Thursday, November 06, 2008
You call that food?
From the RoundTable blog
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Betsy Biesenbach
Biesenbach lives in Roanoke and is a somewhat overweight freelance writer and freelance title examiner.
A while ago, I decided to visit a nutritionist in the hope that losing a few pounds might make me feel better.
I fully expected her to advise me about whether it is healthier to order the cheeseburger or the chicken nuggets at McDonalds. I also wanted to know which is a better breakfast: Dunkin' Donuts or Krispy Kremes?
To my horror, the answer to both questions was: "none of the above, no, never, not ever." She informed me that I eat "SAD" -- which was a surprise to me, since eating generally makes me pretty happy. "SAD," she explained, is nutritionist-ese for the Standard American Diet, which is heavy on sugar, fat and carbs. Uh-huh, and her point was?
The theory goes that all the bad stuff in these foods leaks out of your intestines and your body recognizes them as invaders and attacks them. This can make you feel very, very, very bad indeed.
She suggested I spend two weeks on a diet that excluded all grains but rice as well as dairy, peanuts, corn, sugar and caffeine. At this point, I was willing to walk around on my hands wearing clown shoes if it would make me feel better, so I agreed. After all, I thought, I kind of liked rice cakes.
But by the third day, the mere sight of them made my stomach do flips. Breakfast was almond butter spread on a rice cake. Sounds good, doesn't it? Assuming that "butter" was the operative word here, I thought so, too. But almond butter is actually a greasy brown-speckled glop that tastes like sawdust mixed with school glue. As for the rice cakes, "they make rice bread, too" the nutritionist told me, brightly.
Well, they also make nuclear warheads, but that doesn't mean we should go around eating them. I tried to throw the rice bread out after choking down two slices, but my husband objected, noting that the wrapper said the bread wouldn't go out of date for three more years, and shouldn't we keep it in case of famine? So I threw it out when he wasn't looking. It struck me as very, very wrong that something touted as a health food had a longer lifespan than a goldfish.
The worst thing about the food was that I had to cook it all! And cut it up! And the chewing! Squash sauted in olive oil is not a dish that goes down as easily as, say, instant mashed potatoes liberally laced with milk and butter.
After the first week, I began to feel as though I were living in a foreign country, one where the food I was used to just wasn't available -- if such a place exists anymore. I understand that you can find a KFC on nearly every street corner in any big city in China these days.
In my quest for something familiar to eat, I searched the snack aisle of the local health food store and found mini-rice cakes that were labeled as sugar-free. They were sweetened with a healthy helping of dried cane juice instead. Dried cane juice? Isn't that -- sugar? I also bought a bag of seaweed-flavored rice crackers that tasted every bit as delicious as they sound.
Nevertheless, I was comforted by the mere act of dipping my hand into a cellophane bag and coming up with a processed, prepared food item.
The diet brought home to me that food is more than just fuel for the body. It is comfort. Eating is an important recreational activity. We have business lunches, family dinners and church potlucks where whether or not we eat and what we choose to eat sends powerful messages to the people we're dining with. What we eat makes us fit in; it makes us part of our particular culture. And I missed all of that.
After two weeks on the diet, I didn't notice any difference in my health, unless you count the surge in my blood pressure when my family ate pizza while I had to make do with a plain baked potato.
The diet had only one real effect on me -- there were no longer any unread magazines in my house. And there is one thing I am now sure of. As I sadly told my son one morning as I prepared his breakfast: "A world without Pop-Tarts is a world not worth living in."
