to think cooking two fillets of fish for one person is a bit much?

[MarianneSolong]

I'm going out. Spouse is cooking two salmon fillets for himself. I think it's a bit greedy and he should either have just one - or save the packet for a night when we're both in.

expat I can make a picture of meat do 8 meals for 15 people (smug face).

It's quite nasty to call the OP joyless just because she is restrained about her food consumption.

And all those posters acting like they are such badass rebels because they scoff a big steak. Really? Get over yourselves. No wonder half the nation is obese.

Have we really ended up with a 12 page thread about if a man wants to eat two fish fillets! I really can't be arsed to explain why but I'm currently eating my 4th piece of quiche of the day. I laugh in the face of Two fillets of fish.

You're off the hook there, fruitandbarley, because unless you're in a different timezone from the UK you've moved into a new day. So probably your first piece of quiche of the day, reducing yesterday to a perfectly reasonable three.

I don't think people are obese from eating a steak. Far more likely the cheap carbs they have to bulk out a meal.

MrsKoala I think it is more likely that people are obese from the attitude that excess is something to admire and a little self control is "joyless". Nothing joyful about obesity from where I'm standing.

I totally get the whole big steak for a special occasion thing, but to mock the OP for having a sensible attitude to everyday food is pretty horrible.

Well that would be more to do with ones definition of excess. To me and a lot of others that amount of meat is not excessive. Also i don't agree that larger portions of meat equals obesity. Quite the opposite in my opinion. I think if people ate more (fatty) meat and less carbs and sugar (like we used to) then there would be less obesity.

if you are full and satisfied from protein at 3 meals a day, there is less need to snack or fill up on empty carbs ime.

even if you look at it from a calorific point of view - how many calories in a small piece of salmon? How many calories do you need in a day? Unless you are very small and inactive i cant see how you wouldn't need to fill up on other stuff to compensate for the deficit in calories from that meal. (i am 5ft 10 a size 12 and do a lot of exercise btw so i do need quite a lot of calories).

I am 5'2" and 8 and a half stone so don't need loads of calories, but my DH is 6'2" and runs triathlons. He's lean but definitely not skinny. He manages fine on one portion of salmon. I agree that a decent portion of protein is what stops hunger pangs and snacking, but no one needs massive portions of meat or fish every day. We eat plenty of pulses and eggs.

I eat loads of eggs too. About 5 a day. Not so much on the pulses tho, about 2-3 times a week.

does your dh have something else carby with the salmon? I expect he needs about 3000 cals a day. How does he get that with a tiny bit of salmon for dinner? There must be loads of other stuff being eaten in the day to subsidise it.

we don't snack so our meals are our daily nutrition. Each meal would need to provide my dh with 1000 calories. (in reality he has about 800 for breakfast and lunch and then about 1400 for dinner).

He would eat something like cous cous and salad with the pasta. Thinking about it, the salmon is probably one of his smaller meals because if we are having something like a curry or a casserole he will have seconds or even thirds.

Five eggs a day is loads though, are you extreme paeleo Koala? Your food spend must be quite high.

i wouldn't say extreme paleo as i have pulses and sweet potato, small amounts of spuds, a little rice, some porridge oats and a bit of bread a week. But i expect i have between 60-100g of carbs a day on average.

i usually have a small carbier breakfast on weekday mornings as i am in a rush and i work out for an hour. On the mornings i don't exercise i tend to have 2-3 eggs, sometimes poached with spinach and smoked peppered mackerel or with bacon and tomatoes etc. For lunch most weekdays id have a 4-5 egg omelette with veg and cheese. Because its quick and easy with the 3and 1 year old and the 1yo will have some (i add another egg if he is eating).

cost wise it didn't add that much. I was eating so many carbs before as i was constantly hungry and eggs are only about a quid for 6 at lidl (i do buy free range). My expense/treat is an avocado a day. I love them.

dinner is usually something easy in the slow cooker, last night 4 chicken breasts and a tin of chickpeas, 1 pepper, 1 huge onion, tomatoes and a tin of coconut milk and spices for a curry for 3-4portions. Dh and fil had rice and naan i had cauli rice and half a naan.

we eat quite fatty cheaper cuts of meat too which keeps costs down.

I'm actually thinner than i have ever been and trying to keep weight on as my frame is large and in started to be pointy and bony (probably actually the way i should be really, i weigh 11.7st so I'm fine). But i feel so good with far less carbs so i don't really want to add those to my diet.

