Trying to Eat Right

When I was growing up, my mom fixed the typical American meal; meat, potatoes, vegetables, bread & butter and sometimes a dessert. Of course, back then, a fatty piece of meat was considered 'flavorful', potatoes were mashed using full-fat milk, vegetables were often flavored with bacon grease or butter, and desserts and snacks were just full of both fat and sugar. But at the time, it was considered a pretty healthy diet.

I got a little older, didn't climb trees and run around the block so much any more, and found that eating an entire big bag of chips at one sitting tended to increase my girth. So I tried to stop eating such large helpings, tried to educate myself about what was healthy eating. Things had changed when I wasn't looking. Bye bye to hot dogs, whole milk (2% was all the rage!) and bacon. If you were baking, you were supposed to substitute applesauce for half the butter. And that, apparently, was the new healthy diet.

Okay, more time passed. I had continued to put on weight, despite many attempts to 'exercise more'. My joints started to complain about the strain. What more could I do? I couldn't afford much of the really really lean meat, so meat became a 3-times-a-week luxury. All the fats I knew how to cook with were thrown out in favor of olive oil. Milk became skim milk. In an effort to fill my belly, to avoid all those desserts and snacks I wasn't supposed to have, I tended to have rice and pasta with my meals. Those weren't fatty, so it was okay, right?

Then I was diagnosed as 'pre-diabetic'. As I've learned how to 'adjust' my diet (yet again), everybody keeps telling me how simple this is. Really? You have just thrown out everything I ever knew how to cook. After a week of oatmeal, raw carrots and salad, tell me how to resist the temptation to actually EAT.

They keep changing the rules, but they never really give you a handbook on what you CAN eat, or how to cook it. Oh, they give you a couple sheets here and there, telling you what NOT to eat, but not how to cook (whatever's left) to make it into something you actually want to eat.