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| "OK. Which one of you guys is rejecting Happy Meals?" |
Fellow chubbies and chubbetts. It took me a long time and plenty of reading to grasp the hideous contrast between American eating and nutritious eating.
My vegetable consultant urged me to keep eating meat, and Charlie Sue seconded the motion. I was never a vegetarian, vegan, or roots addict. However, I think some meat and eggs are good for balance.
I have become a salt shopper - I look at the salt level for all foods, and some are scary. Salt tastes good, too good, but leads to blood pressure and other problems. A can of beans can have 120, 240, 480, or 1000 mg of salt. Pizzas? - don't even ask.
I decided to keep butter - in the fridge. I used to find lots of ways to incorporate butter in many things, especially toast. Keeping the butter as cold and hard as a banker's heart has reminded me how all oils enter the body and stay for a long time, like loans. Butter is not bad by itself, rather harmless, but serves as a gateway drug, improving cakes, scrambled eggs, toast, casseroles, vegetable dishes, desserts, etc.
Colas, juices, and fizzy water are a combination of sugar, fake sugar, and salt, so I no longer purchase them. If they could add butter or margarine to drinks, they vendors would.
I might have one dessert a week now, but no longer will friendly visitors mock me for having a deep freezer dedicated to ice cream products. That is a running joke and it makes me laugh too.
Here are the categories for a day's food:
Breakfast - one toast, no butter, two eggs, black coffee.
Lunch - the typical supreme meal:
- Spinach and collard leaves or turnip greens - always;
- Mushrooms, definitely every day;
- Blueberries daily;
- A handful of walnuts daily;
- Sweet peas frozen;
- Onions, green and red peppers;
- Flax seed and maybe sesame seeds;
- One sausage shared with Charlie each lunch;
- One can of low salt garbanzo beans.
- Apples or oranges or bananas
- Citrus
- Fresh pineapple in cold season
- Spinach alone if really hungry
- Bananas for falling asleep
All these foods are medicinal, tasty, and satisfying, but the Harpies of Happy Meals will call out as we drive by the fast-food joints, rags stuffed in our ears: "Come back, Ulysses! We will give you everything you crave - grease-burgers with salt, drinks with salt and sugar, desserts loaded with sugar and salt and fake sugar."
