If you're going to eat cereal, Cheerios is one of the better ones. But it is higher in salt, so be careful there.

Raisin Bran is one of the worst. Tons of sugar. The flakes and the raisins are both covered. And raisins have lots of natural sugar as it is.

Milk is fine, skim is best. It's not like drinking a coke. But milk does have calories, so you should be aware of that.

If cereal and milk are the worst things you're eating then you're doing ok.

Don't forget you still need at least 2000 calories a day, even if sedentary, to maintain your current weight (all of us athletic types will need more). The point is you can get those 2000 calories from foods that make you feel full and don't make you feel like crap or hungry an hour after eating them.

The Paleo folks pretty much believe all grains are bad and cut out most carbs and legumes. Been reading the Paleo Solution Diet lately by Robb Wolf and has some good info although I'm not ready to go that far. They make some pretty big claims about glutens and inflammation that I'm not sure I buy unless you really have Celiac disease which I think is the disease de jour.

A good rule of thumb though is to shop around the perimeters of the grocery store where the fresh food and meats are kept and avoid the inner aisles where all the packaged stuff is.

Personally, I don't really eat any packaged foods or drink soda and I've limited my consumption of rice and pasta and pastries and find I can maintain my weight pretty well along with running, biking and swimming and feel good which is more difficult than you might imagine as you get older. There are a lot of people who start going to hell in their late 30s/early 40s when you are less athletic and all your poor eating habits start catching up to you.

That's a GREAT way to look at it...and that's exactly what I do. I was shopping last night and I passed aisle after aisle saying, "Nope...nope...nope...nope...". Literally, I only went down one aisle and that was to get peanut butter. Everything else came from the perimeter (beef, chicken, eggs, etc...).

It truly is amazing how once you start eating fresh and "healthy" you realize how much crap there is in the grocery store. Over 80% of it I would never eat....

This is now a Training & Nutrition thread I guess, but for the record, I'm reading Oliver Twist by Dickens.

And cereal with 1% or skim milk tastes fine.

Great read, especially for us foodie types!

Downloaded that MyFitnessPal app carleton spoke of. Works really well. I'm impressed. Time to lean up.

That being said, we (ssfg) should have a training and nutrition thread...hm?

Almond butter is your best bet on a substitute for peanut butter, although you probably knew that.

Percentage of fat in milk is a lie, by the by.

Fat content of milk - courtesy of Wikipedia

Nutrition
 

By popular request.

(I'll start moving posts over)

Hurray!

Now my dissertation on The Plight of Legumes can begin.

I've been trying to get my 23 year old little brother to realize that weight and health are not one in the same. He eats as though he was a 7 year old turned loose in the grocery store. I cook the meals for us at the house we share, and he won't touch hardly anything with a vegetable. But he doesn't gain an ounce, and maintains a pretty decent six pack, so he thinks he's being healthy.

I wisened up a little earlier. I'd been a soccer player my entire life, which helped me maintain a pretty decent level of fitness. Then when I was 20 I had a knee surgery, moved to Chicago (the best food city in the world), and started working crazy hours. The end result was that I got up to 215-220 lbs. by age 22, about 50 lbs heavier than my "playing weight" when I was 17. So I bought a bike and lost 40 lbs, down to the 180 where I am now, and am pretty content.

I know I could lose another 10 pounds if I wanted to, but I don't feel like it. I know a couple guys that are super serious about their weight and nutrition, and frankly they are no fun to be around.

To me, moderation is the key, as well as paying attention to what's actually in the food you eat. I stay away from corn-fed food and processed foods containing corn by-products. I don't eat the healthiest of foods (you'll get my wings, beer, and burgers when you pry them from my dead fingers), but I don't overdo it. You don't have to read a book or pay a nutritionist to know that a triple bacon cheeseburger is bad for you. I also eat a lot of pasta dishes because I'm broke, and pasta is a good way to fill up on a budget. But the pasta dishes that I make are veggie and protein heavy, so I'm not filling up completely on noodles. I also make all my pasta sauces myself, so I know exactly what goes into them. I've tried switching to whole wheat pasta, and it's just not for me. With the amount of salt I put on it to make it palatable, it just isn't worth it.

