Sound the alarm! You’re not getting enough protein! Well, if you watch the ads on TV these days, you’ll probably think that you’re not.  After all, every food under the sun is trumpeting its protein content.  (Well, except for kettle corn. As previously established, kettle corn is a gift from the gods and is, therefore, exempt from all dietary claims and requirements.) High protein snack bars, high protein yogurt, high protein cereals are all in league to make us think that our protein intake is too low, that we would be healthier if only we ate more of it!

Here’s the scoop: according to the CDC, the average adult female needs 46 grams of protein daily.  The average adult male needs 56 grams.  The National Center for Health Statistics says that the average adult female consumes 70.1 grams of protein daily, while the average adult male wolfs down 101.9 grams. So, um, yeah.  You’re probably getting enough.

So, why all the hype about protein the last few years?

The Adkins Diet was phenomenally successful – high protein, low carb.  Madison Avenue marketed the whole “low carb” thing so pervasively that we as consumers didn’t even see it anymore.  They had to use something new to grab our attention.  And, voilà! High protein everything hit the shelves.

We like new things.  We want the latest phone, the greatest tablet, the most modern car and the trendiest diet.  The Mad Men know this.  They study us. They probe us. They poll us. They monitor our behavior.  I’m pretty sure that’s where the beings from Roswell ended up – in a suit and tie, probing us via our loyalty cards.  They know more about us and our purchasing behavior that we do. Statistically, they can manipulate us by using the laws of large numbers – they exert a little pressure here, we buy gummie vitamins for adults, a little pressure there and we buy frozen PB&Js. They pull a little there and we’re spending millions to clothe and amuse our cats who grow their own fur coats and who will play for hours in a cardboard box.

All of this hype and nonsense has lead to the unhealthiest American population. Ever. We are overweight, under exerted, overstressed, undernourished, diabetic, cancerous, depressed, agitated, infertile and angry in record percentages. It’s time for us to realize that the advertisements are not our friends. They are not giving us friendly advice.  They are trying to sell us something. They imply that our purchase of the Something will make us prettier, smarter, sexier, more successful and have better hair.  But, the truth is, our purchase of that Something is more likely to do all of those things for the person who came up with the ad campaign than it is for us.

Human chemistry just hasn’t changed that much.  We don’t need some new formula, packaging or buzzword.  We need basic nutrients delivered in or near their natural state. Period.

(And kettle corn.)

At a women’s networking event that I co-hosted last night (it rocked, natch), I spent some time speaking with Elizabeth and Susan who both reminded me of some important points:

1.  It’s not about weight loss, it’s about making healthful food choices, and
2. We are all different; so, what works for one may not work for another.

We have talked about food as building materials and as fuel, but that idea bears repeating.  Elizabeth said it this way last night, “I wouldn’t put diesel or flex-fuel in my car.  My car takes regular gasoline.” I really liked that analogy.  I can eat at the drive-thru every day, all day long and I’m not going to get the fuel that my body needs.  With RARE exceptions, the stuff coming out of that window is nutritionally bankrupt – some things are not as bad as others.  Some members of the Manson family are nicer than others, too – it’s critical to keep sight of the big picture.

And, listen, I’m not going to lie, when I first started my project my goal was weight loss, pure and simple.  However, as I’ve gotten further into it, I’ve realized how my body reacts to different foods.  Some of the reactions – like the ones to wheat and dairy – are so subtle that I never noticed them when those items were such a huge part of my diet.  Now that I’m eating clean most of the time, I know that dairy causes lung congestion and that wheat makes my sinuses swell.  Bread and ice cream were significant parts of my diet, and removing them resulted in weight loss.  Now, from this vantage point, I can see that a happy side effect was better health!

Over the last couple of years, I’ve read more about nutrition that I did over the whole rest of my life combined.  Some of the stuff I read made sense, some of it was straight-up Tin Hat League garbage where correlation was confused with causality.  So, as you go through your journey, be aware that there is an awful lot of advice and information that falls into the “Um, what?” category.

