Is there anyone who just eats normally?

[Peanutss]

I can't believe the amount of threads where the OP claims to eat only a boiled spinach shake for breakfast, plain cous cous for dinner and a salmon fillet with veg for tea. With of course, only an apple as a snack in between.

Is there anyone like me who just has a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast, a meal deal for lunch and then whatever I can be arsed putting in the oven for tea? I'm beginning to wonder if I'm massively unhealthy in comparison to most or whether people are just making this up.

Because it’s not true.

Kissing is clearly the medical expert on the subject, so we can leave it there

A certain poster is literally the BEST MN example I've seen in years of 'can't argue with stupid.'

I assume I eat fairly normally. I try to make sure I eat quite a lot of veg but apart from that I don't have rules or label food bad. I know that I get most the things I need since I'm not restricting anything so don't have to be careful in the same way a vegan might for example. Today I had no breakfast, burger king for lunch, salmon fillet with pesto pasta and lots of veg for dinner.

It’s weird

There’s a pride in the junk you eat

And yet it’s clearly a worry at some level by the way you see everything as an attack.

miaow miaow miaow miaow miaow miaow

I had chicken kievs, chips n veg for dinner and it was so good because apart from a slice of cake around lunchtime there wasn't much time to eat today. In a bit I will go and snaffle the rest of the peach slices from the other night.

Am slightly shocked at the continuing snootiness on this thread. Not one person has proudly gloated over having a relaxed attitude to enjoying their food but I reckon all of the self appointed diet preachers have relished in generalisations and presumption whilst polishing their misplaced control halos.

B: granola with oat milk, orange juice, one slice wholemeal toast and cup of coffee

L: out at cafe so grilled aubergine, houmous, carrots cooked with sumac, green salad, salad, broccoli and quite a lot of bread

Snacks: bowl raspberries, small packet of crisps, small bar of chocolate, liquorice tea

D: corn tortillas with homemade guacamole, vegan chorizo, vegetables and a few glasses of wine

I think that's pretty normal, albeit vegan (for ethical rather than health reasons). No restricting carbs as I would feel ill. Quite mindful that I eat enough fruit and veg but no worries if I don't. No fast days or 'treat' days as I find that kind of talk strange. Eat what you feel like!

You are what you eat :)

You are what you eat

Oh bigger, I'm fish fingers..

And currently, I'm a banana pancake...

I do feel a bit flat.

Ba'boom!

I have a 9 week old baby. One day this week I have survived solely on 200g of dairy milk and 4 cans of diet coke. What's normal again?

Kissing surely you must acknowledge that some foods are bad for you?

No, absolutely no foods are bad for you. Only bad diets are bad for you, and only over a long time.

Do you think some foods are good for you, and if so how are they ‘good’?

The nub of all this is that what matters isn’t what you eat, but what - over a long time - you don’t eat. Normal diets include all the things you should eat, just without slavish adherence to the latest fad.

you can’t argue with stupid

That should be written at the top of every thread on which MN food faddists and self-appointed nutri-gurus gather to congratulate themselves on how much better they are than the ‘bad’ eaters.

No, absolutely no foods are bad for you. Only bad diets are bad for you, and only over a long time.

Absolutely this.

If you have a full English everyday, that would be bad for you. Having a full English once a month, it will likely do you good.
Same with alcohol, drink every day, very be, drink occasionally, its fine and even beneficial.

Sorry yes I do agree that eating pizza every day to the exclusion of everything else would be bad for you but that pizza once a week wouldn't. I suppose I'm just thinking that a diet made up of that kind of food would be bad for you.

Not one person has proudly gloated over having a relaxed attitude to enjoying their food

Look I wish I could ! But I am mid 40s and it’s taken me many years to realise that unless I practice self control I will be overweight .

And it’s not vanity . My extra 3 stone gave me permanent back ache and spent many wasted hours at osteo and physio (although the physio was a game changer as stated me on core exercises which I do daily )

If I lived on sandwiches , pizza and chicken pie and mash every day I would be overweight and less healthy and munching naproxen every day

I also think as you age the benefits of a healthier diet make themselves known , and felt

I am not saying this to be smug but it’s a basic fact of life for many people

So I gained 4 kilo over Xmas
That’s eating a box of Lindor every night for you

But started to use free weights and was horrified to realise that the kilos I wave over my head are only HALF of what I gained . It’s quite shocking to think I gained that much over a month

A lot of it is education and knowledge about the basics of food and our own biology.

It'd be great if there was a stronger emphasis on the benefits of eating healthy & what a balanced diet really means in schools. :)

It'd be great if there was a stronger emphasis on the benefits of eating healthy & what a balanced diet really means in schools.

I agree with this. One of the things I had at school many years ago was very good advice in lessons of what was then called Home Economics. Practical and sensible advice about diet. Plenty of myth busting.

My children don’t get this. ‘Food Technology’, or whatever the latest name is, seems to be about the business of food.

“Home Economics”, to include healthy shopping/cooking/eating taking account of good ecological and budgetary practice, ought to be a core class right through school.

It's been a while since I've spent any time in a primary school, but don't they do lots of work around healthy eating now?

I don't think that the problem is really that people don't know what a healthy diet is (the people on this thread who are insistent that anything but their own version of orthorexia is a trash diet aside). People know what they should eat - it's doing it that's tough. I'm about to eat a cheese sandwich for lunch (gasp!) - it's not that I don't know that a kale and quinoa salad would be better for me, it's that for various reasons (cost, time, what we had in the house last night, what I fancied eating, what I can eat with one hand while MN-ing in 15 minutes then get back to work) I didn't make the absolutely optimal diet choice.

Believing that a kale and quinoa salad would be a better lunch than a cheese sandwich is surely the very essence of orthorexic thinking?

No I don't think from reading comments on MN that people do really understand what healthy eating is.

marymarkle - definitely. People on MNare extremely confused about what constitutes a healthy diet!

People on MNare extremely confused about what constitutes a healthy diet!

It does seem some are in denial/very misinformed.

Education much needed.

The thing is, this thread was never meant to be an argument over what constitutes a healthy diet. I said at the very start I wasn't under any impression that my diet was super healthy and I eat mainly for convenience. Certain people have turned it into that because they can't seem to help themselves whenever someone else's diet is mentioned.