An Approach to Sustainable Eating

I do not believe a meal should be wasted on bad food. Our time on this Earth, though longer than ever thanks to modern medicine, is finite; with so few meals to eat, it seems absurd to waste even one of them on something that isn't actually what you want. I'm not advocating missing meals -- I'm powered directly by my stomach. Missing a meal is losing two productive hours of my day into the haze of a bloodsugar crash. There's only one obvious solution: one must eat three excellent meals per day.

...or so I thought. I should comment on my history, which is a deal chubbier than my present. In college I studied abroad in Italy. One might expect a man like me ate himself stupid -- but that presupposes money to buy food with, which, by the time I settled in Florence, I had already spent, well, all of. All the rest of the money I didn't have went into a nicer-than-needed bicycle. Thus was my life: too proud to ask for more money from my parents, too poor for food, I spent four months biking for several hours a day and eating 12 meals per week. Let's suffer no delusions: Italians don't really do breakfast, and my host mother (an American ex-pat, ironically enough) was no exception: 1-2 pieces of toast, espresso with milk, basta.

I set foot in Europe at a genial bodyweight of around 230 pounds; five months later I departed at 190 pounds. For the first time in my life, I felt svelte and healthy. Stateside, it took me a month or two to discover that 12 is the wrong number of meals to eat in a week, and they needn't be tiny. It took basic arithmetic, the Internet, and extreme fatigue to realize that I was eating 1200 calories per day and burning close to 4,000. I felt like hell. On a revived and renewed budget I resolved not to underfeed myself again; as sort of a thank-you gesture from my body, I almost immediately put on 15 pounds of muscle.

My dietary regimen was intense. For breakfast, I concocted a smoothie of juice, yoghurt, frozen fruit, protein powder, and raw oatmeal that provided an even thousand calories -- but only after I realized that my breakfast ritual of granola, fruit, yoghurt, two pieces of bacon and a fried egg might be a bit, erh, unhealthy. (Without the bacon and egg it became too low-cal -- hence the smoothie.) Lunch was a sandwich or two, usually an hour or two after my mid-morning snack, and an hour or two before my mid-afternoon snack. Then dinner, studying, a snack, studying, dessert, and bed. I had discovered the secret power of exercise: with enough exertion I could eat as much of whatever I wanted to, whenever I wanted. I ate following this philosophy for four years.

It hasn't truly failed me; that's not what this essay is about. These days I carry about 205 pounds of myself around with me. I've sold my car. I tow groceries in 60 pound loads in a trailer behind my bike. I'm the healthiest I've ever been -- which puts me in the mood to get even healthier. Overcoming yourself introduces you to the plausibility of overcoming yourself again.

I've also just turned 25 -- which is a funny age. Growing up in the US is a progression through a series of milestone birthdays: becoming a teenager; your sweet sixteen; turning 18, when you're a real adult and can vote and die in war; drinking at 21. The exciting event when you turn 25? Cheaper car rentals and lowered automobile insurance. Nobody breaks out the brass band when you turn 25.

But even in an optimistic live-to-100 world, 25 is a quarter of your life, done. For the average male, it might be more than a third. I'm young, of course -- but I'm getting older. Much fuss gets made about men's health through your thirties and into your forties; lots of verbiage is spent on such cheery topics as watching your cholesterol, sodium, stress, blood pressure, and glycemic index. Even more fuss is made of the prevalence of a the misspent youth -- the "If only I had been in shape and eaten sensibly" regret. Moving through my twenties, I feel like my thirties are this ominous cloud of discovering all the mistakes I made.

Which upsets me. So far, my life has been, all told, a long succession of things which are each better than the thing prior. Yes yes, I have hardships too -- but I lead a good life. The way health gets talked about you'd think you turn 35 and have a physical during which your doctor extracts all the joy from you, replacing it with low-density lipoproteins and fear.

Chiefly, I'm afraid of giving up eating. Between you and me: I lose sleep wondering if I'll have to give up beef, or gouda, or beer. I'm not sure living to a ripe old age has any appeal to me at all, if it means making the trip without my dear friends lipid, simple carbohydrate, and sodium chloride (kosher, of course). I've begun to wonder: what does being a healthy, responsible foodie mean?

Answers are not obvious, if they exist at all. Just try -- I dare you -- to make sense of the reams of health advice in the world today. We're supposed to eat nothing but meat protein, fat be damned, unless we're supposed to never eat any animal product, fat be damned (so long as it's not animal fat). Maybe the solution is veganism. No wait: hypnotism. If only there was a website to help me choose the right diet!

