CRON-o-Meter and eating out

Michael asks about using diary tools like CRON-o-Meter when you eat out. (And, yes, Michael, your comments show up in my email). Tools like CRON-o-Meter are just estimates. They are based on a USDA database that took samples of food. One tomato is not exactly like another - so the calories are just and estimate. Just because it says that 100 grams of the tomato they sample were 18 calories does not mean that your tomato is not sweeter. It might have 24 calories in it. Don't even imagine that they are accurate to the single digit range.

It is not meaningful, in general, to track calories for a single day. After all, you might eat twice as many the day before and the day after - and not be doing calories restriction at all. If you weight things at home a lot, you will get pretty good at estimating weight based on size. Entering data day after day, the amounts will get more and more accurate on average, since some days you will overestimate and some days you will underestimate.

But, what about eating out? If you eat out at a chain that posts nutrition data, then you can enter data more easily. But, even so, you will need to estimate ingredients for a dish. I often go on the web and search on " recipe" - like "enchilada recipe". This typically gives you a list of recipes for the thing you ate. I am a veteran recipe reader and can figure out which one matches most closely to what I actually ate. I then wil enter the reciple into to tool and can use it after that. Assuming you have entries or recipes for all the food, now you have to estimate the weight. One useful rule of thumb is that 100g is the size of your hand (without fingers). The more you estimate, the better you will get at it and the more your overestimates will cancel out the underestimates.

Fifteen Pounds of Organic "Slicing" Tomatoes

I ordered 15 lbs. of tomatoes from a CSA farm this week. I am not a member, though I would like to be. But, they had an excess of tomatoes and were selling them for $25 for 15 lbs. I picked them up yesterday - and we've eaten 2 lbs already. Any ideas on what to do with them, besides give some of them away? So far, I've made a big bowl of pico de gallo (raw salsa basically), eaten 2 of them sliced with a sprinkle of pepper, and plan to make a middle eastern cucumber/tomato salad (fattoush). They won't make good sauce - they are not sauce tomatoes. I am also planning to eat them as a salad with low fat dressing.

All 15 lbs of them is only 1260 calories - not that you could eat them in a day. Two pounds is certainly more reasonable for a day's intake. That would be 162 calories and 5.7 time the RDA for A, and 4.5 times the RDA for C.

While I am asking questions - does anyone have a favorite brand of olive oil? I bought some at World Market a couple of months ago that tastes funny to me now - like it has oxidized a bit. I just can't use it any more. Yesterday, I bought some imported Italian brand at the grocery store to replace it and it was horribly bitter. I am taking it back. My favorite for some time has been Whole Foods 365 brand. That's what I plan to buy now, unless someone has a better suggestion. I like my olive oil to be nutty and fruity, so it can be flavorful - but certainly not bitter. We cook exclusively with olive oil, so it's pretty important that it be good.

900 Calories - Is that too low?

This seems to be an endless debate. People do have different metabolisms. We all have more or less muscle, which costs a lot of calories to maintain. As you age, your caloric requirements go down. Differences in activity levels can really affect your requirements.

Liza May, a fabulous nutritionist, sets her goal at 800 and swears that's what she eats pretty faithfully. She runs and she is very lean. So, I believe an adult woman can live on 800 calories and be healthy. If I eat 900, I will lose weight, so I need more than that - something around 1200 keeps me at my current weight.

But, what about 1200 as a goal? If I set my goal at 1200, then I will gain weight. As the commenter says, what about eating out, celebrations and travel? If, on your good days you eat 1200, then when you mess up and eat 1800 once a week, your average is actually 1300. Only people who never eat other people's food can afford to set their goal to the actual calorie level that maintains their weight. So, I set my goal at 1000. This is like setting your watch ahead 5 minutes so you are on time more often. And, if I want to actually lose weight, I cannot eat 1200 calories a day. I have to actually eat 1000 or my weight does not budge.

What to do about those days that you blow past your goal? One effective thing to do is to try to make up for it the next day and look at your goal as a 2 day average. If you know you are going out with a group to a restaurant and don't want to eat "weird", then make that your only meal of the day. Just eat a salad the rest of the day - or some steamed vegetables.

