“Healthy” Eating

Trigger Warning — Discussing food tracking sites and non-specific daily calorie intake.

I’ve always known I consume way too much powdered non-dairy creamer.

WAY too much.

But there’s an intellectual difference between knowing every time I make a cup of tea that “Gee, I really use a lot of this stuff” and actually measuring the intake itself.

Last week I decided to see just exactly how much of this stuff I was consuming.

Turns out that I put somewhere between 8 and 10 teaspoons of the stuff in my tea, depending on whether the serving size “teaspoon” is rounded or flat or whatever.

I was getting somewhere between 400 and 500 calories each day in the form of powdered high fructose corn syrup solids.

I don’t think that’s going to make anyone’s list of “good for you” behaviors by a long stretch.

So, I quit it on Thursday.

No more white powder for me. (And yes, I call it white powder because I have long considered it to be as addictive to me as I imagine cocaine is to users of that).

Now, many helpful people said things like “Oh, you should use soy milk” or “half and half is what I use.”

Yes, well, those are helpful suggestions, but when it comes right down to it, I just don’t like those things.

Honestly, it’s the high fructose corn syrup solids that I love (can you tell from the amount I was using?) and the tea itself was really more of an excuse.

So that’s it. Cold turkey. No more powdered non-dairy creamer for me.

This left me with something of an intake issue.

Obviously, I can’t just cut out that large a number of calories every day. If I were getting just a small number from the creamer, I could probably cut it with no effects… but dropping out 400 to 500 calories a day? That’s going to have an impact and I am not interested in losing weight. My calorie counting is done so that I stay the same.

So, I picked up some healthy snacks… raisins, peanut butter crackers, granola bars.

Well, I thought they were healthy… seemed like it… fruity, high protein, etc.

At the same time, I also signed up for one of those food tracking sites, so I could make sure that I was getting enough to eat each day, now that I was dropping out the creamer.

The calorie tracking is one thin (it’s nothing I couldn’t do on my own, I suppose), but I thought it would be better to have something for a while that will show me visually if I am not eating enough.

What I have found fascinating since I started using it is the nutritional breakdown of everything I eat.

Everything has a “grade,” based, I suppose, on recommended daily allowance of vitamins, etc.

So some things that I thought, “Hey, of course that’s healthy” (I’m looking at you, string cheese) got really low grades. And some things, like my beloved instant oatmeal, which I kind of assumed would be rendered less nutritional by all the processing, got high marks.

I have NEVER paid attention to things like “Oh, how much vitamin A am I eating?”, but now, it’s right there in a handy little graph for me every day! And all the stuff gets rolled into a daily score.

MY GOODNESS! I actually thought I was pretty good about sodium. I know it’s supposed to contribute to heart disease, and I don’t actually like salt, so I thought I was pretty good on that front.

But after tracking and seeing exactly how many milligrams I am really getting in my food. Wow!

Now, I am not sure if this nutritional info is going to make me change anything. After all, I am all about the convenience foods, so I have a limited amount of changing I could do.

Still, being a “numbers” kind of girl, I am finding all this information to be quite fascinating for now.

I can see, though, how those sites could be incredibly dangerous. I signed up and then deleted accounts on three different sites before I found one that didn’t seem to want to run my entire life, not just allow me to track what I am eating. Some of them were sooooo pushy with the advice and the newsletters, etc. etc. It just struck me as so enabling of people who might have a tendency toward disordered eating.