Notice a trend here: diets have little message consistency beyond "you would be healthier if you ate like this." Some focus solely on weight loss; others want to lower the concentration of certain compounds in your blood, be it salt or bacon or cholesterol. Implicit in dieting is the assumption that you want to lose weight (unless it isn't --  being fat might save your life). Some studies show it's far healthier to be slightly overweight and active than slim and sedentary. Well and good: but what's over weight, and are you overweight if you're carrying around 120 pounds of extra muscle?

I'm belaboring a point, but it's an important one: you can find expert research to support any lifestyle you feel like leading. I'll bet there's an "All Blow and Hookers" diet out there -- it works for Mick Jagger, doesn't it? Given the wildly conflicting advice, absence of good scientific backing, and the dime-a-dozen feel of the doctors that support these claims, I've a hard time not considering these diets pure baloney. The most consistent element is this: almost every one of these things has a claim to the effect of "The all-remoulade diet, in combination with regular sleep and exercise, might involve you losing weight." Put another way: work out, rest enough, eat what you like.

In an effort to sustain myself, I've taken my usual approach -- which is to say I've over-thought the issue of eating until it seems nearly meaningless. I've noticed a few things, which all seem to line up. Consider:

1. Humans are superb omnivores. We've managed to survive almost everywhere on earth on myriad diets.
2. The American way of eating is atrocious, because it focuses so intently on foods that sacrifice quality for timeliness, filtered through an intensely obtuse and evil web of political and business maneuvers.
3. Obesity? Not a huge problem among a lot of indigenous peoples, or wild animals, or for non-Americans.

Point three, especially, has some fascinating ramifications. I mean, sure, America is the "Land of Plenty," and we all eat as much as we want, and we're sedentary as hell. But what really strikes me is the idea of biological regulatory systems, for which a great case study is my mother's dogs: only one of them, a corgi, will willingly eat more than it needs to in a sitting. Particularly the German Shepherds we used to live with would never eat more than they wanted, no matter what the availability was like.

One of the weirdest part about an eating American is his or her propensity to feed straight past "sated" -- we don't eat until we've had as much as we need. We go until "full," until we can't hold anymore.  We complicate this further with power-lunch-style speed eating, gorging so briskly the body can't get a word in before it's already much too late.

I came upon the idea that somewhere in my body is a little-used branch of my nervous system designed to keep me healthy by helping eat the right amount. Though gentle testing I've found that about twenty minutes after eating what I used to consider a very modest meal, I feel a great deal more full than I did when I finished consuming it. Even weirder: if I eat a huge meal, and I'm really paying attention, I don't often really need that much food at the next meal. A huge dinner usually foretells a small-to-cursory breakfast. Different parts of my brain introduce noise into the signal; I'm a champion eat-when-I'm-sad kinda guy, for instance. The point remains the same: I've discovered my own voice of portioning.

That voice gets louder when I exercise -- or maybe just more distinct. As part of being a sustainable foodie I've introduced a good deal of workout into my week. When I'm faithful to it, when I do my weights and run my miles and bike about town, the Voice of Portions commands eating -- and who am I to argue? If I miss a work out, I find myself looking at snacks and realizing that I don't actually need to eat -- but in a comfortable, peaceful way. I don't tend to blood sugar crash when I've been exercising regularly.

I've re-evaluated my system. Every chance is an excellent time to eat, but maybe eating three big meals per day because I technically can isn't the right way to go about things. With exercise, I can permit more eating -- and that's wonderful, especially if I can enable more eating in the long term. Sustainable eating, I think, means eating only as much as you need. (And after a 30-mile commuting day and a 5 mile run, I need to eat like a fool!)

In the mean time, I've found a wonderful rationalization to try and eat as much local, seasonal, home-cooked food as I can. I want to believe -- I badly want to believe -- that the secret to healthful eating is a little moderation and minimal processing. Yes, I eat cheese, but also home-baked breads, green salads, and sensible portions of meat. Naturally fermented things, like beer and cheese, don't worry me -- I'm no raw foodist, I just care very little for chemicals. I try to eat everything -- health through broad diet. I eat what my body asks for -- fruit and raw veggies some days, a slab of Chateaubriand the next, and yes that does get damn tricky when trying to be local and seasonal. I'm muddling through -- and I feel healthier than I ever have. I'd like to think I'll be able to eat this way 'til the far-off end of my days.

I'll let you know how it goes.