OnlyInThisLight wrote:

I can't do urban gardening, not since the great Caterpillar Catastrophe of 2011.


  THAT BASIL WAS LIKE A CHILD TO ME.  A VERY DELICIOUS AND VERSATILE CHILD.

OMG, basil!! I lost my basil plant too. It attracted fruit flies and they would just OMNOMNOM it. It was really sad.

That sucks you can't do urban gardening! I wonder if there's something you can do that would repel the caterpillars. Like, some plants are naturally pest-repelling, like oregano. Or maybe you can spray it with a mix of a a gentle pesticide, that isn't, you know, cancer inducing?

I heard this on the radio recently and it supports the points I made a while back (saving me the effort of getting proper citations).
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2013- … rican-diet

Last edited by gpink (03-01-2013 02:23:16 PM)

Giovanna wrote:

From what I know of Monsanto, the problem is that they're responsible for the overuse of genetically engineered food, and they're the source of all the out of season, tasteless, genetically damaging crap like bad tomatoes canned with half a pound of salt.

This is me posting to say that I have not forgotten about this post, but that I've tried six times to write this and each time something stupid on my part would happen.

So I'm reserving the spot.

But: there are more issues with the social and ethical implications of what Monsanto is doing with their GMO products than there are problems with genetically modified foods themselves.

Valeli wrote:

Not related to GMOs, but coming back to this because of Syora's tin-foil fish.

Ok, so let's say I want to try something like this (because I do - this or something with my grill pan, and you make this sound easy).  Suppose I went down to the store and bought a one person sized (whatever that is in ounces) slab of some fish that's not too fishy. I need to break myself in slowly after all. Any good fish suggestions for avoiding a strong flavor? Cod? Hallibut?

Then, because I'm OCD about directions, what exactly do you do with/to the fish before you wrap it up and put it in the oven? Do you rub the spices on it, or just leave them in the little packet there? How much of what do you put in? You say a giant slab cooks 30 minutes.. is that giant as in more than one serving size, or just a big serving size? Common sense could probably answer a lot of those questions, but I get scared trying to cook without really firm directions.

I'm kind of worrying that when I do this I'll open it up and end up with some really moist almost soupy mess. Which I'm sure isn't the case since you recommended it, but I'd like to do my best to have /my/ version not end up that way. It's finally warming up here, and I figure that's a good time to be adventurous and start trying new cooking things. This seems like a great idea to start with.

Ha! Halibut is for ballers. Cod is a good one. To me, all white fish isn't too "fishy", and a fresh fish will be less fishy than one that is not. However, I eat things like squid, roe and all other fishy things, so I'm probably a bad person to ask. Yasha's palete, however, is far more discerning than mine, so she might be the better one to ask.

I can't find the video where I got this from...  I will PM you further instructions though.

Syora wrote:

So I'm reserving the spot.

I am slippery with anticipation for this Monsanto learning.

In my experience, sole and tilapia are the absolute best for just simple, safe, and unfishy. They're what I go with if I'm not sure someone likes seafood. Cod is amazing, but you're getting to where the taste will bother you. Also exception to white fish: Mackerel. Stay away.

I'm considering an indoor gardening project thread. I've already planted tons of baby herbs, and am thinking of some heirloom upside down tomato plants. DIY of course, fuck the ugly topsy turvy thing. Interest?

Giovanna wrote:

Spent my whole weekend repotting my peppers, pollenating them, planting and redistributing my salad greens, herbs, and attempting to take cuttings of my dying Tiny Tim tomato plants to root.

I have entirely too much red okra that'll get huge.

BTW this is all indoors with very few pots purchased. (I use egg cartons for seeds.)

Pics, damn you.

Actually, there is one thing more I've noticed when it comes to nutrition - in Poland if someone is suffering from food poisoning, 99% of people go on diet for one week because they know their stomach is very sensitive then. Maybe I'm generalizing but I think it's not that common in U.S.A.

I'll post some more when I'll read all 3 pages!

It's obvious that no one wants to eat during the food poisoning or few hours after that. I've just noticed few times that there are Americans who eat the same type of food one day afer food poisoning. For example they drank milk two days after food poisoning because they were pretty sure they went sick because something else poisoned them, for example fish.
As far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter what caused food poisoning - your stomach is very sensitive and it will find very difficult to digest normal food.
I think there it is well explained: http://www.diethealthclub.com/diet-plan … -diet.html what should we eat during recovery and why.

