Stuff I was wrong about

Wow, where do I begin? :p I’ve been wrong about a lot in my life, but the thought that prompts this blog entry is nutrition and exercise.

Here are the two prevailing thoughts I had growing up regarding nutrition and exercise:

• Diets are inherently unhealthy. Only people with poor self-image and potential eating disorders went on diets.
• Exercising is stupid. I don’t want to fake moving stuff around (resistance exercises) or pretend to go somewhere (running, swimming, stair climbing, etc.). People should be fit by actually doing stuff.

Now, I realize how wrong I was. I was blessed as a kid (and now, to a large extent) with a good metabolism, and I loved to run around and play. As I got older, I ran around less, but due to walking everywhere I went, taking public transit, and being busy with work, I didn’t really put on weight and had a good amount of healthy muscle.

I had a lot of classmates in school (both high school and college) who seemed overly concerned with their perfectly healthy bodies, always worried that they were fat. This led me to form a false association in my head between diets and poor self-esteem, rather than forming the correct idea that a diet is simply being cognizant of what you are eating and attempting to make good decisions about food.

I sit at home, I sit in the car, then I sit at work. I’m no longer the walk-everywhere girl who had strong legs and didn’t mind walking a mile and a half or more to where I wanted to go. My metabolism has slowed down — not a whole lot yet, but it’s definitely caught me off-guard in the last few years.

As I look forward to the rest of my life, I’ve seen that I have to make active, conscious choices to get and stay healthy. I’ve read enough literature now that I know that changing my diet simply means that I’ll be giving my body better fuel to operate for years to come, not trying to starve myself for some shallow purpose. I know that exercising means that I’ll make my body stronger, so that I can live a longer, more fulfilling life.

I’ve learned some interesting things about nutrition too. I’ve learned that good fats are really important and that there isn’t just a small difference between the good and bad fats — there is a HUGE world of a difference in their roles in the body. “Good” and “bad” isn’t being used in a relative sense here, but in an absolute sense.

I’ve learned the importance of fiber to overall health, why it’s good for the heart as well as being correlated to decreased chances of various kinds of cancers.

I’ve learned what role various types of vitamins play in the body.

I’ve also learned that some of what I learned about nutrition when I was younger was waaaaay off. For instance, complex carbs are not all good; white potato is technically a complex carb, but it has almost nil nutritional value and is almost equivalent to just eating sugar. I learned that milk is not necessarily good for you and isn’t necessarily the best calcium delivery agent, despite what the dairy marketing machine will tell you. I learned that eggs are much better for you than believed during the ’90s.

I learned that when I think of the Food Pyramid, I have to keep in mind that it was produced by the United States Department of Agriculture, not a medical or health association, after much lobbying by various bodies within it.

I’ve been eating better for the last month and week, and it’s really nice. I am eating a bigger variety of vegetables in different colors, I’m eating less meat high in saturated fat, and I’m still eating pretty much everything I love, but in smaller quantities with fruits and vegetables taking up the void that would have been second helpings of meat or pasta or rice. I’ve been trying to have a piece of fruit or vegetable at every meal.

I haven’t had the mid-afternoon, post-lunch blahs all year, except once when I had a lot of rice. It’s a nice change. 🙂

The latest book I’ve read on nutrition was Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating.

I highly recommend it.