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lasagne with pernilla and linda, two nice swedish chicks from work. we discussed babies and sexual politics and swedish men and the death of chivalry. you?
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I'm going to go and buy an electronic flea-zapping comb. Not for me, my cats. They're going crazy with the infestation of insects, and keep either racing around, knocking things over, or sleeping in weird places - on top of the cookery books, the breadbin, or damp teatowels pulled from the radiator.
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A sandwich. Grannary bread, tomato pickle, horrible processed chicken slice, and a few slices of cucumber. No butter or spread. Eaten while simultaneously changing the tyre on my bike. While wearing dirty latex gloves. Classy huh? I'm now eating an apple. This concludes today's lunch.
Maybe a coffee in a minute actually.
Yesterday the only thing I had to eat all day was a McDonalds quarter pounder with cheese meal. My body feels all kinds of wrong today.
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no, it just rose up out of the bottle and went all over my desk. about 15 minutes later a bloke from IT called about a domain change for one of the testbed PCs, but there wasn't anything sassy about that.
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I just had an "Angry Whopper" from Burger King. I'd like the sound of it but had refused to buy one before as the advert is so fucking bad, but I was on my way back from Virgin (Just got Metroid 3 and Sims 2 Castaway for the Wii) and was passing so decided to give it a go.
Overall, I'd give it 3/10. The onion rings gave a nice texture difference but you couldn't even taste the jalapenos or the apparently spicy cheese. I wasn't under the delusion that it was going to be really spicy, but I assumed it might be slightly spicier than a normal burger and I was sadly disappointed.
Add that to the fact that with chips and a coke it apparently costs £5.29 but then they charge you 30p for the privilege of eating in there and you're looking at £5.59 for a very poor "meal".
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what I find really really worrying is that you can go onto the websites of these fast food chains and now they put up the nutritional information about their food. I try to avoid looking at these things. Like when I looked up Krispy Kremes and found that some of their donuts have nearly 400 calories in them. That wasn't a happy moment. But actually that seems positively healthy compared to the stuff you get from the likes of McDonalds and Burger King. For instance, I had a quarter pounder with cheese meal from McDonalds yesterday. You might have something like that for lunch or whatever. But in that meal, you'd think what, 6 or 700 calories? Maybe a bit more? Not even close. Try just under 1400 calories. And that's before you even start to look at things like the amount of salt and fat. If you go for the full whammy and go for a super sized burger king meal, you'll be looking at close to 1700 calories in one sitting.
These are companies currently making bold claims about thier products being made with thoroughly natural ingredients, good meat and no added salt. Bullshit. I 'd struggle to make a quarter pound burger with a single slice of cheese which had anywhere near 500 calories in it, using lean minced beef.
I know it's not much of a revalation, as we're all aware that fast food = complete garbage. But I never had any idea it was anything like as bad as that.
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I had an only moderately dispiriting chikken tikka masala, some yoghurt and a couple of 'pieces of fruit', as the middle class people have it.
I was reading an article from the LRB on Pakistan's inexorable descent into mayhem (as usual) and thinking about how I should prioritise my extra-curricular activities in the last couple of months of the year. Since I moved into my new job, all that (writing, learning Spanish, reading teh novels) has taken a bit of a slide as life has resolved itself into two big bins marked 'work' and 'offspring' and nothing besides.
I'm going to see Arcade Fire tonight, so I can't really complain.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: You might have something like that for lunch or whatever. But in that meal, you'd think what, 6 or 700 calories? Maybe a bit more? Not even close. Try just under 1400 calories.
Christ, that explains a few things then. I'm not even full afterwards either
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I'm trying to get to see Arcade Fire here next week, and the people at Universal had the temerity to suggest that I buy my own ticket! Don't they know who I am? Moving to a new city SUCKS!
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Southern Fried Chicken Wrap. This was the best option at my local supermarket. The selection is depressing. 16% of my recommended fat intake in a fucking wrap. I was pissed off with that so I went and bought a Mars bar too, then I paid 50p for a small bottle of water. Then I queued up for so long, the old lady behind me put her basket on the floor and every time the queue advanced, she shuffled it along with her foot, making me feel like I was being followed by a limping, TCP smelling monster or something.