I'm a bit like a Labrador, lots of protein and good fats and my hair is glossy and my eyes are bright, I've got a wet nose and boundless energy...er not sure where i was going with that similie

Hmm, I find what you said about the poverty food tourism thing quite interesting. We have a larger income, (and less kids at home) than we have in the past, but I find I have an ingrained Puritan streak about "indulging" on food, even though, thinking about it logically, if you are going to spend on anything, it should be food.

I am also very good at being thrifty, and it is a hard habit to break.

With the salmon thing, when there were six of us at home, we never even had salmon because six Tesco fillets would have cost us £9.00 or something. Now there are four of us and I am interested in paeleo eating, but struggling to change my mindset.

I'm extremely dubious about this new trend of 'paleo' eating. Human beings are omnivorous. It's been a large part of our success as a species that whichever part of the globe we've ended up on, we've been able to find a way of living by making best use of all the resources around us. Nowadays of course we can import pretty much anything we want if we have enough money to pay for it. However, I can't imagine many societies in the distant past were ever able to eat a lot of animal protein day after day after day. Hunter gatherers would have had some meat after killing a biggish animal but most of the time they would be living on plant matter (nuts, seeds and fruits in good times, roots, stems, leaves and shoots for everyday, bark and woody bits in very hard times) supplemented with insects and occasional finds/kills of eggs, fish, honey and tiny mammals/reptiles/amphibians/birds. We'd have been scavenging as much as hunting a lot of the time. Carbs must always have been a big feature of our diet and once we had agriculture for millennia carbs became the staple food for the great majority of the population.

I know Gasp,

all that protein is also bad for your kidneys, and linked with all kinds of health problems.

Sure we can all do with a lot fewer carbs (especially added sugar) but overeating protein has long term health implications.

People seem to love faddy eating, as it makes them "special"

I don't eat paleo for any scientific reason. I just prefer it. I do think in recent history people ate less variety of carbs, so here it would have been bread and roots. But now we eat pasta, rice, cous cous etc. And as i said more fatty traditional cuts of meat like lamb breast, pork belly, liver etc.

i think the rise of obesity is linked to the increase in cheap carbs post war.

Low carb brings on a UTI - or at least UTI-like symptoms - every single time I've tried it which is a bummer because I lose weight quite well on it.

Lots of us eat normal healthy food - ie unadulterated good stuff which every doctor would recommend. It is not that we are eating weirdly if we don't eat junk food. It is the obese people eating junk food who are the aberrant strange ones, surely.

The fact some women like I am earn enough to buy as much fish as they want to eat should not be used as something to beat us over the head with because we are not porking out on donuts and pasta. What has the world come to when eating a bit of fish is regarded as so very wrong. The fact more people don't eat more fish is why they are all so fat.

Also even go back to the 1800s - cockles and mussels alive alive oh. That was the healthy stuff we snacked on or chestnuts in the streets. Now it's all kind of sugar poisons. No wonder we are less healthy than the previous generation.

DeoGratias Do you really earn enough to buy as much fish as you want to eat?

I must say I had no idea.

Lots of fish swimming round most islands, ovenchips!

There's a rub - our ancestors 40,000 years ago had as much fish as they liked just there for the taking, lucky them.

Gin. That was the stuff they snacked on in the 1800s.

Interesting article.
www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/ancestors-eat-paleolithi-diet/

Gaspode

I don't think it's that you're eating weirdly deogratias. Your salmon with peppers and spinach and your steak lunches sound delicious, and probably a lot of the people who've existed on cheap carbs now and throughout history would've been delighted to eat from your menu. It's just that if this is a typical menu for you, you're likely to be eating a diet heavier in animal protein than we evolved to consume. I wouldn't use the term 'aberrant' about people's eating habits myself, but very meat heavy diets with constant access to animal protein are no less 'normal' in the context of human history than the pasta you profess to despise. Frankly the fact that we've only started to get fat in any significant number recently is probably to do with food scarcity as much as anything else.

So eat what you want, I'm not judging. Just don't pretend your diet is something it isn't. Might also be an idea to reflect on the fact that the planet couldn't afford for us all to eat like you do either, so you may well owe the cheapo carbs brigade more than you think!

I rather resent the fact that the planet is so overpopulated that we are meant to reject salmon-heavy suppers, though. How did we get to the point where our diet has to cater to overpopulation rather than optimal nutrition?