Positive and Negative Freedom

You readers are overdue for one of my philosophical posts. So, here's a fairly heavy one. One of the blogs I follow is The Oil Drum. While a lot of the posts are only for peak oil nerds, there is often a nugget there that provides a perspective on things that is truly unusual - and provocative. Today, there is just such an interesting post on positive and negative freedom. Read the post. I will not summarize it, so you will just have to read it.

The big ideas that drive policy at any point in time are often found to be shockingly faulty later on. The last 20 years have their share. This points out one of them. Our toolbox is sorely lacking in public fixes right now. Too many people believe that government is always bad and that no group solution is ever possible. We are heading for some big disasters if we don't get our collective act together, I am afraid. They are picking us off individually - those collectives know as "business", who continually advertise us into a consumer frenzy. We are getting fat, unhealthy, overworked and overextended as a result. If all of us don't band together and fight back, we are simply prey. This applies to CR, food, diet and health, as well as so many other aspects of our lives.

The Oil Drum is focused on peak oil and a looming crisis in energy. We're already past cheap oil. Oil gets more and more expensive every day to produce. The technology to replace it all takes oil to build it. Our food system is totally dependent on oil When oil goes back up to $150 or even $200 a barrel, the system will start to break down. My lifetime has seen the peak of wealth created by cheap energy. We are almost done with squandering it.

It's interesting to read the discussion of positive and negative freedom. It's an old concept, apparently - though one I have never heard of. Have you? I guess positive freedom has been "out" for a while, so these ideas would not have been taught in universities or discussed. It's sad to me to see the decline in availability of positive freedoms over the last 30 years. For example, it's so much more difficult to pay for college now. People have to work such long hours to pay for all their crap. But then, on the other hand, the internet has created a whole new class of positive freedoms - witness this blog post, a perfect example. The internet's role in the current Iran crisis is a wonderful example of how positive freedom can be increased.

While I can see the value of negative freedom, I have been painfully aware that we have increasingly devalued positive freedom. It's led us into a dark place that will be hard to escape from. Think about it - any of you who believe that collective action can never be a force for good and that individuals are all that matter. Without collective action, we will run out our oil supply in 10 or 20 years - without any alternatives in place. Energy will be too expensive at that point to develop them. The marketplace will not be able to come to our rescue - other than the marketplace for horses and bicycles and chickens in your yard. (That actually doesn't sound that bad, does it?)

Our Faulty Mental Equipment

Here's an interesting science news item on some studies that show people are terrible at estimation - including calorie content. This is why everyone who does CR needs a scale and a food diary - at least until you get better at estimation. I check my estimation capability off and on - try to guess how much an item weighs and it's calorie level. After 9 years of CR (yes, it is almost 9 years now!), I am quite good at this. But, if you have not done it for several month, you will be shocked at how bad you are at it - at least to start.

Squirrel wars

We have two kinds of squirrels here - the typical reddish fox squirrels you see all over the Eastern US and rock squirrels, commonly found in the Southwest. Austin is in an environmental boundary zone, so we have both western and eastern US flora and fauna. The fox squirrels are a minor nuisance, raiding our bird feeder and peeing on the deck. I can actually put up with them. But, apparently, the rock squirrels are a serious agricultural pest. They have eaten a lot of our plants and dig holes everywhere in our rock garden. We finally just got tired of them and purchased a humane live trap, so we could trap them and relocate them. There are lots of non-agricultural nature preserve areas to the west of us, far enough away the squirrels won't come back (we hope). So far, we have relocated 3 rock squirrels and 5 fox squirrels. We've been moving the fox squirrels, too, since they are also a bit of a pest. As far as we know, we are down to 2 more rock squirrels - young ones born early this spring, just reaching adulthood.

It's fun to try to figure out how to outsmart them. If I put seeds on the ground inside the wire trap, they will dig under it to get the seeds without going in. So far, the 2 remaining rock squirrels have managed to get sunflower seeds without springing the trap door.

Meanwhile, all the birds seem to know the fox squirrels are gone and no longer there to compete with them for the feeder. There is a party atmosphere to their feeding. The titmice come up the window if I don't have the feeder out and make a cheecheechee noise - telling me to put it out. They are pretty bossy.

Once the squirrels are all moved out, we'll see how long our squirrel-free status lasts. I bet not long - at least for the fox squirrels.

