Yes the news had another one of THOSE stories; a story that supposedly shows how bad things are with forces we can’t control yet in examination the subject has a lot of blame they have to own.

They had a story about a family that was grossly overweight and the subject was about hidden calories in food. The cameras followed while the family ate food during the day and showed how servings weren’t being followed. Considering with my diabetes I have had to take a different approach to eating I sympathize with the family, but the nutritionist who talked about the calorie intake and how to correct it didn’t take into account some fundamental issues I saw.

Of course they concentrated on the mother and in the course of the day she had a huge bowl of cereal, a giant frozen burrito and a foot long Subway sandwich with chips and a liter of soda. This is what she had for the entire day. The first thing I noticed was she never cooked. She microwaved food, the burrito she had for lunch, but her meals were all fast food or processed material. Maybe this was done off camera but I didn’t see a mention that the basic way they were eating was causing the excess in calories. What was true was if the mother had taken the recommended intake she would have had been around the recommended calorie intake for an adult, which is around 2000 calories. The larger sizes put her close to 4000.

In my head the first thing I would have encouraged was to have ‘real’ food. Take out the processed and take-out food in the meals. A silly but effective trick I use is when I get vegetables for a meal. Canned corn and green beans can have 70 calories a serving, with a standard can containing about 3 servings. So that’s 210 for a can of vegetables. Peas and beets are 20 a serving so the same can would be 60. I’m more willing to get a can of those so I have more calorie play for the meal than getting the green beans or corn. Throw in some potatoes and some chicken and you have a good meal without a lot of calories.

Now watching how she ‘cooked’ another good option would be going to the frozen food section. It sounds silly but when I saw that for dinner they went to Wendy’s for the kids and Subway for the adults, just a quick add up for the four member family has the bill, just for the dinner, coming in around $20. Getting a frozen dinner, especially something like Healthy Choice or some other low calorie dinner, they could get something that had about 400 calories on average and cost $4 per person. That would save $4 but there are always sales on one frozen food so it could be possible to get a meal for $2 to $3 a person. Throw in some fruit to snack on and you have a meal well under the $5 a person they spent and would have a calorie count well under the 800+ the adults had with the foot long and the chips.

As these stories goes this was a little bit more balanced but it still tried painting the family as a victim of circumstances. They admitted they were fat and wanted to do something about it, yet their eating habits didn’t see where they were making an effort to change. It was like the person who ordered the large size Angus burger with cheese meal at McDonalds but gets the diet coke to drink. You may think that’s helping you out but it’s not.

I know I’m a little hard on the story because I went through my own ‘crisis’ this past week. I got tired of the testing and the dietary watching that I decided not to watch things so closely. I wasn’t watching the labels and I was guessing more than monitoring. As a consequence I got a little sick yesterday, though I suspect I was doing poorly by the middle of the week. I’m kind of back on the schedule now. I have to for my health.