Ed. Note: This is a reprint (with a few changes) of an article I wrote a while back as a guest post for the guys at GetFitSlowly - Mac and J.D. are some of my principle inspirations for writing about this process, and their site is highly recommended. I’ve had several requests to repost the article here, so I am doing so today. If you enjoy it, please give it a vote via your social networking tool of choice, such as Digg or StumbleUpon. Thanks. Oh, and if you’re new here, welcome to Almost Fit. Please leave a comment and introduce yourself.

When it comes to food, exercise, and our obsession with obesity, the French appear to break all of the rules of Western thought. By and large those who live a traditional French lifestyle eat for pleasure and satisfaction, they often smoke (arguably a stereotype), and they drink regularly. Despite a diet proportionally high in things like saturated fats, the French have remarkably low rates of heart disease and obesity. Welcome to the French Paradox.

On a visit to Paris with my wife and our 7-month old son, I experienced this firsthand. When you walk the streets of Paris, you are tempted with the most sensual culinary delights imaginable: Delicately handmade pastries, beautiful chocolates, freshly baked bread from ovens that have been used for sometimes hundreds of years, full fat, unpasteurized cheeses, and fresh crepes. And that’s just what you can see in the window displays. When you see overweight people in Paris, they are almost never Parisians; in fact, in my experience it was the easiest way to identify my fellow Americans!

Those who practice a traditional French lifestyle seem to break our most commonly accepted dietary notions. They typically:

• Consume 60% more saturated fats than we do in proportion to our overall intake, primarily through dairy. This includes rich cheeses, real butter, whole milk, and yogurt.
• Do not eat low fat products or use or chemically derived sugar substitutes.
• Eat fresh bread daily that is made from refined white flour.
• Regularly consume both lean and fatty meats including pork, duck, beef, chicken, and a few others (someone hide Mr. Ed), as well as fish.
• Drink alcohol with lunch and dinner, and the alcohol is often unregulated. Meaning, where we have a soda fountain, they may have a cask of wine available for refills.
• Smoke cigarettes. As I mentioned earlier, this is a bit of a stereotype since the French typically smoke less than several other European countries, and only a few percentage points more than Americans, on whole. That said, we found in Paris that the smell of cigarette smoke was abundant, yet for some reason we didn’t mind (neither of us are smokers).
• Eat late at night, much later than we do - Often eating heavier foods for supper at around 9 or 10, followed by a dessert course.
• Do not go to the gym or exercise much more than we do (the reasoning being why waste your life in such a way, when you could be enjoying it?).
• Do not obsess about the chemical composition of the foods they eat, and they do not rely on science and industry to tell them what is good or bad. That is what Mother is for.

With all of this dietary rule-breaking, the French simply should be dying off like flies from heart disease. I mean after all, high fat foods? Simple carbohydrates and sugar-filled deserts? Cigarettes and alcohol? No Stairmaster for 3 hours a day? According to our experience, our industrial and governmental science, and our gigantic devotion to every miracle-cure product and approach we can turn our eyes to, their collective hearts should all be congealed, seized up like French-made Peugeot diesel motors full of hardened, varnished sludge.

The truth is that the French typically live 3 years longer than we do, with only an 8.3% rate of heart disease, and a low occurrence of obesity (though sadly this is increasing as Western ways infiltrate French daily life).

So how do they do it?

According to folks like Dr. Will Clower, Michael Pollan, and Mirielle Guiliano (and place me squarely in this camp, by personal experience), it comes down to this: The French simply eat real food in moderation. They eat good food, just less of it (they eat until they’re full, and then they stop). They generally don’t eat the overly-processed, low fat, low carb, hydrogenated chemically substituted well-preserved food-based products that we do. Dr. Clower’s catchphrase: “If it’s not food, don’t eat it.” Michael Pollan? “Eat food. Not Too Much. Mostly plants.”

How to eat rich foods and not gain weight

How can you implement the French approach? What do the French do that allows them to eat what they want, when they want, and still not gain weight?

