It's cool; I ate Oatmeal for Breakfast.

I’m not sure why, but whenever I think of breakfast foods with oats in them, I have a very real image of myself being warm looking out a window at a beautiful morning landscape, and feeling proud that I am taking such good care of myself and eating so healthy.

I imagine this experience comes straight from Quaker Oats, who has shown me through countless commercials that this is indeed how oatmeal is meant to be enjoyed, and we all ought to give our microwaveable instant oats this kind of reverent ritual to truly enjoy them. And to be honest, I often indulged in this wholesome fantasy, and in fact felt great joy and pride from the first few steaming bites, often drizzled in milk & covered oh-so-gently with slivered almonds and blueberries (ok, I still act out this fantasy, only with a few modifications explained below).

I wonder, as I wander down the isles of my local supermarket, and pass by the Quaker Oats Instant Strawberry & Cream oatmeal, how many other people pick up those boxes of oatmeal and also have the vision of themselves (in 1 minute or less) I described above; being actively healthful & conscientious about their well being by eating wholesome rolled oats.

It has come to my attention that we are very wrong. Sort-a.

There are two kinds of Oatmeal. There are steel-cut oats (of which I am an advocate), and the kinds which contain rolled oats.

Before I get into the difference, from a weight loss perspective I will say that based on calories alone, oatmeal packs a whallop. In the days of our ancestors who were constantly searching for food, that was the point. You eat a three quarter cup serving of the stuff and you get between 150 and 200 calories in (the equivalent of a bagel). The whole point of oats, and the reason they are such an important discovery in our evolution over the last 10,000 years is because oats are easy calories (oats don’t run away) in very small doses.

Think about it this way if you go to IHOP and decided to pass on your usual stack of pancakes (500Kc) for a steaming hot bowl of oatmeal, its entirely possible you are shoveling the exact amount of calories into your body (depending of course, on the fixin’s).

But even if you don’t really care about the calorie/gram of food content, there is another issue as stake, According to Dr. Gundry, when oats are rolled, or made instant, “you have a paper-thin membrane that can be instantly digested into - guess what? Sugar.”. Remember fat isn’t fat, sugar is fat, and a big one and a half to two cup bowl of steaming paper thin membrane is now just a bowl of insulin raising sugar. Great.

If those points aren’t enough to convince you, for your consideration

Steel-Cut Oats: Ingredients: Steel-Cut Oats.

Quaker Brown Sugar Dinosaur Egg Instant Oatmeal (this is the shit we feed our kids, folks): Ingredients: whole grain rolled oats (with oat bran), sugar, dextrose, partially hydrogenated soybean and or cottonseed oil, maltodextrin, confectioner’s glaze, magnesium stearate, soylechtin, artificial colors, blabh blah, salt, calcium carbonate, guar gum, caramel, niacinamide, Vitamin A, Palmitate, Reduced Iron, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride... And the list goes on.

I know that spending 30 minutes to make oatmeal is a pain in the butt, but steel-cut oats have another added benefit. They keep - you can keep them for 5 days in the refrigerator. You can make them Sunday night in a big batch, and take a half a cup to microwave to work every day until Friday. If you haven’t tried the real deal yet, I encourage you to hop over to whole foods and pick some up. Not only are steel-cut oats not going to break down into sugar into your stomach instantly like the rolled kind, and not only do steel-cut oats have the benefit of not having a list of ingredients that is too boring to read, they taste amazing too! If you know me personally, I will happily make some for you to enjoy during the week. Just ask. Anything to spread the steel-cut word.

Happy breakfast, readers!

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Next time on Popular Excuses: Milk.

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Reading List

Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution p.104-105

http://www.blogger.com/www.zeer.com/Food-Products/Quaker-Brown-Sugar--Dinosaur-Eggs-Instant-Oatmeal/000022855

But I don’t LIKE water

Hello, my name is Jes, and I’m an addict. As of today I am 55 days sober. On December 28th, 2009 I decided I had had enough of diet soda and (for the reasons listed below) I had the will to quit - for good this time (I swear!).

