What To Feed Me Friday

First, an anectode.

Where I work, they just opened a pizza restaurant -- one of the national chains -- on the first floor. The smell drifts up to my second floor office from the moment they start making pizza-ish items at 8 am. All day long, my mind is on pizza -- how good it tastes, how good it smells, how much I want some, and how I'm going to justify not eating the lunch and snacks I packed because I want to buy pizza instead. It's such a halos and horns moment -- I pack good stuff, but am tempted by other choices.

All that said, one of the events we held yesterday took a look at nutrition, obesity, etc... through a culturally-focused lens. It challenged us to look at the national charts that say what makes one healthy or not healthy in terms of size, as those national charts don't always take into account ethnicity, class, and gender differences. At the same time, the presentation challenged the notion that people can't make healthier choices even with ethnicity, class, and gender differences taken into account.

But learned about two new resources/books that are interesting when it comes to food, health, nutrition, and how we personally reflect on and manage these issues. The first, Feed Me blog, is based out of a recently-released book, Feed Me: Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image, by Harriet Brown.

The second resource. MyPyramid, an informative and interactive site from the USDA, that helps people learn various nutrition facts, but also has several FREE and interactive tools to help people develop personalized nutrition plans. We like FREE in these times.

I've been challenging the pizza halos-and-horns moments by doing a few things at the office. One, I've put in some Wallflowers from Bath & Body Works to keep my space smelling less like pizza. It has helped a lot. Two, we've pooled our resources to keep bottled waters, fresh fruit and those 100-cal snacks in our common spaces, so that we have some choices to consider when those pizza-craves hit us all day.

Anything to keep us focused on thing other than pizza.
fs