Here is a list based primarily on the writings of the three authors cited above. Of course, their books provide much more detail on the scientific (and anecdotal) evidence that supports the effectiveness of these ideas, and provide specific techniques on how to implement them. Here’s a sample of the guidance they provide:

• Identify honestly what you eat, think about it, and make changes very slightly and gradually. Remember that you are changing these dietary habits for the span of a lifetime, so they have to be simple, livable adjustments. From Mireille Guiliano, “The answer to weight gain is never dieting.”
• Eat only real food, not processed food alternatives, “faux foods”, or food-like products (particularly high fructose corn syrup).The good news is this means you get to eat butter, bread, and chocolate again.
• Eat for the pleasure of eating, rather than as a means of fuel. Treat your mouth more like a sensory tool and less like a Flux Capacitor.
• Eat at regular times. In France, they maintain a social stigma against between meal snacking. In fact, many of their cars do not have cupholders.
• Eat seasonally, locally, and shop several times a week. And as Michael Pollan says, don’t buy your fuel at the same place you buy it for your car.
• Don’t rely solely on “Nutritionism” to tell you what is good for you; use common sense, and eat real foods. If Great-Grandma wouldn’t recognize it, don’t eat it. This is a simplification here; read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan for a much deeper explanation of the dangers of relying on science and industry alone to tell us what we should eat.
• Your dietary emphasis should be on green leafy vegetables, or animals who are fed those vegetables.
• Eat fat! Just the right kinds, particularly dairy and naturally occurring fats in plants (think avocados not corn oil). In fact, the lack of fat intake may actually be one of the root causes of many of our health problems like heart disease and diabetes.
• Quantity does not equal quality. Buy the best you can afford, and be willing to spend a little more (although I’ve found that the cost levels out when you’re eating less).
• Train yourself to eat less by enjoying your food more, eating slower, putting less in your mouth per bite, and eating for sensory pleasure. Realize that portion size has grown 3 times what it was 50 years ago!
• Don’t eat mindlessly or be distracted when you’re eating by things like television or the computer.
• Incorporate wine into your diet in moderation.
• Don’t stuff yourself. Learn the often forgotten feeling of fullness with practice and patience. For example, eat half of what you normally would, and wait for half an hour. If you’re starving, you know it wasn’t enough. If you feel physically good, that is the feeling of being full. Practice identifying that feeling, and it becomes second nature with time.
• Try to get all of your nutritional needs met through whole foods rather than supplements whenever possible (there is an ongoing, raging controversy as to whether supplements actually have much benefit out of the context of the whole food from which they were derived. [Update: After reading further, personally I believe that they DO have benefit, but only the right kinds. Industrially produced, synthetic supplements are not only worthless nutrition-wise, they can be dangerous. Whole food multivitamins, on the other hand, are a proven source of nutrition. For the “real” thing, and to gain a better understanding of the issues involved, see Robin’s blog, Whole Food and More.]).
• Learn to cook, and make time to do it. We often say that we don’t have time to cook, but in reality in the last 15 years most of us have somehow made 2-3 hours time for other things like surfing the Internet. It is ultimately a matter of choosing our health as a priority.
• Make ethical choices in what you eat. Develop a relationship with what you put in your body, understand how it affects you, and recognize that your choices impact the environment. This is an interpolation of the French diet in a sense since it is not a conscious concern of theirs, generally, but in a world of genetically modified foods and questionable shortsighted farming practices, it helps you to identify “real food.” The French concept of the Terroir reflects a profound respect for the land that provides the good things in life - it is a principle that helps when trying to make wise choices.
• Don’t view your weight or your choices as a pass/fail situation. View it as a commitment to improving your life over the long haul.

All of these steps, for me, boil down to this: Eating real food in moderation simply works. It may very well be the solution to the French Paradox.

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Ed. Note: This is a personal entry on my recent trip to the mountains of Southern Oregon. If you enjoy Almost Fit, please leave a comment or consider having Almost Fit delivered to your inbox. Thanks.

