I know I'm not fat

I know i'm not fat
When I tell people I'm on a diet they look at me and almost always the look at me like I'm crazy. All my life I've been the skinny kid. And the men in my family on either side are all skinny men. It's really not in my genes to not fit in my jeans. I know that i can pretty much continue eating whatever i want and the fact that I'm reasonable active will keep the pounds off. But I've been thinking about my relationship with food, about people's relationship with food in general. What I've realized is I don't really know what food is, and I don't think a lot of us do. What is an uncooked chicken supposed to look like? If the idea of a yellow skinned bird entered your mind you like me don't know a chicken from it's feathers. If soyleant green was advertized today it could be a health drink before anyone got the reference. I mean really what is a cheese doodle?
So how did i get here. A fully grown adult who can't even tell what he is supposed to eat. Well the answer is simple marketing. Finish this phrase "two all beef paties...." if you didn't have to think about if the rest of that phrase just rolled off of you tounge think of the amount of advertising that had to go into that. To make matters worse McDonalds doesn't even use it that much anymore and it's still there in our collective psyche. A damn good investment if you think about it from a business standpoint. Here we are parroting a campaign from decades ago. A lot has been written about these things, I'm not having some profound eureka moment that will spark the fire of a food revolution. This is just my personal journey with food.
Like i said before the men in my family are all pretty skinny but the women on the other hand did not have the same experience. Most of them are larger and ALL of them were skinny. For most of them childbirth changed there body type. I mention this because as a result I've watched them all deal in some degree with there relationships with food. My grandmother would cook almost two meals, one for herself and one for everyone else. The refridgerator had food for her and food for everyone else.
I don't want to make this about weight because it's not wholly about weight. It is really about the choices we make when we eat. Here in new york they've made it a law that the resturants have to list the calorie content of the food. At first when i heard this i thought it was a bit crass. Now i find that thought intriguing. The calorie count is just as important as cost. Which brings us to the biggest change in my relationship with food: value.
How do we define value? Sounds like an easy answer. Value comes from getting the most for your money. But of what? I grew up answering that question with this simple formula cost/ounces of meat = value. The more meat for the dollar was the choice always. Yet i now see that as almost a rediculous way of viewing food. Meat is only one aspect of your diet yet i was basing almost everything on it. Nowadays i'm looking more at the vegetables the more vegetables are in it the more i'm interested.
For the most part i still don't believe there is "bad" food. I'm just beginning to question the amount of food i need. Currently i'm about 210lbs. This is a good weight for me. I feel healthy and most people looking at me would agree. Which concievable means i burn what i eat rather effectively. The revelation though is that i used to over eat on a regular basis. I'm not talking about intense binging sessions. I'm talking about going to a regular resturant and ordering a regular entree with no appetizers and no dessert. So much food that i'd feel like i was ready to burst. Why? Because somewhere in Africa, or North Korea there was a starving kid, and if i didn't eat what was infront of me i was wasting food. Wasting food? Growing up we are praised for cleaning our plate. "take all you want, but eat all you take." there are a ton of colloquialisms like this in our culture. While i don't think ordering food just to throw it away is a great thing, eating something because the alternative is the food is going to go to waste is a horrible eating habit. Expanding my waist is as bad as increasing my waste.
Learning to cook has also changed the food conversation, I used to by cookies. Not often, just every now and again. Nowadays when i do get an itch for choco chip, i make them. It is ten times more rewarding to have made them myself and due to the time it takes to make them the i make less and eat them slower to enjoy the effort longer. Net result much less wasteful eating.
My goal with my diet is to create a relationship with food that is healthy and pleasurable. I think I'm on my way and I'm doing it in such a way that I don't give up the things I love i just change the way I eat them.