doin without instead of settling
 

I wonder if I am sometimes just a picky spoiled wench, but the longer I diet, the more I find myself eschewing the low fat / low sugar versions of food. Low fat cheese, low fat sour cream, low fat mayonnaise (honestly, I eat mayonnaise so little I really shouldnt list it), butter substitutes, egg beaters..the list goes on and on.
I refuse to eat these things. For me, I have come to the realization, that I would rather simply cut the portion in half, or do without the item completely, than use something that is close, but not quite the same. Sour cream is a biggie for me. 1 tablespoon of regular sour cream has 30 calories and 2.5 g of fat. 1 tablespoon of low fat sour cream has 15 calories and 1g of fat. To me, if I want sour cream, I want sour cream, and I can find room for the extra 15 calories. The low fat stuff just doesnt taste the same, and the yogurt option is absolutely out. I like yogurt. It is a regular part of my diet, but it is NOT sour cream, and to my mind is not a viable substitute.
I think I have just reached a point in my eating habits where if I can't fit the real thing into my budget, I would prefer to do without, and have something else that does fit in rather than settling. It seems to be working for me. So am I just a picky wench, who has gotten set in her ways the older she gets, or is this a good thing? I really can't decide.

I will add that I do eat low fat/low cal salad dressings. Bottled dressing is still just bottled dressing, and the flavor of the low fat stuff is different than the regular, but I like it just fine. There are some "low" versions I do eat, but not of "real" food.

I think it's a great thing. You seem better prepared to continue to eat healthy, since you know how to eat "regular" things in small portions. I'd rather sacrifice a bit on taste, and eat more-- which concerns me. So. yay for you!

woohoo! perfect, imho.

I don't eat a single food that's been altered to make it low-cal, low-carb, low-fat, whatever. I always think, what on earth has been chemically done to it to achieve that? ewwww. I'm with you, I'd rather have tiny portions of real, honest food than a bucket of processed. :carrot:

Oh, definitely! In fact, I could down right get on a pretty big soap box about it.

I am convinced that the whole "low fat" craze made at least half of us fat!! :yikes: Low fat potato chips? Sugar free ice cream? No thank you! Any time they take something out of a natural food, it is no longer a natural food!! And it is generally replaced with something else. If it's low fat, it's high sugar. If it's sugar free, it's either high fat or has artificial sweeteners or both.

I am a purist. Real sugar is only 15 calories per teaspoon. I can handle that. I'll go a step further and search out these foods in their most pure form when I can. Peanut butter? I'll make it myself. I will no longer eat the jarred stuff. Also, I prefer almond butter now.

I've learned I don't need mayo. Sometimes I don't even need salad dressing! I don't need butter on my corn on the cob. Soy milk is not only delicious but I prefer it in my cereal, and when I use soy milk there's no need for sugar on my cereal.

Yep. This way of eating is something I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life so only eating foods I like. Now in some cases I not only like the low or non-fat version, I prefer them (skim milk, non-fat yogurt, and lowfat icecream long before I started the diet). But can't stand aspartame-sweetened yogurts even though seems like most of the "fun" flavors use it so I pretty much stick to plain and vanilla that's been sweetened with sugar.

Another rant! LOL! I'd love a chocolate custard flavored yogurt, but I'll stick with strawberry, blueberry or vanilla Greek over artificial sweeteners.

I am right with you folks about eating the real thing instead of a low-fat or fat-free substitute! The "unabridged" version of a food often has so much richness and flavor that I can use less of it and enjoy a lot more taste. The worst low-cal offender, to me, is cheese--there's just no substitute for a good Gruyere or the sharpness of real fresh-grated Parmesan. I'd rather go cheeseless than eat a knockoff version of a cheese.

The one exception, for me, is Skinny Cow ice creams in the individual serving containers. Those are gooooood. :D

For me I tend to want a certain amount of whatever it is, particularly in cooking when I just need to have X cups or grams of this or that ingredient to make the proportions come out right. So I choose lite versions of foods that I am OK with (or even prefer) over the "real" versions - a good example is skim milk (I never have whole milk anymore) and other low-fat dairy.

But, there are some things that I would prefer to have "real" - e.g. sugar. I can't stand the taste of artificial sweeteners. So I'll just sacrifice something else knowing that I will be having more calories from sugar if I'm getting something like a vanilla latte with real syrup.

For me it just depends on what the food is - some things I feel fine choosing lite, others I don't. But either way I will probably end up having the same amount, so I just look at the "lite" choices as a calorie deficit bonus, and the "real" choices as a relative calorie indulgence.

