Arapaho is Mountain Dew country. You go to any convenience store and you see more real estate given the Mountain Dew than you see to Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Unfortunately, Arapaho is also partial to homogeneity. They like things plain. Nearly every restaurant in Callie is a burger place. Even the Mexican restaurants here eschew spicy. I could go on and on, but this has repercussions when it comes to Mountain Dew. Namely, they have rows of the stuff but they only have one flavor. Sometimes they don’t even have diet available, much less Code Red, Voltage or (dare to even hope) Livewire. Oh, well they do have the Throwback stuff, so maybe that’s taking up the slots they’d otherwise be giving Diet or Code Red.

I am a big fan of Mountain Dew Livewire. Unfortunately, during my tenure in Deseret it was nowhere to be found. Coworkers at Falstaff would let each other know when we were crossing state lines to get some. Whomever is in charge of Deseret distribution apparently really doesn’t like the stuff. Arapaho seems to be in the same orbit, except that because of the above it’s also missing Code Red and Voltage.

Mountain Dew has recently begun its second Dewmocracy, where they introduce three flavors and allow people to vote on which one to keep. The last time they did this gave us Voltage, though I liked all three options. Unfortunately, Arapaho is undewmocratic because the three flavors are nowhere in sight at convenient stores. Absent some sort of sale, the prices at Safeway are extremely high and the sale they were running was only if you stock up on the same product (no “mix and match” between Pepsi products). So I had an itch to try some of these new Mountain Dew flavors but no means with which to do so.

While driving my route for the Bureau, I stopped at a convenience store in Bass. Much to my shock and amazement, they had Mountain Dew Game Fuel. I never cared all that much for Game Fuel, but it was still at least something different. So I got it and it was my prized possession. I held on to it a couple days for an opportunity that I knew I would be able to completely enjoy it. And… it was flat. It had a sell-by date from last November.

Fortunately, last night I stopped by Safeway and they had a mix and match special going. So I bought all three. Here are my thoughts, for anyone interested:

• Whiteout - It’s billed as smooth citrus. The smooth (which is really just sweetness) kind of overwhelms the citrus, though. I think it’s too sweet, honestly. Kind of cool that it was actually white rather than clear as I had expected.
• Distortion - My ex-roommate Dennis called it. It’s like Mountain Dew Baja Blast that they sell exclusively at Taco Bell. I didn’t like Baja Blast when it first came out but it grew on me. Distortion, possibly by virtue of it following the too-sweet Whiteout, I liked coming right out of the can.
• Typhoon - Very fruity. My least favorite of the three. Whiteout grew on me after a little while but Typhoon really hasn’t. It honestly reminds me of the cheap sugarwater juice that Mom used to pack in my lunch when I was younger.

Right now the vote is tilting in favor of Whiteout. Typhoon follows closely behind. Distortion is toast. Oklahoma and Arkansas are apparently Distortion’s base. Whiteout is carrying few states, but they are dominating California and running up a serious total there. Of course. Now I’m thinking that I might start need to voting strategically. Since Distortion can’t win and Whiteout is the more preferable of the two, do I pick the lesser of evils? Or do I say “I don’t need another flavor of Mountain Dew” and vote my conscience?

Back in the early days of Hit Coffee, there was a vote at my former employer. Winning that vote probably ended up gaining me 10 or 15 pounds. Free soft drink fountains are bad for you. Especially when they have Mountain Dew.

In a discussion about fast food, the In-N-Out Burger chain in California came up. I hear Californians sing its praises all the time. But I also hear people say that Californians only like it because it’s the home team, so to speak. I’ve never eaten there, so I don’t know how good their food is. But the whole discussion reminded me of something I have sort of noticed as I’ve moved around from place to place. Local establishments sometimes get a real pass on quality. I really noticed this when we moved to Estacado. There are a few places in Santomas that everybody says we must eat there. When I do, I find that it’s… pretty typical. Clancy and I were constantly disappointed with the food selection in Cascadia when we lived there and no place disappointed us more than the ones that were billed as local institutions. None of them were really bad (okay, one was), but there was really nothing remarkable about them. Sometimes it’s just the same food with a $2 markup.

There are a number of possible reasons for this. The first is a matter of acquired taste, which requires no real explanation. Second, the positive associations with the place that are not culinary in nature become transferred to the food. You go somewhere that is convenient, you have a good time, you think of the place positively, and you forget that the food is no better there than at the local IHOP. The last possibility that comes to mind is simply hometown pride. You like the food because it’s local.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these. I’m sure if I look back at some of the places that I thought of as institutionally great, it has more to do with the associations and disassociations. I associate it with a good time. I disassociate it with the formulaic makings of chains. And of course it gets some advantage of being different but also some of the advantage of being familiar. I have really grown to appreciate this as I have moved around. I spent my last several weeks in Cascadia eating at various non-chains specifically because they were non-chains (we’re going to put regional chains under the same category as “non-chains” for the purposes of this post). Was there food any better than a national chain I could have been eating at instead? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But they were definitely places that I knew I would not be able to eat at anymore once I got to Callie. Places that made me appreciate Cascadia.

I have trouble getting through to my father on this point. He and I have the tradition of Saturday Morning Breakfast. We uphold it whenever I am in town, though we don’t limit it to Saturdays. It used to be that we would go to McDonald’s one week and then Happy Burger - a regional chain - the next. Back and forth, back and forth. However, when I go back now, I don’t want to eat at McDonald’s. I have McDonald’s everywhere else I go. Nor do I want to eat at Denny’s, where Dad likes to go for variety and a good deal. I want to eat at Happy Burger. Now, Happy Burger actually is better than McDonald’s, regional pride aside, but it’s not nearly as much better as I tend to think it be. It’s something that makes me appreciate being in Delosa.

