Kilts make you watch the old waistline.

[artificer]

Interesting that you talk about eliminating soda...we sometimes forget just how much of the stuff we consume and how it's been insinuated into our diets even though it's totally unnecessary.

Somewhere back there they switched over from cane sugar to corn sugar and I've always thought that was a real dietary turning point for us. I certainly don't excuse the "diet pop" crew, either, since that doesn't seem to make any visible difference in the size of the folks I see drinking it.

Never thought I'd be doing it but now the only thing in the fridge is canned lime flavored soda water...used to hate it, now it's a staple. There's a great brand of canned and unsweetened green tea that you find in sushi shops but damned if I can find it in any of the stores...I'd be buying cases of it if I could find it.

I've tried to systematically eliminate any corn sweetener in the household. It's everywhere these days, though...just look at the ingredients on a jar of spaghetti sauce, for example...I've found the brands that don't have it, though. Sometimes I just buy the cans of diced tomato and cook it with some garlic and basil and a BIT of sugar (it's cane sugar)...but I'm firmly convinced that the corn sweetener is the enemy!

Eat good stuff and not too much of it.

Best

AA

I'm not 'Captain Heath Nut' or anything, but I'm convinced the BEST thing you can do for you health is to cook at home.

Prepackaged food is nearly ALWAYS terrible for you. It's either got WAY too much salt, sugar-as you noted, or fat... OR ALL THREE!

It's amazing to actually sit and count the calorie difference between a pre-packaged meal like a "hungry man BBQ chicken with mac&cheese" versus a home cooked BBQ chicken breast and home made mac & cheese (just to use a simple example).

The calories in home-made can be 1/2 as much, with WAY less salt and fat. AND that using a pre-made bbq sauce. As an added bonus, it won't taste like cardboard.

Fast food and 'sit down' places like Applebee's or Olive Garden can be just as bad as pre-pack, or worse. One of those restaurants actually has a 3000+ calorie SALAD!!

BTW: Green tea (I like brewing loose leaf) and no-sodium seltzer water are staples for me now. I actually have an old-school seltzer bottle that sees a ton of use.

[auld argonian]

Hey...I'm not a health-nut either but I at least figure that you can eat five realistic meals and that provides a bumper for those times that you go off the rails.

I make a killer pot of chili. I won't give a recipe because it invariably turns into a chili-p*ssing-contest about who makes the most "genuine" chili...this is just an example of using the pre-fab as opposed to do it yerself. I stopped buying commercial "chili powder" a long time ago because I read the label and the whole thing was essentially SALT with trace amounts of the spices necessary. I got the individual spices and don't use any salt at all.

They say that you have to shop the perimeter of the super-mercado and stay out of the middle section because that's where the pre-fab food is. It's worth experimenting and trying to do a couple of weeks or a month doing without pre-fab food and just using real stuff...it's not just the weight thing, it gives you a sense of well-being...not to mention a sense of purpose and self-determination for having taken control of this aspect of your life.

Best

AA

[GreenDragon]

My meals now basically consist of the following:

Mon - Fri:

Breakfast: Oatmeal with 1 cup of coffee.

Lunch: Lean pockets

Snack: an apple.

Dinner: Whatever the wife has prepared at home.

[lethearen]

When I measured for my first custom kilt, I thought I was about at the thinnest I'd realistically be getting, as I was happy at that size. When it arrived, it fit perfectly at the narrowest setting. Over the course of the next year, it started getting snug at the largest setting. That was really my wake-up call that I needed to watch the gut! But now... at the narrowest setting I have to keep pulling it back up!