Five Times a Day
Nutritionists, politicians and the entire food industry all agree that we should all be eating a minimum of five portions of fruit and vegetables every day in order to prevent death by happiness. Five portions a day, plus keep your salt intake to below 6g a day and your fat intake to below 90g; have any of you actually tried to do this? It’s just not that chuffing simple!
To start with, there’s the problem that fruit, once eaten, does not exist. Just try this; wait until you’re hungry, and then eat an apple. Feel any better? Feel sated? Feel as if you can now happily wait until dinner before eating again? Or do you just feel roughly as hungry as before, except now you taste vaguely of apple? Do you just wish you’d had a Snickers instead?
Eating a lot of fruit and vegetables just misses the point of eating as far as I’m concerned. I eat because if I don’t then I get hungry and that’s a deeply unpleasant sensation; it makes me feel queasy and bad-tempered. So when I eat something, I like it to have some sort of noticable effect on me; by eating lots of fruit, the only noticable effect so far is that I now buy more fruit.
I also throw away more fruit as it rots like a bastard.
The only way I’ve found to increase the amount I eat is by eating as I would normally, but also eating fruit and vegetables regardless of how hungry I am. So I now slice a banana over my cereal every morning; I’ll still get hungry by 11am, but hey, at least I’ve eaten a banana and the world at large insists that this is A Good Thing. At 11am I now eat an apple, and I remain hungry until lunch at 12noon, which would have been the case had I not eaten the apple — but at least I’ve eaten an apple. At 4pm I eat two satsumas, etc. etc.
Then there’s the problem that almost all food these days is basically made of salt and fat with a bit of artificial flavouring thrown in for taste. It’s inescapable, and I had no idea how unhealthy everything was until the people who make the food started clearly labelling their products with these details, details like “One serving contains 87% of your recommended daily intake of saturated fat and 2.9g of salt and 97% of your recommended daily intake of bowel cancer”. Then, if that wasn’t terrifying enough, you discover that one serving is marked as being about a quarter of what you would normally eat and that you essentially commit suicide with every meal.
A demon? No — an homunculus.
If it wasn’t enough being bombarded with information telling me that a bag of salad counts as being ΒΌ of one of my daily portions and that a bar of chocolate should only be consumed under controlled conditions and preferably without actually eating any of it, it’s also become impossible to switch on the television without seeing someone grotesquely obese being publically humiliated.
There’s the diet programs, the celebrity diet programs, the ‘oh my God, check out this really fat man’ programs that are basically just the modern-day equivalent of people visiting 18th century Bedlam — programs that show us people so overweight that they haven’t been able to stand up for two years and now rely entirely upon their wives to bring them their daily ration of twenty packets of crisps.
Most of these programs appear to be presented by Gillian McKeith, an irritating homunculus of a woman who has a strange fascination with fecal matter. Make of that what you will.
I’m still eating that chocolate I mentioned earlier. It is creamy and good.
I’m left wondering how many portions of fruit and vegetables I need to eat to be able to start feeling the positive effects. I will concede that since making more of an effort to consume five portions a day I’ve successfully avoided catching a cold, despite my landlady, my workmates and some recently-visited friends all having them in close proximity to me. However, I can’t tell if I’ve avoided getting ill myself because of my diet or because over the last few years I’ve just had every possible cold there is and am now immune. Either seems quite possible.
At any rate, all of these health warnings and fat people on television just makes me want to rebel and pig out on Chinese takeaway. But I don’t, because I’m afraid that Gillian McKeith will find out and come and make me look at my own waste products in a disparaging Scottish way.
She does have one strange poo obsession and infact I would question whether she shouldn’t be in bedlam and we can then glare at her in the way she glares down her nose at anyone with more than a ounce of extra fact on their body.