I'm the same way- if I want ranch I'm going to have my ranch! I have tried them and after I finished the bottle I was done. I don't drown things in ranch so I think it's okay to have my serving size once in a while.

I also eat low carb so I don't mind having something that's full fat now and then.

I'm living and working in Germany now and the supermarkets here are SO different. You can't even buy skim milk - the lowest percentage is 1.5! All the cheese/dairy products are full fat.... there is no fake sugar products. The whole diet food industry here is totally absent. The normal slice of cheese here is gouda and contains 150 calories!

So, for me to stay low-calories, the 'diet' foods to make it easier aren't even an option. I just eat tons of veggies to fill me up. I also use a nice mustard as a condiment.

I was cheering you on right up until the soy milk. What is more natural or less processed about soy milk than cow's milk?

Which is not to say you shouldn't drink it if you like it - I have no problem with it, though I'm not crazy about the stuff myself - I just don't quite get what it's doing in this post, with all of this wonderful talk about real, natural, no-processed-substitution-for-the-real-thing foods. ;) What am I missing?

On the topic, I have always held this feeling strongly as well. I love cheese to death - good, real cheese. I can't stand non-fat cheese and would rather eat no cheese at all (or very rarely at all) than eat something called "cheese" that is a bland, rubbery approximation of something I love.

I don't even really care for non-fat yogurt that much - most of it is watery, gelatinous, and too sugary. If it weren't for non-fat Greek yogurt, the only non-fat yogurt that is remotely palatable to me, I wouldn't eat yogurt at all.

Salad dressings - never been a big fan anyhow, and certainly never saw the appeal of commercial fat-free dressing. I dress my salads with salt, freshly-ground pepper, and red wine vinegar - sometimes a little olive oil too. But I did the same when I was getting fat, too.

depends on the product. I don't mind lower fat sour cream, I prefer diet pop to regular, low fat puddings and such are great, ice milk can't be so bad if dairy queen built an empire on it.

no way will I waste my time with low fat cheese though.

It depends on the product for me too. I grew up eating and drinking non-fat dairy products, so full-fat or even low-fat tastes awful to me (except for cheese. if it is cheese, I like it XD). I also prefer the taste of margarine/butter-substitutes over butter because again, that's what I grew up with. I also just happen to prefer almond milk for drinking over just about any other milk available, plus it doesn't make me all congested like cow's milk does.

If anything has an artificial sweetener in it, though, I won't eat it, because it tastes too chemical-y to me. But when I eat non-fat Greek yoghurt, non-fat sour cream, etc., I'm not settling. Eating the full-fat versions would be settling for something I don't really like.

Soymilk= soybeans that have been soaked, ground, boiled, and strained. The soymilk is the resulting milky liquid. That's it. There's really not much mysterious or questionable about its origins or how it's made/processed. Really easy to make at home, too.

I SO agree!!! Low calorie is a scam. Of course, I bought into that scam myself when I lost weight about 10 years ago eating low calorie foods. But Low calories just means that they add either a lot of water or a filler to the regualr calorie food so that you have the same size serving size, but half the calories.

The funniest "low" calorie offender is Smart Ones. They have the same calorie count as an 8oz Stouffers Lasagna for the same amount of food but only a fourth of the taste. Yet people buy it up. Cest La vie. I am nearing 50lbs lost. I should be there in about a week. And I did it with butter, maple syrup, real cheese, real sugar, real fat. I am almost 98% real food.

agree
 

i agree, the thing that squibbed me out about WW was they encouraged all those foods that were "diet" but had too many un-pronounceable words in them, and as you all said, sometimes the caloric result isn't even worth it. Or, if they take one thing out (sugar) they add another (fat).

i personally have decided i'd also rather have a bit of sugar or honey than the artificial crud. i eat a vegan diet and try to do as many whole and natural foods as possible which is why i could eat margarine but so far haven't bothered. There is a long list of ingredients in the veggie burger type things but... most of it i know what it is.... it's not perfect. But i agree with the concept: whole and natural foods are better.

i also will say this type of eating, for me, has shut off the cravings i have had for sweets and junk :) i do hope that keeps up! So you are not spoiled girl. uh-uh!

-fm
edited to add, what i do also is limit "Fake meat" to one time per day (if at all). Also i heart soy milk. processed or not. i love it, and i don't do dairy anymore, so it's all soy for me.