As most of you know, I have become an evangelist of high-fiber cereal. I believe that this cereal has had an enormous effect on my weight loss (30 pounds in six months and nearly 15 in the ten months since). But all fiber breakfast cereal is not created equal. So below is a list of your options in the order in which I prefer them. They’re not organized by taste as the best tasting option (FiberOne Caramel Delights) is below the worst tasting one (Rat Turds). It’s a combination of health content versus taste. If you don’t like one, try others.

FiberOne Honey Clusters - This has become a staple of my diet. It has just a little bit of sugar (6g per serving), but it’s enough that you don’t have to add sweetener for it to be edible. I often do anyway, though. The texture is flakes. There are 13g of fiber per serving, which amounts to 51% of your daily alotment. I typically eat 2-3 servings per meal, so that comes to well over 100% of my daily alotment of fiber and about 15g or so of sugar. Not ideal, but really not bad. If you’re on a low-carb diet or if you have serious blood-sugar spikes, though, it may have too many carbs for you. Clancy found herself falling back to sleep after eating them, though nothing like that ever happened to me. To me, the Honey Clusters are the best balance of fibery health and minimal sugar. {Score: 46, Taste: 8, Health: 7, Consistency: 8}

Kashi GoLean Original - This may well be the all-around healthiest cereal, though my scoring system places more emphasis on fiber and sugar rather than protein. It has about the same sugar content as F1 Honey Clusters and a little less fiber (10g/srvg), but it also packs in 13g of protein whereas the protein content of Fiber One cereal is minimal. GoLean also tastes the best without sweetener of any of these options. It also has more a variety of shapes and texture than the others. However, it does get soggy quicker than the rest. I personally find that the missing fiber content makes a difference, so it’s not my first choice. Another plus of GoLean is that it is that you don’t even need milk to eat it. On our road trips, I try to make sure to bring GoLean simply because it makes for good, high-fiber snack food. {Score: 46, Taste: 8, Health: 8, Consistency: 6}

FiberOne Original (aka “The Rat Turds”) - This was the cereal that I tried first and I’m glad that I did. It substantially lowered my expectations of what fiber cereal should taste like. They don’t taste terrible. In fact, with enough sweetener on them, I liked them for the first couple weeks. But day in and day out, I got tired of them pretty quickly. I guess the novelty wore off. The great part of this cereal is that it has no sugar! Chances are, though, that you’re going to want to add some. But even there, you can add as much or as little as you want. What I noticed was that I started having to put more and more sweetener in it to get it to taste okay and then I started adding genuine sugar and then a little more eventually I was losing ground compared to the competitors. However one thing I found this good for was at work. Mindstorm offered free milk and free chocolate milk. Add just a little bit of chocolate milk into the milk and it actually tastes pretty good. Each serving has 14g of fiber, or 57% of your daily alotment. Two servings typically constitutes a meal, so once you eat this, you’re good on fiber for the day. Notably, one serving of this is half the size of a serving of any of the other options. So you don’t have to eat as much and that leaves more servings so you get twice as many meals out of it. Helpfully, F1 separates the content into two bags to keep it from going stale. The “Rat Turds” moniker actually comes from their appearance. They don’t taste like I would imagine actual rat turds to taste. {Score: 42, Taste: 3, Health: 10, Consistency: 8}

FinerOne Caramel Delight - It’s a fibery knock-off of Cinnamon Toast Cruch. Or at least that’s what it tastes like to me. Bar none, this is the tastiest cereal of the group. Like GoLean, it can be eaten independently of milk. Unfortunately, it tasted a little too good and I found that I had difficulty stopping eating it the same way that I have problem with Kids’ breakfast cereal. So it was on the basis of it tasting too good that I had to stop eating it. It has a higher sugar content than the others, as well, with 10g per serving. The missing fiber (9g/35% per serving) also made it overall less satisfying for my digestive system than most of the other options. But seriously, if I had to choose between this stuff and the really sugary breakfast cereal, I’d take this stuff. If you have kids that need a little sweetness, I recommend trying this on them. {Score: 37, Taste: 10, Health: 3, Consistency: 8}

Kashi GoLean Crunch - There are actually two variations of this, the main difference being the inclusion of almond slices in one. What’s particularly notable about this line is that the cereal is abnormally chunky. They’re the only ones I’ve tasted that can work as finger food. They also taste good in milk, though, and require no additional sweetener. They taste a little granola-ey. They have about 13g of sugar, which isn’t great, and only 8g of fiber (32%/serving). But like the Caramel Delights, they’re more kid-friendly than the alternatives. Not quite as addictive, though. {Score: 33, Taste: 9, Health: 3, Consistency: 8}

FiberOne Shredded Wheat - If you like shredded wheat, give this a try. I don’t care for SW myself but once it was all that was available at Safeway so I gave it a shot. No surprise, it didn’t do much for me. It has similar health content to the Caramel Delight (12g of sugar instead of 10, same fiber content) but without the great taste. Additional sweetener is optional. {Score: 22, Taste: 6, Health: 2, Consistency: 4}

FiberOne Raisin Bran - I don’t do raisin bran, so I have no idea how it tastes. 11g of fiber (43%) and 13g of sugar per serving.

FiberOne Grape Nuts - Inexplicably, this does not exist. I can’t imagine that adding fiber to grape nuts would affect the taste at all. Come on FiberOne, get to it!

Back to the neverending topic of weight loss and exercise, the NYT spotlights research that seems to come from the “well, duh” department: the secret to weight loss is to burn more calories than you consume.

The main problem today is, people have no idea what they’re consuming. As the article points out:

“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”

Most people I know go through 4-5 cans of soda per day. I personally have felt a lot better, and noticed myself getting trimmer (and wanting to exercise more regularly thereby!) when I gave myself one simple rule: don’t stock soda cans in the house. I have juice, I have milk, and that’s it. Generally, after a glass of juice or milk, I don’t feel the need for more than water afterwards; if I drink soda, I find myself thinking “hey, I want another soda.”

