paleo diet. start here:
Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
31–40 of 168 posts
Re: Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
#32When I was about 10 until the time I was about 15 or 16 I would have 2 big cups of chocolate milk with extra sugar. I woke up one morning and decided I couldn't continue doing that or I would have some serious health issues down the road. The next morning I stopped drinking my milk that way, every couple of days I would cheat and have 1 glass, but then I would feel guilty and stop again. I'm 19 now and I drink one glass of 1% milk every breakfast, work out 3 times a week and I stick to a healthy diet that fits my goals.
Perhaps what you need is a lifestyle change and a new way of thinking about those cravings. I firmly believe in the saying "healthy body, healthy mind", and that shy's me away from anything unhealthy.
Of course I'm no saint so I choose 1 cheat day a week and I eat as much junk food as possible, after the day's over I don't want to look or eat any junk food until the next cheat day.
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I should also mention that at around 16 I became very interested in fitness and nutrition so I spent most hours reading up on it. It made me more aware that our bodies are just really REALLY beautiful machines, in order for it to run at full throttle you want to feed it the proper nutrients or else it will just chug a long.
Re: Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
#33Buy organic chips. Figure out WHY you are craving specific things and address that underlying issue. Some examples: For me, drinking lots more sodas at work is usually due to an allergic reaction to something at work that day. I have generally gotten myself healthier and generally consume less caffeine because of it, which is something chocolate and soda have in common. A craving for chips can be due to a craving for…
> A good quality sea salt Is there often a difference between various sources of NaCl? ;)
You don't exactly get pure substances in the world. Soo, very much so, there are differences. Get a couple sorts of salt. Dead sea, Mediterranean, and the generic stuff, and you can certainly tell. Whether or not they have health benefits...
Re: Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
#34I've always eaten reasonably well (comes from having grown up on a subsistence farm), so I have never radically changed my own diet, but I have a few (untested) thoughts:
1. Get some food culture. It is easier to make good decisions when they are made in a larger context than "nachos bad vs. carrots good". Learn something about: where food comes from, diet and health (particularly in America: I'm assuming you're American), traditional food cultures, basics of cooking. For me this has meant reading the likes of Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan, learning to cook some French, Italian and Asian dishes, lots of cookbooks, Alice Waters, Julia Child and other chefs, reading about diet/health studies like The China Study and the Nurses' Health Study, getting myself out to the local farmer's market, but those are by no means the only options.
2. Practice what I like to call "meta-discipline". It is hard to control yourself when you're at home with some junk food. It is easy to control yourself when you're shopping at the grocery store. So don't buy junk and don't have it at home. Before you go shopping, be thoughtful about what you want to buy/eat, make a shopping list, and stick to it. (Usually I think of this in the context of work: it is easy to goof off at home. It is easy to walk to the library. It is hard not to work when you're at the library with a stack of math books.)
3. The biggest improvement to my diet has come from cooking more. Mostly, this happened because I moved from a big city with a bunch of awesome restaurants to a little town with no good ones. I wish I had enacted the change sooner.
Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
#35Personally I eat as much junk food as I want, with one exception: don't eat junk food when you're hungry. One piece of chocolate isn't bad but if you are hungry it's more likely that you'll want to eat a whole bar. Just make sure that you always have an alternative for when you're hungry (fruits for example).
Re: Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
#36My best tip is to equate the foodstuff to exercise equivalent. Ask yourself: How much exercise would I have to do to not gain weight by eating this junk? A chocolate bar is roughly equivalent to, say, a 30 minute jog. If you think that what you're about to eat is as bad for you as a 30 minute jog is good (or that they basically cancel each other out), it doesn't seem quite so appealing. Then if you choose the apple i…
10 minutes of jogging burns an apple.
Okay, then you've done the equivalent of 20 minutes of jogging better. You know what I mean.
Re: Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
#37Prepare your fridge like a subway's counter: many ingredients ready to be inserted into the meal.
A lot of foods that are 'junky' are at one end of a spectrum of foods, too. Nachos, as per your examples, for instance, can be over-salted round chips with 'cheese' poured over them, or they can be orders of magnitude healthier.
If you've money, then you can easily find this out by switching the shops you eat in, but if you're not going out, then as has been suggested, buy things which have only one ingredient(which makes them -the- ingredients). Fresh or Canned, doesn't matter. Construct, rather than 'cheese'+chip nachos, real cheese(try two or three different kinds of cheese, too), a bit of meat (red meat or poultry..I would not suggest fish nachos) shredded lettuce, onions, etc, etc, etc. Those nachos are rather good for you. Still nachos, likely much more delicious, likely better for you.
The ingredients to that can be prepared in large quantities,and used in many other things. Nachos can easily become tacos or burritos, and if you add some loaf bread and leave some meats out, sandwiches.
Re: Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why starbucks, what is wrong w/ coffee?
It's not the coffee, it's the gallon of milk they add to it
Three words you need to remember at Starbucks:
"Tall coffee, please"
Tastes better than any of their espresso drinks, too (though that's not difficult.)
Re: Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
#39Personally, I have to have clear, simple, and hard-edged rules when it comes to my eating diet. If I give myself any wiggle room, I find myself wiggling more and more until I'm back where I started. I've had great success cutting back on junk by following Reinhard Engels' "No S" diet. http://nosdiet.com/ No Snacks No Sweets No Seconds Except, sometimes, on "S" days (Where "S Day" is defined as "Saturday, Sunday, or s…
As a doc, glad to see some people in the community thinking right about this. This is overall pretty good advice. I would add the best snacks are nuts and cheese, or other high-fat, high-protein, low carbohydrate foods.
I like the idea of a chart widget.
I would avoid most bread, including flat breads and crackers. The occasional tortilla for a wrap is ok. I would definitely avoid rice, pasta, and potatoes. If you eat sushi, consider sashimi.
Don't ask your spouse to provide the negative feedback, ambivalent co-workers might be best.
Re: Ask HN: Food hacks for eating well?
#40Your cravings are a signal from your body that something is wrong. You need to address the cause (whatever it is) and not the effect (the cravings).
Unfortunately, the cause may be difficult to determine.
Fortunately, there is a great hack that probably addresses the cause: fruit. Lots of fruit. Always raw. Preferably on an empty stomach. Not too much variety.
Fruit is loaded with just about every nutrient your body wants, many of them difficult to get any other way. Chances are that if you're not eating enough fruit, your body needs nutrition and these needs manifest themselves in your cravings.
It works for me. I've been eating lots of fruit for years, and the only time I crave junk food is when I haven't eaten enough fruit earlier in the day. For long coding sessions, I always keep plenty of the hacker's perfect snack, bananas, on hand: the almost perfect food, self-contained, needs no refrigeration or preparation.
[Written while munching on some delicious fresh sweet watermelon. No junk food could compare to this.]