A Time Capsule from 2005

In May of 2004, I had some blood tests done by my doctor. My cholesterol was a bit high, so she recommended that I cut back on saturated fat. I ended up making a lot of changes to my diet then - cut saturated fat significantly (I was logging everything back then, so this was easy to say), cut back on fast food, and ate a lot more whole grains and vegetables at home.

I remembered today that I had a c-reactive protein test back then, and I thought I might have emailed Sally about it at the time, so I searched my Gmail for "CRP" and turned up an email I wrote a year later when I had more tests done. I'm interested in CRP because it is a marker of inflammation, which may be one of the causes of leptin resistance, which may be a major cause of obesity.

Anyway, I now present, for your reading pleasure, this email from 2005.

Last May, when I got my high cholesterol numbers (from tests taken
in April), I radically changed my diet. Remember? Sure you do.

I have pretty much kept with those changes, and I have also lost 29
pounds since then.

Well, I just got my blood test results back. Here is a comparison:

April
-------
total cholesterol: 211 (should be < 200)
hdl ("good"): 43 (should be > 40)
ldl ("bad"): 151 (should be < 130)
triglycerides: 85 (should be < 150)

Now (February)
----------------------
total cholesterol: 219 (should be < 200)
hdl ("good"): 38 (should be > 40)
ldl ("bad"): 166 (should be < 130)
triglycerides: 112 (should be < 150)

So basically, all of my numbers have gotten WORSE rather than better,
despite my having lost a substantial amount of weight (13% of the
weight I had in April, in fact) and changed my diet in all the
recommended ways (if not to all of the recommended extents).

In addition, this time I had that Cardio CRP test. I got a 10.7.
Here is what the reference numbers are:

< 1.0 Low Risk
1.0 - 3.0 Average Risk
3.1 - 10.0 High Risk
> 10.0 Persistent elevations may represent non-cardiovascular inflammation

Yuck. My doctor wants to have all of this retested in November, and
meantime recommends continued weight loss, exercise, and avoiding
animal fats. (What animal fats? I hardly eat any fucking animal fats
anymore anyway.)

This is kind of freaking me out.

Notice that eating less animal fat, cutting saturated fat from my diet resulted in HIGHER triglycerides (very bad) and slightly worse cholesterol numbers (probably bad), despite the fact that I lost 29 lbs over that time, which would be expected to improve things.

This proves nothing, of course, but unlike most anecdotes, this one at least applies to me specifically.

My Current Beliefs about Diet and Obesity

I thought it would be good to set out my current beliefs about diet, nutrition, the causes of obesity, and so on. They are what guide my (perhaps wacky-seeming) current dietary guidelines. I'd also like to distinguish them from other beliefs with which they might be confused.

Food Reward Hypothesis

I think the food reward hypothesis is the best-supported current idea about why so many of us are overweight and obese these days. The basic idea of this is that we now have the ability to make (in many cases manufacture) foods that are both hyper-palatable (really delicious) and high reward (very tempting/craveable/"addictive" in a loose sense), and that eating such foods causes our bodies to try to keep us at a higher weight than is healthy.

This shouldn't be confused with the "thrifty gene hypothesis," which is the common-sense idea that we evolved to live under the threat of starvation and are going nuts now that food is so plentiful. According to the food reward hypothesis, if our food were still the sort of plain, comparatively unvaried food eaten by our ancestors, abundance itself wouldn't cause overeating.

Stephan Guyenet has a great series on the food reward hypothesis here: Part I, Part II. He talks about the thrifty gene hypothesis as well.

(Note: I will be linking Guyenet a lot in this post. He is not my only source of information here, but he has informed a lot of my thinking, and seems to have done his homework. In many cases he's the best concise link I can give.)

Conclusion: I should eat simple foods prepared at home.

The Role of Carbs

Books like Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes make convincing arguments that overconsumption of carbohydrates, particularly sugar and refined flour, are responsible for the obesity epidemic. Certainly, obesity travels together with insulin resistance (a problem that is all about carbs, and is the fundamental cause of Type II diabetes), and insulin resistance is a big part of what causes heart disease in general.

Guyenet, the same guy as above, has a long critical post about the idea that carbs (or insulin resistance) cause obesity. He doesn't buy it at all.

I honestly don't know what to think about this topic. But what everyone (at least, everyone I'm currently reading) seems to agree on is that if you are insulin resistant, eating a ton of carbs is a bad idea. This is contrary to the official recommendations for diabetes patients (which stress a high-carb, low-fat diet), but I've read enough to convince me that that is bunk; I'll write more below about why.

I've been testing my blood sugar lately, and my fasting morning glucose levels are slightly elevated - not in the diabetic range, not quite in the "pre-diabetic" range, but not where they should be or where they have been in the past either. I have a strong family history of diabetes and I have other signs (like PCOS) of having trouble with insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance definitely leads to heart problems and a lot of other issues. Exercise and reduced carb intake definitely combat insulin resistance.

Conclusion: I should take care not to eat too many carbs.

Dietary Fat

The dominant hypothesis of the last half-century or so of medical advice has been that overconsumption of fat is what causes obesity and (separately) heart disease. This is why diabetics and overweight people (and, really, everyone) is encouraged to eat a low-fat diet.

It is a fact that you cannot eat a low-fat diet without eating a high-carb diet. Humans can't eat the bulk of their calories as protein (you will get sick if you try, but you'll also find it very hard to try, because you will start very very badly not wanting to eat any more lean meat).

The evidence that high fat intake causes obesity is based partly on common sense (fat has more calories per gram than carbs or protein) and partly on the observation that Americans got fatter and started (perhaps) having more heart trouble around the early part of the 20th century, when (it is believed) we may have started eating more fat.

We also started eating way more sugar and refined flour and packaged products and that sort of thing at the same time, so it's very hard to tease out the effects of fat vs. carbs vs. high-reward foods (vs. unknown other factors, of course). There seems to be very little evidence that eating a high fat diet causes weight gain. Many traditional cultures (Inuit, Masai) eat very high fat diets and are very lean (despite not facing any regular food shortages).

Conclusion: It's OK to eat a high-fat diet.

What about Saturated Fat?

As someone who has lived in our culture, it is very difficult not to believe that saturated fats, especially from meat and animal products, are dangerous. I feel as though I know in my very bones that these types of fats are unhealthy and cause heart disease. This is one of the very strongest messages about food from the medical establishment.

