Ratatouille Week: Day 2

"Food is fuel."

I've been hearing this quote in my mind a lot lately, but in the wrong way, I think? Like, Remy's dad (whose name is Django, I'm literally just learning now) says it in support of his argument that eating garbage is okay, and maybe even necessary to survival. Remy, on the other hand, is saying that you have to eat right if you really wanna live.

The rub is that "eating right" looks different to each individual person. For rats, whom I assume have high metabolism and a general tolerance for eating whatever they can get their hands on, "eating right" could mean eating as much as you can, or, if you're Remy the rat, it could mean enjoying the flavor combinations you are tasting. For me, and other humans who have lived their entire adult life near the "obese" column on the BMI scale, "eating right" means eating that correct combination of food that will magically unlock the ability to lose weight without killing yourself.

At the beginning of the year, I made a promise to PoYB that I was going to be doing the keto diet for the entire years, all 365 days. That kind of fell apart as the summer neared, mainly because it constipated me to the point that my body was shutting down (let's be real, though, I loved having the excuse to binge on junk food again). So for the first five months, I lost 20-30 pounds, and then over the summer, I gained it all back.

But on August 23rd, I started a new job, so I tied another life change to that first one—back to another diet. The science behind the keto diet is debatable—i.e. it's not 100% certain that cutting out carbs is actually good for you—but the bedrock of keto as it pertains to weight loss is solid. Burn more calories than you consume. That's it. No one disputes this. That's why keto worked for me, if I'm being honest with myself—it wasn't the act of eating very few carbs, it was the likelihood that eating less carbs was going to coincidentally relate to a decrease in calories too.

So this time around, I'm just counting calories. It's as simple as that. I'm logging everything I eat on MyFitnessPal, and making sure I (mostly) stay under the daily/weekly limit. It's a pain in the ass, but it's working—I'm back to my May weight, with no end in sight, and I feel a lot better than I did during keto. I actually have energy.

That's why I've been hearing Remy's dad in my head a lot lately. I'm still eating shit that I don't necessarily want to eat, but I do it because it's low-calorie and because long-term that's going to translate to a healthier body. I don't like plain non-fat greek yoghurt with chia seeds, but I eat it. Food is fuel.

Which, again, is not necessarily what Remy's dad meant when he said it. But I'm also not a rat, so I can think it means whatever the fuck I want it to mean.

Don't even get me started about Django's other quote: "The world we live in belongs to the enemy." Be thankful I just talked about my stupid diet instead.