Fast Food Fail

I don’t regularly eat fast food, I haven’t for a very long time now.  Perhaps two or three times a year I can be coaxed into Chik-Fil-A because I really love their waffle fries and if I’m going to indulge that craving I’m danged well going to the place I like the most to do it, but that’s about it.  No Wendy’s, no McDonalds, no Burger King – period. McNoThankYou.  Although I am still not thin, I believe this fact is a big contributing factor to my overall state of good health.

Everybody knows that fast food is bad for you, and when I mention my aversion I’m often told: “just have a salad.”

I have two responses to this:

One – If I walk into McDonald’s and smell the fries and Big Macs and then order a salad, I will sit there miserably picking at greens while inside I’m dying for a bite of grease.  Why would I torment myself like that?  I’m setting myself up to binge later on because I feel I’ve been horribly deprived.

Two – Fast food salads are still not good for you!  Sometimes, often, they are loaded with cheese, fried croutons, fried chicken and dressing that is PURE FAT and manage to load more calories onto your day than the sandwich you’re trying to avoid!  Example: Wendy’s Chicken BLT salad with dressing is 790 calories.  I get around 1,500 calories total per day – you do the math.  Would it really be worth it? 

Yes, it’s true, if you go into Wendys and order a plain baked potato and small chili, dump the chili on top and eat it, it’s not a complete calorie disaster.  But is that really what you want while you’re smelling greasy hamburgers and fries the whole time?  Besides which you will have consumed nothing but nearly nutrion-less white carbs and meat fat to boot.  Go home, and make yourself something nice.  Bake yourself a sweet potato instead.  Cooking is fun.

I know some people are saints and experience zero desire for greasy fast food EVER but I am not one of those saints nor will I ever be.  So walking into those restaurants at all is about as smart as strapping raw meat all over myself and leaping into shark infested waters.

I refer to that as McStupid.

Realism in advertising - you've gotta love it.

Binge

I’ve made this analogy before but for those of you who haven’t heard it: being a food addict is exactly like being an alcoholic who MUST swallow half a shot of vodka per day in order to survive, but in order to maintain sobriety – may have no more than that.

So, every day, for survival, you must indulge in your addiction just a little bit and then walk away.  Sometimes at every meal.  Sometimes every minute.

You’ll do great for a month, or a week, or a day, then something like being denied a nights sleep on account of your bedmate’s loud snoring might cause you to eat an entire sleeve of club crackers and a big glass of milk.  Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything…

That may not sound so bad to a normal person so let me enlighten: I have just consumed 1,100 calories with almost no nutritional value (milk has a LITTLE calcium, but it’s actually far from the best source for it).  I get 1,451 allotted calories per day.  That means that it’s now almost 7AM and I have 351 calories remaining for the entire day if I don’t want to go over.  Which basically means I’m going over today, probably by a lot.

A binge feels great while you’re doing it, after it you feel sick – emotionally and physically.  Right now it’s like having a doughy rock in my stomach that’s so nauseating it’s making my throat ache, go figure the physics behind that one.  Worse than that I know that I’m a failure yet again.

As I’ve mentioned before I have a normal stomach and normal hunger impulses, so when I overeat it hurts just like it would for a thin person, and that’s combined with the emotional guilt of knowing that all the hard work I did that day, week, month is now gone.

I would NEVER do this, but I understand why people become bulimic.  It does cross my mind that one quick trip to the bathroom and a minute of unpleasantness would undo what I’ve just done to myself.

Right now it feels like getting through every hour without a binge is a victory, some days it’s every minute.  Right now my resistance was lowered by exhaustion.  One of the “keep you alive” systems that our bodies possess is to hunt for energy whenever possible.  When denied sleep, the hunger impulse will ramp up to try to compensate for the lost energy you should have gotten from resting.  Tonight, that’s what felled me.  Or I guess its morning now.

Later I’m probably going to regret blogging when I’m this strung out and exhausted.  Right now?  Meh.

Glee: Good and Bad

I freely admit that I’m a Gleek, a big fan of the TV show Glee which has been on for two seasons now since 2009.  I’m a big enough addict that I just re-watched the last season finale to get a bit of a happy song and dance fix.  I also confess that I download the music and sing it in my car.

