Fat Warrior

Quote of the day:
“Don’t be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upward.”
--Vladimir Nabokov

I am a fat warrior. Not a warrior who is fat, but a warrior against fat. Eating fat.

If you get annoyed when someone is constantly pointing out how much fat is in everything you’re eating, you do not want to be around me this week. This started when both my doctor and Merrie’s recommended that we take a nutrition class to lower our blood cholesterol.

There has been so much information in the press for so many years, I thought I knew most everything about saturated, unsaturated and polyunsaturated fat, cholesterol, and what foods to avoid. I was wrong.

Just like a financial planner will ask you to write down everything you spend in a week, our instructor has assigned us to write down everything we eat each day this week. Then we add the fat grams of all the items to see if we’re where we should be according to our risk factors for heart disease. My daily fat intake is supposed to be between 45 and 60 grams.

I thought I knew which foods had fat and which didn’t. But what I didn’t know was how wide a variation there is in fat levels. Did you know that a flour tortilla has 4 grams of fat, while a corn tortilla has 1? How about this: a croissant has 18 grams of fat, a slice of bread has 1. An 8 oz. glass of whole milk has 10 grams, 1% milk has 2, nonfat milk has zero.

If you’re not annoyed enough yet, try this: a bag of microwave popcorn has 32 grams of fat, air-popped popcorn has zero. For eating out, a caesar salad has 40 grams while a chicken fajita pita has 8. And a taco salad with tortilla shell has 55 grams of fat, a teriyaki bowl has 3.

As I said, I’m a food warrior. A somewhat insufferable, self-righteous food warrior. But don’t worry. I’ll get over it soon, and I hope to have better eating habits.

I’ll close with this favorite quote, which comes from Woody Allen’s movie Interiors: “You can live forever if you give up everything that makes you want to.”