I’d like to ask about education. Is that really difficult to find information about nutrition? Nowadays we have a lot of possibilities to learn about anything: Internet, for example. It’s true that Internet may confuse us but it’s very easy to look up something about fat, sugar and omega-3. We've just posted some essays about food in this thread. Can't we find cooking blogs online? I'd like to know how it looks like in States, there are tons of them in Polish and cooking shows are more popular every day.

gpink wrote:

About the watching tv issue I remember on CNBC a professor was discussing that tv meals became popular because Americans were watching so much television. I think the statistic is three hours a day.
I have sympathy for people who are working jobs paid or otherwise that make them too physically or mentally exhausted to cook or do other activities but I don't have much sympathy for a person who watches tv or surfs facebook etc for hours and says that they have no free time to cook etc.
Finally Americans drive too much and don't walk enough. People will drive around trying to to find a close spot for more time then they would spend walking inside. Rather then walk across the street some people will drive even when they aren't carrying anything heavy. My sister drives to work even though its 15 minutes by bike.

I guess three hours is enough to make a great meal that you can eat two days, so I think there are people who just don't make a room for cooking in their schedule. I think time is a very flexible thing – it’s up to us how we’ll use it. Also, it’s quite easy to cook few things simultaneously, for example boil rice and chop vegetables at the same time. It's possible to spend a lot of time on shopping 3 times a week and still find time to cook.

Giovanna wrote:

I'm considering an indoor gardening project thread. I've already planted tons of baby herbs, and am thinking of some heirloom upside down tomato plants. DIY of course, fuck the ugly topsy turvy thing. Interest?

Oh please, do so!

Nova wrote:

I checked the linked article, and it is full of sensible advice, advice which I have inadvertently followed on a number of occasions in my own life. I arrived at similar conclusions to those in the article by thinking carefully about what I eat and why-- admittedly not something that a lot of people seem to do.

I would shy away from making generalizations about Americans. We are an astonishingly diverse bunch.

Who is making generalizations here? I'm sure we both were just talking about our observations. To me generalizations occur when someone is saying that "ALL <insert nationality/religion group/etc.> do something" or "ALL <insert nationality/religion group/etc.> are <insert an adjective>". We didn't do that. When we say what's more common (and we are right) we are just adding something to a discussion.

Imagine an analogical example - in Spain there are more people who eat breakfast outside than in Poland. It's a fact. In fact, it would be very difficult to eat breakfast outside in Poland because cafeterias and restaurants open at 10 or at 11 A.M. Should I shy away from making generalizations about Spanish food culture?

It's impossible to say anything here without generalizing a little bit. I don't think it's something bad when we all know that not only Americans are diverse bunch, all nationalities are like that.

I'd like to talk about prices here. Good food is an investment. Why only few people see that as a long-term investment? The more bad food we eat, the more we spend on meds. Sure, right now we pay more, but it is the best way to save money. gpink said that driving is very popular. Can't we spend more money on food instead of paying for gas in some cases?

I see another problem here – there is no such thing as a good diet that would work for everyone. Kids need some things more than adults, pregnant women should eat different food than an athlete before Olympics. Actually, eating healthy is something very abstact.

Not everywhere fast food is the cheapiest option. Polish McDonald’s food is almost as expensive as a dinner at the restaurant. Sure, you pay more when you eat lobster with white wine but you can eat a soup with a salad and drink something and pay the same price as the person who bought chicken legs and one big cheeseburger with Coke. Why? Because Poles don’t like McDonalds that much. Prices go higher because of that and it only lowers the number of people who can go there.

I could probably talk about the financial and cultural aspects of obesity in westernized culture, but others have already raised most of my points, and if I got into it, I'd probably end up writing an essay length reply.