Comes out to 208 a serving (Cheerios+soy milk).

http://i.imgur.com/2Lpn9.jpg

Looks like no more bagels+cream cheese though.. 450 with a ton of carbs and salt seems bad man.

http://i.imgur.com/KzkqV.jpg

Don't kill yourself. 450 calories for a bagel and cream cheese, which (for me, at least) is a full breakfast, doesn't seem too bad. Assuming you're an active guy, I'd imagine your caloric needs are probably around 2500/day, so your bagel represents only 20% of that. There are also plenty of options out there for low fat cream cheese, low carb or whole wheat bagels, and just about everything has a low-sodium version.

For you rice lovers out there..

Take your rice cooker: put rice, (presoaked) lentils, a bouillon cube, and appropriate amount of water and cook it.

On a pan, simmer thinly sliced mushrooms, garlic, and onion in sesame oil until almost cooked, then pour 3/4 of a cup of broth into the pan, along with fresh kale. Then cook until all of the greens are wilted.

Serve over the rice/lentils. Its pretty awesome.

Holy smokes. this is one of the best threads I have read on this forum.
I have really changed my eating habits in a major way over the last year. I tried everything before that... counting calories, lowfat foods, P90X, whatever, and none of it worked. I was 6' 1" and 240lubs. Felt like crap. Chronic heartburn. Miserable.
Started doing some research and stumbled on a website dealing with stuff like this, and read up. Used some other sources for backing, and then dove in. I have dropped 50 lubs since then, most of it in the first four months, and have kept it off. Can't begin to tell you how much better I feel. Went to the doc and he was very pleased and my checkup went without a hitch.
One thing I heard that really sums it up best about what we stuff in our face is this: The quicker it goes bad, the better it is for you. Packaged stuff is out, fresh stuff is in. And I have not felt a hit in the wallet since changing it up either. Also "lowfat" and "nonfat" are out. I have actually increased my fat intake (avocados, eggs, tree nuts... good stuff.) I don't really pay attention to calories, just what it is. No bread, grains, sugar, artificial sweeteners. For milk I use almond milk and occasionally coconut milk. Almond butter instead of peanut butter. I make my own "energy bars," and man are they good.I could go on.
All I gotta say, is I feel a ton better, I am not beat at the end of the day, and I sleep like the proverbial baby.

im eating cereal right now. cherrios.

I quit drinking sodas years ago but I did it in steps. It took about two weeks of drinking diet coke before I was used to the taste. Then, regular Coke was too sweet. A year later, I just quit drinking sodas altogether. Now, I might mix a little fruit juice(with no added sugar) to some club soda.

I gave up fast food years ago, too and do not miss it at all.

I try to avoid vegetable oils and instead use butter, olive oil, coconut oil, and lard. Bacon grease for cornbread and cooking kale and collards.

Cutting out sugar is HARD. No doubt about it. I still have chocolates now and then. But if there's no ice cream in the house, I'm fine. I used to always have several flavors in the icebox. I've discovered that I can drink espresso and Lungo coffee at my desk at work without sugar but the coffee at home from the Mr. Coffee desperately needs it. I try to substitute almond milk instead. It is not the same.

And those damn potato chips. Can't eat just one handful; must go for the kill on the entire bag. Those are terrible for you. Sugar and omega-6 to the max. blech. But they taste so good. I won't buy them myself but if my wife does, they are worse than crack.


I eat Greek yogurt with raisins. We get grass fed beef from our son-in-law's farm. I grow a lot of vegetables in the backyard organically; just had a big mess of kale(cooked in the bacon grease saved from Sunday morning) last night.

I learned to cook when it was just me and my dad. If I wanted to eat, I had to cook. When I was a poor student in New Orleans, I learned to cook cheaply. Red beans and rice would last for days and I could eat on a whole chicken for several meals, the carcass finally being used for chicken soup and stock.

