Discounting sexy, where is the line between crazy and cool?

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Orthorexia is an obsession with healthy eating. Obsession is is the key word -- there is nothing wrong with wanting to put nutrient-dense food in your body that keeps you healthy, but as we struggle without a users-guide that should have come with our bodies when we were born, what "healthy" means is open to interpretation. And it is in that interpretation where obsession can manifest. 

In last week's post, I questioned whether tracking my food and recording it five days a week is on a path to orthorexia. I dated a woman over the winter who, towards the end of our relationship when things weren't going too well, implied that the attention I paid to myself in my eating seemed like some sort of eating disorder to her. On the face of it, it seemed silly and just something hurtful that is said when trying to distract attention from your own issues and noise. But it landed, and it sat with me, a potential red flag humming in the background since before the summer.

So again the pages of the NYT opens and seems to directly address my concerns. Is keeping track of your eating so crazy, or is it cool and in ripe need of a NYT trends piece?

Research shows that people who keep track of what they eat and weigh are more likely to succeed at losing weight and keeping it off. Self-tracking teaches people how their environment and behaviors affect health, said Carly Pacanowski, a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow who studies eating behavior.
“It’s a preventive daily strategy that always stays with you,” she said. “Over time, it provides you a lot of interesting information. It lets people be more in the driver’s seat with regards to their health.”
The key to successful tracking is consistency. An analysis by Withings and MyFitnessPal of their users found that those who tracked food and weight at least once every three days lost an average eight pounds over a year, compared with just one pound for those who less vigorously recorded the data.

Early on I tried MyFitnessPal and found that it's database skewed heavily towards restaurant and packaged food, stuff I can just look on the packaging and weigh out to get numbers from - I quickly sussed that if I were to invest my energies in these apps, it would encourage me to literally eat crappier, as the corporate might that got the processed food into their apps would be a self-strengthening closed loop.

Will Chilli ever forgive me?

I've basically been doing what the app does on the fly in this blog, remembering loosely numbers of different dishes week to week.

The strategy might also work better for men than women, according to research by Dr. Pacanowski. Self-tracking works by forcing people to pay attention to how food affects weight; it may be that women are already exposed to so many ads and messages about weight that the extra attention makes little difference.
Dr. Pacanowski also cautions that those already overly concerned with weight and shape — or who are at risk for disordered eating — could be adversely affected by detailed self-tracking. 

This sounds like the truth. People who are scrutinized most about their appearance and weight are the ones who get eating disorders most often. The main trigger in getting me on this path was a bought of kidney stones and impending middle age, not a concern about how I look in a bathing suite or younger guys competing with me for dates. Food tracking is a little time consuming, but in the scheme of things -- maybe 20 minutes total during the week and an hour or so to write these essays -- is really time well spent. It is in balance. Unlike what my ex implied, I don't really spend a lot of time drilling down on myself -- when I am thinking of food, it's about the fun of eating out, the fun of cooking, or the fun of eating with my kids. The tracking of the food is kinda the opposite, a balance to the partying.

Fat used to be the enemy, more recently carbs have been vilified, and with the recent meat-cancer links, proteins are coming under scrutiny. Tracking food intake, at least the way I do it, is not about trying to find the ideal ratio of macronutrients. It is about portion size -- people have tried all sorts of fad diets, restricted this and that, and time and again they go back to however they were eating and get fat or fatter. Tracking is, at it's core, about portion size. We Americans eat too much, and it is encouraged from the moment we wake to the moment we sleep -- you could say we as a nation have an eating disorder: we've been hypnotized by Big Food to consume more and more, and when someone suggests perhaps we should eat less, they respond by saying we should be free to eat as much as we want, just exercise more. It's insanity, but it's profitable. Fat, carbs or proteins need not be demonized, just portion sizes and any corporation who profits from keeping portions consistently growing.

The piece then goes on to a long disertation about one guy who tracked his food, his ups and downs, and his relative success. Found this quite boring, who cares what another slob puts in his gob day to day? I mean, just read my diary below, boring! While keeping a food diary seemed unbalanced and disordery to my ex, I can comfortably say now, with thought, that no, it is just a corrective to restore balance from the disordered eating we have accepted as normal due to assiduous interests in the market.

A sampling of the food that MyFitnessPal can automatically track...

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WEEKLY AVERAGE: 2957

Heavy eating week, but not out of control. As can be seen from the content of the last few weeks, the gears are turning...

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MONDAY COUNT: 3320

SLEPT: 9:30pm-6am, 8.5 hrs

AM SNACK: 6:15am, iced green tea

BREAKFAST: 10am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 11am, Fage with honey, almonds, vanilla, 450 cal

LUNCH: 1pm, beef patty, chicken soup, momma salad, health salad 750 cal

PM SNACK: 3:15pm, cheezits, 210 cal

DINNER: 6:45pm, scrod fish, asparagus,  poppa salad with dressing, 750 cal

EVENING SNACK: 7:15pm, popcorn, pocky, +/-900

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TUESDAY COUNT: 3300 cal

SLEPT: 9pm-5:30am,  8.5hrs

AM SNACK: 5:45 am,  iced green tea

BREAKFAST: 9:45am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 11am, steel cut oats, 450 cal

LUNCH: 2:15pm, chicken meatballs, lentil curry, steamed stringbeans, 680 cal

PM SNACK: 3:15pm, momma salad, cheezits, 310 cal

DINNER: 5:15pm, vegetarian dim sum, +/-700 cal

EVENING SNACK: 7pm, 3 packs pocky, a few homemade brownies, +/- 1000 cal
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WEDNESDAY COUNT: 3005

SLEPT: 8:30pm-12am, 4:30am-6:30am 5.5 hrs

AM SNACK: 8:30am, 2 small school pancake +/- 100 cal

BREAKFAST: 10:15am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 12:45pm, fruit smoothie, 450 cal

LUNCH: 3:15pm, shrimp and mushrooms with oyster sauce,  poppa salad with dressing, 670cal

DINNER: 8pm, burrito & diet coke, 925cal

EVENING SNACK: 8:30pm, ice cream, +/- 300 cal

HUNGER SNACK: 9:30pm, pocky, brownie, +/- 400 cal, hunger 8/10
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THURSDAY COUNT: 2660

SLEPT: 10:30pm-5:30am, 7 hours

AM SNACK: 5:45am, iced green tea, 2 tylenol

BREAKFAST: 11am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 12:30pm, Steel cut oatmeal, 450 cal

PM SNACK: 1:15pm, momma salad, 100 cal

LUNCH: 3pm, bacon, poppa salad with dressing, 440 cal

DINNER: 6pm, seafood platter, coq au vain, 1 beet, chocolate cake and creme brûlée, bread & butter, bite of steak frites+/- 1500 cal
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FRIDAY COUNT: 2500

SLEPT: 10pm-6am, 8 hrs

AM SNACK: 6:15am, iced green tea, 

BREAKFAST: 10:15am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 2 tylenol, 160cal

BREAKFAST 2: noon, Fage with honey, almonds, vanilla, 450 cal

LUNCH: 2pm, steak, poppa salad, +/- 600 cal

PM SNACK 4pm, momma salad, pringles, 290 cal

DINNER: 6pm, sushi meal, chocolate chips & cashews, +/- 1000 cal