I switched to using smaller bowls and smaller plates, and doling out smaller portions (I have “soup bowls” that are wide but shallow but have a circular imprint in the center, so I only fill the imprint and use some whole-grain bread to sop up the gravy from whatever I cooked).

This is not to say that these are easy things. Sticking your giant-sized bowls and glasses “out of the way” and replacing them is an expense, though not that expensive ($20 at Ikea replaced pretty much what I needed for daily use). Cutting how much you eat may require “feeling hungry” for a while as your body adjusts. But the research is clear; “inability to lose weight even though exercising” is much less likely to indicate that you have some hormonal/metabolic issue, and much more likely to indicate that you’re finding some hidden source of calories and not accurately measuring your caloric input or how many calories you’re burning.

Sometimes we want things from society and the law that we cannot get. For instance, you may believe that abortion is murder or that the death penalty is wrong. However, in most places (well, all places in the former and most places in the latter), you are unable to actually do anything about it. It’s a frustrating situation to be in. Most of the time when this happens, though, we view some wrongs as being more wrong than others. I’m opposed to the death penalty, for instance, but if we’re going to have a death penalty then we ought to try to make sure that (for instance) those that are executed are not tortured in the process and that innocent people are not executed.

Despite my fundamental opposition to the death penalty, I tend to get annoyed with death penalty opponents who play a sort of cat-and-mouse with partial measures. It’s one thing not to want someone to be executed in a way that is tantamount to torture. It’s another to say that method-X is torture. But to suggest that method-X is torture is primarily to suggest, in the short term, that some non-tortuous method is used. The trouble is that when you turn around and suggest that any alternative is still killing people, you’ve undermined your case against method-X. You have revealed that your opposition was to the act and not the method involved. You’ve alienated anybody who generally supports the death penalty but was concerned about method-X. If method-X is genuinely torture, you’ve possibly consigned people to death row to a more tortuous death than would otherwise possible. If method-X is not really torture, you’ve been remarkably dishonest and people (who already disagree with you in bulk) are not unlikely to notice. On the other hand, if and when method-X is replaced by method-Y, you’ve lost a good portion of your argument if your argument was never really against method-X to begin with.

This is why the whole argument about the lethal injection formula at work in our death chambers left me somewhat cold. The fact that the point was never to switch to a more humane method left me skeptical that the fomula (method-X) was really as bad as they were saying. Supporters of the death penalty didn’t even have to say a word. I could be right about that or I could be wrong about that, but that was the impression that I got.

This sort of frustration is how I always feel about nutrition-boosters. I can’t tell you how many discussions I’ve gotten into where I’ve been tut-tutted for liking some food, been told how awful it is for me in terms of fat and lack of nutrients, then listed the nutritional information off the top of my head. Yes, for foods I eat frequently, I remember these things. Turkey pepperoni, for instance, is not appreciably worse for me fat-wise or calorie-wise than sliced turkey on a sandwich. No, it’s not completely stripped of its protein (any more than a turkey sandwich). Yes, a salad would be healthier, but the most likely alternative to a turkey pepperoni snack is not a salad but is cheese. Yes, the cheese has more calcium, but it also has a lot more fat… and wasn’t that your original complaint about the turkey pepperoni?

The real problem, I have come to determine, is not so much that I am eating turkey pepperoni or inulin. It’s that I’m not eating what they eat. Now, if I’m asking for advice on how to lose weight, suggesting replacing turkey pepperoni with celery is some darn good advice. And maybe the turkey pepperoni really is bad for me in some way that I can’t measure. But it becomes rather obvious to me that they really don’t care if it is or not. It’s consumer food. Consumer food is evil.

That’s how I feel about a lot of the complaints about unhealthy beef. It’s not that I don’t think that there’s a problem with tainted beef. There is! I want it fixed! In fact, I think that I want it fixed a lot more than the people screaming most loudly about it. For them, it’s like method-X insofar as it is a tool to their ultimate goal of getting me to stop eating beef. As a beef eater, though, I have more of a stake in how healthy or unhealthy the beef I eat is.

I am reminded of this by a post by Marion Nestle, last seen accusing a 20oz Coca-cola drink of having 800 calories, who argues that irradiation isn’t a particularly good idea. Why is it not a good idea? Because killing bacteria lets the industry get away with producing beef with bacteria in it {cue nefarious music}. So she has now demonstrated that E. Coli is really secondary to the evilness of meat producers.

I’m not arguing that meat producers are benevolent entities nor am I denying that they are guilty of all manner of things including gross mistreatment of cattle. Maybe a law should be passed about that. But every other recommendation (mostly involving testing and handling of meat) I’ve read has come across as far less likely to actually reduce bacteria and more likely to make meat more expensive and the industry less profitable. And it becomes ever more apparent to me that the issue has little to do with bacteria at all and more to do with punishing thy enemy and forcing people to eat less beef.

On a relatively unrelated note, I find it fascinating how bacon became at some point the classy, hip meat. Would the above article have been written if the E. Coli had instead been found in bacon? Oh, probably. But there’d probably be fewer people solemnly nodding their head at the notion that Middle Class America Knows Not What It Consumes.

Clancy: I’m sorry that your tummy is hurting, though I am not sorry if it means that you’re going to be eating hot dogs in the future.

Trumwill: It’ll be a long time before I eat another convenience store hot dog.

Clancy: I can’t say that I have ever wanted to eat a convenience store hot dog.

Trumwill: You don’t know what you’re missing out on.

Clancy: Let’s see. In the last six hours you spent 45 minutes at a rest stop bathroom

Trumwill: Fifty-five. It was 45 from the first discharge to the last. Ten minutes waiting for the first discharge.

Clancy: Lovely… and since then, you haven’t wanted to eat anything…

Trumwill: I may never want to eat anything again. This could make for an innovative weight-loss program!

Clancy: Yeah, okay. Anyway, I’ve never cared much for hot dogs.

Trumwill: I go months without eating them. In fact, it’s probably an indication that my diet has gotten better than my stomach so thoroughly rejected that hot dog.