One book I read whose ideas intrigued me was Your Body Knows by Ann Louis Gittleman.  Her idea is that our bodies perform best when we feed them with the foods our ancestors ate and she’s not talking about our caveman ancestors.  My people are from northern Europe…really northern.  A diet of cold water fish and oats is going to be better for me than a diet of olives and pasta (remember that Mediterranean Diet fad?).  I’m not completely convinced on all of her ideas since we are a long way from our roots in the US; however, I can certainly agree with her point that we are all different and that our bodies need different things.  My friend Michele had a wildly successful experience with the Adkins Diet.  I lost 11 pounds and not one ounce more.  I was cranky, unable to think clearly and had the breath of a dragon.  That’s a big No Go.

Dieting is bad and it doesn’t work.  What works is a lifestyle change and that change has to give the right fuel for you as an individual, highly complex, mobile chemistry lab.

What’s my name? What’s my first phone number? Who are my parents? All of these bits of information are so much a part of me that I don’t remember ever NOT knowing them; however, every one of these things were once new to me.

The French have two words for know: connaître and savoir.  Connaître is knowing something on the surface, like being acquainted with something.  (We get our word reconnoiter from this.) Savoir is to know something completely, like the names of all 50 states and their capitals. (We get our word savvy from this.)  You can’t savoir another person since you cannot know them through and through – you can only connaître them. (Conjugate as appropriate.)  You CAN savoir nutritional information; but, most of us only connaître it.

Let’s get savvy with our food choices!

Read more on Monday’s Nashville.com

“Not by the hair of my chinny, chin, chin.” Remember this one?  What was the moral to the story?  That it’s always best to take your time, use the right tools and do the job right.

I’ve heard all my life, “After 40, your body just starts to fall apart.”  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  The day before my 40th birthday, I broke my first tooth – on a piece of bacon.  Okay, so I thought people were speaking metaphorically – I didn’t realize there was a kitchen timer!  And apparently. mine didn’t make it back across the international date line from that trip to Japan!  Mine when off a full day early.

To some degree, that prediction is correct, our bodies do start falling apart at some point; however, mine was falling apart too early because I wasn’t giving it the nutrition it needed.  So, guess what isn’t the right tool to build this house? Cheesecake.  Yep, when the Big Bad Wolf of Age came knocking, my house blew in. I was one of those people David Vitalis was talking about in Hungry for Change, “People are overfed, but they are also starving to death.”

Who’s with me on this one: I didn’t think about my actual nutrient intake.  I ate frequently and was full; so, I must have been getting the nutrition I needed, right? Turns out, not so much.  My poor nutrition wasn’t responsible for my tooth breaking; but, it was responsible for other deterioration issues.  What I had forgotten is that my body is a building.  That building needs maintenance which is performs on its own.  Our tissue replaces itself at varying rates.  Here are a few examples of healthy tissue regeneration rates: epidermis – 35 days, fat cells – 10 years, bones – 10 years, liver – 5 months, deep lung tissue – 1 year, red blood cells – 4 months.

Of course, even with the substandard building blocks I was giving it, my body was reproducing cells, replacing old ones or damaged ones.  I’m not confident that the new cells were as good as the originals, though, and I wonder what downline issues I’m going to face.  My current diet contains much better building materials and I’m hopeful that perhaps some of the minor damage has been undone.  However, I don’t know if the substandard cells can replace themselves with better quality cells.  Time will tell.

Although my current diet is FAR better than it was three years ago, it’s not as good as it was two years ago during my reduction phase.  Why? Because I’m not eating enough vegetables.  In the US, we are nearly manic about getting enough protein in our diets.  If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest you watch the documentary Forks Over Knives.  In it, Dr. Alona Pulde & Dr. Matthew Lederman said, “We’ve never treated a single patient with protein deficiency; yet the majority of patients we see are suffering from heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses directly resulting from trying to get enough protein.”

As I’ve told you before, I am all kinds of carnivorous and don’t really see myself ever being 100% vegetarian – and I’m not sure I have to be.  But, what I do have to do is make certain that my diet is more balanced which means, ironically, that it has to be heavy on the veggies.

