HW 6 - Food Diary

I usually prefer not to keep count of what i eat because i feel that generally speaking, i eat too much. So instead i count calories and as long as what i ate was remotely healthy, then i can eat more as i get hungry. So this is my list for Wednesday and Thursday

I never eat breakfast, so that is that whole meal right out the window

Wednesday i had some of the buffet food from Emma's Dilemma for lunch, that included, white rice, sesame chicken, and some watermelon, along with that i had a can of seltzer. I estimate that meal was about 700 calories. Then after the soccer game i had a mini apple turnover from entenmann's which i estimate had 400 calories, and along with that i had bought a gallon of water which i drank through out the course of the game and hanging out with people after. Then for dinner, my mom made baked ziti and an arugula, walnut and apple salad. I had a generous portion of both, and i drank seltzer with dinner so i expect the calories from that meal to be around 800. That puts my total for the day to be 1900 calories, I base myself on a 2000 calorie a day diet, so for that 24 hours, i think i did quite well, and i got a little bit of exercise in too, albeit not very much because i am only the goalie so i don't do much running.

Thursday, or today, i had a slice of pizza from that new dollar pizza place and a spicy salmon roll and some other assorted sushi roll from the deli on 23rd and Lexington. and i had a bottle of water. I would chock that one up to 800 calories. Then i had a chocolate chip and a sugar cookie which had about 400 more calories, then i had Chinese food for dinner which included, pork dumplings, fried rice, sesame chicken, and spare ribs. I would then chock that up to 1000 calories because that food is drenched in grease. So that brings my total for the day to 2200 calories, which is about a full cookie above where i want to be, and i didn't exercise either which then shows that these calories didn't get burned like i wanted them too.

As i eat, i look for three things, whatever has the least calories, the most taste, and is the most filling. This is increasingly difficult to find because as the school year gets into full swing, i can't get to the gym as much because i have more school work that needs to be done and things like that. So as i eat, i am more calorie conscious. As i have discussed before, since i have a history with weight problems, i need to be very conscious of what i eat. The thing about my meals, is that in hindsight, there is almost no nutritional value in what i eat, it is mostly based on chicken that is drenched in some very heavy sauce. I mean from just those two days, the food looks terrible for someone who is supposedly counting their calories and is trying to eat healthier. When i eat, i want to be healthy, but I'm not, and i don't think this applies to just me, a lot of people try to be healthy, but it fails because we don't really know how, i know I'm not supposed to eat a lot and try to vary it up, but end the end, in a battle between my stomach and my brain, my stomach is going to win. Looking back, i don't feel good about what i ate, i feel like i have ability to be really healthy and i am not using that option because i don't have the determination that some people to. When it comes to food, I don't really have the option to eat what i want, the dominant discourse of America is that skinny is good, and because of that i need to be skinny, i need to strive to follow the dominant discourse, i need to be self conscious of my body and what i eat, and to go even further, it is to dress nice, and so on and so forth. In the constitution it states that we have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By creating and adhearing to the dominant discourses, we are stripping ourself of the pursuit of happiness. We are now changing it to the pursuit of acceptance, which gives us that false sense of happiness. So what if we can't eat the food that we want, we want to be happy and have everyone like us, so we can't eat like pigs and be as socially accepted. It's not even that our culture doesn't accept people who are overweight, because for the most part, we do, we have to. But we make games out of it, with television shows such as The Biggest Looser, or Dance Your Ass Off. These are all shows where people parade around all in the hopes of loosing weight and following the dominant discourse. We push ourselves so hard to be accepted by others that we are willing to sacrifice our own happiness for it. I guess that sacrificing our own happiness makes us happy after all, because otherwise, why would everyone be doing it?