Chow

Since the late 1970s I’ve generally maintained an eating pattern that some find peculiar: I eat every other day. Nowadays there is a certain cachet to fasting strategies for health reasons, but that wasn’t so much a thing back then. I just experienced that normal but unwelcome post-college metabolism shift and found that the same calorie intake that kept me trim as a 20-year-old added 5 pounds (2.7 kg) a week at 25. There is no secret to losing (or to just stop gaining) weight: eat less. We all know this. But since “less” is almost certainly less than we like…well…we all know that struggle too. Wanting to halt weight gain but faced with the prospect of 1) feeling hungry (by eating less) every single day for the rest of my life or 2) feeling hungry (by eating nothing) every other day yet feeling sated the alternate days, I found the latter easier. I still do. It’s not something I’d recommend to anyone else, but it works for me – when I get into the groove of it.
 
I say “generally maintained” because I’ve maintained it more often than not over the past 45 years. There have been long stretches (lasting years) when I’ve abandoned the strategy for various reasons. The results always were predictably bad. Some of those years have been recent and the results got particularly bad (not helped by other aspects of 2020) by the time last year’s holidays arrived. So, I resumed every-other-day in December and slowly have drifted down about 30 pounds (13.6 kg) since then. The downward drift may continue a little until a new balance is struck, but just a little; further non-trivial losses would require even stricter measures. Mostly it’s now just about maintenance. Having been back in practice for 6 months, the regimen is again second nature. However, I do admit to thinking about food a lot on fast days: not just about the thing itself but about things about the thing itself, such as Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

Cooking food makes calories (technically kilocalories, but I’ll stick with common usage) much more accessible. Wrangham argues this had the secondary effect in the distant past of freeing up time and energy for intellectual and cultural development. How far back did this start? The oldest reliably dated barbeque pit is 400,000 years old but dental evolution (a trend toward weak jaws and small molars) evidenced in hominin fossils hints that cooking may have started as much as a million years earlier. Humans don’t need the robust jaws and dentition of our great ape relatives. We get by on a much shorter and simpler digestive tract as well because cooked food is softer and easier to process. So, while chimpanzees and other apes spend a third of each day eating and chewing just in order to extract enough calories, modern human hunter-gatherers spend only 5% of their time at it. While it is the rare hunter-gatherer who gets fat (the lifestyle is very active and involves few pastries), the same biology poses a serious risk for those of us who are more sedentary and have overstocked pantries.
 
Body Mass Index (BMI) is the most common tool for categorizing people into different weight classes, but it is a crude one. It has some value when applied to large populations in which the errors tend to cancel out, but on an individual level the tool has serious limitations. It is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by the square of the height in meters. A reading over 25 is regarded as overweight while a reading over 30 is regarded as obese. Take, for example, a 215 pound (97.5 kg) man who is 5’11” (1.8 m). He has a BMI of 30.09 so the fellow is obese. Yet, that height and weight could describe three very different people: a body builder with a chiseled physique, a couch potato high in blubber but low in muscle, and someone in between. Calling at least one (maybe two) of the three obese is plainly silly in common parlance, yet they all have the same BMI. Still, BMI is a quick rough-and-ready guide for comparing a small number of average folks or large groups of general mixtures of people.
 
By the numbers, 42% of adult Americans are obese. According to the CDC, which collects the data, there is “no significant difference in the prevalence of obesity between men and women overall or by age group.” In 1970, the year I graduated high school, 15% of adults were obese. I remember 1970 very well and, trust me, we didn’t starve ourselves. So what happened in the next half century? For one thing we followed the advice of the food gurus of the day (advice that lately has been called into question) by cutting back on what we were told was bad for us. Annual consumption of red meat dropped 16 pounds (7.27 kg) per person since 1970. The percentage of fat in our diets has declined from 44% to 33% (though in absolute terms we eat more fat because we eat more calories). Egg consumption fell substantially after 1970 and dairy plummeted. Yet, our substitutions (e.g. chicken for beef or sugary sodas for milk) are either little better or very much worse, and we eat far more of everything else. We eat, on average, 25% more calories more per day than we did in 1970.
 
Average adult caloric intake in in the USA in 2021 is 3600 calories. The USDA recommends 2,600 calories per day for moderately active men and 2,000 for moderately active women. For couch potatoes, cut those numbers back to 2,000 and 1,600 respectively. Yes, those numbers are “on average”: any one person could need substantially more or less based on individual physical characteristics and activities. There is vastly more to nutrition, of course, than calories, which are just a measure of available energy. They come packaged in proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. The right balance of these along with vitamins and minerals is crucial to health. Still, some things are best kept simple, and counting calories is a simple way to avoid surprises on the bathroom scale in the morning. There still might be unpleasantness, but not much surprise.
 
I have no advice to offer anyone on how to control weight. There are plenty of other people eager to do that – and to charge money for the privilege. Besides, I’ve often been bad at it. When I’m good at it, my methods are idiosyncratic to put it mildly. Most people find them crazy. But there is probably some kind of special crazy that does work for you. Best of luck finding it. For me, however, tomorrow is an on-day and I’m contemplating breakfast. (I’ll post this before going out the door in the morning.) I’m thinking maybe a chili jalapeno omelet with black coffee. No toast, but a side of bacon.
 

The Turtles – Food