So, grab a fork and let’s sit inside our brick houses, thumbing our noses at Big Bad Wolves.

What if you found a lump on the side of your neck?  What would you do? You’d probably go to the doctor and have it checked out.  What if, like my mother, you got a diagnosis of non-Hodgkins lymphoma? Let’s say that, with treatment, you could live a normal life.  Without treatment, your quality of life would steadily decrease until you died prematurely.  What would your next step be? Would you educate yourself about your disease, seek treatment and fight for your life? Or would you do nothing and die?

Last week, I saw a report stating that, although total US obesity rates are leveling off, extreme obesity levels are rising among both adults and children.  Children.  I found it interesting that the report discussed “extreme obesity.”  We used to call that “morbid obesity” – morbid, like going to die.  Now it’s “extreme” like some kind of gravity-defying snowboard or bike sport.  I’m not going to use the new term.  As a woman who was once a frog’s hair away from the classification, I’m going to stick with morbid.  We are killing ourselves and calling it by another word doesn’t change that. Obesity is treatable.  Why do we treat terminal cancer more aggressively than we treat curable obesity?

Why do we do nothing?

I went shopping this weekend and at one time had five pedestrians in my view.  Four of them were a minimum of 60 pounds overweight.  That’s not morbidly obese; but, it’s still obese and it was four out of the five.  You can’t even get that percentage of dentists together to agree on recommending sugar-free chewing gum!  I watched those pedestrians and I thought about our society’s cavalier attitude regarding our collective suicide by dinner fork. We don’t even think about it, do we?

Until I changed my eating habits, I certainly didn’t.  Now, I cannot even go into all-you-can-eat buffet restaurants.  I see people in those places that literally cannot fit into a single chair.  They sit down with multiple plates of food and they eat it all. They feel like garbage and they believe that is just how it is.  Perhaps that’s how it is, but it’s not how it has to be.  As a society, we feel bad, we function poorly and we don’t even wonder about it.  We don’t try to find a cause and we certainly don’t make the connection that it’s what’s we’re putting in our mouths. We just pop another pill and grab another burger.

According to the CDC, 35.7% of American adults are obese (having a BMI of 30 or higher).  17% of children are. That’s 78 million adults and 12.5 million children – and that’s not considering the number of us that are just straight up overweight – these are just the obese.  By way of comparison, according to the American Cancer Society, cancer prevalence in the US is at 12.5 million.

We fear cancer. We insure against it. We raise money for research to cure it.  And we should; but, what are we doing about obesity? We don’t have to research for a cure – we have one.  Education!  So, why are we not teaching ourselves and our children about nutrition?  Why are we so unconcerned about a completely avoidable condition?

What if we were dying?  90.5 million of us are.

When I was obese, I was sick.  All the time.  Seriously, I was at the doctor’s office a minimum of twice a month.  I was tired. I was dizzy. My knees hurt. My sinuses were infected. My lungs were clogged.  I had a hangnail.  I didn’t have Münchausen Syndrome really; however, I did use my health to get attention, if only from myself. Feeling poorly gave me an excuse not to exercise.  It gave me an excuse to lay around. It gave me an excuse.  Period.

I used my ailments like a get out of jail free card to avoid doing things I didn’t want to do.  Eventually, I was imprisoned in a body that didn’t function properly because I wasn’t taking care of it.  Ironic, yes? It was a hideous and ridiculous cycle!  I have no clue how I, a reasonably intelligent human being, didn’t see it.  I didn’t make the connection – probably because I just really didn’t want to.

I am regularly amazed at the things I don’t see just because I don’t want to. I literally cringed reading He’s Just Not That Into You.  There were things in the book that were obscenely obvious to any idiot; but, this idiot managed to miss them.  He didn’t call? He’s wasn’t struggling with his feelings for me – he didn’t have any.  Same thing with food.  That greasy slug feeling every time I ate pizza?  Hello! It was the pizza. That faint feeling about 90 minutes after eating a candy bar? Hello! Sugar spike and dip from the chocolate!  It’s not rocket science here.