As the title of this post indicates, despite my best efforts to the contrary, my camping trip at Umpqua’s Last Resort was a dietary success.

After 7 days of camping in the mountains of Southern Oregon and then 3 days at an incredible ocean view rental on the Oregon coast, I have returned unscathed by the scale.

In hindsight it would have been interesting to write down what I ate and drank during our excursion, but I was too busy playing and hiding from the sun. However, here is what I remember:

Friday: Beer. Beef. Beef with Beer, and a side of chicken. A slice of squash, chased with a beer. Packaged ice cream bar (be still my beating heart). Lots of almonds and a beer. Oatmeal that included flax seeds. Tortilla chips and beer. Beer with a side of sour cream and onion potato chips. Peanut butter and apricot jam on 12 grain bread, with beer.

Saturday: Beer. A “cheeseburger hotdog” (don’t ask what’s in it - I didn’t). Carne Asada with guacamole, cheese, salsa, and a flour tortilla. Beer. Strawberries, blueberries, and cherries. Several beers. Gran Marnier, and a shot or two of Woodford Reserve whiskey. Followed by beer. And almonds. Ice cream and cake.

Lather, rinse, and repeat for the next 5 days.

You get the idea.

Mix in a random watermelon cracked over the rocks at the swimming hole, multiple green salads, and some eggs and bacon for breakfast, and you have a portrait of a workable vacation diet, including indulgences.

Fortunately for me, it was blazing hot, which meant I spent a fair amount of energy trying to stay cool in any way possible. This typically included swimming, dam building (building a swimming hole) and jumping from rocks into ice-cold rivers, as well as hiking to incredibly beautiful waterfalls and lounging. And while I’m not certain that lounging counts as exercise, when it’s in the 90’s I think just about any motion burns calories, including fanning yourself under a shady tree.

On the fishing side, sad to say there wasn’t much to be had. We drove up a fire trail to a local lake only to be greeted by a shore full of dead fish. Apparently there had been an algae bloom in the local lakes and it was killing the fish. I haven’t confirmed that, but it was what I was told by a friend who had read it on his way up. At any rate, very little fishing took place, but that was alright - even just making the mindspace for it was peaceful. In a sort of Zen substitution for the serenity of fishing, I spent a good amount of time creating natural art pieces, such as the cairn pictured above.

Other random activities of note: I spent a fair amount of time working on my ukulele skills; my wife and her mother are both oil painters, so they worked on paintings for the new cabin (3 generations of painters in that photo); we had a dedication ceremony for one of the cabins to commemorate the passing of April’s great-grandmother last fall; and last but certainly not least, not a single case of poison oak was had, which is a big accomplishment with two active children.

Our next stop was Port Orford, Oregon, for a taste of France. Stay tuned.

Oh, and I haven’t forgotten World Domination…Soon. Very soon.

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This post is Thursday’s Real Food Resource, which is a weekly spotlight on books, sites, and relevant media that helps you to identify what real food is. If you enjoy this article, please consider receiving Almost Fit in your inbox. Thanks.

“Vegetarian? Carnivorous? Onmivorous? Low-Fat? High-Fat? Are you confused about how to eat for optimal health?”

So reads the back panel on this week’s Real Food resource: The Garden of Eating: A Produce-Dominated Diet and Cookbook, by Rachel Albert-Matesz and Don Matesz. Through a mutual friend, (Thanks K.!), I was recently put in touch with Chef Rachel by email to find out more about how she is addressing these questions on health. She was gracious enough to send her book to see what we think.

Put simply, this book should be required reading.

The Garden of Eating is an extensive volume of well-documented research (rooted in the essential work of Weston A. Price), reasonable and compelling conclusions, ultra-practical suggestions, and phenomenal recipes, all presented in a writing style that is both inviting and accessible.

