Why It’s Not That Hard To Eat Well In America

The title says it all, folks: It is not that goddamn hard to eat a healthy and balanced diet in America. You will find this article to be short: that’s because eating healthy is incredibly simple, and it doesn’t take more than 1200 words to explain how it’s done.

I’m directing this article at everybody who blubbers about it being “impossible” to eat healthy in the USA…most of whom are either fat acceptance biddies that talk about how “society” made them fat while shoving cookies into their mouth, or the occasional “goodwhite” writing about food deserts in TIME or some other periodical.

Yes, America is a nation full of fatty fat fatties. Yes, the portion sizes at restaurants are too big. Yes, many people in America eat a bad diet that turns them into disgusting fatbodies. But for fuck’s sake, people talk as if there’s just lard and instant macaroni and cheese flying through the air, forcing themselves down people’s gullets and dooming them to a lifetime of sexual inadequacy, low-testosterone, and physical weakness. According to these people, this is all part of an insidious plot to make us weak and impotent and thus declare martial law.

This is predominantly a woman’s complaint (I have yet to find a single man formally involved in fat acceptance), but one occasionally sees it in the manosphere as well (most notably my roommate in my last year of school who adamantly refused to ever learn how to cook).

It is, in fact, incredibly easy to avoid crappy food and enormous restaurant portions.

How To Avoid Eating Crappy Food Or Giant Portions

Step 1: Don’t buy crappy food or go to crappy chain restaurants!

Who the hell wants to go to Applebee’s anyway? Applebee’s sucks. Why don’t you patronize a privately owned restaurant instead and support your local economy, or better yet, learn how to cook? Knowing how to cook is a cheap and easy way to wine and dine a woman, and then get to the debauchery that you really want.

It also makes you a person worth knowing, which is of course something that this website advocates, my own website advocates, and most other websites in this subculture do as well.

Refusing to patronize chain restaurants also jabs a needle into the palm of the Cheap Labor Lobby: the service industry is one of the biggest employees of illegal immigrants (in the United States at least, I admit I don’t know the statistics for other countries). While it likely won’t affect too much change, it’s more of a worthwhile symbolic gesture then voting.

“I may not go to shitty restaurants anymore, but I still can’t cook!” you might say “I need to eat frozen garbage that is loaded with preservatives!” Once again, learn how to cook. Patronize used book stores, I picked up a copy of this cookbook for 75 cents.

Or, considering that you’re on the internet right now, find some recipes for 0 dollars and 0 cents! Buy some cheap cookware (most cookbooks list all of the supplies needed for their recipes, which are more than enough for the average kitchen) and get on your way to making healthy food, fatty!

“But The Grocery Store Doesn’t Sell Healthy Food” Or “It’s Too Expensive!”

I hear this excuse way too much, and it’s complete nonsense. I’m going to give you a very simple rule of food purchasing, one that my parents taught me to use, and I have used since I moved out: If your great-grandfather wouldn’t recognize it as food, it’s not food. Don’t buy anything Gramps wouldn’t recognize. And obviously, if you yourself have children, add another “great” onto that when you teach it to them, and so on for their children and future descendants.

Any grocery store worth its salt should have perfectly healthy food. If your local ShitMart doesn’t have any, find a farmer’s market or a green grocer (once again, use the internet for something useful, that’s what it’s there for). “Food deserts” only exist because the clientele makes the surrounding environs so dangerous that respectable food producers don’t sell there. If that’s the case for you, drive until you find a decent grocer.

I really shouldn’t need to tell you what constitutes “healthy food”—even if you had idiot parents that fed you junk food, you all went to elementary school, you’ve seen the food pyramid, and while the portions listed on that pyramid are highly skewed towards the grains (due to the economic politics of agricultural business), the other foods listed on it are still the foods you should be eating—meat of all kinds, dairy, fruits, and vegetables.

Bear in mind that when I mention “avoiding overly processed foods,” I’m not saying you have to be anal retentive and only buy organic food. While organic food is probably slightly more nutritious, conventionally grown and raised agricultural products still have to meet minimum safety and nutritional standards. By overly processed, I mean foods loaded with preservatives (sugar, salt, MSG, etc.) As a (literal) rule of thumb, if the list of ingredients is longer than your thumb, be wary of it.

One can live quite comfortably on spending 50 dollars a week on groceries (and that’s being generous) provided you cut out desserts and other junk food, buy food that has all the essential nutrients that you need to function, and ration your food to last the week (and without even trying, I just gave you an effective method of dieting for weight loss: eat less by buying less food). You don’t need as much food as you think you do.

I’m aware of the fact that, for you weightlifters out there, you won’t be as strong on a calorically restricted diet as you would be with a more calorically dense diet. But eating a common-sense, “don’t eat shit” diet has all of the essential nutrients, and it’s a lot healthier than most of the garbage American people eat nowadays.

And I can give you my personal promise that, if you combine this diet with daily exercise, you will lose weight and, for the most part, retain your muscle mass as well (meaning “As well as you would on a specialized “cutting” diet”).

So what are you waiting for? Quit making excuses and do it. And if you’re still struggling with this “buying decent food” concept, ask the people who work at the grocery store. It’s what they get paid to do.

Read More: Let Hard Experience Be Your Teacher