Clancy: That’s a bright side, I suppose. How long has it been since you had a hot dog?

Trumwill: Cooked? Months.

Clancy: Uncooked?

Trumwill: Well, I had a couple raw hot dogs when I was staying with Clint in Shaston last weekend.

Clancy: You eat uncooked hot dogs?!

Trumwill: They’re fantastic. I’m pretty sure that I am the one that got Clint into it, as well. an instant snack. and they’re pre-cooked, so you don’t have to worry about the bachteria of raw sausage.

Clancy: But how can they possibly taste good?

Trumwill: They just do. a nice, cold snack. Plus, I save carbs by not eating a bun!

Clancy: Fantastic. I just don’t like hot dogs. I prefer sausages. Cooked sausages.

Trumwill: The raw sausages aren’t nearly as good. Don’t ask me how I know that.

Clancy: I don’t even need to.

Trumwill: I’m talking about the precooked sausages. Not the really raw hot dogs. I probably shouldn’t say “raw” so much as “unheated.” actual raw sausage doesn’t taste good at all. at least, if it’s anything like raw bacon.

Clancy: You eat raw bacon?!

Trumwill: Only once. I figured if raw hot dogs were so good, raw bacon would be even better. Since I liked cooked bacon more than I like cooked sausages. I was wrong.

Clancy: Yes. Yes, you were.

Trumwill: You’ve tried it?

Clancy: Normal people don’t have to try it.

Trumwill: Yeah, but a normal person wouldn’t have discovered the glory that is uncooked hot dogs.

Clancy: Eck. I guess I like hot dogs okay if they’re grilled. But when they’re boiled, not so much.

Trumwill: I don’t like them boiled, either.

Clancy: You like them uncooked but not boiled?

Trumwill: I like them in the following order: uncooked, grilled, microwaved, then boiled.

Clancy: Microwave tastes different?

Trumwill: Not really. They’re mostly like boiled. The thing is, though, that the skin cracks. It creates a crevace that you can stick american cheese into. Kinda like those cheesedogs - which are really good uncooked, by the way - except cheesier.

Clancy: Throw in Easy Cheese and I think you’ve just about hit all of the low points of the american Diet.

Trumwill: Easy Cheese. Hmmm….

I’m not quite the cook that my wife is, but one thing I do like to make is Breakfast Burritos. In an effort not to gain (more) weight while unemployed, I’ve reduced the portion size to what I affectionately call my TTBB (Teeny Tiny Breakfast Burrito). I decided this evening to compare the health content of my product with that of the McDonald’s Sausage Burrito which seems to be about the same size.

TTBB Ingredients:
1 High-fiber burrito
1 slice reduced fat cheddar cheese
2/3-3/4 helping of Lite Spam
2 “Large” eggs

You can imagine my shock when I calculated up the calories and fat grams and discovered that my TTBB’s are worse than McDonald’s. Holy cow, I wondered, if I’m using lower-badstuffs and higher-goodstuffs ingredients and I am worse than McDonald’s, what in the world are they using?! Where do they get their low-calorie, low-fat sausage and eggs?! Do they have some sort of Superfarm? They should totally advertise that!

So I guess I come out ahead.

Charles Homans think that ketchup packets are the worst idea ever:

I think that’s wrong. Very wrong. They’re not even the worst condiment packet ever!

Ever since my decision to make common cause with our president by putting mustard on my burger, I have been fumbling ridiculously over mustard packets. Mustard gets everywhere except on my bun. Unlike mayo and ketchup, mustard doesn’t come off the fingers with a lick. It’s like toothpaste on shirts. It has staying power until you break out the soap.

That aside, the mustard experiment has gone over well. Not only does it replace mayo, but combine it with some Sriracha or Tabasco sauce and it overwhelms any cheese you might put on it and you can replace that, too.

There was a flap a couple weeks back when Barack Obama ordered dijon mustard at a historic burger joint in Virginia. This was considered indicative of Obama’s elitism because he can’t eat ketchup on his burger like reg’lar folks. “What kind of man orders a cheeseburger without ketchup, but Dijon mustard?” Laura Ingraham asks. The answer, David Frum unearths, are those effete coastal elites in Texas. Actually, the Texans prefer regular mustard, but no ketchup.

So how ridiculous is it that these right-wing blowhards are trying to mock Obama for liking Dijon mustard? Republicans have indeed made an art out of criticizing the culinary choice of Democratic politicians. Remember John Kerry’s infamous preference for swiss cheese on his Philly Cheesesteak instead of Cheez Whiz. Yet as much as we might want to chalk this up to the intellectual bankrupcy of conservatism, does anyone doubt for a moment that certain corners on the left would take swipes at a Republican candidate with a soft spot for Spam or, for that matter, Cheez Whiz? In fact, in a post ridiculing Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and others, Jason Linkins goes out of his way to denigrate people that eat ketchup:

What kind of man orders a cheeseburger without ketchup? Uhm, how about a FULL GROWN ONE? Ketchup, and it’s cousin “catsup,” doesn’t come near my food, because I am no longer a small child.

Ahhh, so ludicrous as it is to ridicule a mustard-eater as an elitist, calling ketchup lovers immature is just calling a spade a spade, I guess.

One funny aspect in all this is that in Obama’s second book, a guy named Aaron reminds us that his preference for Dijon mustard makes an appearance in his second book:

He was at a restaurant with his campaign consultant who had been coaching him on how to behave in rural Illinois. He asked the waitress for Dijon mustard, and the consultant waved him off: “He doesn’t want Dijon.” The consultant then shook at him a bottle of French’s already on the table. “Here’s some mustard right here.”

The moral of the story was that the waitress, an actual Real American, was puzzled by the consultant’s Old Politics assumptions, not Obama’s mustard preference. The suggestion, seemingly, was that our nation is not as sharply divided over mustard as pundits would have you believe, and as a result it is possible to solve real problems. Story on p 49.