The writers of Glee have a lot of good things going for them, they present a persistent message of hope, courage, friendship and understanding between different people.

They have the balls to include in their permanent cast not one, but two overweight characters who not only get air time – they both have love interests.  They touch on the fact that these characters are overweight, but it’s not the ONLY facet of who they are.  They’re also talented, confident, and dimensional.  They’re fully realized people.

Glee has a gay character whose father is a love letter to what caring and understanding parents should and could be.

They have a character who has Downs Syndrome, played by a young actress who really does have Downs Syndrome.  She’s on the Cheerleading squad.  She is never the butt of jokes.

The writers of Glee love everybody.

Well, almost everybody.

The writers of Glee do not love me.

It’s very difficult to be so inspired, get so much joy, shed happy tears and jam so much over something that’s written by people who despise me.

There is only one time you see cruel, misunderstanding parents and mean spirited, nasty caricatures of people rather than developed characters.  There’s only one group who receives blatant, cruel ridicule on the show – that would be characters who the writers define as “Christians”.

Need examples?  Quinn’s parents, who throw her their daughter out of their home for being pregnant and turn their back on her.  You might be tempted to say hey, there are plenty of parents who do behave that badly.  That’s true.  There are also plenty of parents who, upon learning their child is gay, treat them like absolute crap – but as I mentioned above that particular character’s dad is written like the poster child for good parents everywhere.  Of course he’s a good guy, he’s not religious.

A judge at one of the singing competitions is a Catholic nun.  She’s a nun not because she’s actually, you know, religious or anything – but because she used to be a stripper and she needed somewhere to go.  This is supposed to be hilarious.

Then there’s the “Christian” school choir who competes against our heroes by singing a poorly written song called, “Jesus is my friend” like a bunch of psychotic, frozen-smiled escapees from the Barney Dinosaur show.  If they wanted to put a Christian school choir in there, there are probably a hundred thousand well written, rocking contemporary Christian songs they could have used for them instead of making up something so stiff, frozen and outright bad.  But since the whole purpose was to depict Christian school kids as insane little robots that wouldn’t have been as “funny”.

I’m not even going to get into the Sarah Palin knockoff character, it was nauseating enough that I couldn’t watch that scene all the way through.  Lets face it, I can’t really get through anything all the way through that features Kathy Griffin.

I love Glee, but the people who write Glee make it abundantly clear that they hate me in return.

It makes me a little angry, far more than that – it hurts.

Farmer's Market / Garden Report

I hate inflation.  Part of the reason going to the Farmer's Market was cool was because it was so reasonably priced, I've noticed that this year it's just as expensive as the grocery store if not more so.  Now the main appeal is really fresh food and supporting my local growers, which are both still incentive enough to get me there, but I miss the deals.

It's late enough in the season that the fruits have started to show up, so today I got "Tango Mango Peaches" which look like so:

The flavor is awesome.  Light and sweet with a very slight tough of tartness and hints of mango.  The name is pretty spot on with it's description.  Plus they look fun - like little squashie doughnuts.

This is not diet friendly but I couldn't resist.  There's a baker that comes to the Market each week selling breads, cakes, home made cookies and such.  They make this stuff called "Olive Rosemary Bread".  I seriously wish I had smell-o-vision so your nose could enjoy the wonderfulness along with me.  It's crusty, it's olivey, it's chewy, it's soooooooo so good...

My own garden is having a bit of a weird summer.  The heat has killed my cilantro completely, I think I was able to harvest it once before this happened.  My dill is dying a slow and painful death right behind it, but I'm hoping to get one more handful to make cucumber dill soup with before I give up and pull it out.

The basil is flourishing.  Apparently it likes to fry.

The tomatoes are alive and just now starting to come in, here's the first one I've harvested:

They're red, and firm, but very small.  I don't know if that's the heat or just the breed I selected.  I'm inclined to think somethings not right though since the name of the breed is "Big Boys".

Lastly, something very, very strange is going on with my jalapenos.