Smallist

There’s some basic, no-nonsense diet advice that’s pretty much the undisputed consensus. Here’s the things everyone agrees on:

• Eat lots of small meals throughout the day.
• Eat plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.
• Avoid excessive, unrefined carbs.
• Eat fewer calories altogether.

These are all good tips, but there’s minor catch 22 due to a hidden variable: Preparation time. To eat fresh food and fewer carbs tends to increase preparation time, because vegetables have to be chopped, and ready-to-eat processed foods tend to be high-carb. Meanwhile, the economy of scale favors larger meals: if you’re going to chop broccoli, you may as well chop it all.

So all things being equal, the more you try to eat small, frequent meals, the more you’re going to tend to eat processed, high carb foods. And the more you try to avoid high-carb foods, the more chopping of vegetables you’ll be doing, and you’ll tend to consolidate your meals for convenience sake. Try to keep both in mind, and you’ll end up spending hours in the kitchen.

What’s the solution? I don’t think there’s a magic bullet, but here’s a few tips I think might work:

1. Start with an understanding of how many calories / meals you need per day. 1600’s a good dieting number for most people, but there’s plenty of places to go on the internet to calculate it.
2. Divide by 5 to get 300 or so. The math is bad, but it gives you an extra 100 calories for a glass of wine or an apple.
3. Plan meals that store well and will keep for several days. Single pot stuff like vegetarian chili, stir fry with brown rice, etc.
4. Buy single serving sealable containers, and store the big meal for a few days worth of small meals.
5. Augment with soups, which tend to be low-carb and single serving. Just watch the salt, if you have high blood pressure.
6. Nuts are high calorie, low carb good-fat, and can be split into single servings pretty easily.
7. When shopping stay out of the aisles (except the soup). All the good stuff is around the edges.
8. Don’t go to restaurants. Or if you do, don’t eat food. Or if you do, avoid the bloomin’ onion. And take half the entree home.
9. Also, frozen vegetables are better than you think. There’s a chopped corn, carrots and stringbeans one that I love. It takes 6 minutes to nuke, and is about 250 calories. The corn probably qualifies as high carb, but the amount of fiber you’re getting, who cares?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Tips, Food and Drink, Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.