My Two Eating Catchphrases

It has occurred to me that I’ve evolved two simple principles that can then be applied to any aspect of life, in particular to eating. Here they are:

The laws of physics have not been repealed.

The secret is that there is no secret.

Let’s take a look at the implications of the first one. Here I can’t do better than to quote one of the characters in Dickens’ David Copperfield:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.

You make more money than you spend? Happiness. You spend more money than you make? Misery. That’s a basic law of economics. Money is finite, and, the vagaries of credit and investments notwithstanding, there’s always a day of reckoning. Did you manage well on a day-to-day basis? Then you almost certainly will end up okay, barring the unforeseen disaster. I remember a conversation with my husband when we were considering the purchase of a house in the Chicago area. We liked it pretty well, but one aspect of it bothered Jim: In order for him to get to work he’d have to take the tollway every day. I don’t remember how much it was—this was over 25 years ago, after all. He kept insisting that the tolls should be figured into the cost of buying the house; I kept saying that it was such a small amount as to be completely irrelevant. “We’ll never miss it!” was my mantra. In the end Jim ended up getting transferred and we were spared the final decision.

So who was right? Well, Jim was. I sort of was. While it’s true that every penny counts, no one outside of an obsessive/compulsive keeps track of them all. Even the most frugal people have some amount of money slosh, some “mad money.” But it is also true that small amounts of money can add up over time. Had we set ourselves a little challenge and put aside the amount of money that we would have spent on those tolls, we would have ended up with . . . something. I just went online (anything to do internet diving!) and it looks like you’d pay about $1.50/day for a similar route. I’m sure there’s some kind of monthly pass you can buy, but let’s say for the sake of argument that we’d have spent $20/month on tolls That’s . . . um, let’s see . . . about $250 a year. If we’d put that in a little non-interest-bearing account (which I assure you would not have happened in the real world) we’d now have over $6,000 in cash. Huh.

Money doesn’t just disappear; something happens to it. Studies have been done on how much you could accumulate if instead of buying your $5 Starbucks coffee every workday you saved it; $5/workday is $25/week, $100/month, $1,200/year. You know how much you’d have if you skipped the lattes for 25 years? $30,000.

Well, you see where I’m going here, don’t you? All of the previous adding-up gives you a positive result, but the adding-up effect of calories is in the opposite direction. Here’s the law of physics that hasn’t been repealed when it comes to our weight:

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

We often don’t realize what a “calorie” actually is. Understanding that concept can be extremely helpful in looking at how we eat. A calorie is simply a measure of energy, with a food calorie equating to how much heat it would take to raise a kilogram of water (a liter, or about a quart) by one degree celsius (or almost two degrees fahrenheit). Does that seem like a surprisingly high measure of heat to you? It did to me. (Food or nutritional calories, also called “kilocalories,” are 1,000 times bigger than chemical calories, which measure the amount of heat needed to raise only one gram of water one degree.) And here’s the thing: that energy, once ingested, has to be dealt with by your body in some way. None of it just “disappears,” as I’ve discussed before.

As for the out-in-the-open secret, I’ve become more and more tickled/irritated/outraged, depending on my mood, at all of the “what could possibly be happening?” material out there. It’s perfectly obvious what’s happening: we’re eating more, of uniquely fattening foods, and moving less. Yes, yes, yes, I know: nothing new here. But it’s like the Starbucks calculation, in that we just don’t realize how things add up.

This concept that every calorie counts has been very real to me for the past week and a half or so. A week ago Monday (March 11) I had some fairly minor foot surgery to correct a couple of problems consisting of two hammertoes and a neuroma. I’ve been in a surgical boot or shoe ever since, with no capability of taking my regular walks. I also haven’t been driving, since the boot is on my right foot. If I had to, I could drape my booted foot over the floor divider and work the pedals with my left foot, a feat I’ve accomplished in the past when I’ve had a cast or boot on that right foot. (Several problems have occurred with that foot.) I’ve been out and about very little, even missing church last Sunday. I spent most of last week on the couch with my foot propped up and am now getting around home a little more, but if my toes start hurting I sit or lie back down, figuring that a couple of weeks of self-coddling is a good investment in the long-term effectiveness of the surgery. If I worked outside the home, as they say, I’d have to get back into the fray, but I don’t. Anyway, the point is that my activity level has been extremely low during this period. I’ve tried to be very conscious of how much I’m eating and to tailor intake to outgo. It would be so easy to lie on the couch and eat chips!

Well, as usual I’m over my word limit for a post, so I’ll quit. Besides, it’s lunchtime! There are some fabulous leftover homemade eggrolls in the fridge, so I’m going to eat 2-3 of those.

Up next: the fabulous food books of Michael Pollan.