The Good Nutrition Diet

In our society there are so many different things to eat and ways to get them. Super Wal-Mart, fine markets, restaurants, fast food. Our American culture is unique in its approach to food. The French call our fast food "culinary prostitution." I think that's rather apt. I mean, France, and other older countries, still get their food the old-fashioned way. Their meat comes fresh from the meat market; their produce comes fresh from the fields to the produce market; their bread comes fresh from the bakeries and are made with old-fashioned, unrefined grains; their wine and cheese and chocolate and cream all come from their own special places where they are produced and prepared for sale with natural quality. They eat real food, as nature intended it. We have so many manufactured, pre-fab foods it's possible to eat all week and never put any FOOD into your mouth. Some of us eat like that our whole lives, from baby formula to frozen dinners and McDonald's. Let's face it-the processed stuff is cheaper and easier to acquire than the real stuff (baby formula compared to breastmilk, excluded). And I don't know about you, but I find myself going a little crazy by the end of my grocery shopping with trying to determine exactly how natural a product is. Our food choices are so overwhelmingly complicated and we really know so little about the stuff on our grocery store shelves.

The truth is, though, that we Americans focus more on good nutrition than any other culture, and our people have been bombarded with good health advice everywhere, and yet we have the most pitiful, albeit plentiful, food supply around. We are dependent on the heavily refined, manufactured products. I mean, who wants to cook oatmeal and eggs every morning? I'm not a morning person and I silently scream with gratitude for my daughter's Fruity Cheerios® each day. They have a teeny bit of whole grain and fiber and have "less sugar than the leading fruity cereal" and real fruit juice flavoring. The oatmeal and eggs are not even organic-they were made with pesticides and growth hormones and immunizations, so they aren't natural anyway. People everywhere have gotten or are getting heartbreakingly fat eating all the fake foods that we as a nation so habitually consume. Junk food is one of our greatest hobbies. Fast food is one of our choicest entertainments. And we've all blown off the notion of moderation that our Great Depression survivalist relatives tried to instill in us. I mean, it shows. How many overweight people do you know? If you're overweight, what kinds of foods are in your pantry and your fridge? How many of the basic food groups do you have in there? Do you think about the food groups as you choose your food for each meal? And when someone is trying to lose weight, how many non-food products do they eat? There are tons of special diet foods out there. We lose control of our weight by eating fake foods, and then eat fake foods trying to fix the problem.

I've dealt with weight loss. I've done some diets. I've read The South Beach Diet, The Fat Fallacy, and Shrink Your Female Fat Zones. And I've walked away with a greater respect for nutrition and cooking and eating natural foods, giving the body what it is designed to eat, and shunning all of the fake food for what it really is: good-tasting, addictive, sugar-loaded stuff that does great things for your tastebuds and absolutely nothing good for the rest of you. A homemade chocolate chip cookie is just as good or better than a store-bought one, plus it's only got in it ingredients you put in it, ones that you are familiar with, ones that are natural (unless you buy fake chocolate). There's just no reason to eat all of that fake stuff. There's certainly an irony in eating it and whining about your figure. And you eat chocolate chip cookies a lot less often if having them to eat depends on you making them yourself.

Now, I do eat my share of fake food. Easy, pleasurable food is one way to enjoy life. And people keep telling us all of the insane chemicals in our food are in such a small amount that "they won't hurt you." Okay. If they say so. Then I won't worry about eating the processed, manufactured, made-up-entirely-of-chemicals-and-corn-syrup stuff every now and then. But it's imperative to know what it is you are eating. To see it for what it really is. Fake food. Something your body is not meant to consume. Something your body can't use. That's key when it comes to eating in the USA. Otherwise you will just eat the common, plentiful stuff and very little actual food. And it's good to know that what the food companies are really trying to do is make it taste so good that you will eat it all of the time. They put loads of sugar and salt in everything-even things that aren't sugary or salty-because sugar and salt taste good. And corn syrup-do you know they're saying that stuff is addictive, and food companies know it, and load it in everything so that we will become corn-syrup/fake food addicts? Well, it's worked. Kinda makes me feel like the American people are all the food companies' little lab rats. They concoct products using chemistry and feed it to us and watch the intended effect-we want more. Cha-ching!

We all know what real food is. The majority of us read nutrition information and ingredients labels at least sometimes. I mean, they teach that in school. Along with the food groups and health and biology of the human body. And we've all seen all kinds of nutrition diagrams. The problem is that no one is really bothering to tell us that all of the rest of the stuff out there isn't real food. Doritos® doesn't say on their bags "made of tortillas and cheesey tasting stuff and additives, produced in a lab by chemists educated to know how to make a tortilla taste like it's loaded with cheese, only better." Now that I have a kid, all of the commercials for "kid food" on TV make me really mad. I want her to know food like that is just crap and I really don't appreciate food companies telling her that her life will be more fun if she eats it. It's a battle I shouldn't have to fight. And yet it's a common aspect of Western culture. Something as basic as what the body needs to eat should not be so misconstrued, and so casually accepted.

I laughed at myself about a year back when, in a desperate attempt to lose five pounds that just wouldn't go away with working out alone, I made up my own diet. I decided to only eat dairy, vegetables and fruits, lean meats and whole grains, all sensibly prepared. I didn't drink anything but milk and water (tea and coffee were extra sugar and I knew cutting them out for a couple of weeks would help). I didn't eat any kind of chip, white flour cracker or bread or other such product, and absolutely no sugar. As I watched my diet turn into actual meals-high-fiber cereal or toast and yogurt with fruit for breakfast, a salad and some cheese for lunch and some whole-grain crackers, and a sensible dinner with two freshly prepared vegetables and a good source of protein and another whole-grain dish-I realized my diet was simply eating only healthy, natural, real foods. I was eating what fit into the food groups and nothing else. I wasn't dieting at all! I have always considered myself a healthy eater, but there are so many extras you can add that are not a part of a healthy diet. Healthy eating isn't just eating the foods you should be eating, it is not eating the foods your body doesn't need. This is still my "diet," by the way, when I have a few pounds to lose. I cut all the crap from my diet. I eat only nutritiously, in reasonable amounts, at the normal three times each day to eat.

Our economy would never survive if Americans suddenly started eating only real foods. And we'd all starve if we went completely natural and only ate organic, hormone-free, un-chemically-processed foods. There just isn't enough real food to feed us all. And our economy is so dependent on the money exchanged over chips and white bread and Hamburger Helper® and nutrition supplements that it would collapse if we didn't buy them anymore. But for those of us out there who are concerned with what our bodies need, what our children's and spouses' bodies need and what we can do about it, just pay attention. Eating basic good nutrition and approaching all of the other non-food products with caution makes a tremendous difference. The body is smaller on a diet like that. It's healthier. Every aspect of it functions better. Because it is getting what it needs in order to function as it should, and isn't being overwhelmed with other stuff. And it's easier to eat plenty of the real food if you aren't distracting yourself from it with the non-food stuff each day. You're not going to eat chips and whole grain crackers in one meal, so skip the chips and eat the crackers. You're not going to drink soda and milk with your lunch, so skip the soda and drink the milk. If you do it all of the time, it really is possible to get the amount you need of the food your body is designed to get. And the times you eat the really tasty, convenient stuff becomes what it should be-a treat, a little guilty pleasure. Actually, you won't feel guilty about eating it because you are aware of what it is and are keeping it in its place. And it won't have an impact on your figure or your health.