Everyone’s mileage on this varies. I come from a pretty red part of the country but it wouldn’t occur to me to mock someone for wanting Dijon mustard on a burger. Maybe it’s cause I was raised all wealthy and stuff. Nor would it occur to me to denigrate someone that likes ketchup (or, for that matter, Swiss cheese or Cheez Whiz).

For my part, I am not a big fan of ketchup. Whatever appreciation for it I once had I lost when I had a roommate (a Republican… ooooooh) that put gobs of the stuff on everything. It made me so sick of the smell I avoid it whenever I can. In Deseret they have this stuff called Fry Sauce that is a mixture of ketchup and mayo that tastes pretty good. And I’ll put ketchup on black-eyed peas because God intended ketchup to go there. But that’s about the extent of it. I eat Dijon mustard on Subway sandwiches, but that’s about it. I used to eat regular mustard on burgers, but I didn’t like the way it mixed with the cheese and so I stopped. Now I put mayo or salad dressing, if anything. In solidarity with our president, though, as well as a desire to consume less fatty mayo, I will start putting mustard on my burger. I may even go all coastal and go with Dijon.

In case you were wondering, this stuff is downright frightening in person.

As in to say: the grease literally drips right off it in front of you, and the smell is nauseating.

I read here and there that one of the dangers of drinks with sugar is that they give you calories without actually filling you up. So they’re as empty as empty calories can be. I don’t doubt that much. Refined sugar and corn syrup and all that are definitely among the worst ways to spend one’s calories.

The claim, though, isn’t that they consume too many calories for too little in return. It’s that they do not satisfy hunger at all. That doesn’t seem to be true in my experience.

Whenever I’ve given up soft drinks in the past, one thing that I’ve noticed is that there is usually an uptick in my hunger. I don’t mean substituting sugar for sugar. That would make sense. Stop drinking coke, want candy bar. But stop drinking cokes, want any food you can get your hands on? I thought that maybe it had something to do with oral activity (the weight gain that often comes after quitting smoking gets attributed to that), but the hunger seems to come more from the stomach rather than the mouth. I do know the difference. Then I thought maybe it was psychosomatic, and maybe that’s part of it, but it’s usually something I notice in retrospect. I notice that I’ve been hungry for the last few days… then I look back and notice the soft drinks. False attribution, maybe. I also thought that it might be that I substitute soft drinks for diet soft drinks which contain antacids with can make you feel more hungry. Maybe that’s the case, though I’ve never noticed any difference based on whether or not I’m replacing the soft drinks with diet soft drinks or otherwise.

Then there was today. Today at around 6:30 or so I started getting hungry. I had half a Subway sandwich in the fridge, but I didn’t want to spoil my planned dinner for the night. So I decided to go to the vending machine and get a bit of beef jerky to tide me over. Except inexplicably there was a line at the vending machine six people long. So, realizing that I hadn’t consumed my daily quota of soft drinks for the day, I decided to go ahead and get a Mountain Dew and come back to the vending machine later.

Except that later I wasn’t hungry. Two hours later, I’m still not. This is not the first time that this sort of thing has happened to me. That I’ve been hungry, drank a coke, and then not been hungry anymore. That’s never happened with Diet Coke, and I didn’t drink the Mountain Dew with the expectation that it would fill me up, so it not really easy to chalk it up to my imagination.

So faced with the alleged fact that cokes do not satisfy hunger in any way, shape, or form… and faced with the alleged fact that Mountain Dew does seem to quench my hunger… I have no choice but to conclude that Mountain Dew has protein.

If you don’t have any plans for dinner, consider eating at Subway tonight. There’s apparently a movement on to get as many people as possible to eat at Subway today in an effort to save the NBC show Chuck, which just keeps getting better and better. So if you like the show or are amenable to eating there for those of us that do, I recomment it.

I meant to say something earlier. I heard about this last week. I decided that I haven’t eaten at Subway in forever and it sounded good. One of the main reasons I haven’t eaten at Subway recently is that it’s rarely convenient to. The one that exists on my drive home from work often doesn’t have any parking available.

So wouldn’t you know it, since deciding that I was going to eat at Subway today, I have had one opportunity after another to eat there thrown at me. Every chore I went on over the weekend, there’s been one right there. And the one on my drive home actually had parking available when I stopped at a nearby gas station. But each time I had to forego so that I would be sure to eat there today.

Makes me wonder if Subway isn’t losing money on the deal.

Update: I decided to get two subs. Considering that my current eating habits only allow me to eat 6″ at a time, I know what I’m going to be eating for the next couple of days. That, combined with the left-overs from the Mexican restaurant we ate on Sunday night, will prevent me from eating much in the way of ravioli and Spam for a while.

I love the cafeteria at work. It’s not only convenient, but the food is good and not too terrible for me while saving me from much greater sins elsewhere. They also have a nice variety of foods and weekly specials, so I end up eating more different meals than I otherwise would. Well, “different” usually within the context of a bun or tortilla (or occasionally a crust).

The biggest complaint I have is that they put certain foods where they don’t belong. Case and point they put green peas in rice. I don’t like rice much to begin with, but I hate green peas. There is no vegetable I hate more. There aren’t many ingredients where I practically refuse to eat anything with it in there, but green peas are right there with raisins.

You can imagine my surprise when I got a beef taco a few weeks back only to discover these little green bulbs inside of it. Having already ordered it and seeing that there weren’t many, I closed my eyes and ate the thing. I picked out the ones that were convenient, but I know one or two got through. Lesson learned. The next several times I got some other meat only to see that they didn’t put the green peas in there anywhere.

Then one day I get a burrito and I know that they’re going to put rice in there. I tell the woman to put only a little bit of rice. I do that with burritos anyway, but it was particularly important this time around. If there were only a couple I could pick them out. So I breathed a sigh of relief. Little did I see that this time they had put the green peas in the darn chicken this time.

