As others will attest, when you sit at a desk all day (possibly bored), you end up snacking. This has a double whammy: because you’re sitting, you don’t get exercise, and because you’re snacking, you get fat.
I’ve struggled to find a sustainable eating regime. I’ve tried a bunch of things. Fruit is a good option when I want something sweet. I usually go through three pieces of fruit during the work day. The savoury snack question, however, has been harder to answer.
For about a week, I happily munched on cashews. Mum had bought raw cashews and roasted and salted them at home. I thought, “This is perfect! Cashews are tasty and nuts are good for you!”
Then, on Friday lunch time while web surfing, I discovered this: energy content of food.
| Cashews | 11 000 – 12 000 J/g | (2.5 – 2.9 Cal/g) |
| Marshmallows | 4 200 – 5 800 J/g | (1.0 – 1.4 Cal/g) |
What the — ??!! Cashews have twice the energy content of marshmallows? You mean, I could be stuffing myself with double the weight of marshmallows instead of my ‘healthy’ cashews? And look how light marshmallows are! At this rate, I could be pouring two packets of marshmallows down my throat every day.
I stopped eating cashews straight away.
For those of you who are interested, the way I’ve settled this is by eating five meals a day instead of three. I have First Lunch at around 10:30 AM (basically, whenever I feel hungry), Second Lunch at the normal lunch time and Third Lunch at about 3 PM. I eat quite a bit less and feel full the whole day to the point that I often don’t feel like eating Third Lunch.
If you’re wondering about the title of this post, I was introduced to scroggin at Grade 5 camp. It was delicious (at this camp, I also ate my first taco). I can’t remember the exact trail mix but the folklore says scroggin is made up of:
- Sultanas
- Chocolate
- Raisins
- Orange peels (candied)
- Ginger (crystallised)
- Glucose (generic candy, such as barley sugars)
- Improvisation or imagination (i.e. the chef is supposed to add a favorite ingredient)
- Nuts (any kind, so long as they are not salted)
P.S. Here’s an interesting cultural highlight from Wikipedia — Australian snack food.
P.P.S. Hey! This is even more interesting! Wikipedia describes the origin of the dim sim. It was created by celebrity chef Elizabeth Chong’s father. It was invented! Wow. I had assumed some Australian fish-and-chip shop owner mangled a Chinese yum cha delicacy by deep frying it and mangled its name again by calling it ‘dim sim’!
P.P.P.S. Haha…! Tim Tam Slam. This article is as silly as Iron Chef. I like this line: “The thicker chocolate coating on the Double Coat Tim Tam offers a more stable exoskeleten to help ensure the biscuit does not collapse prematurely.”
Dearest Joan,
Don’t worry about any of that self flagellating christian guilt mania diet nonsense. Do the math. Think about how much you eat. Thing about what would happen if you were even 1/20 out between energy demands and consumption. Daily energy demands for a woman approximate 10 mega joules. Pure fat has an energy density of around 3000 Kj/100g. So your energy demands can be met each day by a little over 333 gms of fat. A finger of butter or 3-5 chocolate bars. If you’re 1/20th out, that’s 17 gms of fat per day. Or 7.3Kg/year of pure fat. But adipose tissue is a complex of fat cells storing around 15Mj/Kg. So this translates to a 12.3Kg/year weight gain or loss (loss is easier to model as an extreme, due to fat cells having basel energy requirements). To the naive this would suggest a forward path of extreme conscious dietry control, but a little reflection will demonstrate that since most people are in equilibrium subconscious mechanisms must already tightly control body composition.
Your brain is very good at measuring your body composition and controlling your appetite without conscious control. It’s a lovely, sophisticated device! If you don’t want to get fat, eat the cashews, not the marshmellows, for they are a source of plant life to be and due to the common ancestory of man and plant a good source of life for Joan; a rich bounty that tells her brain its food supply is plentiful. Marshmellows and other refined foods she may need to eat a mountain of to get, say, your folic acid needs met; a poor diet which may activate biological strategies for dealing with food scarcity (please Joan! store emergency reserves; i can’t live on this stuff!).
Lack of exercise does not make people fat through decreased energy demands. Rather it changes the brains perception as how much weight the body may carry without detrimental effect. Exercised induced overheating and over energy expendature from lugging extra weight around (it takes twice as much energy to lift twice as much weight) will be measured by the brain through metabolic products in the blood, activating body composition modification via change of appetite and activity levels, moving the composition to a form better suited to the exercise rich environment in which it finds itself. Everyone knows muscle fibres grow in response to exercise, but adaptions take place throughout the body and brain to minimise the exercise induced stress and maximise efficiency. It’s an optimisation problem with two variables. Reserves vs. agility and efficiency. The global optima depends on the weightings of those two variables. You can change the weighting through conscious behavior, behavior which subconscious brain regions will then measure to control your appetite. Amusingly, the traditional energy reduction diet has the effect of activating scarcity strategies, increasing appetite and subsequent weight gain.