I watched ‘You are what you eat’ on Wed, and felt convicted by the amount of starchy food I eat – far too much, according to Dr McKeith. So starting thursday I made a serious effort to cut down on the admittedly huge amount of toast, cereal, white potatoes and bread products I eat each day. The only discernable difference is that my chocolate intake increased about 3 fold – whether this is due to resulting hunger, or to the stress of having to monitor my daily intake, I’m not sure.
That was the funniest article I have read in a long time. :) Thanks for the great laughing out loud.
Cocoa comes from a fruit – surely that makes it good.
I never worry about my food intake that much…
Of course, I am 16…
When they show the “this is all the crap you eat in a week” table on those “You’re a fat pig and we’re all gonna stare” programs, does anyone else think how good it all looks? Fish and chips, burgers, fried eggs (eggs are good for you aren’t they), kebabs, pies etc etc
Yes, and it doesn’t help that I keep managing to run into these programs after I’ve been to the gym and am starving for junk food to replenish my calories. All those pies and chips and the only vegetable is tomato sauce…mmmm…
I want to know what they do with the food after they’ve laid it all out — does the film crew all dig in and make the fat bloke watch?
I saw one once where they couldn’t fit all the food in the fat bloke’s house, so they had to rent out a local working men’s club and laid out all his food on about three tables. Impressive stuff.
Perhaps they make the fat bloke/woman eat the table(s) of food (and perhaps even the table), just so they learn their lesson.
Anyway, chips are made from potatoes, potatoes are vegetables, vegetables are good, chips are good. Similarly, vegetables are often found in pies, so pies are good too
Don’t forget that chips are cooked in grain extracts – also good.
I take the same approach to you for the most part, in that my (reasonable and relatively varied, but probably over-calorific and carbohydrate-heavy) diet is bulked out by extra fruit and sometimes vegetables, if they’re not integral to what I’ve cooked.
Yesterday that manifested itself as eating four pears after my lunchtime pasta (they probably sent me well over my daily 2500 calories or whatever the hell I’m supposed to be ingesting) and a bowl of radishes as an accompaniment to the bread/soup I had for dinner. I did go to the gym, though, after a short period of not-going-enough, so feel almost absurdly virtuous (you know that healthy glow that regular gymgoers get? It’s actually smugness).
Oh yeah, and I now do yoga as well. My Sideways Plank is second to none, I tell you.
i know what you mean bout still feeling hungry after eating fruit.. it does nowt… fruits appetite satisfying game is weak.
i try get all my portions of fruit / veg with main meals… which makes it a lot easier… eatin it as a snack is wack. if you make a fruit smoothy you can get most of your fruit portions in one go :D
imo the thing to avoid is hydrogenated fats – thats is some bad shiiiit. its in loads of stuff as well, google the process of how its made… its scary.
Interesting, enlightening read. I agree with you one hundred percent that fruit does not make you less hungry. I’d even argue that fruit sometimes makes one feel even more hungry. Dunno if it’s due to the fibres or something.
Happy weekend! Stay fat;-)
Oh thank Pete. I thought I was the only one. Now I can see that there are at least 13 people in the world that get this too!
After going to the gym or swimming I don’t actually often feel that hungry anymore. This week I made a delicious vegetable soup, that didn’t make me any less hungry whatsoever – so I ate most of the contents of the breadbin with it. I think maybe I got the balance a little wrong there.
Dried fruit in the porridge, fruit with lunch, meal replacement milkshake, more fruit, small dinner, swim or gym and have I lost any weight in 3 years?
Capt. J
all that for 3 years and you havent lost weight? what are you putting in those meal replacement milksakes? cheeseburgers?
Mmm, cheeseburger milkshake; it’s surely only a matter of time — just think of how many valuable calories we could save if only we didn’t have to chew.
I see that Burger King have now introduced the ‘triple‘ burger. Did Morgan Spurlock teach us nothing, damnit?
Also, Mars have introduced the ‘Snickers Duo‘ (and also the Mars Duo and the Bounty Trio, etc.) — after ditching the King Size versions of these bars, they’ve replaced them with these, which are basically the same size as before but cut in half. Marketing genius.