Avocados and Watermelon and Other Produce Musings

Two things that are cheaper and much better here in Austin are avocados and watermelon. People buy lots of both here, so they are always fresh. During the summer, they sell little avocados for $.44 and watermelons are often $4 - big seedless ones, too. The cheap avocados are perfectly ripe and tasty. The watermelons are sweeter and crisper than any that I got in Virginia. The last two years, the peach crop was devastated here in Central Texas. This year it was a freeze, last year the drought. Supposedly, 98% of the local crop was killed this year by a late freeze. Otherwise, Texas peaches can be very good and inexpensive. My husband is longing for those delicious Pennsylvania peaches we used to get at the farmer's market in Falls Church. The tasteless ones from California are not worth buying. Lots of blackberries here, though, and the blackberries did fine in the freeze.

I am sure people in the mid-Atlantic region would argue with me about corn. They love their white corn there. I did not care for it at all. I greatly prefer Texas yellow sweet corn. The yellow corn back East was not as good, I must admit. If you come to Texas from the East, try the yellow. It's good. There is no white corn here.

The sun is so strong here that vegetable gardens are best planted for spring and fall - not for summer. People actually put 40% shade cloth over tomato plants for June-August to try to keep them alive. Our tomatoes are doing well under our deck - totally in the shade except for the morning and evening. We planted them late - in April - on a northern Virginia timetable, not an Austin one. We have some small tomatoes on them now - hopefully we will get some to eat.

CRON-o-Meter

I've used CRON-o-Meter off and on lately. Now that I am trying to get back to using a diary every day, I've used it 4 days in a row. I must say, Aaron and his several helpers have done a very nice job with the tool. I miss my "magical score" number for each food, but otherwise it is just as good or better than the tool I built for myself. In case you don't know what I mean by the "magical score", here's what it is. My tool has a main page for each day that shows a line for each food. You can click on the food and it will give you detail, but normally you would not do that. What you see for each food is the nutritional score - the magical number - and a summary percent of your nutritional targets that each food contributes for the day. There is a percent for calories, protein, carbs, fat, B vitamins, minerals, and antioxidant vitamins (A,C,E). The nutritional score is the average percent of nutrients divided by the percent of calories. So something that provides 25% of calories and 25% on average of the nutrients that you want (not saturated fat, for instance), gets a score of 1.o. This makes it clear which foods are helping you with CR, and which are hurting you. CRON-o-Meter is not bad for this either, though. As you click on each food in your list, you get a nice visual that shows a bar for each category of nutrient. The detail is on other tabs. This is really pretty equivalent, just different. The biggest difference is that you can see the percents for each food all at once on a single screen without clicking through each of them.

I am not eating that differently than I have been while I was off my diary habit - though I am sure I am eating a bit less. I find that I come out close to Zone ratios of 30-40-30 for protein, carbs and fat without even trying. It's a long habit for me, eating Zone. I just mix and match the foods subconsciously now. I also seem to come out close to my targets every day for protein - vitamins and minerals as well. Vitamin A is always 300%+ every day. I just eat a lot of foods with Vitamin A - carrots and bell peppers especially. So, I don't need the diary for nutrition. I guess I will get good nutrition the rest of my life. It's something I have just learned to do so well, it is second nature now.

There are still many, many foods I will say that I just don't eat - gak foods. We've been getting "butter" croissants at the grocery store for the last year off and on. My mother gets them and I occasionally buy them for her. My husband and grandson will eat them some. I have eaten maybe 15 of them over the year. I love them, but they just don't fit in my calorie budget. I finally looked at the ingredients and nutritional label on them. Before I had just glanced at the calories - 100 per small croissant. This is a level I am willing to indulge in on an occasional basis. However, on closer reading, the croissants get 90% of their calories from fat, and the fat is not butter at all, but the dreaded partially hyrdogenated vegetable oil. 1 gram of transfat per croissant. Gasp!! My husband won't eat them now, either. They will not sneak into my kitchen easily any more, though I am sure my mother will buy them occasionally. It's hard to argue with someone 82, with heart failure, that they need to watch what they eat, so they will live longer. That argument just does not make sense to her. But, for me, it makes perfect sense. I would like to be a lot healthier than she is at 82 and be looking forward to at least 10 more years. I would like to think I have 40 years left at a minumum. Worth watching what you eat for that.