Many of the book’s ideas feel like the next logical steps for some of the fundamentally important resources that I already have. In other words, where books like Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon are quintessential in understanding the human diet and our impact on the world around us, The Garden of Eating demonstrates a mastery of these concepts while taking each one to a completely new and practical level. The Garden of Eating is filled with direct answers to the questions that most of us have when we start to really think about our diet, lists in the margin that simplify shopping intelligently, and simple but powerful suggestions on how to eat well without going bankrupt.

How to shop for just about everything

One of my favorite features of this book is the method the authors use to break down food choices. Where some of my other top-shelf reads include useful conceptual information, The Garden of Eating connects the dots on how to immediately put that information into action. Read the rest of this entry »

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This is part three of the series, “How I quit eating fast food”. If you enjoy this post, please consider receiving AlmostFit articles in your inbox. Thanks.

In parts one and two of this series, I described how I’ve quit eating fast food using 3 basic steps: Educating myself, Deciding to quit, and Acting on my convictions. In this final part of the series I’m describing the actions I’ve used to successfully break the fast food habit.

20 tactics to kill the fast food habit

1. Start out with a ridiculously simple goal - So simple that you can’t fail. Leo Babauta’s book, Zen To Done, (an excellent book by the way), highlights this concept. If you start out excessively simple, you can build on that success to reach your goals over time. Here’s an example: I first realized that soda, regular or otherwise, is bad for me for one specific reason: in the end, even diet soda simply perpetuated my desire for the stuff. I realized that I could easily give up soda if I wanted to - it never tastes the same at a fast food place anyway, and I always drink too much of it. It was simple and attainable. And the more I did it, the more “power” to change that I felt.

2. Treat the decision to quit fast food as a habit, not a lifelong commitment. The idea is to make it your habit to seek out real food, at the expense of spending time and money on fast food. It doesn’t need to be a lifelong political position. You want healthful choices to become second nature. That way when you do give into that impulse desire, which you likely will at some point in the future, you will not have “failed”. Take it slow, and be proud of your many small accomplishments that will lead to a bigger success of building a healthy habit of eating.

3. Make yourself as publicly accountable as possible. Blog about it. Tell your friends that you are doing it. Use that concept of peer pressure to your advantage by putting pressure on yourself to stick to it. Everyone you know should be shocked if they see you walking out with a weighted paper sack with an ever-expanding grease spot on the bottom where the fries are trying to dig their way to freedom.

4. Don’t buy into the “healthy alternatives” concept that fast food is trying to sell to you. This is basic marketing 101, and is one of the greatest “dupes” since the famous Roman campaign for the healthfulness of lead cups (OK I made that up - but it sounds plausible). The basic idea is to find any way possible to get customers into the store. That is the hardest part. Once customers are in, add-ons are the name of the game. Want that salad? Bundle it with a cheaply sweetened fruit cup and a large diet soda.

“And ya know, since it’s better for you, well, it is going to cost a little more. But that is the price you’ll have to pay for a “healthy” choice. . .”

Sound Fishy? It should. It is malarkey.

Let me put it to you this way: Using basic common sense - If Add-ons and upselling didn’t work, no one would bother to do it.The truth is, IT WORKS. The answer? Don’t enter in the first place.

5. Don’t enter in the first place. This deserves repeating (See the previous tip to understand why). This is hard to do, without question. It may take a while before you can make that a habit, but think of it this way: If you suffered from an addiction to alcohol, does common sense say it’s your best move to buy your groceries at the liquor store? It is common sense, no matter how we try to rationalize it. Believe me - I’ve tried.

6. Reduce your exposure to fast food advertising. This is going to sound crazy, but if you watch less commercial TV, you will be less inclined to eat fast food. Why? Again, common sense. Big Industry pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year trying to find ways of convincing you in a 30-second spot that eating their new sandwich will change your life for good, forever. And their tactics simply work. If you are exposed less, you will be influenced less. Exposed to more - influenced more.

