Better than 80/20 - Diet, Pt.2

In part 1 of this update on my diet, I talked about when and why I eat what I do. This time, I’ll cover the what. As I have mentioned many times on this blog, I am more low-carb than I am Paleo. I eat some foods that are not considered “Paleo,” and I sleep without fear that the food police are going to come take me away in the night. That said, I stick mostly to whole, real, non-processed foods, with a little wiggle room for occasional exceptions. (I say this to distinguish the way I eat now from how I ate years ago, when I first started learning about all this, and would eat any ol’ low carb shake/bar/food-like thing, as long as it was low carb. So I’m still low-carb, but now it’s real food, for the most part.)

Like I explained last time, I am putting only the smallest amount of thought and effort into what I’m doing and I’m getting satisfactory results. This is not to say I put no thought or effort into my diet, only that planning and preparing my food doesn’t rule my life, I can generally throw together a meal in about twenty minutes, and I’ve never found myself at a restaurant where there was “nothing” I could order and consume without worry.

So the way I eat these days isn’t entirely effortless, but it’s certainly not difficult. And yes, I could probably be “cut,” “ripped,” or “shredded” if I wanted to micromanage my diet and exercise to the exclusion of all other aspects of life on planet Earth, but call me crazy, I just think there are more worthwhile things to experience than bouncing a quarter off my abs.

May I Recommend...

Haven’t posted anything since the last week of May. Show of hands: who missed me? (*Crickets.* As I suspected…) But just in case you think I’ve been sitting on my duff doing nothing in my blogging absence, the truth is, I’ve been staring at the wall for hours, pondering my life hard at work on a super-special project I will tell you about when the time is right. (And no, that is not a marketing ploy to get you to buy something when it debuts, because, frankly, I am a total and complete moron when it comes to whoring out selling stuff and making a living at this.) So anyway, it might be a little bit before I hit my blogging stride again, but for now, I wanted to give you a couple of cheese suggestions, ‘cuz hey, who doesn’t want to try some awesome new cheeses?

Label Madness Monday: What's in a Name?

As promised last week, today’s study in label chicanery is about ice cream…or, rather, frozen dairy dessert. See, they’re not the same thing, and unless you know what to look for on the label, you could be spending your hard-earned money on wacky additives instead of what’s supposed to be in ice cream: cream.

I’m not saying it’s completely impossible to cut corners in food production or that you absolutely cannot purchase good food at a reasonable price. But there is a kernel of truth to the saying “you get what you pay for,” especially when it comes to food quality. There’s a reason manufacturers can still make a profit when they sell their goods on buy-one-get-one-free sales (also known as "BOGO") or otherwise deeply discount their usual prices, and that reason is most likely that the raw materials used for the product were dirt cheap to begin with and the "normal price" was actually a huge markup.

But before I launch into my rant, let’s go to the pictures.

Label Madness Monday

In the spirit of how we recently turned our clocks back an hour (at least, here in the U.S.), with today’s look at label craziness, I offer the suggestion that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to turn the clock back on food processing. Instead of everything being pasteurized, sterilized, irradiated, hydrogenated, fractionated, and otherwise just plain messed with, it would be nice if we could get back to when we all just ate REAL FOOD. Whole, unprocessed foods with simple ingredients the way they were meant to be consumed. I’m not completely badmouthing modern food technology. I don’t advocate taking a stroll down Salmonella Street or a brisk walk down Botulism Boulevard. (Listeria Lane? Clostridia Court? I could go on and on!) I’m simply saying let’s keep things safe but stop tinkering with things that don’t need tinkering! Today’s label is a pretty clear example of this, so here goes.