I encourage those of you who think diet soda is helping you drop the pounds to read on and consider doing the same.

For my entire life, I’ve been a diet soda fiend. When I was a teenager and had no money, I would penny pinch by buying Diet Rite, after a run, I’d grab a diet coke instead of water, in the midst of a serious diet instead of eating I’d grab a diet soda or two or three. Diet soda for dessert, breakfast, with every meal, and whenever I was anxious, sad, happy or indifferent. On occasion, if I was feeling healthy I’d stir up some crystal light. In fact, if I had to guess I’d say that from the age of 18 - 26 I’ve consumed an average of a six pack of diet soda a day.

I never went for water because I hated the taste, and I knew enough about dieting to stay away from juice. I could go without wine, coffee and most liquor. Just diet coke was good enough for me.

I basically had a super sweet tooth with the will power to stay away from calories, thanks in large part to food science. Though I’ve been told for years that soda was bad because and it was going to give me cancer and make my hair fall out and ruin my skin, and fuel the fires of hell, I had always ignored the advice. Hell, I’d even gone a few spells without drinking soda, but always told myself that the aspartame, splenda & sodium was fine, and I’d start drinking that stuff again. Even Cliff Sheets, author of Lean Bodies couldn’t convince me not to drink soda by asking me “would you wash your clothes in Soda Pop? Then why clean your body that way?”

As far as I was concerned, if the Kc read 0 - there was no reason not to put as much of it as I wanted down my gullet.

But here is the thing, drink diet soda has never made me thin, and I know plenty of chubby, heavy, obese (and even skinny) people who drink their fill of the stuff. I have never in my life been the weight I wanted to be, and yet I had free reign to drink as much calorie free filler as I pleased. Why is it that my sweet tooth was never satiated (and often encouraged - diet soda didn’t even taste sweet to me anymore) by the soda, and that soda was never a long term solution for not eating?

Upon reading the following paragraph from Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution (of whom I will pull from often in this blog) - I was a convert:

“Any sweet substance, even an artificial sweetener, tells [your body] that sugar is on the way, so please produce insulin.” Followed by “...even just the taste of sweetness raises insulin levels”.
Which might not mean much unless you know that the following: one of the jobs of insulin is to stimulate cell growth, and tell the liver to convert excess sugar into fat for long term energy storage.

It turns out - fat is not fat. Sugar, even fake sugar - is fat. And I had been pumping 72 ounces a day of it into my system. My heart sank. How many years had I lied to myself. How many wasted attempts to loose weight were undermined by my insatiable appetite for fake sugar. How many people had I told diet soda was fine and to drink up. How many years had I been telling myself I was being good by avoiding cake and candy and regular soda? I feel like I should have just eaten all that stuff so that I could have at least had the benefit of feeling full. I guess I should have known better - if diet soda was any good at helping people loose weight, Coke & Pepsi be running add campaigns every 2 minutes to convince its patrons that they too can be skinny with the will to drink diet!

So - I’m over my monumental 10+ year failure now. I’ve been off the junk for about 2 months, and I don’t see myself falling off the wagon any time soon. I can drink water now, my sweet cravings are gone (thank you Omega -3 fatty acids, which I will talk about soon), and I enjoy black coffee, red wine, and occasionally a bite of dark chocolate. I’ve also started to break the habit of emotionally eating soda (another future topic).

My advice, be brave and drop the soda. Trust me, after a few days you’ll be able to enjoy water, and after a weeks, you won’t miss it. I know I know - its nothing you haven’t heard before.

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Reading & Source Material:

Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution
http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Gundrys-Diet-Evolution-Waistline/dp/0307352129/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267169162&sr=1-1 page 33

Cliff Sheats Lean Bodies
http://www.amazon.com/Cliff-Sheats-Lean-Bodies-Revolutionary/dp/0446670308/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267167889&sr=8-1 page 217