Define "Nutritious," and Make It Include Bacon

Basically how I understand nutrition

This year, one of my goals is to eat healthier. Sounds easy, right? Especially since I never set the parameters, so it’s not like I have to eat a certain number of calories per day or cut out all fatty foods.

But I am finding it EXTREMELY challenging. To really get the depth of my struggle, you need to understand two things.

First, you need to know my typical eating habits. I believe I’ve mentioned before that I don’t actually believe in calories, and I do not follow any sort of healthy eating habits. I fully enjoy the eating process (again, Taurus here) so I eat things I like. What do I like? Bacon, cheese, meat, bread, and sweets.

When I like something, I want to eat it over and over and over and over again. And that’s all I want to eat. So a typical day of eating?

What I consider a balanced meal (balanced in deliciousness!)

Let’s see, if it’s a weekend I normally like to have bacon for breakfast. There was an unfortunate year where I was eating a full pound every time, but now I’ve been doing much better by limiting myself to only a half pound of bacon at once, and instead of eating it twice a weekend I’ll only have it one day (baby steps). So that’s breakfast. If I’m still hungry I’ll normally have some fried potatoes, or maybe eggs.

Later for lunch, I’ll go with one of my typical favorites of beef ramen. Now, prior to the ramen I won’t be very hungry because of all the bacon. There’s one thing you should really know in life though: food is a gateway food. Eating the ramen will make me want more food, so I’ll then have a snack of about 1/3 bag of buffalo pretzel bites.

Finally for dinner I’ll go with something simple such as boneless buffalo chicken, bacon cheese fries, chicken pot pie, or bacon quiche. Delicious. If I get hungry again later (which is very likely), I’ll eat a giant bowl of whatever ice cream I’m craving at the time.

So you may have already realized this, but EVERYTHING I eat is unhealthy. How have I managed to survive for years? Well as I’ve said before my metabolism is fabulous and still not dead. Plus, I have completely ignored all facts related to healthy eating. I’m sure I’ve heard things over the years like what one should eat and avoid, but I am super good at not wasting memory space with what I consider “irrelevant” information.

When I made one of my goals this year to eat healthier, I knew I would need to actually investigate and find out what that meant. I’m still not concerned about calories (I still don’t think they’re real). What I’m concerned about is not giving myself a heart attack at age 30 like everyone in my family has always expected.

But I’m busy, and lazy. Thus I haven’t done the research yet. Which means I’m just guessing what I think is or is not healthy.

You’d think I’d know, right? Well you’ve never heard me justify how the freaking delicious large white cheddar mac & cheese at Panera hits all my nutrition needs.

My first issue was at a pub in the Denver airport, trying to find dinner. I was searching the menu for something healthy, having recently been told that cheese is apparently not ideal for cholesterol or arteries or something (since when?!) I felt like fish is supposed to be good for you, so I went with that. Did I mention though it was fish & chips? Apparently once something is fried it loses all nutritional value.

Since it was now clear my own judgment was useless in this arena, I started bugging friends. We had almost a 10 minute discussion ordering lunch this week as I kept asking about the healthiness of various options like garlic bread and Italian fries. This process was so discouraging to me that for dinner I gave up and had potato skins, buffalo chicken, and boneless honey-chipotle wings.

Then at lunch two awesome friends tried to talk me through what type of food I might want to start including in my diet. This was a great discussion. We determined I could start making smoothies as a way to eat fruit. Brilliant! I need to go get a blender now, but I think this will really work.

Even better, at dinner Thursday night two other friends explained step by step things like “avoiding transfat” and “reading food labels.” They gave tons more suggestions on what to eat, and how to make the food more delicious.

This is especially helpful, because honestly most of the time I don’t eat because I’m hungry, I eat because I like the food. So when I have something in front of me that I don’t love, I struggle to eat it even when I’m legitimately hungry.

Like cheerios, but cuter

I’m very lucky that everyone else in the world paid attention to the health rules of life. Hopefully they stay patient with me until I get motivated enough to do my own research.

In the meantime, I did FABULOUS yesterday. I had whole hearts cereal for breakfast, a monkey bar, a frozen veggie pack thing for lunch, peanut butter crackers, and strawberry yogurt. Look at all that healthy food! All in one day! It’s a miracle.