I don’t get it. If a burrito factory offered to put beans inside their burritos, I doubt one in ten customers would ask for it. Why in the world defile glorious meat with such ugly nutrition? I understand the need for filler, but green peas are not uncontroversial. Not only would few ask for it, but I suspect a larger number would specifically want its exclusion. When I get something meaty and some potatoes were thrown in the hash, I do get the vague sensation that there are potatoes where meat ought to be and that sucks. Sort of like how they fill up your cup with glass cause that’s cheaper with cola. But it’s nothing to get excited about. Yeah, a little less meat and a little more potato, but I know few people that would actively object.

Green peas? Different story. I’m sure there are people out there that are excited about them, but there are also a lot of people that hate them. Including my wife, who is much more a veggie person than I am. I dislike carrots a good deal, too, but I understand that fewer people have the distaste for them that I do. I accept that I am alone or near alone or aligned with people of the caliber that make me wish I was alone on a lot of foods.

But green peas ain’t one of them.

Last weight post. I promise! For a little while, anyway. This post is going to cover some ground covered in my previous post about Inulin. This one was written first and Inulin became a hot news topic before this went up.

I wrote twice before about how people that have never really, truly struggled with their weight (losing 10 pounds to look good for your high school reunion doesn’t count) don’t understand how complex the process of losing weight is. At least from a psychological perspective. Another factor is that people lose weight in different ways. What works for one person does not mean that it will work for another. For instance, if you have one guy that loves cheese and pork and doesn’t have any real use for bread and crackers and put him on the Adkins diet, he’s much more likely to succeed than a bread-lover with a fondness for pastries. Even though they may have will-power, self-control, and discipline in equal measure, the results won’t be equal.

I have personally found that a couple of minor tweaks made all of the difference. What matters most for me is simplicity. Anything that requires me spending a whole lot of time counting points is likely to lose me. I’ll lose track of how many points I have for the day, get frustrated, and put the diet off for another day. Likewise, anything that requires of me to not eat cheese isn’t going to happen. Or a diet that says that if I drink a coke, I’m screwed for the day. I need room for a little bit of sin, lest I end up settling for a lot of sin.

I decided after moving up here to make one and only one major, written in stone change: I will eat my daily allotment of fiber at least five days a week. My initial thought was that I would try to do this, see if it did any good, and then if not I would find some other simple rule. I figured that by then I would have the habit of eating fiber and therefore taking the next step (whatever it might be) might be easier. Turned out that the fiber created a cascading effect of virtue.

Partially, I think, because of how I chose to get those calories: High-fiber cereal. Really high fiber serial. I eat 80-90% (or more) of my daily allotment for breakfast. That has the benefit of getting breakfast into my system at the beginning of the day. As everyone knows, it’s better to eat more meals of smaller quantity than fewer meals of greater quantity. I always knew that, but could never manage to do it. But breakfast set the stage for that. And it prevented me from going out and getting breakfast of a much worse sort. I did have to strike out a compromise and created a compromise: I get to eat breakfast at McDonald’s on Wednesdays. I gave in on this so that I would always have McDonald’s to look forward to without eating it on too regular a basis. To say that I’m never going to eat there is to set myself up for failure. Knowing which day I will be eating there helps solidify the thing to look forward to.

In addition to preventing greater dietary sin, the cereal keeps me full until lunch. For lunch I really lucked out. Another example of how an external circumstance can make all of the difference in the world. Mindstorm, my employer, has a great employee cafeteria. A wide selection of food at reasonable prices. But the biggest thing is that it’s a very short walk away. That’s how I learned something about myself: One of the problems in the past is that I have a psychological fixation on the notion that if I invest time and energy to go some place for lunch, I am going to do some serious eating while I am there. Since going across the street to the cafeteria is no great inconvenience, it’s incredibly easy to just get a quick, relatively small thing.

Sometimes I do get hungry later in the day, so I try to keep a box of cereal at work that I use for snack food. I did this after I realized that I was starting to go to the vending machine to satiate that end-of-day hunger. Plus, Mindstorm has free milk. So that works out. But the important part of this is not what I eat, it’s that by having fewer dietary problems (now I’m eating a good breakfast, eating a smaller lunch) I am better able to identify what the problems are and come up with solutions. It’s not so overwhelming anymore. The more changes you have to make and urges you have to fight off at once, the exponentially harder it gets to make them. I know someone that quit smoking this way, by-the-by. He just got rid of one cig a day per week (the third after lunch, the second in the morning, etc) until it wasn’t worth bothering anymore.

Dinner varies pretty wildly. When Clancy’s not on a horrendous rotation, she cooks and she makes enough for two. Otherwise I usually open something canned or in some cases just have a snack at night. The canned foods are generally not very healthy. But they’re not ridiculously unhealthy either, unless you count sodium. If I’m really hungry it’ll be some sort of pasta like Beefaroni or maybe spaghetti. Chili and/or a burrito is also an option. If I’m less hungry, I’m more likely to eat soup or just get a snack. The snacks are usually not of the healthy sort. They often include Spam.

I’ve recently expanded my attempt to include a morning workout. The workout is actually not entirely for weight. It’s partially an issue of general health and partially in anticipation for my next chore. One thing I don’t mention above is that I still drink three cokes a day and that’s not good. So I’m going to try to make a change there, too. But I know that I have to actually be ready for it in more ways than I currently am.

So for all of you I don’t know how many of these tricks might work for you. I think that it is really important to recognize that overweight people generally have bad habits in different ways. I really don’t think that there is any diet out there that is right for anyone. I think that boosters of one diet over the other (say low carb vs low fat) often mistakenly give people the impression that the way that they lose weight is the only way to do so. According to low carb people, I should be ballooning up about now when in fact it’s my low-fat diets that have historically proven to be more successful. When my wife diets, she has to go all-in. Whenever I go all-in, I burn out and fail.

Of course, what works for me may not work for anyone else. Indeed, what worked for me in the past stopped working five years ago. It used to be that I lost weight by going all-in, spending a couple days eating scratch and then slowly working my way from there. When I lost 70 pounds at the end of high school, that was how I did it (albeit not completely with intent).

