9/10/2017 0 Comments Old Diets Don't Have to Die HardI am lucky (or maybe unlucky) to have absolutely the MOST delicious heritage. I grew up in a rare cultural mix: Italian, Lebanese, and quintessential Appalachian. My grandparents alternated Sundays for cooking. When it was my maternal grandmother’s weekend, we showed up promptly at 2 p.m. to a table stacked with foods that no one could resist:
Every other Sunday was a decadent indulgence in the fine art of Italian cuisine. And true to form for an Italian, the entire visit was full of rhetoric persuading all guests to eat, and eat some more. Sure, you just ate your week’s worth of carbohydrates, but do you want an ice cream sundae? How about a can of mixed nuts? Maybe a candy bar? “No, thank you, I’m full.” “Well...here’s one just in case.” And if you didn’t know, now is the time to learn: refusing food from an Italian is the ultimate insult...in addition to that, how do you refuse an ice cream sundae that is melting in front of your eyes? Don’t forget the leftovers...even though only 8 people were committed to coming to dinner, my grandmother made enough to feed Queen Elizabeth’s court, and you know what that means: everyone goes home with something! You get a meatball! And you get a meatball! Fast forward to the following Sunday: my paternal grandmother is cooking and if you like “down-home” cooking, her house was the place to be. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob with a tub of butter on each end of the table. You know how you applied the butter to the corn? Spread that butter liberally on a piece of sliced white bread, wrap it around the corn, and give it a rub down. Delicious. And we aren’t even to dessert yet. My grandma LOVED Dairy Queen...especially Dilly Bars. She always had them in the freezer, and we kids took them as we desired. As an adult reading this blog, you might catch yourself salivating at the prospect of these meals. Maybe you feel your dieting willpower diminishing ever so slightly, thinking about the fact that you have pasta in the pantry and some thawed ground meat in the refrigerator that needs to be cooked. Now, imagine being a child and having that food already prepared and directly in front of you. If your willpower so easily wavers as an adult, who understands the consequences of eating badly, a child might as well have none at all. Add to the formula the fact that child supervision decreases as the guest count at a gathering increases, that the child comes from a household of very meager financial circumstances that do not allow for the same delectable cuisines throughout the week, and said child with no willpower gets to delight in a volume of food that is likely more than necessary. This was the situation that I faced as a kid. Every. Single. Weekend. I cannot count the amount of Sunday dinners during which I ate so much that I felt sick to my stomach afterward. And even then, I couldn’t refuse dessert. It is no surprise, then, that I weighed well over 100 pounds even in elementary school. The more pressing issue, however, is that I carried these eating habits into adulthood. As I started becoming more financially independent and doing my own grocery shopping, the scrumptious foods that I so fondly remembered from these family gatherings were inevitably those to which I gravitated. These eating habits, paired with my lack of work-life balance (as described in last week’s blog), was a recipe for the destruction of any and all nutrition. I remember sitting at lunch one afternoon with my coworkers. I was eating my usual leftover pasta from dinner the previous night. During our conversation, I commented that I’d really like to lose weight. One of the more blunt teachers in our group said, “If you're trying to lose weight, why are you eating all that pasta and bread every day?” My defenses were up immediately, so I responded with my typical excuse: “I’m Italian. I can’t give up my bread and pasta.” For years, I used that response. My predisposition toward carb-filled foods was entirely in my head. Believe it or not, an Italian CAN live without pasta and bread. In fact, I can’t tell you the last time I purchased either of those items. And yet, I’m still living and breathing (with much less effort than I’ve ever done so before). Bad eating habits developed during childhood are hard to reverse, but they CAN be. However, if you invest yourself in the old cliches that tell you when people are set in their ways, they can never change their habits, you are setting yourself up for failure. You cannot allow the circumstances of your past, dietary or otherwise, to determine how you will lead your adult life. If your goal is change, clearly what you’ve done in the past is not giving you the results for which you hope. To change yourself, you must also change your ways. As an adult, you have the ability to make those decisions, and you are also held responsible if you do not.
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August 2017
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