From what I can tell from my reading, it's just not true, or at least, many very large, long-lasting studies designed specifically to support this hypothesis have completely failed to. Now, my reading isn't (can't be) exhaustive and it's possible my sources are looking at the data in a really biased way, but it doesn't seem so to me.

Here's Guyenet on saturated fat and cholesterol, the diet heart hypothesis, coronary heart disease, and on findings about full-fat dairy. I also found Good Calories, Bad Calories pretty convincing on these topics. And, of course, when you look at recent studies comparing low-carb to low-fat plans for weight loss, everyone gets healthier on both sides.

An additional bit of common-sense thinking: for a very long time before agriculture, our human ancestors got most of their fat from animals. Either they ate a very high-carb diet (and probably some did), or they ate a lot of animal fats (definitely some did). It's likely we evolved to be able to handle eating these fats.

Conclusion: It is truly safe and healthy to eat saturated fats, including from animals.

Pre-Western Cultures

The fundamental idea of the paleo and primal advocates is that we should eat the way that our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, rather than the way that our immediate agricultural ancestors did. In other words, rather than relying heavily on grains, legumes, and dairy for our food, we should eat more meat, vegetables, perhaps occasional tubers, berries, nuts, and things like that. We certainly spent a lot more time evolving to eat a hunter-gatherer diet than we have spent evolving to eat grains.

The only populations on the planet today who don't suffer from a lot of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and other "diseases of civilization" (periodontal disease, appendicitis, gall bladder disease, etc.) are the ones people used to call uncivilized - small pockets of people living a traditional culture. It is true that they largely lack these health problems even when you adjust for age.

These groups are very different from each other. The Masai have a diet made up almost exclusively of milk, cow blood, and meat. Traditional-living Inuit have a diet that is something like 90% animal fat. On the other side, there are traditional cultures who live very healthy long lives (when they don't die in infancy) on diets composed almost exclusively of yams or sweet potatoes, and others who eat more balanced diets. But in general, my point is that there are very healthy cultures living on high-fat and on high-carb diets. It appears that healthy diets can have a wide range of macronutrient ratios.

What these cultures have in common is that they eat very little refined sugar, very little refined grains, and they don't eat "food that comes in boxes" - highly processed food manufactured to be as delicious and tempting as possible. They eat diets of mostly plain foods, with not a lot of variety by our standards.

It's hard to tease out what aspects of the western diet and/or lifestyle cause all of our problems. Is it the sugar? (There is some evidence that high-fructose foods like table sugar and corn syrup may have especially bad effects.) The comparatively recent introduction of grains to our diets? The refining of those grains and sugars? The even more recently introduced cottonseed, canola, corn, etc. oils (polyunsaturated fats)? Or the excessive variety and deliciousness of the manufactured food products that surround us?

At any rate, if the problem is dietary (as seems likely), then, while we can't say exactly what the problem is, we do know that simple diets of plain, pre-agricultural foods are healthy. (Of course, no food that I eat is actually pre-agricultural. I don't hunt or gather anything myself. But I think we can all agree that grass-fed beef or an apple is more "paleo" than a Big Mac.)

Conclusion: It may help to avoid modern agricultural products like sugar, refined grains (or any grains in large quantities), and seed oils.

Exercise

Exercise decreases insulin resistance and has many other beneficial effects, but I seem currently incapable of incorporating much into my life. If I explained why, I would just be making excuses, so I'll just say it's not a big focus for me right now.

Based on what I've read lately, I do think that high-intensity interval training is way more effective than regular steady moderate-intensity cardio. If I were designing an ideal exercise program, I think I'd go with something like Mark Sisson's recommendations in The Primal Blueprint, which means a good base of low-intensity exercise (walking, slow swimming, jogging if you're much more fit than I am), small amounts of interval training (two or three times a week for 5 or 10 minutes), and regular natural, whole-body strength training (two or three times a week for 30 minutes or so).

Conclusion: I should exercise, but I don't.

I hope this helps to make sense of why I'm doing what I'm doing, or was at least interesting on its own.

Weight Watchers vs. MyFitnessPal

I've been doing Weight Watchers lately. I haven't told most (hardly any, actually) of my local friends about this, because I always feel private about trying to lose weight. It's also ridiculously boring for other people to hear about, I think, and sort of tedious and typical.

I told one local friend other than Ed - the one I'm closest to. I told her I wasn't going to tell anyone else, not because it was a secret (I didn't want her to feel obligated to keep it as a secret, because that's always a burden and this isn't very important), but just because I didn't want to talk about it with anyone else. But it's good to have a couple of friends for support.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Websites.

Weight Watchers is pretty cool these days. I just do it online. They still have a program based on "points" which are calculated for a food based on its protein, fiber, carb, and fat content. In reality, it works out to about 1 point per 40 calories, though WW doesn't want you to think that way. Non-starchy vegetables cost no points and, even more astonishingly, neither do any fruits (except avocados).

You get a daily points allowance, and then you also get this weekly pool of points that you can use for extras. You can have a few of these every day or you can have them all at once if you want to.

I really like the program. They reduced the points totals to allow for what they think will be typical fruit/veg consumption, and the free fruits really encourage you to snack on fruit, vs. forcing you to choose between a banana and a 100-calorie snack pack of mini-oreos, where most people will choose the oreos, which is clearly not the way to go for overall health and well-being (or, most likely, satiety). And I like the pool of weekly points - it really helps me manage social occasions and things like that.

Recently, the site myfitnesspal was recommended to me. It is a dieting site based purely on calorie-counting (or you can track whatever nutrients you want). Unlike Weight Watchers, it's free (ad-supported). For about the past week I have been logging my food intake in both places.

The calorie budget that myfitnesspal gives me based on my various statistics and desire to lose 1 lb per week basically comes out to be the same as what WW gives me if you include the weekly points. (WW "requires" you to eat all of your daily points, but you can forgo the weekly ones if you wish.) Of course, WW lets me eat fruit on top of that allowance, and myfitnesspal does not. Myfitnesspal doesn't have any software-supported way for me to bank calories to eat on other days, either, or anything like that.

However, myfitnesspal does have a truly excellent food database, the easiest one to use that I've encountered since the tragic demise of BalanceLog. In addition to their database, users can enter foods for anyone to use, and other members can verify that the nutrition is correct. If 43 people agree that this entry for McDonald's fries is right, you can pretty much trust it.

