Healthy Over Variety: Why I Eat What I Eat
Food choices have an affect on our everyday lives. Over time, these choices will play the primary role in our life span, health, and wellbeing. I consider myself lean and fit, but it has taken years of hard work, devotion, and willpower to get to where I am today. I have had complete body transformations, and have fluctuated my weight throughout my entire life, mostly by choice. From birth, I was larger, remained larger through high school, and have to work hard to keep weight off now. With that being said, I am forced to make or change my food choices in accordance with how I want my body to look. As I have grown older and are more conscious about my food choices, I have learned that my diet is going to be the controlling factor in my weight fluctuation. I eat what I eat because I have a consistent fear of returning to my previously corpulent body, and becoming unhealthily overweight in my future.
In my adolescent years, I ate as I pleased without worry of my weight because I had little to no concern about how people viewed me. I was born as an endomorph, meaning I had a naturally a larger frame. I ate fast food quite often, stuffed myself for every meal, and made sure to get seconds at dinnertime. The only reason I never became obese was because of my athleticism and my determination to be accepted by my peers through playing sports. My favorite food at this time was a Pizza Huts Meat Lover’s Stuffed Crust pizza that I got on special occasions. My father, a marathon runner, would slowly eat two slices as we conversed, but I would consume the vast majority of the pizza. In the summer time I was never afraid to take off my shirt at the pool. I was always told that I was husky, or big boned, but never fat.
The food choices I made in high school for football had an immense impact on my body and mind equally. Entering high school as a larger boy, my coaches and I knew that I was born to be a lineman. Linemen are the largest players on the field, and typically have the highest percent body fat to aid in pushing the other players around to protect the quarterback. Jere Longman described the affect weight has on linemen in football in a news article entitled “Fat vs. Fit” for the Taipei Times. He states,
“Weight-training programs are essentially conducted year-round. Linemen face pressure to keep up with counterparts who are getting bigger. They also face urging coaches to gain or maintain weight… A study of more than 3,600 high school linemen in Iowa, published in January in The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 45 percent were overweight and 9 percent were classified with severe adult obesity.” (Longman)
I quickly became best friends with all of the other linemen on the team, and we would have traditional after-practice dinners together. Our eating habits included All-You-Can-Eat Ribs at RibCrib, Bottomless fry nights at Red Robin, Never-Ending Buffet at CiCi’s pizza, and Coney eating contests at the Coney Islander. Bourdain and I can closely relate to eating rituals, because “for the rest of that summer, and in the summers that followed, I ate everything” (Bourdain 13). I remember one day in the locker room, my friend challenged me to a Krispy Kreme doughnut-eating contest. Ultimately, I won hands down by consuming an insurmountable 12 doughnuts before a football practice, however it ended with a horrific stomachache to follow. The coaches were proud to see us putting on weight because that is what was expected of football players. This is exactly how Longman described coaches in his article. If we were seeing results in our playing, and our coaches were proud of us, Pollan accurately described our eating habits if no one is interfering with it. He says, “if nature is silent, what’s to stop the human omnivore from eating anything?” (Pollan 297). My parents at home always prepared healthy dinners when I got home, but when I was at school, I was free to eat as I pleased. After combining this type of eating with weight lifting and football training, I gained 30 pounds from my transition from freshman year to sophomore year of high school. I was self-conscious about myself in the summer, but due to strength and conditioning training for football, I rarely had time to go to the pool. Winter was my favorite season because I could wear baggy clothing. This meant my pseudogynecomastia (excessive fatty tissue beneath the pectoral region in males) was unapparent under the multiple layers of clothing. My first fat nickname came from a sandwich created by the Sonic Drive-In called the “Big Cheese.” It was a triple patty/cheese burger with two separate layers of bacon, and not to mention the dripping grease that followed eat bite. I was able to eat one every two days, and when a fellow lineman noticed my infatuation for it, I was instantly given the nickname. My sophomore year of high school, I got to start my first game of Varsity football as a long snapper on special teams. I was proud to conclude that the theory I held on increased eating habits were directly parallel to the amount of playing time I received in football games. After seeing these satisfying results, I continued to eat more. Entering my senior year of high school, I started offense, defense, and special teams, was Texas All-State in defense, and was a captain of the team. With friends and family supporting me throughout my entire high school career, our team went on to win the championship undefeated. At this moment in time, I weighed in at 230lbs. After all of the seasons I had dedicated to training, I was exceedingly proud of my athletic accomplishments, but was insecure and lacked the much-needed self-esteem.
