You guys are hilarious!
Now, given my size, I've gotten pretty darn used to people being unable to help themselves in their need to stare at me, my clothes, my shopping basket, etc. I don't think this is ego really; in general, I just don't consider myself important enough for anybody to care about, but it's pretty hard to miss how people "react" to you when you are something "different". I am huge but maybe other people get it for being a different race, or having a major visible tattoo, or whatever.
So, I sometimes feel a bit abashed for having lowcarb stuff in my basket, because when the person behind me is critically eyeing all the fat on the conveyor belt, I feel like my size is giving whole foods a bad name, so to speak. You know, like either the "No wonder she's...." or worse, "Now I see what eating like that does to a person." They don't know I've lost weight, cured a dozen medical symptoms with no drugs, etc. etc. I feel as if I am poorly representing lowcarb, which I would definitely like to positively represent.
My kids' class needs snacks bought for it, and aside from once in awhile fresh fruit, usually what they want is big boxes of cheese-its and stuff like that. So this probably seems like a real contradiction, but I seriously doubt anybody even notices that sort of thing, nobody cares enough for THAT much cart inspection. For some reason what tends to embarrass me the most is bacon on the conveyor belt. I just feel like that has such a bad rap.
Sure I look at people's baskets, for the same reason I look at headlines and children and flowers and the 172 overpriced small items on the other side of the checkout line that they would like me to impulse buy: I'm bored, I'm curious, and I'm stuck there while my walmart cashier, one of several dozen very nice women with oversized pupils clearly medicated into passive mode (I'm beginning to think the number of people NOT on anti depressants or other psyche drugs may be smaller than those who are), scans the stuff for the person in front of me.
I dunno how judgemental it is though. Mostly to me it's like a license plate game or making clouds into shapes. Guessing something about their household or their plans based on their food.
I admit to feeling desperately sympathetic when I see people with weight watchers stuff though, especially if they are overweight and looking pretty miserable to accompany it. I just feel like maybe they'd be less miserable joining a nice cult or something and giving their money to that instead of to a zillion frozen foods. I don't mean to knock the efforts or the group, I know many people have great results with them. I've just had the unfortunate bias of knowing a lot of people over time who've been involved with that, none of whom are currently at goal weight, all of whom professed to love it, but all of whom were patently miserable, and eventually gained MORE weight, which since they were my friends kinda bummed me out for them.
So last night when I went shopping at walmart, it was a few minutes in the produce section, a minute to grab something in the meat section, another minute to get eggs and cheese in the dairy section, and then a few non-food items and we were done. We'd merely walked around the edge of the shopping area quickly. So when I stand in the checkout line, 90% of what people have in their baskets, I never even went past.
I admit I do feel kind of sorry for women when I see them with several children and a giant basket stuffed with carbs. I think, that poor woman is probably exhausted if she is eating that stuff, fighting weight gain, etc. and doesn't even know why. It's not my job to evangelize, but I do wish that others didn't suffer the ignorance I myself did, especially since the long-term result of high-carb eating, unless someone is naturally built for that (and most aren't), is obesity.
I sometimes sigh when walking through the store itself. You know, most people just don't realize that the big lowfat banner on a product, or even low sugar, is usually accompanied by enough carbs to do far more harm than the fat or frankly the full sugar version would have. When I first went lowcarb, I was astounded while reading labels, and seeing that nearly every product with low-anything advertised on it had higher carbs! Like, lower sugar higher carbs -- what would be the point of that? Like carbs aren't sugar to the body? I just don't think people get it.
My father was telling me Friday on the way home from the airport, there was this "great diet pill that really works" and when I asked what it did it says, "It absorbs/blocks up to 40% of the fat..." and I nearly had a coughing fit. I said dad, why the hell would you want to do THAT? And before you choose to do that, can you tell me, (1) How much fat RESEARCH -- not drug ads -- says you should have, vs. (2) How much fat you are actually eating, so you know whether or not you SHOULD be reducing your fat? Of course he couldn't.
This is the guy who with his wife told me Atkins was bad because too much protein could give you kidney stones or whatever it was some 20/20 "investigation" made hype about. I asked how much protein a person needed based on weight, and how much protein they were testing on for that bad result, and how much protein Atkins recommended, and they had no answer for any of those.
I fail to understand how otherwise highly intelligent people can be complete morons when it comes to stuff on television. Maybe TV really is evil haha.
So this mentality carries into his shopping. He was horrified to discover that real ice cream with a sugar substitute had 'so much more fat' than the alternative diet ice cream with a long list of chemicals and hydrogenated whatever the trans-killer and so on. It's like total brainwashing. He has no idea why something is bad, only that it IS.
I suggested to him that eating fat making you fat, made as much sense as suggesting that eating tomatoes makes you red. (I read that somewhere recently and it cracked me up.) And pointed out that the growing obesity epidemic isn't from having more meat, which is what our species started with after all, but from having more processed crap, much of which is billed as 'low-fat' in the grocery store.
Blessedly he is not the person doing the cooking in his house, so he may live to learn better eventually. ;-)
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