In addition to these aspects, myfitnesspal has a community aspect. There are message boards, but, more importantly, it has the whole "friends" thing from Facebook. That part of the site is almost a direct clone of Facebook - you get a news feed of your friends' updates, which (depending on their preferences) will include posts when they log their food for the day, update their weight, etc. So if you have friends on the site, you can get a ton of social support. Also, if your friends' food diaries aren't set to private, you can go see what they ate every day, which is fun if you like that sort of thing.

I'm considering abandoning WW (esp. since it costs money) and just using myfitnesspal. I want to continue enjoying the social aspects of myfitnesspal in any case, and it would be nicer to only be using one site rather than two.

What's a little sad for me is that I really do like and prefer the WW program itself. I like the points and the weekly extra points and the free fruit and all of that. It sort of turns the whole thing into a game rather than being more of a dreary regime. It takes things slightly out of the realm of reality.

But I feel like I can only really enter into the playful fantasy world of WW if I don't at the same time do actual calories. They don't layer well for me.

To be clear, I think these systems are pretty much equivalent in terms of the bottom line of encouraging the energy deficit that leads to weight loss - it's just a matter of what works better psychologically. And of course, one doesn't need to decide once for all time. But those are the issues I'm pondering right now.

Why We Get Fat

A few months ago, I read Gary Taubes's Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. I've been wanting to comment about it ever since. I found parts of the book very convincing and others less so.

Taubes is a low-carb (practically no-carb) advocate, which is always suspect. The book presents a pretty strong argument against the view that people are getting fat because they eat too much and exercise too little.

I was amazed and convinced by the way that Taubes argues agains the "calories in, calories out" way of thinking about weight change. It's not that he disagrees that you gain weight by taking in more calories than you expend; it's just not a useful way of looking at it, because it doesn't answer the question of why that is happening.

By way of analogy, if you were in some particular room in a museum and after a while you noticed that the room was becoming very crowded, you might ask your companion, "Why is this room getting so crowded all of a sudden?" It would be true but not at all helpful for your companion to answer, "More people are coming in than are leaving." That's how Taubes views the calorie situation.

He points out that, for instance, children gain quite a bit of weight as they mature, yet this is not because they take in more calories than they expend. Obviously they do, but the causality goes the other way - they take in more calories than they expend because they are driven to grow. Similarly, adolescent girls develop fat deposits on their chests and hips, and this is not because they are eating more than they need; they eat more because biology pushes them to in order for them to develop secondary sexual characteristics.

He also points out that something like a 35-calorie-a-day difference (a bite of a brownie, basically) adds up over a 30-lb weight gain (or loss) in 10 years. Given that math, how is it possible that so many people do maintain a consistent weight?

Obviously there are processes in our bodies that balance our food intake and energy expenditure. Experiments with rats show that at least some types of rats can stay fat or thin (according to genetic predispositions) on various amounts of food by modulating their energy expenditures. This is presumably not because the skinny rats read Vogue and the fat rats watch too much television.

Taubes then presents his case that the reason people are getting so fat now is that we're eating so many carbs. His line of reasoning involves insulin regulation. If I remember correctly (which I may not), the basic idea is that eating more carbs causes our bodies to produce more insulin, and insulin promotes fat storage, which is to say it causes (basically) our fat cells to become hungry and thus prompt us to eat more so that they can grow.

I find that argument reasonably convincing. What I found less convincing is Taubes's line of reasoning that goes something like, "Everyone in the past knew that you lose weight by cutting down on starches, before all this low-fat bullshit came along." I agree that the low-fat craze of the 80's/90's was mostly b.s., but I don't find it that meaningful that people have historically known to cut back on starches. It's pretty obvious if you consider what people usually eat (even in the past) that we're much more likely to overeat bread, rice, potatoes, pasta, desserts, etc., than we are to gorge on meats. And of course it's almost impossible to overindulge in veggies. (Most people historically probably couldn't even afford to overeat meat. Also, it's much more fun to overeat starches, IMO.) Of course, that's on top of the general thing that citing the wisdom of the past is always selective.

Taubes's ultimate recommendation is the standard Atkins type of diet, with extremely restricted carb intake. He justifies this partly in the common paleo way - apparently our caveman ancestors mostly ate corn-fed beef from the Safeway, and we should too.

I find the general recommendation to cut back on starches pretty convincing, but I don't find that cutting all of them from my diet is any easier or more possible than keeping myself on a general starvation regimen that makes it impossible to gain weight anyway (even as one of the fat rats). A mostly-meat diet is expensive and, after a while, sort of disgusting, and it's obviously not at all environmentally sustainable.

I also, of course, know plenty of skinny vegetarians and vegans, who are clearly eating very high carb diets, suggesting that there are various types of diets on which one can maintain a healthy weight (even effortlessly, if you're lucky in that way). So...yeah.

But the book is probably worth reading if you're into this type of stuff.

The Leg (with Bonus Song!)

On MLK, Jr. Day, the day before school started, I had a nasty fall in the bathroom and sprained my knee. What happened was that I got into the shower, then realized I wanted to see something on the bathroom counter, got back out, stood with my legs too far apart, and my feet slipped outwards in opposite directions. I'm nowhere near flexible enough to do a split, and what gave first, I guess, was my right knee.

There was some screaming.

After a while, the pain subsided and I began to gingerly see if I had any serious injuries. Everything seemed all right. I carefully got onto my knees and then stood up on my lef (uninjured) leg. I was very heartened to find that nothing was seriously wrong with me despite the pain I'd felt. I put my right foot down...and promptly my knee gave out again and I found myself on the floor, screaming again (though not as much the second time).

I live on the second floor, Ed wasn't coming back from Austin until that night, and I felt pretty doomed. I considered calling Drew (grad school friend) to see if she could come help me, but what could she do?

I managed to reach some clothes from the floor so that I could at least be dressed, and then I called 911. Once the paramedics were en route, I used my elbow to drag myself over to the door so I could unlock it for them. They showed up pretty quickly and ultimately carried me down the stairs in a special ambulance chair and took me to the hospital.

Nothing was broken; I got crutches, a pain med prescription, and advice to stay off it for a bit. Drew came and picked me up in her big truck, which was interesting because I had no way to get in. If you think about trying to get into a full-sized truck while only putting any weight on one leg, it's pretty much impossible, at least if you don't have the upper body strength to do a pull-up using the panic handle. Ultimately she folded the back seats up and I was able to sit on the floor back there and scooch in.