All right (though don't most kinds have some sort of sweetener added? a genuine question, I don't really like the taste of soy milk myself so I don't know a ton about it). Thanks, but I won't be making it at home. ;)

I wasn't knocking soy milk here, or saying it's bad or that there is anything wrong with it. But it seems like a people use it as a substitute for cow's milk, so I didn't understand what it was doing in Eliana's post about how "real thing" foods are better than substitute foods. It seemed like a non-sequitur to me.

Reading her post again, I now see that her last paragraph wasn't really about how "real thing" foods are superior, rather about some instances where she has learned to prefer passing on the real thing enitrely. And in that context, her comments make more sense to me, assuming that soy milk is less caloric or something than regular milk (which again, I have no idea).

With very few exceptions, I eat real food, just in smaller servings. I do drink skim milk in my coffee and diet soda, because I have forever.

I will never, ever eat a slice of fat free faux cheese again. It's been over a year since I gave it up and I haven't regretted it a second. I don't eat cheese as often but I enjoy it now when I do. :)

Some brands do have added sweeteners, many don't, it depends on the brand/ variety chosen...

Soy milk actually was not developed in the modern day as a substitution for cow's milk but rather there is evidence that it was created in China(along with, and as a byproduct of, tofu...) in the period of A.D. 25-220 for medicinal purposes.

I suppose, in food cultures where consumption of dairy is central, that soy milk can be seen as a knockoff of the "real thing", but soy milk truly wasn't created as a substitution for anything as its development was completely separate of any presence there might have been of dairy.... so I'd be willing to argue that it's a "real thing" to be enjoyed in and of itself. :p

When it is used in place of cow's milk, soy milk is cholesterol free(unlike cow's milk, which can raise cholesterol, soy milk actually lowers it), soy milk has about the same amount of protein as cow's milk, less fat than cow's milk(of which in cow's milk, most of the fat is saturated), has fiber(cow's milk does not), is full of amino acids like cow's milk, and has less calories. So for many, soy milk really can be a healthier option while it's also just as much a real food as dairy.

Speaking of milks, almond milk also has a long history, albeit not as long as soy milk's. It was a very common ingredient in medieval European cooking; it was originally a substitute for milk used on fasting days (such as during Lent) when animal products weren't to be eaten. As it had the distinct advantage of not spoiling without refrigeration, it began to find its way into dishes even on ordinary days.

Both cow's milk and almond milk are different kinds of yum! to me, so I don't really think of either as a substitute for the other. :)

LOL! I think you are over thinking it. :D It's simply a personal choice on the soy milk. To me all milk is the "real" thing unless it's chocolate or some other flavor. I don't see anything wrong with skim milk they're not replacing fat with anything like sugar. I think it's like soup. If you let it sit in the refrigerator it forms that layer on fat at the top. If you remove that layer of fat, have you changed in some way? Is that more processed? In my opinion, no. I don't think it's man's way of messing with food to make milk less fat. I could be wrong! But that's how I think about it.

My thing with milk is a personal choice. I just decided a while ago that humans probably don't need milk, and certainly not that of a cow. I believe it's made for a baby cow and not for human consumption. So I drink soy. But I'm not militant about it. I buy milk for my family and I'm not opposed to cooking with milk and I love ice cream. :D It's really just a personal thing.

Yeah, you're right. It didn't belong as a milk vs. soy thing or as if soy is better than milk. I think I was just talking, you know?

I like your posts. :D I've never researched this, it was just a gut thing when I switched. You're making me feel validated. :D

Oh, one more post from me. Sorry! :^:

This whole change over to "the real thing" has been a slow process for me. I'm not perfect at it at all. Some of us, most of us, have just grown up with all this crap and with some of it I didn't know there was anything different.

I picked up a bottle of syrup the other day to see if I could find one without HFCS. Each bottle I picked up listed that as the first ingredient. Then I picked up a bottle of "maple syrup" and I couldn't find the ingredients. I put it back and kept searching. Nope, I couldn't find it. So I went back to the one with no ingredients and realized all it said was "pure maple syrup". Yeah! That was the ingredient! LOL! So I took it home to my family and set that one on the table beside an old bottle. I asked my kids to read the ingredients from each. They did the same thing I did. "Where are the ingredients?"

They're at a good age for that. It amuses us all.

I wholeheartedly second this post - I feel very strongly about artificial sweeteners. I use real sugar in my oatmeal, just not as much as I used to. I buy plain yogurt and flavor it myself. I buy real cheese. I sometimes buy fat free putting and ice cream, and ALWAYS regret it when I do. It just isn't good, and I end up eating more to be satisfied, which I can rationalize because "its lower in calories."

