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Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

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Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#101

Post by ctdonath »

adeaver wrote: post #87
ctdonath wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If surviving on that arrangement doesn't work, change the arrangement. Move somewhere with a cheaper standard of living. Reduce expenses to where one spouse can stay home. Find another job closer. Unplug the TV already. Seriously. Yes, if you want it badly enough you'll do it. I moved 1000 miles, changed jobs twice, worked 2 jobs at once for years, have a family to care for, cut the commute from 2 hours to 15 minutes…

I'm not sure if you are just naive or intentionally contrary. Please, explain to me how a family that can barely afford rent and meals can move 1000 miles away and find work. It's not really that easy to find a new job in a town you've never been to. Or a couple in which one is handicapped or seriously ill can 'change the arrangement' You made your situation better. Congratulations. I mean that. But assuming everyone…

Intentionally contrary, as I see a glaring over-application of "poor" and "can't".

This country was founded on people having very little walking very long distances to build homesteads from nothing.

I'll agree there are some people who truly can't make the changes I indicated; we have a social safety net for them, and I do put in a weekly effort to help them. Most who whine "I can't" can, they just won't.

Obviously there are exceptions, and a short aphorism of "you'll do it if you want it bad enough" is not expected to have encyclopedic thoroughness covering those few genuine cases who really, truly, can't; it's directed at the other 99.99% whose only real barriers to success is themselves.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#102

Post by jff »

itsybitsycoder wrote: post #97
king_jester wrote: post #29

Eating cheaply is really difficult to do for the folks with the least amount of money to spend on food, as working is counter to the things that make eating cheaper: cooking your own meals, shopping or growing cheaper foodstuffs, having appliances to store items for longer periods or cook dried items, being able to plan meals out in advance, etc. That is the reason why convenience foods are popular. A lot of advice s…

Also, and this is true for many things, the poor are less capable of spending more money now to save money over the long term. E.g., if a pair of boots that will last 3 years is $150 and a pair of boots that will last 6 months is $30, the $150 pair of boots is a better deal because you'd have to buy $180 dollars worth of cheap boots to last 3 years. But if you only have $50 available to spend and you need new boots n…

Oh hi, fellow Discworld fan.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#103

Post by ctdonath »

itsybitsycoder wrote: post #96
ctdonath wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of advice stories about eating cheaply often fail to achieve that goal because it is hard to do and requires a lot of effort. This is a recurring sentiment which speaks volumes about our culture. Complaints of "hard" and "a lot of effort" belies how incredibly rich this society is, that the notion of just making pasta or growing vegetables is somehow prohibitively difficult - not because it's inherently so hard…

I think as software developers, many of us are very disconnected with the lives of the very poor in our society. There are people out there working multiple full time jobs, or working full-time while raising young kids by themselves. It boggles my mind that you would consider these people lazy because they're dead on their feet when they arrive home... probably even software developers can think of days when they're…

I know it boggles your mind. I too shared the mindset susceptible to "I can't". Amazing how being dead for a few hours can change your perspective on such things.

It must be done. Do it. Eradicate "I can't" from your vocabulary. Cut out all superfluous activity & costs. Unless you're in fact passing out onto the floor, you have the energy and time to do it. Yes, every day. I'm so far past tired and overwhelmed that they're just not excuses any more - it all still needs doing, and the alternative is being where I've been and I'm not keen on going back there.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#105

Post by jff »

fghh45sdfhr3 wrote: post #44
marknutter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So these people have no free time whatsoever?

On weekdays? Long job, long commute, children, sleep - yes, it is easy to have pretty much no free time for most of the week.

The total time it takes to start the rice cooker, slice a chicken breast (it can even be frozen, just slice it small), and give the chicken a quick fry in my cast iron pan (which I then rinse out and wipe clean, 10 seconds cleanup) is probably less time than you'll spend sitting in the drivethrough of McDonalds.

While you're waiting for the rice to cook, you can spend some time with your kids or watch the expensive cable service every "too poor to cook" person I've ever know has had.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#106

Post by itsybitsycoder »

Shorel wrote: post #55
DanBC wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention some things that are under debate. Those things are not part of "healthy" eating, they are important for "optimal" eating. Fat is not returning with a vengeance. Common sense advice has not changed particularly much over the past twenty years. There are some things - dietary cholesterol isn't seen as evil (but the foods it's in are). But other stuff - replacing fat for sugar (replacing a real salad dressi…

You should see the weight loss and muscle gain pictures in the keto forums to really understand why (only some kinds of) fat is returning with a vengeance. With these sustainable results, it's not going back. Now traditional dietitians seem quite outdated and retrograde (because of their results) in comparison.

Keto is the first weight-loss diet I've ever been on where I'm not constantly hungry. It's also the first diet where I've lost 15lb in the first three weeks, without actually trying that hard. (Clearly some water weight in there, but still.) Fancy coffees every morning and steak every night, if I want.

