One evening, at around 22:45, someone called me and asked: “How rich is the milk kissel they sell in those kilo-sized packs?” I didn’t immediately understand what “rich” was supposed to mean, since you can’t really ask or say “how rich” – everything is relative and it depends. The person was simply craving a couple of big glasses of milk kissel, but the problem was that their body had kind of got out of hand, it was late, and they didn’t want to make things worse.
It’s hard to explain this to people, hard to make clear how it works with this “richness”, whether something is “allowed or not allowed”, how much, when and what you can have. People find it incredibly difficult to grasp that a large part of what happens in us and around us unfolds as processes. Processes that, on the one hand, begin and take shape as the sum of small events, and on the other hand, the tiny steps or details usually don’t have a big, immediately visible effect on the process as a whole. It’s the same with weight loss, with weight gain, with any kind of development, with changing something or something changing. On the one hand, even a hundred-kilometer journey begins with a first step; on the other, once you’ve taken that step or two, you can’t see that you’ve got very far along your way.
So what should I say to such an evening kissel lover? When I hear questions like this, I always get a tragicomic image of a house that’s blazing, seriously on fire, and people going to put out the huge blaze with a bucket of water. On the other hand, it would also be wrong to sit idly by and do or recommend nothing at all – or to recommend the wrong thing.
Allowed or not, does it make you fat or not?
Everything is relative and there is no single answer. An ordinary person, of course, doesn’t understand this talk of “relativity”. What does relativity mean? It means that whether you can drink those two glasses of milk kissel in the evening at 22:45 depends on the broader context. That context is your lifestyle as an ongoing process – that is, everything you did today, yesterday, and how you plan to spend the coming days. Here we’re talking about physical activity, the nature of your work, the food you’ve already eaten and your calorie intake. Do you have an active job, do you do training on top of your day job, and if so, when (during the day), how intense and how long are those training sessions, and what has your energy expenditure (in calories) been over the whole day and the training? All of this together determines whether, when and how much milk kissel you can drink in the evening between 22:00 – 23:00. Of course, if you got home from an intense workout at 21:30 and have eaten in the meantime, there’s no question – the context is such that nothing will happen if you pour those two glasses of kissel down even at midnight. On the other hand, if you’re sedentary, haven’t burned much during the day and have eaten quite well, then indeed – you wouldn’t need that kissel, I say as a nutrition consultant. But if I’m honest as a person, it makes no difference. It makes no difference in the sense that if you drift through day after day inactively and unhealthily anyway and that’s simply your lifestyle, and then one evening you worry about two glasses of milk kissel – then it makes no difference.
People tend to see things in black and white, and nutrition is no different. Very often only “allowed” or “not allowed” is acknowledged. Likewise, I sometimes find it quite hard to explain to certain people how I can be on a tough diet and still eat 20% – that is, relatively “rich” – sour cream. All they see is a guy on a diet and, “look, he’s eating fatty sour cream and says it’s still hard”, but they fail to understand what my energy expenditure in training actually is, what sets and weights I train with, and how little 20 – 50 grams of sour cream really is. But the context is in place, and look, even “rich” sour cream, cheese and chocolate can be allowed.
Which is why, in the end, you can actually eat anything, even when you’re trying to lose weight, but the question is quantities, total calories and timing. To understand these things, though, you first have to seriously admit to yourself that you want change in your life, that you want to start eating healthily, you have to gather knowledge, start researching and reading – you have to want it. You have to set a conscious goal and move toward it by getting to know yourself and experimenting.
Author: Janar Rückenberg
Come and train! ArtGym