Anyway, it's been three weeks now, and the knee has healed pretty quickly compared to what I expected. I can walk unassisted (with a pretty heavy limp), but have been carrying a cane for longer distances. (When I use the cane, my limp isn't as noticeable to me. I also like the way it is a signal to other people that I have an issue and am not just slow or obstructive.)

My knee seems to be OK from a weight-bearing perspective. I've been careful. I went up and down the stairs at my complex on my butt for a long time, but these days I can walk up in the normal way (a bit slowly). I walk downstairs as well, but I put both feet on each step before going to the next one.

It used to hurt a lot when my lower leg went in or out from my knee (to the inside or outside, I mean), but that seems to have pretty much gone away. The only thing that hurts now is when my knee goes into an acute angle, especially suddenly (for instance, when I sit on the edge of the bathtub to scoop out the cat box), or when I bend my knee at all if it's been straight for a while (like rolling from my stomach onto my side when I'm asleep). I also can't easily straighten my leg all the way out, so when I stand, most of my weight is on my left (good) leg. I guess that flexibility will return in time.

Other than that, I'm pretty good. I'm really glad this has resolved so quickly. I walk to and from school every day normally, so not being able to walk was putting a lot of strain on me and on the people I was bumming rides from, and of course there's no way to bum rides from one building to another on campus, so that was annoying too. (I found walking on crutches truly exhausting and difficult.)

I promised you a bonus song. I was torn between this one and "Montana" but this one worked a little better for me.

My Visit with Mosch

Saturday, I flew to Albuquerque and spent the day with Mosch in the rehab hospital. When I parked and walked up to the building, he was waiting for me outside, standing with his sitter and with Nancy and another friend. I was astonished to see this guy who looked kind of like Mosch and then have it turn out to be actually Mosch. He recognized me as I walked up, which was awesome.

Back inside the hospital, we walked around some. He asked me to tell him about what's going on with me right now, so I did, taking a couple of videos of him on my phone. He wanted to play cards, so we fetched some from the room and played a 5-person version of War. He was able to cut the deck, deal cards to each player when it was his turn, and determine which person won each round. (The only card he didn't recognize, at least before he got a little tired out, was the Joker.) When we stopped, he was able to count his cards in his head, and arrive at the right total (15).

Mosch is walking now, which is great. When he walks, he wears a wide canvas belt around his stomach, and his sitter walks behind him, holding onto the belt. His balance isn't perfect - he walks a little like a drunk guy, basically. But one of the great things about rehab, vs. the hospital he was in before, is that he can walk anytime he wants, and has a sitter 24/7 to go with him. Before he was apparently spending hours restrained and frustrated, trying to get out of bed, which was terrible and unhealthy.

Talking to him right now is like talking to someone who is mildly mentally retarded and/or has alzheimer's or has just woken up from a compelling dream. He talks just like Mosch, with all the verbal tics of Mosch, but sometimes the things he says don't quite make sense (they make, to me, "dream sense"). For instance, Saturday night he kept asking everyone for a screwdriver, which he said he needed to "unscrew his screwdriver."

He was at his best and most alert when I first got there. He was just realizing how impaired he is, and he said to me, "My brain isn't working right, and it's so important to me, it's such a big part of who I am." (It sounded so much like normal Mosch.) Upon my saying that he was doing much better, he said, "Better than what??" He wanted to know whether he had in fact been good (smart or with it or whatever) in the past. At one point he asked if he always walked like he was drunk.

After lunch, Nancy went to the library for a while to return some books, and I sat with Mosch in his room. I told him that I knew a lot about his life, and he asked me to tell him about it, so I told him basically his whole life story as I know it, and then some more little stories about himself. Through it all he had his eyes closed a lot and was nodding, smiling with recognition. Afterwards he said, "Wow. I had no idea you could tell it like that!" When I asked him if he remembered specific things, he would say something like "vaguely." I really enjoyed that whole conversation, which felt very natural and Mosch-like.

He gets frustrated and irritated a lot. They don't really do therapy on the weekends, so there wasn't much to do all day. He seemed to be looking for a purpose a lot. He would ask, "What's next?" We would go somewhere and he'd want to know what we (his visitors) wanted to do, and we didn't really have an agenda, of course, but that was annoying too. Why did we come out here if you didn't want to do anything? was what he seemed to wonder.

At one point we had a long (for him) walk and when we got back to his room, he said, "This is the same place we started out from hours ago. This whole place is BULLSHIT!" I'm sure it's very hard to have so much energy and restlessness without having any attention span or anything you're supposed to be accomplishing. I hope it's better for him during the week when "What's next?" can be answered with the different kinds of therapies. It's obvious that he wants to work. (When we were in the dining area looking at the TV, he said, "I'm waiting for him to take off his clothes so I can practice doing that." They've been doing that in occupational therapy, I guess. While I was there I saw him unbutton and remove a long-sleeved men's shirt, twice, which is pretty great for someone who couldn't use his left hand just a week or so ago.)

He's not so easy on the nursing staff, because he's often not cooperative and doesn't remember instructions. If he wants to get up, he is supposed to let the sitter know, and then s/he will help him with the belt, but instead he usually just starts clambering over the bed rails or bolts up. He often tries to remove the belt, which I'm sure is a little uncomfortable, sometimes over and over again while it's being explained why he shouldn't. He can't seem to hold information about that in his head, or else he just doesn't care. But the sitters have pointed out that having that drive and energy will help him get better faster than if he were more complacent, and I'm sure that's true. Mosch has always been careful to call a baby "easy" rather than "good" and that's kind of what applies here - Mosch isn't an easy patient but he's a good patient.

Overall, I really enjoyed being with him. Of course, with a person who is fully unconscious, like he was on my other visits, you can imagine that they'll wake up and just be normal, and you can't do that with a person who is awake and functioning but not normal. But you can still get some of the Mosch personality and it's much more interesting to interact with someone who is walking around and talking. He seems to be improving day to day and (vastly) week to week, so now it's just a question of how far he will come in his healing process. I'm feeling pretty optimistic about his future.

Data-Driven

This New York Times Magazine article "The Data-Driven Life" was pretty interesting. An excerpt (not particularly well-chosen):

For a long time, only one area of human activity appeared to be immune [to numbers]. In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy.

