Eat better AND keep your favorite foods....

Today's Post:  Friday, 7-6-2012

Most people today eat in ways that tend to make them fat or sick or both.

But people do have favorite foods.

One way to make eating better doable is to have ways to help people to eat much better and know why and how to do it.

To be fair, some drinks and foods are simply too harmful to have more than once or twice a year. 

Soft drinks are an example of that.

But for many foods that are favorites, there are ways to eat them less often or in less harmful forms and to eat them with health OK foods to balance their effects.

Suppose you love to eat bacon, you rely on fast food for lunch, and you strongly prefer to have meat for dinner every day.

Many American men fit this profile and grew up eating this way. So you may identify with all or part of it.  And most people who will eat it at all love bacon.

Most people with that profile are fat or they will be and will likely keep gaining.  And, their risk of heart disease and some cancers are much higher than normal.

This post is to show that you can eat in a dramatically healthier way and still cater to those 3 preferences.

Let’s describe a before and after menu for someone with those preferences but who wants to eat better while keeping those preferences.

Before, typical breakfasts 7 days a week might be:

Bacon, two eggs fried in the bacon grease, and two pieces of toast with butter and jam. Having coffee with nondairy creamer and sugar is not uncommon.

During the weekday, a typical lunch might be a hamburger, a large order of fries, and a 16 ounce soft drink.

Dinner might be beef five days a week, chicken once, and ham once.  Most would include mashed potatoes with gravy or a baked potato. Dessert might be cookies from packages bought at the grocery store.

The good news is that someone eating like that is getting plenty of protein.  But they are likely to be fat and getting steadily fatter.  They are also headed for likely heart disease.

If they smoke or are around second hand smoke too, heart attacks become relatively likely.

If they never exercise, their risk of heart attacks go up and being fat and getting steadily fatter becomes much more certain.

1.  So the first thing to do is to avoid tobacco smoke totally. 

2.  The second thing to do is to do strength training 3 alternate days a week and two to four of the remaining days, do interval cardio. 

You can go to a gym to do this.  But even 10 to 15 minutes at home early mornings is so doable most people can manage it.  

(That’s helped me to be quite consistent in my own exercise program.  My weekday sessions range from 6 minutes on Friday to 15 or 30 minutes on Monday and Wednesday and 25 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.)

You can eat with these preferences with far less harm by just doing these two things.

A.  How to make eating bacon at breakfast every week safe to do:

For breakfast, eating bacon every day, and eating bacon with a high level of preservatives, is harmful.  But without giving up bacon, you can eat it three days a week instead of seven.  And you can buy nitrate and nitrite free bacon at Whole Foods.  You still get to enjoy bacon every week.  But the damage you get from eating is cut something like 90% just from this one set of changes. 

You can make your heart attack risk drop quite a bit by adding a bit of 2% lowfat milk to your coffee instead of nondairy creamer.  Nondairy creamer is mostly hydrogenated oils.  Hydrogenated oils are like heart attack starter in their effects.  So just by making this one switch, eating bacon just became a lot safer!

Instead of eating refined grain wheat bread toast, eat oatmeal or cooked beans or lentils.  The toast tends to be fattening and has almost no fiber. And it has similar effects to hydrogenated oils on your heart disease risk. 

Even better, both oatmeal and beans or lentils have soluble fiber to help your body move the saturated fat in the bacon out of your body.  In addition, they are more filling so you will be less hungry than if you ate the toast.  Less hunger later means less fat gain too!

Eggs it turns out are actually good for you.  And you can now get eggs from pasture raised hens at Whole Foods.  Those eggs are even better for you.

Lastly, on the days you have bacon, fry your two eggs at low moderate temperature in extra virgin olive oil or boil them.  Do this instead of frying them in the bacon grease.  That too will make the bacon a lot safer to eat.

And, instead of jam, eat the real fruit and eat an organic version if you can get it.

Strawberry jam likely has high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar.  That makes it very fattening and bad for you in other ways.  Real strawberries taste good too.  But they avoid the high fructose corn syrup and have more vitamin C and have more fiber than the jam.

These changes each help make eating bacon every week dramatically safer and less fattening to do.  Yet you still eat bacon every week.  And your bacon tastes just as good.

