Healthy Eating Blues - The Oatmeal Edition, Part 3

There is a part of me that thinks perhaps in my quest to make oatmeal taste good, I am making something that is supposed to be healthy quite unhealthy, and thus defeating the whole purpose of eating oatmeal in the first place. At the very least I believe I am lowering the “healthy” factor. Especially after watching a recent episode of Top Chef (DC) when one of the chefs mentioned how much sodium and fat peanut butter contains. Great.

Then I reminded myself that I am trying to eat healthier. Maybe one day I will make the leap to unadulterated oatmeal, but that day is not today. I’m pretty sure it won’t be tomorrow, either. I guess it was like my Hershey’s Kisses philosophy when this whole endeavor began: eating oatmeal with Hershey’s Kisses is better than eating Hershey’s Kisses without oatmeal.

That is going to have to be good enough for now.

Well, since I learned about the relative evils of peanut butter, I decided to omit it from my oatmeal in this week’s batch. It has made my Tupperware easier to wash. Guess there is a lot of fat in there.

At first, I thought about adding syrup as my sweetener. I have two kinds of syrup – like people have two kinds of china – the good kind and the everyday kind. The good kind is 100% maple. The junk kind consists of < 2% maple and/or maple flavoring. I hesitated to use the good (i.e., real) syrup, because what if I did not like it or needed quite a bit to flavor my oatmeal? You see, I learned from the honey experience that oatmeal somehow whisks away the sweetness, so you have to add a lot of it (seemingly, at least) to gain any kind of taste benefit.

Wow, I am on the upswing of the oatmeal learning curve!

Anyway, I nixed the “maple” syrup idea since when I read the label of the “everyday” syrup, it is waaaayyy worse for you nutritionally than peanut butter. So I went back to my brown sugar option and added a splash of honey as a bonus. I also had a nice, ripe mango, so I diced that and added it into the mix. Adding a couple of hearty shakes from my unsweetened cocoa powder canister and I was in business. Not quite Flavor Town, but maybe a distant, but neighboring county. At least we were in the same State (think Vermont, not Alaska). Kinda.

Frankly, I am somewhat surprised that I have been able to sustain my four-day-a-week oatmeal consumption well into Week Number Three. But now is not the time to allow arrogance to swagger in . . . rolling its hips and making that irritating chin lift of acknowledgment. I think that the one-month mark may serve as a saturation point. Righteous intention and plucky stick-to-it-ness can only sustain you for so long. It will become significantly harder to maintain my whole grain commitment in the next several weeks. Especially since I do not see any measurable benefits. I don’t feel or look better. I don’t have more energy. I don’t eat less.

Now that I am depressing myself, I will cling ever more tenaciously to the idea that eating oatmeal/10-grain hot cereal is good for my insides. Yes, not just good, but incredibly good for my insides. Monumentally beneficial for my insides. In fact, every time I eat oatmeal, my insides rejoice and give thanks for the spectacular bounty presented to them.

Oatmeal, oatmeal, rah, rah, rah.

*sigh*

Maybe I’m hitting the wall before my first month is up.