I think it's better to eat the real thing instead of something that's been manufactured to taste like it. With the real thing, a little goes a long way. (I realize that as a chemist, I'm supposed to be pro-chemical, and I am, just not in my food.)

I think this is one of the largest reason people have become more and more obese. We have this mentality that if it's low fat we can eat more of it. Or, like you said, we eat more to satisfy the initial craving. "The next bite will be better." But it never is.

I know, I do that and then make a total doofus of myself. :hug: and I'm really sorry for picking apart your post with tweezers! :headache:

:hug: to Horo too for the patient explanation of stuff about soy milk. Very interesting!

My mum was always dieting when I was a kid, so the fridge was always stocked with watery low fat milk, along with bitter and metallic tasting diet yoghurt.

I didn't think I liked yoghurt for years because of that stuff. I used to wonder what all the people raving about yoghurt were on about. Then I tried real yoghurt and just about died. OMG! Amazing.

Actually I partially blame those horrible diet foods for making me crave full flavour hitting stuff as a teen.

The diet foods I do love are diet soft drink and cordial. The sugar versions make me feel really sick. I also prefer sugar in my coffee, but switched to stevia for the same reason.

Otherwise I prefer the originals. :)

I'll be the voice of dissent here. I love artificial sweeteners. I have very unsophisticated taste buds, and they don't taste weird to me at all: a little different than sugar, but not bad. I eat an amazing amount of aspartame in a day--I put it in my cottage cheese (with cocoa powder lately--yum!), I put it in my tea, I drink crystal lite like it was going out of style. They never leave me feeling "weird" the way sugar does. My life would be a sadder place without artificial sweeteners.

Now, there are "diet" foods I won't do--non-fat dairy is a big one. And there are more I avoid just because they are really expensive and may not be any lower calorie. But I like to EAT, and anything that allows me to eat less while staying in my calorie limit makes me happy.

Shmead, as the OP of this, I do have to shamefacedly admit to one serious failing in my "I wont eat the fake stuff rant". I do the aspartame thing in soda. I can't give up my coke zero. I can't say, as you do, that I prefer it over sugar, or that I particularly like the taste. But I "need" my carbonated burn in the morning. Yes, I pop a coke zero, or a diet dr. Pepper first thing in the morning. Something about that first burn of carbonation down my throat in the morning gets me going. I used to drink upwards of 4 regular sodas per day. This was something I absolutely could not find room for in my budget. LOL
But I was also not quite able to give it up completely. Now I drink 2 diet sodas per day.

Shmead, I was hoping someone would come in opposing. :rofl: I know we aren't all in this camp! The wonderful thing about finding a diet that works is that there a lot of ways to do it.

I don't eat either the real or the *watered down* version of many foods. I don't eat real or fake butter. I don't eat real or fake sour cream. I don't eat real or fake cheese. I don't eat real or fake mayonnaise.

Ahh, wait there are a couple of exceptions. I do eat a tsp of parmesean cheese. I haven't in ages, but I every now and then make cole slow, using a dollop or two of low fat mayo.

I do eat fake sugar though. Daily. Several times a day in fact.

I don't eat low fat or altered foods at all. The more they alter an original food product, the more they use fillers and substitutes are are less healthy and frankly, taste bad. Real food, as is, is the only food I will eat. I agree, the calorie difference is often minimal. I also disagree with the concept of eating more because we "think" it contains less.

Real food has a satiety and satisfaction component that altered food does not. Something to consider. Learning to eat less overall is more important in my book for permanent weight control.

Why shame? It's a chemical that happen to be very sweet. It is a combination of two amino acids that are both extremely common in all kinds of food. I think a lot of people have all this guilt/shame about being fat, and that being fat is some how a punishment for the sin of liking food. If that's the logic, aspartame or splenda are "bad" because they are cheating--getting sweet without paying the cost. But nothing is good or bad, it's ALL just chemicals and biology.

So yeah, I think it's AWESOME that I can have sweet, calorie-free coffee. Nothing to be ashamed of.

The shame is not in the drinking of the diet soda. I figure we all have to have at least that one thing, and diet soda is mine. NO guilt in drinking it. The shame is that I was the original poster of the "I don't like the fake stuff" thread, and had to qualify it. LOL

Man Robin, more power to ya, lady! I won't say I can't do without cheese, butter, and sour cream, but I do very much enjoy the stuff, and I would absolutely not give it up completely unless I had to. If I can make it fit, its goin in!