That said, does that mean I have to give up watching Top Chef? I don’t think so. If you want to see who gets voted off the island this week, go for it - but DVR it if you have the option, and then skip the commercials. Of course, if you want to go hardcore, just give up TV altogether. It’s almost guaranteed you will be less influenced if you reduce your exposure.

Want scientific proof? It’s simple: Corporations are all out for one thing: MONEY. If gigantic ad campaigns, which mean repeated exposure, didn’t actually work, do you think they would spend their money on it? Trust THEIR money-making science - they truly do know exactly what they’re doing.

7. Be a cheapskate. Don’t confuse quantity with value, throwing your money away because it is sold to you as a “good deal”. Fast food depends on the idea that you will be foolish enough to believe that a big pile of garbage has more value than a little pile of quality food. Stick with the quality food. Learn to cook. Make enough for leftovers. Lather, rinse, repeat.

One other thing on being cheap as a method of motivation: Remember that when you eat a pile of junk food for $5.00, the one thing you are NOT getting is decent nutrition. Nutritional deficit may be the single greatest cause of all classically Western diseases. So in the end, you’re going to pay for it anyway. And in the mean time, the fast food CEO will be using his $18,000,000 dollar salary to eat excessively well at your expense. Read the rest of this entry »

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This is the second part in the series, “How I quit eating fast food”. If you think it might help others, please consider sharing it via Digg, StumbleUpon, or your favorite social media tools. Thanks. And don’t forget to check out part 3, “20 tactics to kill the fast food habit“.

“Just because it’s toxic doesn’t mean it’s not tasty.” - MastersInTheMaking.com

As I made clear in part 1, I think it’s fair to say that I have an issue or two with my lifelong personified compadre, Fast Food. That’s not to say that it’s my ONLY issue (oh and by the way, speaking of issues, a big “thanks” to the coiners of that ubiquitous ’80s phrase, “global thermonuclear war” for ruining my trust in humanity - Nice work), but in my opinion the fast food hang-up really does have the possibility of killing me in a hurried, greasy fashion.

And if I have one rule in life, it is that when I go, I do not want my mournful passing to be in any way associated with Grease. And thus why I am neither an auto mechanic nor John Travolta.

Further, to prevent a future experience that includes balloon-like medical devices being inserted near my nether-regions in an emergency effort to clear out my brittle arteries, I have quit frequenting fast food restaurants since the beginning of the year.

How am I doing it, considering I seem to get the hankerin’ for Kentucky Fried Chicken every few months as if there is some sort of time-release chicken nugget flavored tablet wedged somewhere in my right parietal cortex?

If you read nothing else, read this

In my opinion, there are very few things in life that you can give up permanently. Does fast food in all of it’s forms fit that category for me for all Eternity? I can’t say - I don’t wear that cologne. But for right now, I have decided to exclude it from my diet altogether (both fast food AND cologne) to allow myself to create the HABIT of eating better.

For me, the only way that I can do this is to say no to fast food completely. Who knows; at some point fast food may become “real food”…But from my vantage point today, I highly doubt it. For now, I’ve decided it doesn’t fit the current picture of my life.

In other words, giving up fast food is a reasonable goal for me, today. Where you draw your own line is, well, your own business.

How to quit eating fast food

There are three parts to this process for me: Educate, Decide, and Act. Read the rest of this entry »

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This post is Thursday’s Real Food Resource, which is a weekly spotlight on books, sites, and relevant media that helps you to identify what real food is. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to Almost Fit. Thanks.

Every once in a while I stumble across an entirely new, personally unexplored pocket of the Internet that really inspires me. I don’t know why I’m surprised by the discovery, but each time I find an unexplored corner of the Web, I feel like I’ve landed in a new self-contained community filled with thousands of original and interesting perspectives that no one from my tribe has ever seen. Yes, its geeky, but it’s not unlike what I might imagine exploring new galaxies would be like, if I were, you know, to geek out (assuming of course, that we are not…..Alone…..[cue the doom music]…..).

Not that I ever have that mental picture of myself, in a space suit, or anything.