Um…tell me again why it took 46 years for me to make the connection between dairy and chest congestion? Industrial strength rose-colored glasses, that’s why!

This week, I was involved in a speculative discussion about the causes of fibromyalgia, ADD, and other diseases that were exotic 30 years ago; but, common as ticks on a hound now.  One participant in the conversation asserted that it was our food.  Our food is the cause of all of these issues. This same person has fibromyalgia and a pretty serious commitment to Captain Crunch.  Again, ironic, yes?

There’s a solid way to find out: the scientific method.  Hey, it worked for me on the yogurt thing!  If we eat whole foods without dyes, preservatives, additives and whatever else is in the kitchen sink, and we see decreases in diseases, then, voila! Question answered and all of us have to remove our rose colored glasses.

In that case, the solution is simultaneously elegantly simple and torturously difficult.  Stop eating the garbage.  I changed my diet two years ago and I have not been to the doctor for illness not one time since.  Not once. Even if we don’t know that our food is poisoning us, we suspect it strongly.  What would we do if we strongly suspected that a coworker was poisoning our coffee? We’d stop drinking the coffee, that’s what!

So, why are all the drive-thru lines still long at lunchtime and the doctors’ waiting rooms still packed?

Quick! How many almonds in a serving? What’s a serving of peanut butter? How big is a serving of pasta? How much wood could a woodchuck….. oh, wait.  Scratch that last one.

23 almonds are in a serving.  Two tablespoons make one serving of peanut butter.  And 1/2 cup of cooked pasta is all you get in a serving.  In those items are 160 calories for almonds, 188 calories for peanut butter and 212 calories in the pasta.

I bring all of this up as a result of a conversation the other day with a friend who said that she really doesn’t eat very much.  She’s a little puzzled as to why she weighs what she does.  To be honest, I was the same way.  I generally ate about 550 calories over the course of my work day.  Not bad except that I usually consumed them in the form of a Snickers bar.  But, still, it was all I ate all day and the count itself wasn’t that bad.  How could I have weighed so much?

Dinnertime, that’s how.

When I started keeping a food diary, I was startled, horrified and embarrassed at how much I ate in a single sitting.  My nighttime meals, often the only real one I had on any given day, were ranging up to and sometimes even over 1500 calories in a single sitting.  How in the world do you do that, you might ask.  Easily, I would answer.

A plate of spaghetti (or about 1.5 cups of noodles) is 636 calories, add another 70 for a cup of canned sauce, another 73 for an ounce of ground beef added to the sauce, another 140 for a single slice of garlic Texas toast (but you’ll probably need another half slice to sop of the rest of the sauce) and you’ve got a meal with 989 calories.  For dessert, let’s go with 1 cup of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food.  That’s another 420.  Okay, so that’s only 1409.  I exaggerated….a little.  I could easily eat 1400 calories.  In a single sitting. RIGHT BEFORE BEDTIME.  That’s more calories that I now eat in an entire day!  Friends, nothing good will come from that.

The tools in my kitchen that get washed the most are my measuring instruments – spoons, cups and scale.  There are some foods that I can sort of “eyeball” a single serving of.  The problem with eyeballing and ballparking is that my eyeballs and ballparks both get bigger and, before I know it, that half cup of pasta is an overflowing whole cup.  I can’t control my calorie, carb, fat or whatever else intake if I don’t know what I’m eating.  And, to really know what I’m eating, I have to measure it.  In a pinch, I use the palm of my hand to guesstimate a serving size.  That works when I’m eating out or am a guest in someone’s home and I want to watch my manners in the hopes of being invited back.  I’ve found that if I get too weird or high-maintenance at the dinner table, my phone number gets lost.  Quickly.

It’s a nuisance, to be sure; however, it’s absolutely necessary if I am going to really know what I am putting in my body. If I’m not vigilant, I gain weight, lose energy and lose my way.  Having traveled this reduction road now more than once, I know how hard it is.  With this vigilance, I won’t have to do it again.