My advise to anyone who wants to loose weight; deny yourself no complex food that primitive man would eat (vegitables, red meat, including organs, fish, eggs, fuit, nuts, all simply prepared). Eat slowly so appetite change can control intake. Within this structure eat whatever tastes the most appealing. Foods which have something you lack will taste nicer till the need is forfilled. Exercise to create weight induced over heating and carry stress to activate weight reduction strategies. How many overweight long distance runners do you know?
Julian.
http://iq.org/
Hello Julian,
I’ve never heard your sequence of logic (and supporting evidence) before. It’s appealing — “Your body knows what’s good for you so listen to it.” I suspect that most weight-conscious people see diet as a battle between the body and brain, like: “Food! Food! Gimme! Eat!” versus “No food for you! You’ve already had 10 Weight Watchers points!”
I wonder how my body is regulating my weight differently now as compared to when I was in high school? My activities, diet and exercise patterns are very different and I’ve gained weight since high school, yet by all mainstream standards, I have a healthier lifestyle now.
I do have a tendency to eat quickly and trying to ignore the times I feel like eating (“It’s only an hour to lunch time, I can wait.”). I’m trying this new way of eating, which is as soon as I start thinking about eating, I eat something. It’s usually a fraction of lunch-type food, rather than nuts or biscuits. Hopefully, this matches up with your advice on how to balance food intake with exercise.
I will admit that I’m doing more exercise than I used to. I’m interested in raising my muscle-to-fat ratio, which the gym people say will increase my metabolism. I suppose I should be conscious that increased metabolism will make me want to eat more! (I’m also trying to increase my core strength so that I can do crazy break dancing and floorwork in hip hop.)
Mmm… looking at that page with Australian snacks makes me want to snack… But I don’t have any of that stuff in my pantry. Sigh.
(Is it just me or has the background of your blog gone a faint pink?)
I’m a bit obsessed with soy crisps, which are made of soy protein and spices. Sounds all right except that I think they’re deep fried.
Chocolate crackles remind me of birthday parties in primary school.
Never got into fairy bread.
(I haven’t changed my blog background. Is it your new computer that makes things look different?)
I used to be addicted to those soy crisps too! Mmm… tasty…
I still like fairy bread, but I haven’t made it in ages. I used to take it to uni. Now I try to bring real food.
(I just looked at the code of your page — it seems your body background colour is set to #FFFAF0, which according to http://www.htmlref.com/reference/appe/colorchart.htm is called “floral white”. Was it always that colour? Other white things (like the background of this comment box) look white to me, so I don’t think it’s my computer.)
The background of joan’s blog for me has always been a creamy/pink-white.
Hi Joee, long time no see 😉
I haven’t changed the background of my blog for a long while, Vera. I remember choosing floral white, thinking that I wanted white but not eye-burning white.
Do you remember in your younger days when your first website had a black background? Does everyone go through that phase? I remember my first website (Year 10 Info Tech class) was black with little white dots for stars.
That’s strange. This screen must be more sensitive ’cause I’ve never noticed on any other computer that it’s off-white.
Don’t you find off-white hard on the eyes, especially when there’s something white nearby?
And yes, I remember those black-background days. My first website (1997) had a plain black background.
I’m a big fan of white backgrounds now, with dark grey text. I find that combination the easiest to read.
Hmm, I don’t know. Is it off-white uncomfortable? I am aware of web accessibility rules and am doing my best to follow them (without actually know what the rules are, to tell you the truth).
I’m thinking about redesigning this blog. Not seriously, because I don’t have the skills or time or design eye. But I can change background colours! 🙂
Change it! Change it! 😀 (To white.) Your text is already not-quite-black, isn’t it?
The pinky colour kind of gives me a headache. This must’ve been the first time I’d looked at your blog on this computer, ’cause I’m sure I would’ve noticed it before!
I reckon the rest of the blog looks good though, and I don’t think there’s much to change!
Well, Vera. I know you sometimes sit at your computer hitting ‘reload’ while staring at my blog. I wouldn’t want you to get a headache 🙂
Whoo! I just hit reload. Much better! I hope noone else complains hahaha.
ahahahaha
(just want to join in)
I like this coconut picture. What are some good options for using it?
I suggest a book called ‘The paleolithic diet’. Now I haven’t actually read this book or any other diet book, but I have seen some extracts of the Paleo book and it seems unusually well written and similar to my own thinking.
This raising / lowering metablism thing also falls under scrutiny. Metabolism can be raise in many different ways, but if appetite is also raised along with it, there will be no difference in body composition. Social stress will raise metabolism, but will also raise appetite, presumably because when food runs low, the unpopular starve. There seems to be a lot of fat goths around… cause or effect? I bet it’s unpopular => social stress => activate potential food scarcity program => fat => goth. Best of a bad lot strategy! You can punch holes though almost everywhere you look in the `diet’ field. I don’t think it attracts the best and brightest, or when it does, for the usual perversities, their message doesn’t sell.
J.
http://iq.org/