Last week I ran across an MSN list about weight loss with a mathematical oddity. In the process of trying to track it down, I read just about every diet-related thing that they have. What struck me as I was reading was how many of their “tips” just didn’t apply to me. It warned against monotony, for instance, but for me monotony is a powerful thing. Creating “defaults” so that if I’m not in a particular mood for something else, I’ll eat the same thing every day. For the author of the article, though, it was a recipe for failure.

Ten years ago little changes were hard for me. Now they’re the only way that I can make changes. Ten years ago eating a little bit of cheese meant that I would go hog-wild. That’s not the case anymore. Ten years ago I could completely steer clear of cheese and sweets. I can’t anymore. Some people need carbs and others need fats and asking them to go without is completely counterproductive.

It seems to me that the best way to go is with an eye towards knowing what your limitations are and what your strengths are. My strength (and weakness) is that I am a creature of habit. I don’t get tired of foods. There are also some ubiquitous foods that I can almost completely eliminate from my diet such as french fries. There are others that I can’t. My wife’s diet includes sacrifices I could never make. Sacrifices I’ve made without little effort are things that would require the world of her.

For me, right now, the path to success is replacing one bad habit at a time.

One danger of forward-dating posts is that between the point when you write it and when you post it, something hits the news that changes the reader’s perception of everything. Seriously, what are the odds that in the week in between my writing of a post involving fiber and it’s scheduled posting, that fiber would be in the news? Particularly the exact kind of fiber involved in the post?

Slate has an buyer-beware article on faux-fibers such as polydextrose and inulin. These don’t constitute real fiber, Jacob Gershman says, and Megan McArdle agrees. The implication, of course, is that people reading this need to go eat raw roots, nuts, and berries if they want to be healthy.

Unfortunately, I think this attitude has precisely the opposite effect. Instead of telling people what the true and good things to eat are, they sort of lead us to throw our hands in the air and say “What’s the point?” It’s sort of like that guy that, whenever you say so-and-so is bad, points to the alternative and says “that’s bad, too!” And we sort of end in this no-man’s land of nutritional post-modernism wherein whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Boiled roots and steamed beans are good for you. No one really contests that. And I get it. I get the notion that as long as I’m not eating things that I have no use for, I am a dietary sinner. I might as well be eating pig lard covered in triple-refined sugar.

One of the problems I have with the medical establishment in general is that they often have the perfect tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good. I tell my phys ed coach that I’m drinking orange juice, and I’m warned about the sugar. People get excited by new games and game systems like DDR and the Wii that encourage exercise and they go out of their way to say that the exercise isn’t as good as the exercise you might get on the treadmill. I half-expect them to complain that the treadmill isn’t as good as jogging, which isn’t as good as carrying logs, which isn’t as good as pushing boulders in persuit of building a cave.

The problem I have with this is that for most people, the alternative to natural orange juice is not prune juice, it’s Sunny Delight or Mountain Dew Livewire. The alternative to the Wii is the XBox. The alternative fake fiber is not a breakfast of… I actually don’t know of any breakfast that they haven’t told us is killing us at some point in the last ten years. Eggs, bacon, oats, orange juice. Maybe a pear and a grass salad is okay. Or eggs, if you strip it of the part that tastes good and don’t add anything to add taste (cause it probably contains sodium, which as well all know will kill you).

The more personal problem I have with it is that more than any other product I can think of, the one thing that has helped my life more than any other is the fake fiber discussed in this article.

When I moved to Cascadia, I made only one conscious dietary decision: to eat more fiber. I decided to do this with fiber-enriched FiberONE cereal. FiberONE contains inulin, which is discussed in the Slate article. Since making that decision, I have lost 35 pounds.

I drink three or four cokes a day. I eat McDonald’s for breakfast once a week. Donuts once a week. If I really want a burger or a couple pieces of pizza, I eat it. I put cheese in the canned pasta I not-infrequently have for dinner. I have not once said “That’s unhealthy. I shouldn’t eat that.” But the weight nonetheless came off.

It would be silly to attribute it all to the cereal. But what happened was the cereal replaced the far, far less healthy breakfasts that I had been eating. It got me to stop skipping The Most Important Meal of the Day. It kept my bowels regular. It suppressed my appetite. It got me started on the right foot. So when it came to lunch, unless I actively wanted something unhealthy, I would continue the trend that I set myself in the morning and get a boca burger. Since I’m less hungry (or have been hungry for less time), I’ll eat less.

If I had read this article before I’d made that decision, I never would have started eating the cereal. I mean, what’s the point? It’s not real fiber. You might get the impression reading the article that there was nothing worthwhile in the product at all. A waste of time. I might as well be eating at McDonald’s.

McArdle makes the comment that the FDA should release a statement saying “If it tastes that good, it isn’t good for you.”

In some people’s minds, it’s as though something tasting good is immaterial. Or that, if they really tried, they’d learn to like brussel sprouts. Maybe, if raised on it, they would.

But things like taste and convenience matter. They matter a great deal. Because without it, people will not continue to eat it. They will likely default to something far, far less healthy. If putting a cheese on a veggie burger makes me like it, it’s worth the added fat because it means that I will have liked my veggie burger and will eat it again. Struggling with no cheese or soy cheese may be acceptable, but it won’t have me coming back for more. That double cheese-burger, which I know will satisfy me, will call to me evermore loudly.

Granted, I am fortunate in that if I do the right things (and even some of the wrong ones), I will lose weight. I recognize that others don’t have it so easy. For whatever reason, they have to sacrifice a lot more to get a lot less loss in return. So for them, maybe these articles are worthwhile if they wonder why their high-”fiber” breakfast isn’t doing the trick.