But as someone with a history of various eating disorders, I can speak from an insiders prospective about the supposed correlation with education and eating disorders/eating in general

Firstly, when it comes to most people with eating disorders, we are very much educated. We know what we are supposed to eat, what the proper calorie intake is, and that we need more variety that we take in, but we are deluded into thinking that only applies to everyone but ourselves. If any given person talked to me about food while I was at my sickest, they would quickly learn I knew a disturbingly large amount of information about food diet and nutrition. Semi starvation makes you obsessed and compelled to educate yourself on everything regarding food and by extension nutrition. That isn't even the disorder itself, just the biological effects of it. If you want to know about what exactly semi starvation does to a brain, look up the Ancel Keys Minnesota Starvation Study. A breadth of knowledge there. There's denial, but in reality I've yet to meet anyone who actually believes it's healthy to live off whatever small amount they eat. In fact, in most treatment facilities, other patients will tell each other that their rationalizations are bullshit and they need to get their shit together and eat. With empathy of course.

Basically, there is a complex psychology behind food and what we eat that is far too complex to boil down to one element, or apply to a large mass of people in generalizations. It's such an individual thing. Everyone develops a relationship to food in their lifetime, be it a comforting one, an antagonistic one, or an indifferent one. Though all that we talk of what is healthy to eat, what we need to keep out of our diets, etc, we forget that food is in essence a sensual experience. We crave to eat what is fulfilling and satisfying. Fats and sugars are satisfying to the body because they are quickly converted to energy and release endorphins. Most people, especially people in poverty, come into contact with fat and sugar through processed fast foods and not in healthier alternatives, so this creates the pleasure pathway in the brain that makes us go back to those foods. In neurology, it's said that what fires together wires together. And it can be extremely difficult to break that association. It can be done, but it can be very difficult.

It's biology, it might be effected by education or culture or financial resources, but the body is the driving factor behind what we choose to eat. Not to say we can't be healthier, and try to cut down the amount of processed junk we eat, but it isn't something that should be shamed. Food is pleasure. Some people are compelled to eat higher amounts of sugar and fat, some aren't. Kind of like sex And in North America especially, there's way more access to processed fats and sugars, so it's only logical that there would be higher obesity rates. Obesity is treated so differently than other health issues, mostly due to the illusion that it's only caused by a lack of education or laziness. But in reality if you have a genetic predisposition to a higher weight range, you live in poverty, and you happen to be a highly pleasure seeking individual, it just isn't that simple.

Well I had a huge thoughtful post in response, but a power surge ate it up

Basically, there is a huge hypocritical nature to the treatment of eating disorders in the medical community, we're simultaneously praised for losing weight, condemned for "taking it too far" and god help you if you tell a doctor that you binge and purge, because that's wrong you shouldn't do that now stop it *The More You Know* There is just tons of judgement and yet tons of encouragement. The advice you get from most doctors compared to the doctors who specialize in eating disorders is night and day. And it mostly comes form trying to look at it from a purely medical problem or an exaggeration of the body image and diet woes that plague the majority of the westernized population. It's a mental illness and there is no basis of logic involved and any concern to our health is a really thinly veiled excuse, that we may or may not be in deep enough denial to believe ourselves at first. By the time I'd been sick long enough I even dropped that pretense all together. It's when doctors try to sympathize as opposed to empathize that they become the most misinformed. Or they view it as an insult to their profession that we would "do this to ourselves" I've gotten that too, similar to what you described. A lot of the medical community see it unfair that we'd be taking up beds in hospitals when we're "making ourselves sick" forgetting that we are sick, mentally.

As for the availability of knowledge, the vast amount and lack of a unified stance on what healthy is makes it very easy to justify what you're doing as healthy, or at least not unhealthy. And the stance seems to be if you aren't emaciated or puking on a regular basis don't even worry you're fine. In the very beginning of my eating disorder, I was too young to know anything about eating disorders or do tons of research, and I assumed that skipping breakfast and lunch then exercising until bedtime was perfectly healthy by osmosis. But when I was a little older and I began to restrict with renewed vigor I lost weight even more quickly because I had so much access to information that was so easy to abuse. Nobody could ever say I wasn't educated, I even learned how to tell when my body was burning fat by the taste at the back of my throat.

Yet I was still shocked to hear a team of eating disorder specialists tell me I had an eating disorder, and a severe one at that. Up until that point the general consensus I'd gotten was my behaviour was odd but harmless. Most eating disorders wouldn't get so severe if doctors knew what they were looking for before it became dire.