I was served by a nice lady, so I put in some effort to be polite. Then I remembered that I had to pay National Insurance contributions in the post office. Another queue, this time 15 mins. I just stood there cross armed and tried to zone out by staring at the lady in front of me's curly mop of hair. Unfortunately about 8 mins into my trance she turned round and caught me. She looked scared and the rest of the wait was uncomfortable.
Came back to work, ate the wrap, ate the mars bar, drank the water.
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Potato waffles topped with some of the hottest beef chilli I've ever tasted, while watching the end of series one of "24" (never got around to watching it before). Days off rule.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: I know it's not much of a revalation, as we're all aware that fast food = complete garbage. But I never had any idea it was anything like as bad as that.
There's a certain amount of feeling hoodwinked by it all though. That's one of the biggest complaints about fast food through the courts. It's not that we already know it's bad, but that the companies exist on near lethal food. Today's experiment: Try to eat the burger part of a macdonalds cheeseburger without the ketchup and cheese. It's like brown paper mache. Even the bun gives the thing a certain amount of flavour. But anyway, bashing macdaffy's is kind of easy, so I just wanted to point out the last time I went there for a cheeseburger, I noted they had provided all their nutritional information with a range of symbols. So instead of saying 'Salt: f'kin'loads' they have a circle with a dot in it and two semi circles either side, followed by a percentage. So you have to sift out the key which will be printed in the restaurant somewhere. After everything, Supersize Me, obesity claims on the front page of the news, losing legal battles and huge sales slumps, they still provide this krypton factor-style information to the consumer. I just don't choose to go there anymore. Do you think Macdonalds will be around forever, like cockroaches and Ricky Martin?
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Well yeah, I don’t think anyone actually goes into McDonalds assuming that they’re going to be having some kind of balanced, nutritious meal. Well, maybe some Americans. But I see what you’re saying, the information in the stores is in a really cryptic format. In fact I don’t recall ever even seeing any in McDonalds or Burger King. However the information is available on their websites in a very simple and transparent format, where each item they sell is broken down into stuff like fat, salt, calories, kj, etc etc. But you’d actually have to feel motivated enough to look there in the first place.
Did you know that there’s virtually as many calories in your regular fries, for instance, as in your burger?
Presumably the reasoning is thus: they put the information in a format which is really hard to understand in the restaurants themselves, while putting the information in a clear format on their website. If you read, while waiting in the queue, that your burger was going to contain 800 calories, and nearly your whole day’s allowance of salt, chances are you’d probably walk out the door and go to somewhere that feels a little more healthy, like Subway or Pret. But by the time you’ve got home and gone onto your computer, chances are you’ve forgotten that you even cared.
Maybe giant warnings on the side of fast food wrappers, like they do with cigarettes. Or maybe people should just wise up and start taking a bit more responsibility for what they put in their maws. After all, as I say, nobody surely thinks that fast food is good for you, we all know it’s bad but the question is just how bad it really is. The information is available so you’d have to think the only reason people don’t check it out is because they know they might not like what they find. I know I didn’t
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Milk Shakes as well - those bastards can have about 1200 calories in them if you get the bigger ones.
I find it quite comical on the one hand - nutritional value for junk food - when I see someone reading the info on a pack of crisps, chocolate bar or fast food meal, I'm tempted to shake my head in slow motion in a disapproving/bad acting kind of way - it should just be in a red wrapper and have "can cause death" on the food.
That said, sometimes all you really want is a Whopper Jr with cheese...
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they used to just have leaflets by the counter with all that stuff in. maybe ten years ago? me and my sister used to read them out loud to each other in the queue in an amazed sort of a way. 'ninety seven grams of fat in each carton of bbq sauce? no fucking way! how do they fit all the fat in those tiny little packets?' sort of weird, that when noone gave a shit about the fact that macdonalds was solely invented for people who hated their arteries, they were that brazen about it. it was like 'this shit is shit, and heres a leaflet telling you its shit, whilst you can read whilst ordering your shit, and you dont even care, you pathetic artery- hating shits.'