But I think that a large part of the problem with obesity in this country has less to do with too many people thinking that faux-fiber is actual fiber and a lot more to do with being made to feel guilty any time they eat something that they didn’t pluck from the ground themselves. Diets are notorious for being short-lived and ultimately resulting in weight gain. They tell us that we need to not just go on a diet, but change our lifestyle. But anything convenient or tasty is off-limits.

That’s a recipe for failure.

How you reckon I convince Clancy that our next vacation needs to be to Quebec?

Without mentioning the real reason as to why?

Unfortunately, I let it slip when I recommended New Orleans (See #4) and now I’m not sure if I’ll ever convince her to go…

Slate offers up one of their random weirdo articles; a guy who married a vegetarian, who gets to eat meat once to twice a month “on the sly”, whose wife is one of the militant-veggie “our kids will be raised vegetarian” sorts.

In my life, I’ve known a few vegetarian-ish people, of varying degrees. In the Southern Tech University dorms, there was one girl (a cute redhead who’d had anorexia, who became an absolutely STUNNING redhead when she got treatment and regained about 50 pounds) who’d done enough to her body that she sort-of, kind-of became “vegetarian” because she’d destroyed her body’s ability to digest meat properly (go without for too long, you stop producing the enzymes necessary for digestion, you lose the helpful intestinal flora that assist in the digestive process for meat, and you might even get food poisoning because it can then rot in the intestines).

Two others I know currently I’m interested in dating. One has food allergies galore; peanuts (thankfully not the “it can’t even be around me” kind, but bad enough), pork, and a couple less annoying ones. The other is a partial-vegetarian who doesn’t eat “meat” (in the pork/chicken/beef/etc sense) but still eats fish and dairy products.

The odder question from my angle is: at what point does one start altering habits (should it manage to turn into a full-blown, exclusive dating relationship) to coincide with this? Admittedly, in the one case it’s a matter of real danger (plus the whole idea of “congratulations, you ate something I’m allergic to, now go brush your teeth or else no kiss”), while in the other it’s a semi-moralistic/semi-health-conscious thing. Also, in the one case it’s obviously going to need to be one-way (hard to “compromise” on allergies) while in the other?

And, can I really manage to give up my traditional bacon-and-eggs sunday breakfast?

Annoyance of the Day:

People that seem to like Indian/Dominican/Brazillian/Taiwanese/{insert foreign food that isn’t Americanized Italian or Mexican} food primarily on the basis that it differentiates them from people that don’t foreign foods.

I’m wondering if either the city of Soundview or state of Cascadia passed a law requiring fast food places to post their calories on their menu. I stopped by Jack in the Box on Saturday morning and they’d put stickers with the calorie count all over their drive-through menu. I’m thinking that Jack did not do this as a gesture of good will because it was pretty shocking. That fast food is unhealthy is hardly news, but I figured that Jack was about like the rest of them. Turns out that they stack up pretty poorly with McDonald’s, which is the general point-of-comparison that I make.

The biscuit sandwich I was going to get is 740 calories, compared to 570 for McDonalds. At McDonalds, you can get a sausage McMuffin with egg and cheese for 465 calories. No such tasty sandwich exists at Jack for under 500 calories except a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese biscuit (which is comparable in health content to McD’s). Roughly half of Jack’s breakfast menu is over 500 calories compared to about a third for McDonald’s.

The dinner menu is little better. McDonald’s only has one burger over 600 calories (Double Quarter Pounder, 740) and Jack in the Box had at least a dozen with half of those being over 1,000.

I’ve gotten into debates in the past over whether restaurants should be forced to put up nutritional content. Some say that the motivation behind doing so is to shame fat people and that anybody eating at fast food restaurants is obviously not worried about health content. To some extent they’re right on the latter part, but I’m not sure if that’s sufficient. Some people aren’t overly worried about counting calories, but I think that it is in general a really good idea to remind people how many calories that they’re consuming. One of the most successful dieting maneuvers in existence is simply keeping track of how much you consume in a day. People are notoriously forgetful when it comes to everything that they’ve eaten in a day but they remember better when each thing has a number value assigned to it. Even if you don’t set yourself up with limits and even if you don’t have a calculator with you, it still helps you realize where exactly your greatest dietary sins are and almost always provides easier ways to cut back.

By eating at McDonald’s rather than Jack in the Box, for instance.

It makes the really unhealthy stuff much less enjoyable. It’ll be a while before I eat another Ultimate Cheeseburger, for sure.

The onslaught continues. I can’t remember the last time I had pizza at the cafeteria but it’s nonetheless still a staple of my diet.

Last night there was a little hitch, though. Whoever ordered the pizza seemed to do it with stunning disregard for what kind of pizza people might want to eat. Typically when ordering pizza for a group, you get some variation of four major kinds (cheese, pepperoni, sausage, Canadian bacon) with maybe something more exotic thrown in there for people that want something a little bit different. Tonight’s collection had something like 10 pizzas with exactly one of the above four staples and nine of the exotic kinds.

The pepperoni was gone within ten minutes and the rest had not more than a piece or two taken out. Now I do sometimes like variety. In fact, except when my options are limited I’ve stopped eating tomato-sauce pizza almost altogether. When my wife and I order pizza, we almost always order pesto sauce. I’ve also somewhat reluctantly come to like BBQ sauced pizza (in small quantities) and always love Alfredo sauced pizza. I’ve never been big on tomatoes anyway and while I tolerate the sauce, it’s the tribute to all the cheese that I get with the pizza.

There was one type of exotic pizza in the line that I did eat. It had artichokes, onions, and feta cheese on it and it was pretty good. I’m not entirely an unadventurous eater. I’ll really try just about anything once. The thing is that I have to know what it is. The pizza we got last night was full of stuff that I couldn’t identify and that’s about the worst kind of stuff that there is! I did give one new kind a try that didn’t look like it had anything too exotic, but it had something in lieu of the tomato sauce was so dreadful that I threw away my first piece of pizza in living memory.

It’s hard not to realize what a prick I am for complaining about free food, but I never claimed not to be a prick.