Real men don't eat veggies

Grandpa Gathman was a milkman in Elgin.

Some of my earliest memories are of him picking me up in his Park Road Dairy truck in the late 1950s, seating 4-year-old me next to him on an upside-down wire milk crate (the truck had only one seat and child-seat safety standards were, shall we say, just a little more relaxed back then) and driving me around on his delivery route.

Grandpa G. passed down the idea that milk was the perfect food, loaded with vitamins and minerals, though cream and butter tasted even better.

His half-German-speaking, half-English-speaking "pa" owned a farm in what is now Elk Grove Village, raising crops and cows on the land that now holds the WGN Radio antenna. He passed down the ideas that dinner should be meat and potatoes, and that a good snack might consist of summer sausage like they ate back in Hanover, Germany.

My mom's dad, meanwhile, operated a little "truck farm" near Itasca that sold tomatoes and vegetables.

He passed down the idea that you had to do what you could to make a living, even during a depression and a world war. But if you made enough money by selling vegetables, maybe you could afford to eat meat.

I grew up as a fussy eater with a special love for salt and sweet.

My kindergarten teacher worked with Mom and Dad to persuade me to like peas and carrots. That was not successful. Allowance money left over after buying Marvel comics and Hardy Boys novels went for penny candy at the Ben Franklin dime store.

As I grew up, my taste became a tad more liberal. But as I entered the Fittest Loser contest, my diet was unusually plain.

It also was predictable. Almost every breakfast I would eat a whole-grain cereal (usually Grape-Nuts or organic shredded wheat) with milk on it, plus a glass of cranberry juice mixed with three other fruit juices.

The main course for lunch would alternate between So Good beef or pork barbecue sauce (made in Union, Illinois) on a hamburger bun or Campbell's canned beans. Barbecue would be escorted by potato chips, beans by bread with Shedd's Spread plus summer sausage, cheddar cheese or Velveeta cheese. With either main course I would drink milk and eat some canned fruit.

Dinner, consumed with my wife Patty, was a bit more varied. But almost always it would include a main course of broiled beef, pork or chicken plus a potato course (usually mashed, sometimes baked). Sometimes some rolls (either brown-and-serve or crescent) with Shedd's Spread. And almost always a slice of jellied cranberry sauce and a glass of milk.

Extracurricular eating, much of it as I stayed up until 1 or 2 or 3 in the morning, would include various candy, leftover theater popcorn, maybe a banana cut up in a bowl with milk on it.

And like the way many people sip coffee all day, I tended to sip constantly on sodapop - an average of three or four cans of Mountain Dew Live Wire, Cherry Coke or Pepsi per day.

Vegetables?

Almost nonexistent unless we went out to a restaurant and ordered a salad to go with our steak or barbecue or chicken.

Fish?

Don't like it.

Water?

I didn't have anything against it. But pop tastes better.

Practically everything I ate owes its life as much to a factory as to a farm. But I figured most of these things were not terrible for my health.

I never had tried to analyze the nutrition in what I ate, except for vitamins and minerals. I had no idea whether I was taking in 1,000 calories a day or 10,000. I did notice that a can of Mountain Dew contained 170 calories and that when I used to ride a stationary bike at The Centre of Elgin, it took an awfully long time to burn off 170 calories.

When I met with trainer Josh Steckler to plan my Fittest Loser eating, I told him my doctor thinks I'd be healthier if I lost 10 or 20 pounds.

To lose weight at my size, Steckler said, he recommended eating 1,800 calories a day - plus, of course, following Push's demanding guidelines about how those calories arrived.

That made me curious about exactly what I have been taking in for 40 years of adulthood. Not just how many calories, but how much protein, carbs, good fat, bad fat, sugar, etc.

So I wrote down every morsel I ate or drank for one typical day just before I was to start the 12 Weeks of Deprivation. I did a lot of label reading and internet research. And what I discovered was a real eye-opener.

Some of the junky foods I thought were terrible turned out to be not so nasty at all. And some I had been proud of eating turned out to be Benedict Arnolds, plotting to rot me out from the inside.

Details next week.

• Dave Gathman is a Daily Herald correspondent. He is undergoing the same physical workouts and nutritional counseling as the Fittest Loser contestants as he writes about their journey.