Weaning from processed food and losing weight

Today’s guest post is from a bloggy friend whom I just recently found out to be a fitness/nutrition enthusiast from the comments she left in my fitness posts and our email exchanges afterwards. Here is an account of her journey from eating the easy, greasy stuff to eating healthy and achieving her fitness goals and managing her weight.

Thanks to JuliaS for this post!

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Twenty years ago (!), when I was 15 years old, I started to work at McDonald’s. I was initially disgusted by the way the french fries were made – so greasy and gross! But over time, I got used to it and ate lots of McDonald’s food that I’d get free during my breaks. My pants got tighter but I wasn’t alarmed - I got myself bigger pants.

I cared about my weight but didn’t want to bother to change my eating habits back then. I’d eat donuts or chocolate chip muffins for breakfast and loved the taste of a quarter pounder with cheese. It was my favorite thing on the McDonald’s menu. The vanilla shakes were another favorite and I got them at every opportunity.

Over time I gained enough weight that I became more concerned about my eating and went with the early-90′s low-fat craze. I eschewed McDonald’s for low-fat cereals and Snackwell’s cookies. Do you remember them?

I thought I was trying but I didn’t lose any weight. I worked out regularly, but I couldn’t help but binge on food and though it seemed like it should help that I was eating lower-fat and lower-calorie versions of the processed foods I bought, it didn’t make any difference whatsoever. I hated how I looked and I hated how I felt. I was disgusted with myself.

And then i graduated college and just didn’t have the time to fret about what I ate. Because I was so busy, I ended up eating very differently. I worked in a restaurant, where I ate herbed butter on my bread. I hadn’t allowed myself to eat butter for years! My restaurant had delicious cheese soup that had amounts of cream and I loved it. I found that I didn’t really need to eat that much of it, because it was so rich. I’d gone from binging on low-fat processed foods to indulging in high fat foods.They certainly weren’t what anyone would call healthy food! But I ate less, because it was such rich food.

And surprisingly, I lost weight. A college friend of mine came to visit and was shocked. I’d lost about 15 pounds without trying. I always had worked out religiously – that hadn’t changed. But my eating habits had changed dramatically.

Once things got less busy and I could think about my food habits, I decided to keep things minimally processed.  I ate what I wanted to, within reason, and I seemed to do just fine.

One day a few years ago, my little cousins were in town and we all went to McDonald’s. I wanted a quarter pounder with cheese as a treat for myself – It had been years and years since i’d tasted one and a vanilla milkshake! I had such strong memories of how i loved them.

The burger was greasy and disgusting that I couldn’t finish it. The milkshake tasted like strange chemicals, not at all like vanilla.

I had a similar revelation with fast-food donuts last fall. I hadn’t eaten them in years, and now, I can’t eat them. They’re repulsive to me. They seem to cover up lack of flavor with an excess of fat and sugar, and that tastes nasty to me.

Now, I eat a variety of foods. Sometimes, I’ll have high-fat treats. More often, I’ll eat homecooked food, as healthy as i can manage. I don’t eat too many processed foods. I don’t always eat healthy, but I don’t binge on junk food much either.

I didn’t intend to train myself to like natural foods…it just happened. But it’s possible to do with effort, too.  If you’re interested, i’d highly recommend getting the cookbook How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.  Read his writing as well as trying the recipes. I agree with a lot of his philosophies about food. I really like Michael Pollan too. He explains the insidiousness of processed foods very well, and explains the industry and the politics that influence the typical American diet. As the American diet becomes more popular in other countries, obesity rates in the corresponding countries increase. As do diet-related health problems.

I learned to eat differently entirely because of circumstance rather than effort but I’m so very glad that I did, and now I try to put effort into eating real foods instead of following the latest diet craze. My body is far from perfect, but I like to think that I’m better off.

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Next week, I’ll write something connected to this guest post – on how I managed NOT to gain weight during vacation despite being constantly surrounded with good Japanese food, minimal exercise and no diet.

Tagged as: diet, Fitness

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