You guys that aren't yet 30, your metabolism WILL slow down. You don't believe it anymore than I did when I heard that from all the old fat people but it WILL happen. It is depressing to know that you used to eat 8,000 calories of whatever you wanted every single day and couldn't gain an ounce and now just looking at food makes you gain weight. So just be ready for it.

Artificial sweeteners...

gimme the deets?

Well, your body can't create calories where there are none, so if it's a zero-calorie sweetener then you don't have to worry about calories. But... I've read that your body treats these sweeteners the same as it does regular sugar when it comes to insulin production. So if you are concerned about developing diabetes, the zero-calorie sweeteners don't reduce that risk. Or so I've read. Who knows what's actually true?

Aw, did carleton hurt your feelings by saying the word "freshman"?
:innocent: :D

Maybe I haven't found the right brand, but I tried whole wheat pasta a few times, and the texture and taste have been pretty subpar each time. I had bought a whole bunch too, because I had (mistakenly) assumed that it would be the same as regular pasta, except whole wheat.

They have been linked in various studies to weight gain. Why? There are differing reasons. One is that it tricks your brain into wanting regular sugar and the cravings are harder to stave off.

Here is an excerpt from an article on Mark Sisson's website Mark's Daily Apple:
"Another study, which I covered a couple years ago, analyzed the diets of more than 9,500 men and women between the ages of 45 and 64 and found that drinking diet soda was associated with a 34% higher risk of developing metabolic syndrome – the perfect storm of high triglycerides, belly fat, insulin resistance, and obesity that’s so popular nowadays. This was an even stronger association than the one between the “high-meat, high-fat” Western diet and metabolic syndrome.

Authors of both studies speculate that diet soda drinking just extends the life of sugar cravings, rather than eliminating it. In this scenario, diet soda doesn’t regulate the desire for sugar; it increases it, and diet soda drinkers are simply replacing those empty calories with real sugar. This makes sense, and I think it’s part of it, but a couple other studies suggest that something else is going on entirely independent of caloric intake:

The dietary habits and weights of a homogenous group of middle aged women were tracked for a year. Regardless of initial weight status and inexplicable by “food consumption patterns,” users of diet soda were more likely than nonusers to gain weight. They didn’t eat markedly different from non-soda drinkers and yet they got fatter."

Interesting stuff.

Being from the south, the #1 enemy IMO is SWEET TEA. We drink it as if it were our mother's milk from the time we are toddlers, and it is so, so hard to kick. Even when I get good at kicking sweets and other processed foods, the tea is always what keeps me hooked on the sugar. I've recently turned to vegetarianism simply because it forces me to cook. I keep track of everything on MyFitnessPal, and I will admit, my protein intake has suffered; however, it has kept me shopping around the perimeter of the grocery store.

For me, besides the sweet tea, the hardest thing to overcome is carbs. I love bread, rice, pasta, and other grains like couscous. I have discovered quinoa to be something that I can substitute for couscous in a lot of recipes, though, so maybe that will help some. I only use whole wheat pasta now, but the carb savings aren't that significant. Cereal has been such a staple my whole life (no wonder I'm a fatty), and this thread has opened my eyes up in that regard.

What does everyone eat for breakfast?

I've done a lot of reading on artificial sweeteners, and can't find a straight answer. Some tests say they're fine for you, most indirectly funded by the companies. And I've also read the opposite, funded by other sweetener companies... And its almost 50/50 regarding third party research...

as for breakfast, grapenuts and fat free milk.

Breakfast?
Usually two eggs scrambled in butter with some red peppers chopped up in it, or an omelet with some sausage, or ground beef and some spinach, and 4% fat cottage cheese and a cup of joe.

This is so far from true it is ridiculous.

My own anecdotal observation is that fat people are always drinking big ass diet sodas.

Post Hoc, my friend.

The simplest advice about food and shopping for it. . . you can survive and live healthy with just the foods found all around the produce section. Vegetables and lean proteins, everything else is just filler, quite literally.

Let it go guys.

I'm editing the bickering out of the thread.

Just had some Bear Naked granola. nomnomnomnomnom