And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed. On MedHelp, one of the largest Internet forums for health information, more than 30,000 new personal tracking projects are started by users every month. Foursquare, a geo-tracking application with about one million users, keeps a running tally of how many times players “check in” at every locale, automatically building a detailed diary of movements and habits; many users publish these data widely. Nintendo’s Wii Fit, a device that allows players to stand on a platform, play physical games, measure their body weight and compare their stats, has sold more than 28 million units.

This sort of thing appeals to me but I won't usually keep up with it if it's not very easy.

My Multicultural Great-Great-Grandmother

One of my Michael Pollan's suggested heuristics for eating is, "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize." He uses, as an example, Go-gurt:


which, he speculates, your great-grandmother wouldn't know whether to classify as a food or maybe some kind of balm. He also suggested that, depending on your age, you might need to go back more or less far to find a maternal ancestor who didn't eat the modern western diet.

I decided to go with my great-great-grandmother, and I am also assuming that I had several (this is true, of course) and that they were from a wide variety of cultures (which is probably not true). Since tofu has been eaten for several hundred (possibly thousand) years, it passes muster with my fictional great-great-grandmother, even though I doubt anyone in my actual lineage, above my grandparents, ever ate it.

My fictional GGGM wouldn't recognize some of the ingredients in Go-gurt, such as high fructose corn syrup, tricalcium phosphate, potassium sorbate, or carmine. On the other hand, she would recognize the ingredients of Stonyfield Farm strawberry yogurt: whole milk, strawberries, sugar, pectin, beet juice, natural flavor, and yogurt cultures.

This "rule" (which I'm not following strictly, but more sort of paying attention to) may have some merit on its own, to the extent that foods handed down to us from hundreds of years of culture are well-tested for eating compared to food additives invented in laboratories in this century, but I think it's better as a kind of proxy. Is this a fresh, natural food such as I might make in my own kitchen? If I had these individual ingredients around, would I use them in my cooking?

None of that guarantees healthy eating, of course. But I think, at least for me, trying to cook and/or use fresh, natural foods tends in the direction of healthy eating, because I'm not likely to cure my own ham or start saving up organic bacon grease to cook all of my greens in. My mental image of the kind of cooking and eating I'd like to do is definitely healthy. And it keeps me away from chain restaurant food, which is invariably engineered with mysterious chemicals.

So, thanks, fictional GGGM, for your fantastically healthy, ethnically diverse diet.

Review of "In Defense of Food"

I'm currently reading Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food. Pollan is the guy who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma (and some other books, of course) and he is basically a proponent of what you might call natural eating - eating regular food-type food that isn't too processed or industrial.

I haven't read any of his other stuff, but I'm really enjoying this book. Even though I haven't learned that much actually new material from it, he does give a different perspective, and the way he writes about food is motivational for me.

One thing he opposes is what he calls "nutritionism" - that is, the culturally prevalent practice of talking about foods as though they are just collections of chemicals that have nutritional consequences. An example he brings up is a government panel or committee of some kind in 1977 that was looking at heart disease, and decided to recommend that Americans eat less dairy and meat, since it was pretty clearly associated with increased risk of heart disease. Of course, the dairy and meat industries freaked the fuck out, and the recommendations were changed to, basically, "avoid saturated fat," even though there wasn't good evidence that saturated fat was the problematic aspect of meat and dairy. But by focusing on invisible chemical aspects of foods rather than on foods themselves, the government could make dietary recommendations without earning the wrath of any particular food industries.

The growth of nutritionism has also, in Pollan's view, fostered the industrial approach to food that has our grocery stores full of boxes and bags. Once it's discovered that antioxidants, or fiber, or Omega-3 acids are healthy, then they can be added to cereals, breads, pasta, yogurts, cookies, and all the other foods that industry churns out for us. A recommendation like "eat more fruit" or "hey how about some green veggies" doesn't foster the same kind of innovation in new products. (And in case it's not obvious, it's a lot easier to make big profits on something like cookies than on something like eggplants.)

He delves into quite a bit of nutrition science himself, a contradiction that he acknowledges. But it's not that he rejects science, including nutritional science, as our best tool to understanding what makes some foods healthier than others. What he rejects is using today's limited science to decide what to eat based on a nutritional perspective. (He's also in favor of the idea that people can suffer from "orthorexia," or an obsession with the healthfulness of foods.)

What's clear to Pollan is that the basic culprit behind the diseases of affluence (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.) is (besides the small contributing factor of longevity) basically the Western Diet itself. Whenever people living on any kind of traditional diet (of which there are quite diverse kinds in the world) change over to a Western diet they get fat and diabetic and all the rest of it.

So his basic advice is, don't eat the Western diet. He begins the book with the (familiar) advice: "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." The last third (perhaps) of the book is devoted to ideas about how to do this - what he calls "algorithms" and I would call "heuristics." He talks about each part separately - what is "food" (vs. a "foodlike product")? What kind of plants are best to eat (lots of variety; more leaves than seeds)? And what kind of cultures of eating should we follow in order to make food healthy as well as emotionally and socially satisfying?

If I lived fully in accordance with my most basic feelings, I would eat like most of my dad's side of the family eats - a lot of fried chicken and other fast food, chain restaurant fare, the occasional home-cooked spaghetti or hamburger. Most of the other side of my family eat a pretty impressive diet of vegetarian (or near-vegetarian), fresh, from-scratch, vegetable-heavy foods - to such an extent that, while I admire it, it's also hard for me to understand how they can do it. And, of course, my dad's side of my family is markedly more obese and has vastly more health problems than my mom's side.

(My Aunt - my mom's sister - tells a story about when I was little. I visited her during the summer, and she had made some beautiful fresh gazpacho from things she had grown in her own garden. When I went home, I told my mom, "...and all we had to eat was frozen tomato soup!" What's funny to me about the story, and about my Aunt's telling it, is that I would feel exactly the same way now if someone served me gazpacho as a meal.)

So I am kind of trying to use education and knowledge to move myself from my western-diet nature (which has me end up like my dad's family) to a diet more like that of my mom's family (which will help me live longer and in better health). I mean, to be clear, I don't think the difference between the two sides of my family is innate - like genetic or whatever. But growing up as I did, in this place and time, what I want is "the good stuff" - the more fried, refined, salted, sweetened, and processed the better.