Nearing the end of high school, I faced reality, took notice to the fact that I was growing more and more unhealthy, and started a diet that would ultimately change my life. The summer before college, I started researching different types of diets and fat loss methods. I searched on the Internet “diet” which displayed results varying from exercise equipment to fat loss supplements all the way to the Akin’s Diet. I knew that my greatest strengths in life were my determination and willpower, so I went on the toughest looking diet I could find, and integrated daily cardiovascular running with it. That night, I ate my first dinner without a second helping and placed my plate into the sink smiling knowing at that moment that I was about to change my entire life. I was now on the Ketosis Diet. Also commonly known as the Akin’s Diet, Ketosis occurs when glucose in the liver are diminished in an account of decreased insulin levels usually seen in people who have skipped a meal. However, as this continues and the liver’s glycogen is reduced to nothing, the pancreas begins to use free fatty acids (ketone bodies) for energy, ultimately aiding in fat loss. In order to complete this complex task, all I needed to do was deplete my body of its carbohydrates. I would have a well-rounded breakfast with 4-5 eggs mixed with meat and a hefty glass of milk. For lunch, I had burgers, steak, chicken, or any type of meat, but always without the bun. However, dinner did not exist anymore. I replaced it with a protein shake. I was taking in around 1500 calories per day, which is roughly equal to that of ½ a single meal during the previous football season. I have a very impatient personality and demanded immediate results, so I then added weight loss supplements to my daily diet. I began taking Ephedrine, a metabolism boosting and appetite-suppressing drug. Without proper research of the drug, I was unaware that the NCAA had banned this drug in athletics due to heart failure and malnutrition. I started to run everyday ranging from 30 minutes to an hour and a half and my weight began to drop exponentially. Three months later, after not a day of rest from Ketosis, I looked at myself in the mirror. I had dropped 50 pounds. I was approached by a teacher that week and was called into her office where I had the talk that most teenage girls fear the most. I was asked if I had an eating disorder. I laughed out loud, assured my teachers that I was going about my diet in the healthiest way possible, and even pulled out a protein bar I had kept in my backpack to prove my point. While I may have been eating the way the diet instructed me to do, the conversation opened my eyes to the fact that I was losing too much weight and in too little amount of time. Even with the self-research I had conducted, I finally understood that the diet I was on had proved to be excessively effective. An alteration in my diet would deem safer and more efficient, especially if I wanted to remain healthy.
The summer before my first year of college, I got a job at a fitness gym where I learned the true meaning of a healthy diet. I talked with several trainer employees about my current Ketosis diet, which they quickly ridiculed. They explained to me the importance carbohydrates have for long-term energy, fatty acids for short-term energy, and protein for muscle growth. I scheduled a session with the registered dietician and he analyzed a weekly sample of my food intake. He was disgusted. My carbohydrate numbers were too low and I was dropping weight so fast that my body was beginning to resort to consuming the muscle I had worked years in the weight room for. He tested my resting metabolic rate and determined that I should be taking in a minimum of 2500 calories per day. He then explained to me the diet that would (again) change my life, and that I rely on to this very day. The 2:2:1 diet, commonly used by bodybuilders, consists of four to five meals a day, each at a 2:2:1 proportion of protein to carbohydrates to fat, respectively. All fried foods, high sugar, complex carbohydrates, and desserts were now my enemy. Anything that had the 2:2:1 ratio became my favorite food. The best example of this would be the omelet I eat every morning. It consists of six eggs (half with the yolk), meat, fat free cheese, skim milk, and two pieces of wheat bread. For lunch I would eat a grilled chicken sandwich, followed by a protein shake with fruit two to three hours subsequently. Dinner was always either red meat, grilled bar-b-q chicken, or grilled fish, and always with a simple carbohydrate. As Pollan would diagnose, I became a neophiliac, or “took comfort in the familiar” (Pollan 295). I never minded the uniformity, for I knew this what was best for my nutrition. June 23rd of 2006 was the happiest day of my life. I was preparing to take a shower, turned towards the mirror, and saw something I had never seen before in my life. I had for the first time in my life seen my abdominal muscles. After several tests, I became a personal trainer and gained even more knowledge about different diets and nutritional values. I was then able to discuss and debate openly with the other certified trainers about logical, wholesome, and beneficial diets, but also about the dangers of fat loss supplements. It was at this point in my life that I realized the potential I had with helping others in a health club with nutrition as the foremost concern, and using myself as a walking example. I knew that since I had the ability to change my body dramatically, I thrived to spread that passion and wellbeing to others in need, and this time in the healthiest way possible. As that summer ended, I weighed in at 180 pounds, and carried 6.9% body fat. Since the beginning of that summer, I have not changed body weight or fat percent, and have the utmost self-respect, confidence, and reassurance in myself. This is not because of my weight, but because I accomplished a feat that, in the beginning, appeared to be impossible.
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