Food with food in it
I'm dieting (again), and I'm not especially happy about it.
Lest I sound like a manic weight-loss fanatic, let me put your mind at ease. I am nothing of the sort. In fact, I am the opposite. It is precisely because I consume with such reckless abandon normally that I am now forced to reckon with the consequences and do something, anything to reverse the expanding trend of my waistline.
It's not (just) that I'm vain (though I am). There's an economic impact involved as well: I don't want to have to buy an entire new wardrobe to accommodate my gluttonous ways.
I am, once again, using Weight Watchers. The only problem with it is that, as I am a man of small stature and am far from morbidly obese, my point allocation is rather low: 20 points a day. Tinkering with their calculator, I did a little reverse engineering to figure out that that equates to something like 1,000 calories. Doling out the additional 35 flexible points for the week evenly, that works out to an average of 1,250 calories a day.
This is clearly untenable, at least for me. I have been ingesting practically nothing but fruit and salad (that is, if wine counts as fruit), and am still struggling to stay within my allocation. It's a little absurd that I am forced to consume roughly half the USDA recommended number of calories to lose weight.
My food philosophy has always been to eat, as my friend Kate says, food with food in it. That is to say, food that is derived from whole and wholesome ingredients. No artifical sweeteners, no preservatives, no trans fats, no hydrogenated oils ... you get the picture. The idea of diet sodas and fat-free snacks hold no appeal to me. It's not that I, like most humans, don't have my failings in this regard. I do have a weakness for Doritos, for example. But I have always believed that a mindful diet full of real food is intrinsically healthy and therefore, by extension, not fattening. Then again, I wasn't always pushing middle age.
So for the time being, should I post about anything that is clearly not diet food -- and I will -- know that I had to carefully budget my intake to accommodate it, that for every luscious indulgence there was another mouthful of romaine. But even my low-point salads are not joyless, for they are full of food nevertheless.