So I think Michael Pollan's basis thesis is right, and I am finding the book reasonably motivational. (Some of his stuff also reminded me of Sally's hypothetical Navajo talk about eating.) I recommend reading it, and it also makes a very good companion (obviously up the same alley, yet without much overlap) to The End of Overeating.

Stupid Health Care Tricks

As of my recent doctor visit, I am taking ranitidine (aka Zantac) to manage my heartburn. I was given a prescription for this, although it is also available over-the-counter. My prescription is for 2 pills a day, or 60 a month.

I find prescriptions kind of a pain in the ass, what with the need to renew them and everything, so as I went to the store I thought I would probably just buy them over the counter. What I found was that a 24-pack (12 day supply, in other words) of generic ranitidine was something like $6 on sale. I knew my co-pay for prescription drugs was something like $10, so I went ahead and filled the prescription.

It turns out that ranitidine is one of my pharmacy's low-cost drugs, so the entire month's supply - 60 pills, or $15 worth of OTC stuff, was $4. That wasn't dependent on my insurance, it was just the pharmacy's price.

I have seen this before, where, either because of insurance or just in general, you can get prescription drugs more cheaply than the same drugs over-the-counter.

One of the things I dislike about the way that health care works in America is that, if you don't have health insurance, you end up paying more for things, and not just in the obvious way. For instance, my doctor's fee is something like $135 for an office visit, but my insurance pays her $45. If I were uninsured I'd have to pay the full $135 because I wasn't included in that negotiated rate.

And if I couldn't afford to see a doctor about my heartburn, I'd have to pay almost four times as much for my ranitidine.

This particular thing is one of those situations where each individual component makes sense and seems like a good thing, but the overall effect is somewhat perverse.

Goodbye Grainless

Well, my magical grainless diet worked...for a few weeks. Now I can't get myself to get back on it. And, what's more, I'm distinctly eating worse than before the grainless diet. I'm obsessing over food a lot (even though I'm eating plenty) and often eating completely unnecessarily, which I wasn't doing (much) before trying the grainless diet.

I feel like dieting is just a generally doomed enterprise, to the extent that we mean anything other than "trying to keep a general focus on eating in a healthy way."

Trying to force myself to eat a particular way or amount just seems to drive me bonkers and make me obsess about food continually.

Not trying to force myself to eat a particular way or amount seems to lead to weight gain.

Obviously I should change my environment. Unfortunately, I think moving to the 19th century would probably shorten my lifespan more than it would lengthen it.

How Is Kaiser Permanente Not Like Walmart?

Timothy Noah has an article in Slate today about health care reform, in which he laments the fact that, according to a recent poll, Americans are more afraid of the government having a larger role in determing what medical treatments people receive than they are of the role played by insurance companies. He writes:

The discouraging finding concerns a question that [the Kaiser Family Foundation] doesn't appear to have asked in previous polls. In his July 22 press conference on health reform, President Obama parried a question about the prospect that the government would ration health care by saying:

[T]he government already is making some of these decisions. More importantly, insurance companies right now are making those decisions. And part of what we want to do is to make sure that those decisions are being made by doctors and medical experts based on evidence, based on what works. Because that's not how it's working right now.

It's a powerful point: Wouldn't you rather decisions about your medical treatment were made by government-paid medical experts, focused on which treatment may help you get better, than by private insurance companies focused on maximizing corporate profits? Granted, once a treatment is approved, the government would probably pay less for it than a private insurer would. But, ultimately, government is answerable to the public. Insurance companies are answerable to their stockholders.

As often happens when I read Noah on health care reform, I was a bit boggled by this. Let's try a slight substitution:

Wouldn't you rather decisions about what types of cereal are available be made by government-paid consumer research experts, than by private retailers focused on maximizing corporate profits? ... Ultimately the government is answerable to the public. Retailers are answerable to their stockholders.

Now, it is somewhat clear (or so it seems to me) that medicine isn't really acting in the normal market way. This is probably because of the ways it's regulated already (e.g., the way we get insurance through our employers without paying taxes on it). So we can't really just choose a better insurer as freely as we can choose to stop in a different store. And, honestly, I don't want health care to just be a completely free market, because I think that would (overall) be worse instead of better. But it is certainly not obvious (and is quite possibly not true) that having the government decide what you can and can't have is going to be nicer than having a variety of private companies making those same decisions based on a contract between you and them.

Noah concludes with this even more bizarre assertion (emphasis added):

The larger point, though, is that evidence is growing that even the seemingly bumbling intervention by President George W. Bush's treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, helped the United States avert the onset of a second Great Depression. President Obama's maladroit stimulus probably helped, too. The same may be assumed of legislation that would increase government control over medical decisions. If it doesn't help, voters can make their legislators change it. What their legislators can't do is protect them from the rapacity of private health insurers should no health reform be enacted.

I guess we may assume, then, that any and all government intervention will "probably help," since growing evidence suggests that the bumbling and maladroit stimulus bills did. Perhaps the government really should step in and take care of that breakfast cereal issue. After all, if it doesn't help, we can make legislators change it, while what the legislators can't do is protect us from the rapacity of, well, Walmart.

Grainlessness Update

So, I am still doing the grainless thing, though not with perfect adherence. I've decided to add whole wheat pasta (2 oz. at a time only) as well as brown rice (small quantities, like 3/4 cup) to my diet. And I've been exercising somewhat regularly, though not quite as much as I'd like.

According to the scale at the gym last night, I am down 10 pounds from where I started in early June. I was only wearing my bathing suit (and Crocs) when I weighed myself, which may be less than I generally wear, but I was dripping wet from my shower (I hadn't dried off at all since I was headed straight for the pool anyway), so that may have balanced it out.

Despite having lost 10 pounds, I feel unsure that this way of eating/living is actually going to result in a lot of weight loss. I don't know why that is, except that weight loss is generally slow if you're doing it the way I do, and so it's hard to be sure you're really seeing a trend and not random fluctuations.

But I'm feeling really, really good about it. For the first time pretty much ever, it's crystal clear to me that I feel better when eating this way than I do when I overeat (especially in an unplanned way). I feel kind of strong and good inside. I hope that it lasts. I am really trying to think of this as a lifestyle change and not a diet to lose weight, so...well, we'll see.

