Fiat Lux

Couldn’t sleep, so I was browsing the news sites this morning. I came across this gem from Salt Lake City: No-Carb Eating Couple Booted From Buffet.

Roast beef was the issue. As Reuters put it, “when [customer] Amaama went up for his 12th slice, the manager asked Amaama to stop.” Chaos ensued.

What rational person is going to think they’re controlling their weight by eating that much food? ‘Oh, but it’s low carb!’ you hear the cry. ‘Cut out the carbs and you can eat anything you want and still lose weight!’.

I call bullshit.

If each slice of roast beef averaged a mere 2 ounces, that’s just under a pound and a half of meat eaten. Let’s look at the calories in that (you remember calories, right?). According to the handy guide at http://www.calorie-count.com/, 3 ounces of cooked beef, all fat removed, has 232 calories. So those 11 slices of roast beef contained approximately 1700 calories - more if my estimate of a 2-ounce slice is too small or if all the fat had not been trimmed off.

It passes my understanding how people can think this is a good way to lose weight. The FDA recommends consuming approximately 2000 calories a day, depending on a person’s age and activity level. You can bet dollars to doughnuts (if you’ll pardon the carb-laden expression) that this goober ate much more than just 11 slices of roast beef that day. Whether he was exercising regularly or had an active lifestyle wasn’t mentioned in the article, so perhaps I’m doing the guy a disservice. Maybe he mountain bikes to work every day and rarely sits down on the job. But somehow, I suspect that’s not the case.

You want to lose weight? It’s simple but it’s not easy. Burn more calories than you consume. How you do that is up to you. Exercise or don’t, eat carbs or not - it doesn’t matter, as long as your net calorie count is negative, you’ll get lighter.

Maybe I should write my own diet manual. Call it “The Sanity Plan.” I’d make millions, quit my job, and spend my days doing book tours and being pampered. With merchandising tie-ins (I see ‘I want sanity’ t-shirts, maybe kitchen products), perhaps a chain of Sanity fitness centers, I’d be set for life.

Unfortunately, most of America is not ready for sanity. And people (I do not exclude myself) are generally lazy. They really want the magic fix-it that’s going to let them do as little as possible and still shed pounds. Sanity is too hard.

Ah well. Time to brew some coffee and get ready for work.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2004 at 8:29 am and is filed under Food.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.