Stupidity comes in packs of eight now

The Daily Fabrication has acquired a list of the eight most ridiculous food-related gibberings of health ‘experts’. Follow them at your peril.

Let’s dissect them from the top:

1) Not planning your meals.

How can you not ‘plan’ a meal? If it’s in your fridge or cupboard then you planned to eat it, didn’t you? Does anyone buy food as fridge interior decoration? Okay, I know that’s what broccoli is for but I don’t buy that stuff. If I could preserve it forever I could use it as trees for a model railway but it has no other use.

I plan my meals depending on what I have available or whatever takes my fancy in the shop on the way home. Or on whatever I might get handed for free if I’m there when Local Shop does the date-expiry-checks,

As it’s payday on Friday and I have a little to spare, what took my fancy tonight was a lump of rump steak with a bottle of cut-price Aberlour for dessert. I already had frozen chips at home, also onions, mushrooms and tomatoes. They were there because they were all part of the plan. My plan. The one where I get to eat them all.

There is also a microwave chicken tikka masala in the fridge. I plan to eat that too. Just… not today.

Apparently not planning a meal results in you eating unhealthy food. Unhealthy food is food that has gone off. Food that has not gone off is not unhealthy. Too much of any kind of food is unhealthy. Even water.

 

2) Eating healthily during the week but taking the weekends ‘off’.

I am not currently eating healthily during the week. The problem with my diet is that there’s not enough food in it – which is why I’ve lost over half a stone since Christmas. That’s because of seven days a week working and not taking in enough calories to cover it. Actually, I don’t mind. I could stand to lose six or seven more pounds before getting into ‘gaunt’. Even then, a skeletal appearance, a black uniform… I could work with that. I’d just need a scythe.

This ‘weekend food binge’ is only a problem if you are overweight and actively trying to lose weight. If you are not trying to lose weight it matters not one jot. You’ll know if you are eating too much. Overeating makes your belt shrink. I have Expertly Said and Studiously Shown this to be true.

 

3) Having a glass of wine before bedtime.

Ridiculous. Unless you are as old as me in which case a high-volume drink of anything before bedtime means getting up again halfway through the night. In which case, whisky is a far better bet. Gives you sellable nightmares too 😉

It’s claimed to be bad because a glass of wine contains 160 calories which, in the human metabolic scheme of things, is like blowing petrol fumes into your car’s tank and hoping it’ll last you the week. The average human needs around 2000 calories a day to stay alive at a desk job. My job burns more fuel. I can do an 8-hour shift and not sit down even once. At 2000 calories I lose weight fast. What I chiefly need is loads of fat in my diet… so I fried that rump steak in olive oil and then let the mushrooms soak up the oil.

Calories do not ‘add up over time’. You’ll burn off much more than a glass of wine’s worth while you’re asleep.

It’s like the Climatologist argument that when we put CO2 into the atmosphere, it stays there forever. It does not. Plants and algae and even some bacteria eat it up. Likewise, calories do not stay in you forever. By this argument, you could buy a new car, fill the tank once and that would be it for the next ten years.

 

4) Not drinking enough water.

Oh for… Try this test. Fill a glass with water. Start drinking. If you down the glass in one go, you were thirsty (or in my case, hungover). If you take a sip and pour the rest down the sink, you were not thirsty. That is how real life works. It’s easy if you just ignore the cretins trying to run yours for you.

You are told that you must drink two litres of water a day. The people who tell you this are idiots. The human body is somewhere above 80% water – so was that steak I had tonight. That glass of wine before bedtime is 85-90% water. If you eat lettuce it’s almost all water: basically it’s wet cellulose. That’s why rabbits have to eat their own shit. They don’t get enough nutrients from just one pass, they need to let their gut bacteria ferment some goodness into it and then they eat it again.

Same for cows, sheep, goats… although they have a better plan than shit-eating. They have a big bag called a rumen where the bacteria produce all they need from a lousy food like grass and then they digest the bacteria. Which are also mostly water.

Everything you eat is mostly water. Everything you drink is even more mostly water. Even this Aberlour here is 60% water. If you need two litres today, you have already eaten and drunk most of it anyway. If you do a heavy-lifting job in a hot summer you will need more water -but you will also need salt. Sweat loses water and also salt. Pile in the water and forget the salt and the world loses another gullible idiot. Yeah, okay, no biggie.

 

5) Skipping meals when you know you are going to indulge.

This one was declared by someone who never gets invited anywhere and it’s not hard to see why. They believe that if you skip one meal you might overeat at the next one. If you skip one meal and eat two at the next one, you take in exactly the same amount for the day.

On the very rare occasions I visit a restaurant I am well aware it’s going to cost some money. Far more than making the same meal at home. I’m not just paying for the food, I’m paying someone else to cook it, someone else to bring it to me and someone else to clear up afterwards. It’ll be expensive. Therefore I will be sure to eat all of it. Whether I am hungry or not.

If you don’t turn up hungry but feel obliged to complete the feast because of the cost, then you’ll get fat. But only if you do that often. Few do.

I suspect the originator of that particular piece of bar-room wisdom is one who does. And who is now a universally shunned fat bore in a string vest with a face like last week’s party balloon.

Not a role model I’d want to follow.

 

6) Eating lunch at your desk

Eating while sitting in a chair at your desk will make you all flabby and give you Cholesterol! – whereas eating while sitting at a chair at a dining table will make you svelte and athletic. See the difference? Of course not. There isn’t one.

It’s what you do when you are not sitting and eating that matters. If your job involves sitting at a desk all day you have two options. Reduce your calorie intake or go for a walk at lunchtime.

There used to be a TV ad that said ‘walking a mile uses the same calories as running a mile’ and people were amazed because people are, on the whole, rather dim. If you run a mile you burn calories faster but you complete the mile in seven or eight minutes. Unless you are an Olympic athlete in which case it would be about four. If you walk a mile you burn calories slower but the mile takes 15-20 minutes. The total calories burned are clearly the same. Even if you use a Zimmer frame and take three hours, the total calories are still the same. You can have a glass of wine at the end of the mile to begin the refuelling.

 

7) Overeating on the days you work out.

Well that’s easy. I avoid overeating on the days I work out buy having no days when I work out. No need. I get more exercise at work than the muscle lumps get at the gym and I get paid to go there. In your steroid-twisted face, gym members.

Suppose you have a car (yes again) and you drive it a little bit each day, to work and back and it uses a little bit of fuel every day. Then you drive it 500 miles one day and complain that it needs more fuel than usual  Are you an idiot? You decide.

 

8) Adding salt to everything.

‘A teaspoon of salt is your entire daily allowance all at once!’

Who adds salt by the teapoon? That applies to sugar in tea. A teaspoon of salt is one hell of a lot of saltiness. Real people in the real world add a sprinkle now and then and if we eat too much salt, guess what? We get thirsty and drink more water. The balance is the thing. Your body knows this without using consciousness at all. These idiot drones tell you these things without using it either.

 

I do not accept anyone else’s declaration of my ‘daily allowance’ of anything. I am neither Cyberman nor Borg. I am me and I am not you. You want to believe yourself superior? Let’s discuss it over a drink. I will still be coherent while you go ‘Blalbla snickety foomwhat’ and I will leave you convinced of something I haven’t even thought of yet.

There will be many who believe this shite. Take comfort in the certainty that they won’t be bothering the rest of us for too long.