The Real Purpose of Neosporin

Last night, while cutting up some peppers, I sliced a bit of the end of my thumb off (just the skin). Trying not to drip all over everything, I had Ed apply a bandaid (feeling grateful, once again, that we have the nice fingertip kind that are shaped well for just such a purpose). It was partly successful at containing the mess.

This morning, I went to change the bandage. I was completely unable to remove the portion of the bandaid that was on the actual wound. I tried soaking my thumb in a cup of warm water for about half an hour (seriously) and it still wouldn't come off. It was too painful for me to pull it off and I didn't really want to start it leaking again.

Yes, I am the biggest wimp ever.

So I went to a clinic today to say, basically, "What the hell should I do with this thing?" In the meantime, I had cut away all of the old bandaid that I could, and put a new one on top of it.

It turns out it is important not to let a bandaid become a permanent part of your body (who knew) so the doctor took it off (almost painlessly somehow, though it did reopen the wound), had me soak my thumb for 10 minutes in lidocaine, and then had a nurse clean it up and dress it with some neosporin and a new bandage.

I feel I now know the real point of neosporin - to keep your bandaid from sticking. Duh.

The End of Overeating

I've finished David Kessler's book "The End of Overeating." It was a pretty short and easy read, and aside from a bit of annoyance over a misdefinition of "heritability", I don't have much to say against it. I guess I'm not sure whether his ideas justified an entire book, as opposed to perhaps a long magazine article.

I did get something new out of it. I had already believed that people are getting fatter because we live in this environment that is full of food engineered to be as delicious as possible that can be obtained and consumed 24/7. I think that's kind of a no-brainer if you have thought about the issue at all. Part of this is the market at work - companies have been motivated to learn how to make tastier and tastier food, while our health is none of their concern - and part is a change in social mores such that snacking anytime, any place no longer seems gauche or inappropriate. (According to Kessler, snacks in America used to be something only children got. And in France, people still don't eat outside of mealtimes.)

But what I hadn't really "gotten" before - although I'd thought of it obliquely from time to time - is the way that these "hyper-palatable" foods act sort of like drugs in setting up a cue/reward/craving cycle. Instead of having a normal relationship to food, a lot of us think about some of our favorite foods all the time, and obsess over them. Plain, enjoyable foods don't trigger these kinds of responses, but the kind of layered/loaded extravaganza foods that are marketed to us do.

I remember as a kid, I used to fantasize about everyone else disappearing from the world. I still think about that sometimes, but as a kid, the first thing I did in this fantasy was go to McDonald's and eat all the french fries I wanted.

On vacations, I am always really interested in what we're going to eat for meals. It's probably the most interesting aspect of most vacations for me.

I moved away from Houston almost 9 years ago and I still obsess over some of the restaurants there.

These are not healthy ways to feel about food. After all, I live in an environment of plenty, and unless the world changes, I should never be threatened with starvation. (Even if my life radically changes for the worse, there are food stamps, food banks, etc., to help me out.) I don't obsess over air or water, so why should I obsess over food?

Kessler doesn't really recommend a "diet" per se (in fact, like most sensible folks, he's into the idea that you're changing your habits forever, not going on some kind of "plan" of limited duration), but the last parts of the book do have recommendations about how to eat better and (possibly) overcome what he calls "conditioned hypereating."

His recommendations aren't very systematic, but they boil down to strictly avoiding hyper-palatable foods (at least while you get them under control), finding healthy foods that are satisfying and enjoyable in appropriate quantities, using rules/planning to guide your eating, not engaging in will power struggles over food with yourself (i.e., using rules to avoid the "I want that / I shouldn't eat that / But I want it / But that's bad" type of inner dialogue), and developing negative attitudes towards hyper-palatable foods (viewing them as the enemy and something you're tricked into wanting, similar to how our view of cigarettes has changed).

I found the advice realistic...maybe too realistic. It did instill the good idea of mentally focusing on changing my relationship to food in this way that would be very positive, but it basically made me feel much more pessimistic about being able to do it. When I finished the book I was pretty much ready to give up on the whole thing and just be fat and food-obsessed instead.

Anyway, I'm basically in favor of the book - I think it raises important issues and has basically sound advice about them. And it was interesting to read.

David Kessler in Salon

Salon has an interview with David Kessler, former head of the FDA, about his new book "The End of Overeating." He talks in the interview about what (in his view) causes people to overeat, which is basically just conditioning based on our experiences of eating rich food. For instance, he says,

In people who have a hard time controlling their eating, their brain circuits remain elevated and activated until all the food is gone. Then the next time you get cued, you do it again. Every time you engage in this cycle you strengthen the neural circuits. The anticipation gets strengthened. It's in part because of ambivalence. Do you ever have an internal dialogue? "Boy, that would taste great. No, I shouldn't have it. I really want that. And I shouldn't do it."

That sort of ambivalence increases the reward value of the food. It increases the anxiety, it increases the arousal, it keeps it in working memory. We're wired to focus on the most salient stimuli in our environment. For some people it could be alcohol or illegal drugs or nicotine or sex or gambling. For many of us it's food.

He seems to be at least a partial advocate of rules-based eating:

The question is, how have [some people] stayed lean? For many of them the fact is, they're in torment. It's a constant struggle. Others have laid down new learning, and that's made it easier. They develop rules for themselves that they follow. Then, you're not constantly eating in a chaotic, disorganized way. You're not constantly being cued. Your brain's not being constantly activated. But those rules have to be unambiguous, and they're not easy to follow.

In the end, they have what's called a critical perceptual shift. They look at food differently. How do you really cool a stimulus? How do you decrease the anticipation of the food, the power of the food to activate, to grab attention? The answer to that is you view the stimulus differently.

And:

Some people -- and I'm not advocating it -- become vegetarian. That makes it easier. They look at animal fats and proteins and say, "I don't want that." Some people look at food and say, "That's highly processed, I don't want that. I want real food." Some people look at large portions and say, "I don't want that, that looks disgusting."

I find that my no-grains diet is working pretty beautifully. I'm not sure yet whether it will have the desired results (weight loss), but it's definitely making controlling my eating pretty easy. Aside from occasional, brief, intense cravings, I'm not finding it difficult not to eat grains or potatoes. I just don't eat them. There's no wiggle room, no way to start eating the plate of fries Kessler talks about, and so no problem not eating the entire plateful.