I don't know that this is an issue of HCLF vs LCHF diets as much as the previous dominance of HCLF diets though. I'm not a biologist/nutritionist at all, but it seems like HCLF and balanced diets work for some people, otherwise we'd all be obese or constantly hungry. But they definitely never worked for me. We already know that people's bodies differ in how well they process different foods (allergies, Celiac, alcohol flush, etc), so I wouldn't find it too surprising if different people had different ideal macro ratios.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#107

Post by webbastard »

adeaver wrote: post #87
ctdonath wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If surviving on that arrangement doesn't work, change the arrangement. Move somewhere with a cheaper standard of living. Reduce expenses to where one spouse can stay home. Find another job closer. Unplug the TV already. Seriously. Yes, if you want it badly enough you'll do it. I moved 1000 miles, changed jobs twice, worked 2 jobs at once for years, have a family to care for, cut the commute from 2 hours to 15 minutes…

I'm not sure if you are just naive or intentionally contrary. Please, explain to me how a family that can barely afford rent and meals can move 1000 miles away and find work. It's not really that easy to find a new job in a town you've never been to. Or a couple in which one is handicapped or seriously ill can 'change the arrangement' You made your situation better. Congratulations. I mean that. But assuming everyone…

Borrow money from a loan shark, scout a new city alone. This is an option if you're motivated enough.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#108

Post by aghast »

gbog wrote: post #75

Just reading Antifragile, and stumble on this seemingly immortal shitcliché: one need to eat "At least 55 grams of protein per day", "Around 50% of food energy from carbohydrate". I do not even want to know what a carbothing is. This is plain proved horseshit. Our stomach has been prepared by Mother Evolution to handle a wide range of variation in the feed. And the risk of stomach boredom is very real. So the real pr…

On the one hand, you have a point, and it's really tempting to give into this sort of ethos, as an approach to diet and nutrition, but at some point it becomes important to acknowledge that a very real and practical biology reigns over your internal organic processes. These processes can be measured and understood at a chemical level.

We don't understand them perfectly, and many people (maybe more than half the world?) don't actually measure out their hunger in grams and milliliters, or understand the fundamental building blocks of metabolism at the chemical level, and get buy just fine, purely trusting their guts.

One size doesn't fit all, and sometimes cravings are correct, but not all the time. Addictive substances and microbes show us that "what you want" isn't always "what you need."

Opiates have been around for centuries, and demonstrate that just because you might feel a hunger for something and find it satisfying doesn't mean it's good for you. You're body's understanding of the world around it can be distorted. Sometimes the things that distort it's intuition are odorless and colorless. Natural food does not come with labels (and even labels can be wrong), and if you're uncertain of the purity of the water you boil your meat in, well, maybe there could be something in it that is sapping and impurifying your precious bodily fluids.

Meanwhile, it might be counter-intuitive that bread mold can ward off infection, but then again we have penicillin which has proven to be a powerful and valuable anti-biotic.

So, feel free to operate on faith and emotion, but going through life with your blinders on, you might be caught off guard by things that you could have avoided if you hadn't chosen to ignore them.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#109

Post by jff »

ryeguy wrote: post #99
DanBC wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention some things that are under debate. Those things are not part of "healthy" eating, they are important for "optimal" eating. Fat is not returning with a vengeance. Common sense advice has not changed particularly much over the past twenty years. There are some things - dietary cholesterol isn't seen as evil (but the foods it's in are). But other stuff - replacing fat for sugar (replacing a real salad dressi…

Fat is "coming back" in the sense that it is no longer mistakenly being viewed as evil. It seems carbs have taken that place, but at least that is kinda true: http://examine.com/faq/are-there-health-benefits-of-a-low-ca... . Granted, people overdo the 'carbs are evil' thing.

The best reason to avoid carbohydrate-rich foods is exactly the reason they figure so heavily in the diets of many nations. Rice, bread, these things pack a ton of calories. This is not great for a computer programmer who sits on ass all day, converting the carbohydrate calories to weight, but goddamn if rice isn't a cheap way to power yourself when you're on a budget.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#110

Post by ctdonath »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #94
MarkMc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a book called Rework [1]: "When you want something bad enough, you make the time - regardless of your other obligations. The truth is most people just don't want it bad enough. Then they protect their ego with the excuse of time." I think virtually everyone in the UK has the means to eat healthy if they really want to. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Rework-Jason-Fried/dp/0307463745

"I think virtually everyone in the UK has the means to eat healthy if they really want to." For too many people this is simply not true. People living in poverty face a number of challenges to eating healthily. For example: - Cost. Fresh healthy food is becoming more costly due to exchange rate commodity price fluctuations. See [1][2]. - Access. If there are no shops nearby that sell fresh food (and this is becoming…

Cost: you're setting the standard of "fresh healthy" too high. I've got a can of assorted seeds, enough to sow an acre of all the veggies you need - $40, get busy. Assorted frozen veggies (flash-frozen minutes after picking, so yes they're fresh) are $1/pound; canned works too, and actual fresh is also available if you look with care.

Access: you can arrange transport a couple times a month to someplace selling healthy/cheap/durable food. If you truly are in a "food desert" (a wildly over-applied term), do what you would do if in a real desert: MOVE.

Fuel: canned & dried foods don't need refrigeration. Scrap wood burns. Yes I cook over a scrap fire on occasion. Electricity is cheap for a $4 crock-pot.

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