Your Body Is Not A Trash Can & Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches Are A Health Food

My dear friend, "American Liz" (so
named because she lives in the US, and I like to use description nicknames for my duplicately-named friends) brought a post to my attention a while back, that made both our skins crawl.

It was a post from a macro tracking group on Facebook, where a woman was celebrating throwing out a pb&j sandwich that her daughter had refused to eat.

Her pride came from the fact that, instead of treating her body like a trash can and eating the sandwich, she tossed it in the actual trash, instead.

This way, she still had room in her macros for the ice cream she had planned for later that evening.

Liz, who is fierce and amazing, and one of my total heroes, is a climate change advocate (and kick ass personal trainer). She was furious that someone would throw food out, rather than save it, and present it to her daughter at a later time.

Food waste ought to be absolutely not a thing. From a historical perspective, we have never lived in a time where there was such an abundance of food, that it is disposable...and yet, there are food shortage crises.

Liz raised the point that, in 30 years, the woman's daughter would be kicking her mother for throwing food out, when the climate eventually makes food development a challenge...and that's coming, trust me. Climate change isn't a myth, and it is nowhere near harmless.  That, however, is for another post.

Liz and I were both really irritated at the fact that the woman threw out a very wholesome food. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is macronutritionally solid. Carbs, protein, and fats. The woman stated that she had goals that she was working hard for, and there was no room for this sandwich. She alleged that her daughter wouldn't touch 'old' food, so in the can it went. I'm sure the ice cream later that night tasted stellar.

It was the phrasing about not wanting to treat her body like a trash can that got my back up, immediately.

No body is a trash can.
Food is not garbage.
And why would the same meal that you prepare as acceptable for your growing child, will make your body the equivalent of a trash can if you eat it?

It was an onion of wrong, and it had me screaming in my head.
It's good enough for your kid, but it's basically world ending for you.

Liz's solution was to eat the goddamned sandwich and go for a run; if the concern around calories is so great.
I would have made the woman eat the sandwich, and then slapped the calories off her, myself. 😈

But this kind of rigid thinking around macros and calories is a perfect experience of how someone can make "flexible dieting" very inflexible, indeed.

It's not the diet, it's how you implement it.

Many diets are very restrictive by nature. They eliminate food groups or greatly reduce calories consumed.

Flexible Dieting/If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM) is meant to be a sustainable, long term, lifestyle solution to fat loss.
But if you look at everything as black and white, IIFYM can be just as restrictive as any other way of eating.

It's important to remember that everything in the world exists in shades of grey...

Magic, opinion, fallacy, and even dieting.

I'm not saying that rules are pointless. I'm saying that there is a variance in anything.
You don't burn exactly the same number of calories every single day.

Some days, you move more, some days less.
Some days, you eat more, some less.

I'll likely be hung for this, but when you set your calories and macros, you can feel okay about hanging within 50-100 calories, either way.
It's better to be consistently nailing your nutrition 80% of the time, rather than being "perfect" on some days, and a trainwreck on other days.
However, if you do trainwreck, just get back on track the next day.

Aim for progress, not perfection.
And progress is never linear. Ever.

Your body is not a trash can, not even if you eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich - which is far healthier for you than the thinking that eating it will make you the human equivalent to a garbage dump.

🎃Welcome to October, darlings!🎃

Sarah