The obesity phobia that's happening in North America was probably the single biggest trigger for my eating disorder. I was always an anxious kid and all of the propaganda and research that went along with it made me convince myself no matter how bad my eating disorder was it was healthier than being obese. Even though research shows I was at a much higher risk for death and already experiencing so many health problems.

Just a side note on the Pro Ana movement, a lot of pro eating disorder forums aren't the big bads the media will have you believe. While some definitely are nothing but Tipz and Trickzzz a good amount of it is just people being supportive of each other in a non judgemental way. The only pro ed sites I joined were really strict about any direct encouragement of symptoms and rage would erupt in threads where n00bs would ask "How do you get an eating disorder I want one to b skinny by prm"   I tend to equate pro ana/mia forums with sites that are supportive and don't demand you go to treatment right now. But in mainstream media all we hear about are sites that "brainwash" people into developing eating disorders, which is pretty much impossible

While I have no doubt that media can exploit people with low self esteem who were already vulnerable to developing eating disorders, not just anyone can be made to develop an eating disorder. If somebody is already looking up pro ana or other things along those lines looking for tips, then they're probably already walking an unhealthy path. It's been proven time and again that while people with eating disorders can be different from each other in many ways, there are core traits that are associated with eating disorders. I've yet to meet somebody else with an eating disorder who doesn't have maladaptive perfectionism. The vast majority also have some type of anxiety and often some other kind of mental illness. Not to mention the rate of addiction comorbidity.

While somebody may begin to eat very little or in very unhealthy ways for weight loss, there has to be a reason to continue. Most people would find out very quickly that starvation is god awful and no amount of weight loss is worth it. After the initial phase of onset, when weight loss stops being a reward (you look and feel awful constantly, your loved ones are chastising you for your eating habits and weight loss and start policing you) or you come to the realization that you're gonna have to stop binging or you won't have enough for rent,  is when the compulsive and addictive nature of the eating disorder will kick in for people who are susceptible. That is why you hear some stories of people who "snapped out of" their eating disorders, when it stopped being rewarding to them by either the havoc it created in their lives or their own epiphany of how wrong it was, they stopped. Even those people are different from the majority of the population, they had a low enough self esteem that they have more issues to work on than just food and body image.

If the majority of the westernized world is exposed to unhealthy ideals for body shape and weight, why do only a small percentage in total develop eating disorders? Because those people were the ones who already had the building blocks of compulsive behavior already waiting in their genetics to be assembled. There is a huge difference between bad body image, disordered eating, and an eating disorder. They can come in a package deal, but there are a lot of people who have bad body image and/or mildly disordered eating and don't have an eating disorder. That voice is one that would never manifest in an otherwise well adjusted individual.

And in general that's not how most pro ana forums work. Even the worse ones have an air of exclusivity. They aren't trying to teach anyone how to be sick, more like trying to have a social network amongst themselves so they aren't completely isolated. The reaction to somebody coming on asking for tips will almost always be met with anger or attempts to reason the person into just eating a healthy balanced diet and to go to a healthier place to look up how. Because an eating disorder is something I most certainly wish on anyone and most people who have one feel the same way.

Last edited by BlackBeforeRed (04-14-2013 10:57:47 PM)

Orthorexia is definitely on the rise, though I tend to think of it like a subset of anorexia since it proceeds/follows it in most cases. When I first developed anorexia it was probably more in line with Orthorexia, I could only eat "healthy" things, a list which eventually became long enough to count on my fingers, and weight loss was a side effect that became my reason to continue. And I reverted to some of that way of thinking when I was in treatment, if I couldn't lose weight I was going to have the healthiest diet of anyone. That was a very common mindset for most of the people I knew in recovery. Definitely a perfectionism/control thing and it allows people to feel like they're still "doing something other people can't" which gives a sense of fulfillment and relieves low self esteem (temporarily )

Pro Ana forums can still be unhealthy cispools of tips and unhealthy encouragement when they aren't moderated well, I just don't know them to have that behavior with outsiders. The ones that stick around don't usually work that way though It's weird I'm defending them when I hardly use any of those sites anymore I just don't like the misunderstanding that we somehow can brainwash people into having eating disorders