B.  How to eat at a fast food place every weekday, avoid most health harm from it, and even lose some extra fat instead of gaining it:

This method actually works well for people who like to eat meat.  And you can do it in virtually every city where you can buy fast food.  Subway sandwiches are like Starbucks outlets.  They are literally everywhere!

You do have to get water or coffee, never get soft drinks, and avoid ever getting any of the dessert like goodies to have it work.  But it is doable.  Just read our posts about how bad for you and fattening those things are if you get tempted.

Subway Sandwiches has a serve yourself veggie area.  And they have tomatoes, onions, mild peppers and more to add your sandwich filling.

Their bread is pretty dreadful.  It’s like the bread in the toast.  But by getting the sandwich Atkins style without the bread and adding enough of your favorite veggies to be as filling or more than the bread, you can actually get a relatively low calorie but satisfying fast food meal at Subway.

Just as one example, in a five day period you could get these 5 kinds of sandwich fillings:

Buffalo Chicken;  B.L.T.;   Oven Roasted Chicken;   Ultimate Veggie; &  Tuna.

(Buffalo chicken is spicy chicken slices and the veggie sandwich has avocado.)

Four of these sandwiches are high protein and three are meat and one has bacon!

What if you are going to have dinner late or show up starving hungry?  Just get two sandwiches.

And, by not ordering fries or soda or a dessert treat with the sandwiches, it’s about the same as or less money as getting a fast food lunch elsewhere.

C:  How to eat meat most days for dinner without most of the harm from it:

One way to do it is to eat meat from animals fed only grass.  Whole Foods is a source for both

-- such 100 % grass fed beef and lamb.  And they even have buffalo, if you’d like to try it.

These cost more than grain fed meat.  But they are dramatically safer for your health to eat and less fatty.  One way to do it is to eat them 3 days a week instead of 7.  That helps make them more affordable. You could eat grass fed beef two or three days a week and eat grass fed lamb or buffalo for a change of pace on one day some weeks.

Because these kinds of meats are so lean, it helps to have a way to make them tender.  Butcher’s Kitchen makes a steel meat tenderizer, their Impressor model, I once heard Chef Narsai David review as working very well.  The Jaccard Super-3 is a similar device that may be as good.  By using one of these you can have tender, lean, health OK meat.  You can also slow cook them all day in a slow cooker or Crock Pot after tenderizing them -- with some onions and other spices -- and have them be ready to eat when you come home

  

On other days, perhaps twice a week, you can eat some form of skinless fat reduced chicken such as skinless chicken breast.  Using the tenderizer is a good idea and you need a recipe with enough spices to add enough taste to this somewhat bland meat.  But the harmful stuff from the chickens that are grain fed is in their skin and the fat.  You can get almost all the protein without that junk by eating it this way.

For both grass fed meat and skinless poultry, it can also help to add some extra virgin olive oil to the recipe to carry the flavors and keep the dish from tasting too dry. 

You can also eat wild caught salmon two days a week.  It’s very high in omega 3 oils and has a very meaty taste and is quite tender.  In addition, on days you haven’t time to cook, and inexpensive way to serve it is to get canned Alaskan salmon which is all wild caught salmon.  I eat mine with pasta sauce and spices that I like right out the can.  I don’t need any cooking time.

Those protein foods allow you to eat a high protein dinner every day of the week and meat three days a week yet stay healthy doing it.

Lastly, potatoes are so high glycemic they tend to be fattening.  So another way to be far healthier and still eat meat or a high protein food for dinner every day is to eat vegetables or a salad or both with your meat instead of eating potatoes.

Foods like radishes, raw broccoli florets, and cauliflower florets with a health OK dip such as hummus or guacamole works.  So does lightly cooking green beans or small green peas and adding a single pat of butter to a serving.  Cooked kale with extra virgin olive oil and garlic also works.  Coleslaw made with red or green cabbage and extra virgin olive oil instead of mayo also works well.  You can also have one of dozens of kinds of salad and use extra virgin olive oil as the oil.

These vegetables are filling and low calorie.  They are dramatically less fattening than the potatoes.  And for many of the most important nutrients known, eating them for dinner this way is one of the most effective health boosters known.

So, as you can see, if you know how, you can stay quite healthy, avoid being fat, and still eat bacon for breakfast every week, eat at a fast food place for lunch every weekday, and have meat for dinner most days and a high protein dinner 7 days a week.