Men and Food

In reading Tosca Reno's new expanded edition of the Eat Clean Diet, I found the new chapter, "Men Can Eat Clean, Too." She feels, through her experiences, that most men don't make as much of a fuss about food as women and generally eat what is placed before them at home and what is "easiest" when out of the home. I think the idea might be that women reading the chapter should feel comfortable changing the household fare to cleaner meals because "Someone prepares the food in question, puts it on a plate and sets in in front of said man. The food is consumed, the meal is over and that is the end of it."

Not at this household. I try to serve healthy meals and Pat is used to it. He may eat the meal, but he'll be sneaking around the kitchen at 10pm frying up some greasy concoction to "make up" for whatever he had to suffer through. Should I dare serve something out of the ordinary, a quinoa casserole perhaps, he will suddenly be "too tired to eat" and will "have some later." Later never comes for the food exotic to his palate, but later does come for a dripping cheeseburger cooked after I am in bed. This has been going on for decades.

Long, long ago when we were first married...Pat would run with me and go to the gym with me. He would also seemingly happily eat the healthy fare that I set before him. Little did I know that he was stopping at his mom's house daily to fill up on the daily fried feasts he was accustomed to before heading home. I later heard from a relative that she thought I was "starving her poor boy."

I just can't agree with the idea that if you serve it they will eat it. If they've been conditioned for years to eat slime and filth, they will crave that slime and filth. They will need to embrace clean eating of their own accord. Either the waist band will have to get too tight or the doctor's report be too frightening before some men will ever adopt a healthier eating lifestyle. Some might even require alien inhabitation of their bodies!

Most of the chapter is very good though - convincing men that they can start eating clean and that their health depends on it. She brings up that it was male body builders who first introduced the concept of clean-eating and avoiding processed foods, at a time when processed foods were becoming marketing favorites. She likens cleaning eating to high octane fuel for a treasured vehicle. Thrown in is the perk that clean eating will improve their sexual health.