Sunday, May 01, 2005
Nothing is for dinner
One of the things I like about the new government dietary guidelines is that they provide a way to customize your food needs to your body type and energy level. Since last week, I have been tracking my food intake and physical activities throughout the day using MyPyramid. Before I go home from work, I would look at the summary and see how much budget I have left for calories, fat, cholesterol, sodium, etc and decide my dinner accordingly.
The biggest problem has been that there is usually not much room left for dinner. The "beef is what's for dinner" plan has become more or less "starve or die." Or "starve and die." It's not that I go over budget for everything since I try to do a reasonable job of rationing my lunch, but the frequent issue is that it's tough to find anything to eat that doesn't blow away my sodium allowances. The simplest answer could be a yogurt which also helps satisfy the milk requirements, but then I would be short on the meat side and that little known parameter called fun or quality of life. I guess the only path is to skip the chips and go running to open up the food window. What a devious way to make people exercise more. Sigh...
But then there are people with bigger problems. When the calculation system first became available last week, a bug in the software resulted in recommendations of zero food servings and zero calories per day for people over 65 years old. It sounded suspiciously like the Terry Schiavo diet. A Sacramento TV station consulted a health expert who promptly offered this helpful opinion: "Obviously, if you're over 65, you still need more than zero calories to survive." I hope there was an error in my program too. Somebody must have seriously undercounted my meat and salt entitlements.
- posted by Woofwoof @ 6:02 AM
