Tom and I have discovered a weird side-effect of not eating fast food.

It's been a couple of weeks since we've bought fast food. This was largely because we realized just how much money got dumped into it every week, but also for health reasons. [I'm more about the healthy part. Tom's deciding factor was the money part.] It wasn't quite an every-day thing, but three, four times a week, Tom would swing by Burger King, either when he got out of work or when I did.

Now, he's still eating one Subway sub each day, but his body seems to handle those just fine and dandy. (Plus, at $5 for an entire meal for him, it's an awesome deal.) Me, I'm nibbling at more rice and veggies. I baked some muffins yesterday (which, btw, are AMAZING - shredded carrot, cinnamon, cumin, I forget what else; just savory enough to satisfy a craving, while still sweet). I'm keeping more munchable healthy things around the apartment, and not letting myself buy so much candy at work.

Yesterday, since I wasn't working, I nibbled at some rice'n'veggies, had a muffin or two, and picked at bits of things while making a simple casserole for Tom: This is an amazing, amazing little meal-maker. SUPER cheap. I've found the chicken is optional. Salsa can sub in for the tomatoes and peppers. Rice + chicken broth for the boxed thing. Everything but the cheese is always on-hand! Add some spices to the rice to make it more interesting. Yesterday's variations: ground chicken from the freezer that I cooked in a bit of Frank's Hot Sauce, left-over chicken broth from the fridge that I cooked the rice in; cumin, chili powder, ground chipotle; bought some veggies cheap - used half a red pepper, half a green pepper, a jalapeno, a small onion; found sharp cheddar on sale and grated it myself. I had a smidge more casserole than would fit in the intended pan, so I nibbled at it while Tom attacked the main dish. (This is when I found that a light dusting of bacon bits was FANTASTIC, so I added that on.)

Anyway, I got enough food to get us through the week for $20. Little more than I'd hoped to spend (given that I have $50 to work with this week...it was a rough rent-payment this month), but, I realized I have enough on-hand to make a whole second one of those casseroles! woo! (I may even have a chicken breast in the freezer, though Tom reminded me that skipping the chicken is fine.) Plus there's *both* pb&j and ham&cheese for Tom to have sandwiches.


So, point of the story:

While Tom was wolfing down the casserole... he realized he was still *starving* after a bowl. He had a second. I threw a muffin at him. This got him down to "regular hungry". As he filled the cereal bowl a third time, we stopped to consider this. Typically, he'd only need like two bowls, and then nibble at the third for awhile. This third bowl was going to be gone in the next five minutes. (Bearing in mind, the boy always eats way, way too fast. I'm still working on that one.) He told me he's been hungry for the better part of the last week, way hungrier than usual. And he's been eating more.

And then we realized:

His Burger King meals included a big burger combo (burger+fries+Coke) and a second, usually smaller burger. ONE combo meal is likely close to 2000 calories. (Which is why they make me feel queasy - my calorie requirements are something like 1400 per DAY.)

Tom's body had acclimated to that ginormous calorie intake! It was *expecting* to have something like 3000 calories or so, basically every day. (I'm sure it's higher - he'd often do two Subway subs or a sub and a BK. On top of whatever he ate at home.) So even though he's now eating *more* food, I don't think there's anything I could possibly cook him that comes anywhere near the calorie level of a BK Quad Stacker.

Now, listening to my nutrition lectures.. your stomach's "full" message comes from volume, not calories. So we might be able to work with that to an extent. But that won't keep him from being hungry again ten minutes later. "Your body remembers what it *usually* does", the lecturer often repeats. His usually ingests a LOT of energy. I'm sure he burns through an awful lot of it - walking across his store twice is undoubtedly a mile, he's a freaking giant so it takes more energy to just pump blood around, etc.

I need to figure out how to make healthy, HIGH calorie food for him. At least as an intermediary, to slowly convince his body to only take in what it should really need. This is going to be interesting...

Labels: cooking, health, life in general