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quote:Originally posted by Benny the Ball: I find it quite comical on the one hand - nutritional value for junk food - when I see someone reading the info on a pack of crisps, chocolate bar or fast food meal, I'm tempted to shake my head in slow motion in a disapproving/bad acting kind of way - it should just be in a red wrapper and have "can cause death" on the food.
Nutritional information is extremely important, especially on junk food. You might want to shake your head but that’s kind of part of the problem. Like, speaking as someone who not long ago was technically obese, one of the most important parts of losing weight is in understanding calories – what they are, how many you’re eating, and how many you’re burning.
It would be nice if our natural instinct was to automatically eat a balanced diet which maintained our ideal weight, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. We’re living in a world where all manner of rich foods are available in abundance, and unfortunately our natural instinct is to eat these and put on body fat. It’s only through using our minds and our intelligence that we can really overcome that. Quite why this affects some people more than others I don’t know, but the same rules apply to basically everyone. It’s only through full possession of the facts that we can really understand what we’re doing to our bodies.
To put it another way, by your logic if you want to lose weight you should just cut out all of the food which you know to be bad. So crisps, chocolate bars, burgers, whatever; all should be cut out completely. But the trouble is this isn’t something you could ever hope to maintain. You still desire these things, and not eating them will probably just make you miserable, which I think is the reason there are so many people who seem to be constantly on diets, constantly unhappy, and never even losing weight. The important part of being successful is in making a lifestyle change whereby you’re not afraid to eat the things you like, you just eat them at a level which is sensible and fits in with a healthy lifestyle. The only way you can hope to be able to do this is through knowing the nutritional content of just about everything you put into your mouth.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Presumably the reasoning is thus: they put the information in a format which is really hard to understand in the restaurants themselves, while putting the information in a clear format on their website. If you read, while waiting in the queue, that your burger was going to contain 800 calories, and nearly your whole day’s allowance of salt, chances are you’d probably walk out the door and go to somewhere that feels a little more healthy...
...maybe people should just wise up and start taking a bit more responsibility for what they put in their maws. After all, as I say, nobody surely thinks that fast food is good for you, we all know it’s bad but the question is just how bad it really is. The information is available so you’d have to think the only reason people don’t check it out is because they know they might not like what they find. I know I didn’t
Very true. But I'm not talking about the likes of yourself. Some people don't have or use the internet still. Children aren't always aware of the impact of unhealthy food. There's no whistles and bells to what I'm saying, except the unethical act of making the nutritional info anything less than a list of ingredients by word and the amounts listed in a simple conversion is so deceptively and almost childishly underhand that sometimes I can see why the government feels it can be unfair to blame the consumer. (breathe) I understand that people have a freedom of choice, but is Mcdonalds winning the war because there's a fight between education and advertising? Ba-rur.
quote:Originally posted by Benny the Ball: I find it quite comical on the one hand - nutritional value for junk food - when I see someone reading the info on a pack of crisps, chocolate bar or fast food meal, I'm tempted to shake my head in slow motion in a disapproving/bad acting kind of way - it should just be in a red wrapper and have "can cause death" on the food.
Nutritional information is extremely important, especially on junk food. You might want to shake your head but that’s kind of part of the problem. Like, speaking as someone who not long ago was technically obese, one of the most important parts of losing weight is in understanding calories – what they are, how many you’re eating, and how many you’re burning.
It would be nice if our natural instinct was to automatically eat a balanced diet which maintained our ideal weight, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. We’re living in a world where all manner of rich foods are available in abundance, and unfortunately our natural instinct is to eat these and put on body fat. It’s only through using our minds and our intelligence that we can really overcome that. Quite why this affects some people more than others I don’t know, but the same rules apply to basically everyone. It’s only through full possession of the facts that we can really understand what we’re doing to our bodies.
To put it another way, by your logic if you want to lose weight you should just cut out all of the food which you know to be bad. So crisps, chocolate bars, burgers, whatever; all should be cut out completely. But the trouble is this isn’t something you could ever hope to maintain. You still desire these things, and not eating them will probably just make you miserable, which I think is the reason there are so many people who seem to be constantly on diets, constantly unhappy, and never even losing weight. The important part of being successful is in making a lifestyle change whereby you’re not afraid to eat the things you like, you just eat them at a level which is sensible and fits in with a healthy lifestyle. The only way you can hope to be able to do this is through knowing the nutritional content of just about everything you put into your mouth.