I will admit, however, that in my mind I visualize myself exploring tide pools filled with strange and interesting things.

When I started Almost Fit my inspiration began with a combination of physically local blogs (which I still read) and a handful of widely scattered favorites. The Portland locals included Get Fit Slowly, Portland Food and Drink, and Kevin Allman’s blog for just plain great writing (although Kevin has since moved from Portland to his hometown on the Gulf Coast). My wider net of favorites at the time included Orangette, ZenHabits, and the Sartorialist, among many others, most of which I still read voraciously. Over time, that list has of course grown beyond all rational and reasonable levels of control and safety.

So why stop now?

Thursday’s Real Food Resource

For this week’s Real Food Resource, I’m highlighting a thriving hub of the Internet that I literally had not stumbled across until last night:

http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/

Eating locally is one of the core tenets of eating Real Food in Moderation, although I don’t insist on making a virtual “religion” out of it. I tend to lean away from the extremes in diet and fitness, as I think for the most part, unless you have a medical mandate to do so, they are short-term solutions at best and sometimes unhealthy practices in the long run. And even the medical mandates should be questioned.

I think that is why I was so excited to find this site - their suggestion is to take your food selection seriously, do your best, but be reasonable. It is not a Cardinal sin to eat a tomato in January - but you should consider including locally grown, seasonal options.

What is their focus? Here is how the writers describe themselves:

EatLocalChallenge.com is a group blog written by authors who are interested in the benefits of eating food grown and produced in their local foodshed.

Spanning the United States, the group is committed to challenging themselves to eat mainly local food during a specific period of time during the year.

In this article, “A few tips for the May 2006 Eat Local Challenge“, the Locavore pledge is cited with the last line as a humorous addendum, which I felt really boils things down on the question of how to shop for food:

If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then Organic.
If not ORGANIC, then Family farm.
If not FAMILY FARM, then Local business.
If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then Fair Trade.
If all else fails, at least don’t eat at McDonald’s!

I also really appreciate the site’s candor, with articles like, “About four days ago, I decided to quit the Eat Local Challenge” - not something I expected to see on a site that is dedicated to the polar opposite of the article’s title.

For me however, the greatest benefit of this site is all of the incredibly useful links to other sites that touch on the subject of eating Real Food. In a quick glance through their list, I only recognize one or two - the rest are completely new to me - and there are literally dozens of them. In the few I’ve explored so far, I am already engrossed in a wide array of completely different perspectives that are both new and intuitively familiar.

If you have some time for exploring, be sure to check out http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/. It’s well worth the stasis period during interstellar travel. But there I go again with the geek thing. To which I say:

Live Long, Eat Local, and Prosper.

(Wow. That was dorky even by my own standards.)

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This article is the second part of, “Should you bother with organic fruits and vegetables?“. If you enjoy these posts, please consider sharing them through Digg, StumbleUpon, or the social media of your choice. Thanks.

In part 1 (“Should you bother with organic fruits and vegetables?“) I suggested that when it comes to the debate over organic vs. conventionally grown produce, if you are relying strictly on the moving target that is statistical evidence you are likely to be confused at best, and disillusioned at worst.

With so many loud opinions on the subject, deciphering which pieces are truthful and accurate is nearly impossible. But for me, ultimately the statistics are not making my decision. My wallet has something to do with it of course; but really it comes down to one of those Life questions. (Ughh…not one of those…)

For me, it’s a question of Risk

To state the obvious, life involves a degree of risk. You choose to accept the risk of driving a car at 70 miles an hour on the freeway. You accept the risk that the guy who is hooking up your bungee cord KNOWS that everyone lies about their weight, so he’ll shorten the rubber band for that extra 15lbs that you forgot to mention. You accept the risk that watching The Soup may actually ruin your Dancing with the Stars viewing pleasure.

We all have to choose what we’re willing to risk in our lives. So how does risk play into organic vs. conventional produce? Read the rest of this entry »

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