I'm Not On a Diet, I'm Eating for Life... Wednesday, March 4

I've resorted to eating a salad...  do I look like a salad-eating girl?! Let me answer that for you, NO!  I'm a meat and veggies kind of girl.  I hate salads.  And while I'm sure I could add some substance to salads, I argue that my one-dish wonders that I already cook up are jam packed with awesomeness and they kill salads.  I seriously felt embarrassed eating a salad and ate it as quick as I could, so that members coming in wouldn't see me.  

I'm am not a salad girl.  

I've always associated salad with being the go-to diet food and I am not on a diet.  I am eating for life, for hard training, for all my rounds of boxing and kilometers with my running.  I'm eating for healthy skin and healthy hair, for organs and bones that will keep working strong, for energy levels that can compete with those I train.  

I got into a conversation with one Hulkie today who upon seeing I was eating one of my many meals, blurted out "Oh, well-being food."  The so-called "well-being" food label is so easily misused here in Korea, for goodness sake they've got "Dr.You" granola bars dipped in chocolate and chocolate chip cookies that have been labelled "well-being food" but they're hardly that.  And while I'm sure they're probably healthier than most granola bars or cookies, they're still loaded with sugar and chemicals.  So called "well-being food" is a going trend these days and it's right up there on the top of the silliness and nonsense meter with those plastic roller things that claim they'll give your chin a more v-line shape if you role it excessively on your face and "calorie cut" pills that claim they'll make you cut calories and lose weight.  It's a trendy marketing scheme that's made a killing out of making fools out 

of the vulnerable. 

You want to lose weight, combine eating real food with training. Hell you don't even have to really train if you want. Eating healthy is estimated to be 70-80% of how your body looks, feels and works, with the remaining 20-30% being your activity level and genetics. 

When he called my food "well-being food" I giggled. It's not well-being food, it's just food. 

High Fructose Corn Syrup, Potassium Hydrogen Sulfite, Polydimethylsiloxane, and Magnesium Gluconate... do these sound like foods to you? They're not food but do you know what they actually are?! Well, they're some of the most common chemicals found in processed foods and you probably ate them today.  So I can't help but giggle when he says my food is well-being food when what he may be eating may not in fact be even real food but instead overly processed "stuff". 

I really try not to eat any processed crap and I try to make all my meals -- I eat 6 meals a day -- out of natural foods. Natural food has an expiry date and for the most part they consist of only one ingredient. The longer the list of ingredients on a food item, the more processed it probably is. For the most part, natural foods are found on the perimeter of a grocery store so a good thing to keep in mind when grocery shopping is to stay on the outside perimeter of the store. 

A lot of the self proclaimed "nonfat" food items at the groceries have extra chemical ingredients to simulate the flavor and texture of fat so I no longer go for the non-fat food. I'm so used to non-fat milk that drinking a glass of regular 2% milk makes me gag still but I don't drink milk much anymore and I find I use less in my morning coffee than when I used nonfat milk because it's all that creamier to my palette. 

I'm guilty for eating processed foods but I do really try to limit them. I think the key I found to avoiding such processed foods is to find healthy alternatives. I've taken it a step further and have tried to make some of my own healthy substitutes.

Some of my loves and my healthy alternative substitutes for such loves:

Skippy Peanut Butter -- I make my own and it's 100% peanuts, nothing added.

Strawberry jam -- I buy frozen strawberries and simply just mash them before adding them on top of my morning oven bake.

Bread -- I'm trying to be more consistent with doing this but my substitute is to make homemade whole wheat tortillas. Wrap a banana with some homemade peanut butter in that and woozers, holy delish! I will admit here that my cheat meal usually consists of bread because gosh darn it's so dang yummy.

Cheese -- I've switched from mozerrella slices that seem to have a shelf life of a trillion years to a marble cheese that lasts so much shorter and is definitely not as processed. I love cheese but I really try to limit myself to cheese only a couple of times a week. The fact that the brick of cheese is actually individually sliced with only but a simple sleeve of tissue-like paper between each slice keeps me from cutting off a chunk of cheese -- definitely helps with portion controlling my cheese intake.

Salad dressing -- I usually just use Balsamic vinegar now but once in awhile I will use an almond coconut dressing for dipping veggies in because, well to be honest, I eat clean enough to not have to stress over a little "dirty eating" mixed in with my clean eating.