johnpalmer

So, yesterday, I decided to make a loaf of sourdough whole wheat bread. I've seen suggestions that people can better tolerate whole wheat bread over white, and sourdough over bread raised with baker's yeast. It might have been a tactical error.

First, once the bread was out of the oven, and three hours cooled, I had the whole "OOOH FRESH BREAD!" reaction. That's getting easier to tamp down, but it's not, you know, *easy*.

Then, today, I cut myself enough bread to be really stingy, really, you know, *mean*. Enough so that, when I weighed it, I'd chuckle and say "see? that's not a lot of bread." Well... it was 76 grams. It wasn't a *lot* of bread, but it was a substantial amount. I could count on that being at least 36 grams of carbohydrate.

I've had at least twice as much bread with breakfast before - imagine two pieces of bread, buttered and grilled so the cheese melts on top (did I mention the cheese?), then topped with bacon or ham or a very-thin sausage patty, and then a fried egg placed on top of each. That was what I considered a good, satisfying amount of bread. That would be 72 grams of carbohydrate... well, now that I'm working out harder, I eat a lot more than that much in a day, but if I wasn't intentionally "sugaring up" for a workout, I might not eat even that much in a day. And, if I did, I'd do so in the form of lentils and onions and nuts, not simple starches.

The same rules always apply: anything I want to eat before exercise is fine - it can't hurt me, my muscles will burn it up, and without even putting much strain on my beta cells, because exercise burns sugar without insulin. But do I really want a nice, tasty loaf of bread, sitting around, calling my name, reminding me of the joys of buttered toast? Do I want to constantly think about making a hamburger sandwich, instead of just having a hamburger patty? When I'm eating sardines, do I want to be thinking "Eh, bland - maybe if I toasted up some bread, I could kinda mush 'em up - maybe add something as a flavoring to make a fish sandwich?"

(NB: Just discovered that sardines are a *very* good food - very high in Omega 3 oils, good source of protein, Vitamin D, calcium, B12, they're sustainably fished, and, they're low enough on the food chain that they don't tend to concentrate toxins.)

Here's the basics of food... your body needs protein, and fat. And, it needs glucose - but it can make it from protein if it has to. Your body doesn't actually need any carbohydrate.

Now, don't get me wrong: you'd be seriously malnourished if you avoided foods that had carbohydrate in them! But protein and fat build the body, and the carbohydrate is just the fuel. And wheat is a damn good source of fuel. If I was going on a ten mile hike, a nice big hunk of bread would be just the thing to have along with me. But let's face facts. I'm a database administrator, and if I'm not sitting on my ass for 7 hours a day, it must be a really slow work day. Before bread is a "good" food for me, I need a lot more activity, and, that activity is going to have to be self-directed.

I'd like that. I'd like to be more active. As time goes on, I realize my body is much less able than I'd like it to be. I'd like to be able to jump and run and dance; I'd like to take a martial arts class and be told that I obviously already can *move* just fine, we just need to learn to *direct* that movement. But, even if I exercised a heck of a lot more each day, I wouldn't actually need *bread*.

If, to quote Cookie Monster, bread has to be a "sometime" food, maybe it shouldn't be around the house. That's in keeping with an old rule I like to follow, where any food that's important enough to run to the grocery store is "legal".

(Have you ever heard of that? It goes like this: Any food important enough to motivate you to run to the grocery store is legal, but, you can't keep leftovers - which, for some people, would be really bad. They'd eat the entire 2, er, 1.75, er, 1.5, quarts of ice cream in one sitting. I've been there, though more often with a bag of chips, than with ice cream. But, it can work as good discipline. You want a few cookies? Fine, go to the store, buy the cookies, eat what you want, throw the rest away. But if it's not so important that you'll go to the store for them, it's *not* that important. I'll note it also requires a high degree of food security, where you *know* you have money to "waste" on an entire box of cookies when you'll only eat a few.)

I have a lot of dried berries around the house. They're *great* for sugaring up, but they're "treats", not "food". Bread is "food". When I visited

kightp, I bought some candy, and again, treats, not food - that worked out well for me. But bread....

What's worse is, sure, whole wheat flour has good vitamins and minerals and fiber (insoluble fiber, which can be very important), but that's just the germ and the bran, both of which you can (and I have) bought separately. The rest, all the stuff that makes up the larger portion of the kernel, is just the starch, just the fuel, and not that good for you. I mean, as I said, *great* fuel, but I don't need much fuel.

I'm afraid that I'd be wisest to keep fresh bread out of my house, unless I can find a very germ-heavy recipe.