My current "rule" is that I can eat grains/starches reasonably freely for one meal per week, I can eat them if no other food is available and I need to eat (which may come into play when, for instance, I visit my vegetarian relatives, who always cook at home), and on geniune special occasions (like cake at a birthday party). "I especially want french fries right now" is not a special occasion.

Anyway, in the usual way that people enjoy information that confirms what they already thought or were doing, I enjoyed the interview.

No Grains Update

So far, the cunning plan is going pretty well - I haven't eaten grains, potatoes, or sugar in the past week (not counting small amounts that may be found in sauces or the like). And last night when (on a whim) I went to the gym, I was 7.5 lbs lighter than I had been on Monday. Even for a first week that is pretty nifty.

I'm eating fruit like crazy, I guess because I can't have other sweet things. I'm amazed how few calories are in most fruits. I've been having lots of blueberries and strawberries mixed with plain Brown Cow cream top yogurt. This is clearly one of the foods of the gods.

Meals are trickier, and I'm having to get more flexible about my ideas of what a meal is. Last night for dinner, I had beef fajitas from Whole Foods (the kind that come raw, marinated and mixed with peppers and onions, which I cooked in a pan with some olive oil). Once I got over feeling sad about not having tortillas, or at least rice, with them, they were actually fantastically good. The quantity I had wasn't really sufficient for a whole meal, but I didn't need a whole meal either, because I'd been snacking a lot of the day.

We have friends who come over most Sundays to do a roleplaying game, and I like to have some snacks on hand. I decided this week not to have snacks I couldn't eat, so I put out blueberries, stawberries, and a package of shrimp cocktail (i.e., cold boiled shrimp with the tails on, plus cocktail sauce), also from Whole Foods. The fruit was popular but the shrimp were not, so I ended up eating most of those (I thought they were fantastic).

Dinner Saturday (returning to the "what's the for dinner") topic was a hamburger patty made of about 1/3 lb of lean ground beef, topped with spicy brown mustard, plus half of a raw red pepper, sliced up, plus a cup of a creamy tomato soup. That was pretty tasty.

We ate out Friday night and I finally, for the first time, had the canonical Atkins food - a bunless cheeseburger. With that I had a mixed greens salad with ranch dressing.

Anyway, enough about food. I also made it to the gym three times last week, which is not very many times, but not nothing either. I swam two of those times and walked (on a treadmill) the other time.

My Wisdom Teeth

I saw a dentist today for the first time in a few years. Aside from doing a more thorough cleaning (due to the "few years") part, I didn't need any work. But the dentist did strongly suggest that I have my wisdom teeth removed. With my current insurance, it would cost me about $100, which is certainly doable (especially since I would just use my HSA for it).

I told her I would look into it. The thing is, my wisdom teeth have all grown in - none are impacted or anything like that. They gave me trouble on and off for years, but they settled down 7 or 8 years ago and never give me any grief. I'm not sure why I should surgically remove perfectly healthy teeth from my mouth.

Her argument is that they are difficult to clean and thus may cause problems down the road, perhaps even affecting the adjacent teeth. And they will only become more difficult to remove as I become older (bones get firmer, surgery is more dangerous, etc.) But in my 34 years of life so far, I've had exactly one cavity, so I don't think my teeth are very decay-prone to begin with.

I did some research online, and from what I've read, the active question (that is, the dividing line) is whether impacted wisdom teeth that are not causing problems should be removed. This leads me to believe that settled opinion is not in favor of removing non-impacted teeth.

A dentist 10 years ago told me my wisdom teeth were fine and not to give into any baloney arguments about why they should come out. I have no reason, of course, to trust him over my current dentist. All the same, I think I am going to keep these perhaps-extraneous teeth.

Summertime, Summertime

This summer, for the first time in a few years, I won't be taking any classes, for the simple reason that there are no classes remaining for me to take that are taught in the summer. So, aside from work, I'll have the summer off.

"Aside from work" is a big exception, but when I am in the habit of being in school, not being in school does seem to give me oodles of spare time (with the attendant boredom, etc.) So I have two goals for the summer.

First, I'd like to cook more. I've been making dinner two or three times a week, and Ed has been enjoying and/or tolerating my food. I'd like to bump that up to five times a week, just for the summer, and see how it goes. I'd also like to plan ahead more - buy groceries only once or twice in the week. Overall, the idea of this plan is to practice cooking on a really regular basis, and I also think it will save me money and result in a healthier diet.

One challenge is that I don't currently make enough different meals for us to eat my cooking five times a week without dying of boredom. So I'll have to expand my repertoire a bit, but that's all to the good. There are certainly a lot of different meal ideas out there that meet my criteria (reasonably cheap, easy, healthy, and bountiful).

My second goal is to start exercising again. I haven't gotten any exercise to speak of since my semester heated up, and that's bad. Ed and I were going together before that. Whether he can resume joining me or not, I want to start working out in some fashion five times a week. I still have my 24 Hour Fitness membership, plus, of course, it's summer and thus wonderful and nice outside for all kinds of things, so it should be pretty easy.

I'll keep you posted on how these things go.

Cooking Experiment

For the past few months, Ed and I have been trying to make and eat dinner together more. We've stuck pretty well to our original goal of having me cook for us twice a week and him once a week. A meal is typically weekday dinner or weekend brunch, and we try (and have so far managed) to include protein, vegetables (and/or fruits), and some kind of starch. I often include a whole grain when it is my turn. (I did not make the meal in this picture, but it looks like my type of thing.)

Last night, for instance, I made boneless pork chops (broiled in the oven), brown basmati rice (plain, but cooked with salt and butter), and asparagus (sauteed in a pan with olive oil, crushed red pepper, and garlic). It made a very pretty meal, actually, and the asparagus was pleasingly spicy.

Here is what I have learned so far:

• I much prefer cooking for the two of us to making my own dinner, even though when I cook for just myself it is much easier (because I don't make such elaborate things).
• I actually really enjoy making dinner for us.
• I prefer cooking several things to making a one-pot dish. I am especially fond of the protein/starch/vegetable trio, often with a very plain vegetable.
• Any kind of fish can be cooked with oil and butter in a pan and come out delicious.
• Excluding (bizarrely) restaurant food, I view food cooked by other people with suspicion and distrust.
• I like to control what we have for dinner.

It's been really exciting to learn that I can pretty easily make a variety of reasonably healthy meals, and that I enjoy doing so.