be out of control as well.

If you do a teeny bit of housework every day, your house always looks decent, and if you pay attention to the broad strokes of your diet every day, your weight will stabilize appropriately.

[wosnes]

If they get too tempting I'll just throw them out but for now I look at it like I had a nice meal... and now... it's over!

As long as you don't eat them as a snack, no problem in eating the leftovers.

[Blithe Morning]

"In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan is a breath of fresh air regarding what is good food. It's worth reading at some point as it fits well with No S's old fashioned, common sense approach to eating.

IDoF can be summed in three guidelines:
Eat food (the closer it resembles something your great great grandmother would have recognize as food, the better)
Mostly plants (easy on the meat and dairy, half to a quarter plate's worth)
Not too much (No S, baby).

Since you are new, I would focus on No S at this point. However, if the shame and guilt of eating "unhealthy" food threatens to derail you, then read Pollan's book to get a new perspective not pimped by the pseudo-scientific diet drones, who incidentally more often than not make money on selling snacks, supplements and even entire meals.

So, to get back to your original post, not only are sweet potato fries allowed on No S but they are also pretty good on the IDoF scale. They are something that resembles real food, they are plant based and they were properly portioned.

[Nicest of the Damned]

Ok, I am not eating sugar/sweets but I did have some sweet potato french fries with my dinner. It was a small serving (about 1 quarter of my plate) and I did have a lean chicken breast and steamed green beans with it.

Sounds good!

I was proud of myself because the rest of the small box was calling me for seconds and I did not cave

This is excellent. Resisting the temptation to "finish things up" is hard, at least for me.

It sounds like you're looking for perfection in your diet. That's not the point of No S, to have every meal diet-book perfect. The point of No S is to restrict your diet as much as you need to, but no more. Restricting your diet leads to feelings of deprivation. Feeling deprived leads to binge eating and failure over the long term. You have to strike a balance between eating too much and feeling deprived. This is a Scylla-and-Charybdis situation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scylla_and_Charybdis

Deviating too far either way is dangerous. It's not extra-good to have more restrictions than you need.

You've just started No S. You should not even be thinking about what you're eating yet. You should be trying to establish the habits of eating only at mealtime, eating only a single plate at meals, and not eating sweets.

You've got a limited amount of willpower. If you stretch it too thin by trying to work on what you're eating at the same time you are trying to establish No S habits, you'll overwhelm it. Willpower is like a muscle- you can build it by establishing good habits. If you want to build muscles, you don't start by trying to lift the weights that Olympic weightlifters lift. You start with smaller weights, and work your way up.

[wosnes]

I'll second the recommendation to read In Defense of Food or his book Food Rules, which is simpler and easier to digest.

In terms of the fries, here's his rule #60:

Treat treats as treats

There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day isn't a special occasion. This is another case where the outsourcing of our food preparation to corporations has gotten us into trouble. It's made formerly expensive or time-consuming foods -- everything from fried chicken and french fries to pastries and ice cream -- easy and readily accessible. Frying chicken is so much trouble that people didn't use to make it unless they had guests coming over and a lot of time to prepare. The amount of work involved kept the frequency of indulgence in check. These special occasion foods offer some of the great pleasures of life, so we shouldn't deprive ourselves of them, but the sense of occasion needs to be restored. One smart way is to start making these foods yourself; if you bake dessert yourself, you won't go to that much trouble every day. Another is to limit your consumption of such foods to weekends or special occasions. Some people follow a so-called S policy: "no snacks, no seconds, no sweets -- except on days that begin with the letter S."

So, if you want fries, make them yourself. You're probably not going to do it every day.

[Blithe Morning]

So, if you want fries, make them yourself. You're probably not going to do it every day.

Now roasted sweet potatoes are easy and one of those things you can make frequently, assuming you have an oven and about 40 minutes.

Preheat oven to 400°F/204°C.
Wash and cube sweet potatoes. You can add other veggies too. I like carrots, parsnips, regular potatoes. Onions and peppers can be used too but need a little less cooking time.
Toss veggies with 1/4 cup olive oil. A quarter cup is if you are going to mostly fill a cookie sheet with veggies. Use less if you are making a small amount.
Spread veggies on a cookie sheet. Sprinkle with a little kosher salt.
Bake for half an hour, stirring every 10 minutes.

[gettheweightoff]

Excellent advice. Thank you so much.

Reading this in black and white is what I needed to see the light.

I'm just going to concentrate on the no snacking, no sweets and no seconds and KEEP THINGS SIMPLE.

All I've ever done is restrict myself (raw vegan, weight watchers, calorie counting, low carb/no carb,) no this, no that and then I rebel and bingo I binge and gain weight all over again.

Thanks again. You don't even know how much sense you just made to me and how this will help me.

[Nicest of the Damned]

All I've ever done is restrict myself (raw vegan, weight watchers, calorie counting, low carb/no carb,) no this, no that and then I rebel and bingo I binge and gain weight all over again.

What's happening is that you're asking too much of your willpower, and it's failing. You build up resentment through too much restriction. When the built-up resentment overwhelms your willpower, you binge.

Eventually, the No S rules will not seem like restrictions. They'll seem more like just the way you do things. Then, not before, is the time to think about mods and other food issues, like eating healthier food. That will take at least a month to happen, longer for some people. I wish it were quicker too, but that's just how human habit works. It's like pregnancy- it's something you can't rush, and it's ineffective or harmful to try.

Eating less fried food might be a worthy goal. But, first, you need to tackle the issue of just plain eating too much. It doesn't work to give up the fried food without addressing the issue of how much you are eating. We tried that, along with giving up or restricting red meat, in the 80's. The obesity rate didn't go down then, nor did it when they came out with Baked Lay's Potato Chips in 1996. We've tried the experiment of giving up either fat or carbs without addressing the amount we eat, and those both failed to put a dent in the obesity rate. You yourself have tried numerous ways of restricting what you eat, and it didn't work. If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting the results you've always gotten.

[Over43]

As several people have stated, if it fits on your plate it is part of your meal.