In Search Of: Breakfast

I am stuck at my company’s semiannual sales meeting, and I’m cranky because the food has been so abominable.  Lots of pasta, lots of bagels, lots of cereal, lots of desserts.  Even the “legal” foods have been terrible.  All the salad dressings are loaded with sugar.  The scrambled eggs are dreadful.  The lunch protein choices have been dried-out, overcooked hamburgers; dried-out, overcooked boneless, skinless chicken breasts; and hot dogs.

Folks, it’s bad when the best food choice on the menu is a hot dog.

Oh, and the breakfast bacon has been decent.  But rumors to the contrary, low-carbers do not live on bacon alone, though this week it certainly seems like it.

One morning I helped myself to four, count ‘em, four egg and cheese croissant sandwiches in order to get enough protein to last until lunch.  The croissants I shucked off and piled up like the giant pile of shells left over from a crab feast.

At most of the breakfasts, there hasn’t even been any fruit.  Fruit juice, yes, but as I’ve said so many times before, fruit juice is junk food in a health food suit.

Dinner, at least, has been at restaurants, and I’ve had a fair amount of autonomy in choosing restaurants and ordering food.  San Francisco has some pretty good food.  I had a fantastic cioppino the other night.

But I can’t wait until tomorrow, when I will step off the red-eye, head home, and choose and prepare my own breakfast.

Looking at what people eat for breakfast is fascinating.  Lots of people ate the cold cereal, many with skim milk.  Many others had bagels or pastries.  Comparatively few ate the eggs, bacon, sausage, and potatoes.  Most of the conference attendees are sales people (I’m not), and they are very young and slim and apparently healthy.  I couldn’t help wondering what they’ll look like in ten or fifteen years, whether they’ll struggle with their weight, whether nagging health problems will creep up on them in their 30s and 40s.  How many will become diabetic?  How many will start experiencing joint inflammation?  How many women will have fertility issues, or problematic pregnancies?

I am fascinated by the concept of biochemical individuality, the notion that different people can thrive on different diets.  But I often think that people don’t quite get how this works.  The fact that someone in their 20s can appear to be healthy on a carb-heavy diet does not mean that it won’t catch up to them later.  I was very thin and apparently healthy in my carb-consuming 20s, too.

In fact, one of the reasons that there’s so much controversy about what constitutes a healthy diet is that bad food is slow poison.  If we all became fat and diabetic, with aching joints and cognitive difficulties, immediately after eating bagels, we would all know right away that bagels are a bad idea.  But the effects of bad diets are cumulative and can take years or even decades to show up.

I think of this a lot.  I am sure I come across in my blog as very sure of myself, but that’s the face I put forward.  The truth is, I don’t know what to eat any more than the next person.  I have a few cues – ugly blood sugar incidents, weight loss and weight gain, aches and pains waxing and waning, skin clearing up or breaking out, stable moods or mood swings – that give me some indication of what I should eat, and more important, what is slow poison.  But what will happen in a decade?  I think I know – I think that I’ll continue to manage my weight effectively, avoid aches and pains, and maintain stable blood sugar and moods.  But truth be told, the very young people all around me eating Special K with skim milk for breakfast probably believe the same about themselves.

It’s lunch time, and I’m starving – time to see whether today we are having bad chicken or bad burgers!

(P.S.  When I left home a week ago, I was down 3 pounds.  However, I am sure that some of that was due to water and muscle loss from the stomach flu.  I can’t wait to get home and weigh in.)