True - I was being a little glib - perhaps educating people so that they know that it isn't the junk itself, but components of the junk that you can get from other healthier sources would help.
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Well kind of, but it’s also in acknowledging that there’s room for the things you want within a healthy diet.
Look at it this way, when I was a kid, every now and then we’d have a McDonalds as a special treat. I never actually understood why this was a special treat. I mean, I knew it was special, because I really liked the taste and at the time McDonalds was aimed fairly squarely and unashamedly at children. But I never understood why it was that we didn’t just eat it all the time. To a kid, that’s fairly reasonable logic – you know you enjoy eating this thing, and you don’t know of any reason why you shouldn’t eat it all the time. That’s the problem. So you grow up with this kind of mentality, not quite understanding why some things are only ever enjoyed in moderation. Sure, when you start doing stuff at school you’ll learn about the basics of nutrition, but by then it’s too late; you’ve already made your mind up that certain foods are great, and others are rubbish and you don’t want to eat them. What kid likes to eat vegetables anyway? This is perhaps at the root of the current obesity problem.
But as I say, the approach that in order to lose weight and be healthy you have to cut 100% of junk food out of your diet is completely screwy. After all, I know plenty of people who are very skinny and yet eat the occasional McDonalds, or pizza, or kebab. So you have to accept that eating these things isn’t, in itself, the only reason for being fat. It’s eating these things too often, and in too great a quantity. Like, I could never understand why some of my friends would have things like a cheeseburger meal, when there was a Big Mac meal on the menu. That’s fatty mindset – always have the biggest portion available. You’ll not have the 8oz sirloin, you’ll have the 10oz rump.
But it’s this oversimplification that leads to unhappy dieters. When you think about losing weight you don’t tend to consider things like portion size as being a factor. You might give it some slight thought in as much as thinking that it doesn’t make much of a difference if you have an ever so slightly bigger portion. After all, that’s only what, like an extra 100 calories? But that extra 100 calories a day equates to nearly a lb of fat each month. And that means the better part of a stone in a year. And that’s how things literally balloon out of control.
And that’s why understanding calories is of massive importance. So you can eat healthily, have a healthy lifestyle, and not be on a ‘diet’. By which I mean a strict eating regime which sets a generally unrealistic short term goal which will almost always fail because of the misery it puts the dieter through.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: when I was a kid, every now and then we’d have a McDonalds as a special treat
Apparently, according to a chef friend of mine, in Italy if someone is borng (or annoying or something) they can be likened to pizza, and if they are interesting and fun they can be likened to bread.
Huh?
Well, pizza is great, but you'd soon get bored of it if you ate it every day. It's something to have in small doses.
Bread, on the other hand, is just great and can be eaten every day without getting bored of it.
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I’m eating a helluva lot of pizza right now, and I’m not bored yet. It is delicious every time. I alternate where I get it from, but this is more out of shame than hunting for variety...
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quote:Originally posted by SilverGinger5: I just had an "Angry Whopper" from Burger King...
...you couldn't even taste the jalapenos or the apparently spicy cheese. I wasn't under the delusion that it was going to be really spicy, but I assumed it might be slightly spicier than a normal burger and I was sadly disappointed.
So how would you describe it, if not an "Angry Whopper"? A "Slightly Irked Burger"? A "Mildly-Grouchy-Meal"?
-------------------- Black Mask: Have a good weekend, TMO!
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In a slightly connected note, I just had a call about an attempt to use a clone of one of my cars - they tried to spend 400 in car phone warehouse, then went on to spend £20 in a fast food restaurant - I hope they get a brain tumour and their artieries fill up with bad fats until they die in horrible pain.
But, you know, it's only money...
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Yes, mart, it was. I went on to get hammered in the evening, so I'm feeling a bit fragile. I intend to type up a full report on the HB experience as soon as I'm feeling strong enough.
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