The heroes and villains of my dinner plate

Last week I described what I had been eating before entering the Fittest Loser diet/nutrition regimen.

My breakfasts were built around whole-grain, sugar-free cereal, My lunches would alternate between Campbell's beans and So-Good beef or pork barbecue sauce on a bun. And my dinners were good ol' American meat and potatoes. All day I would sip on Mountain Dew Live Wire pop and I'd frequently snack on candy and popcorn.

As part of revamping my eating for the Fittest Loser, I wrote down everything I ate on one typical day.

Josh Steckler, my trainer and owner of Push Fitness, had recommended that if I wanted to lose 10-20 pounds, as my doctor has suggested, I should eat 1,800 calories a day. A typical American diet is 2,000 to 2,400 calories.

So, I added up the amount of calories I ate on that typical day. The result was a shocking 2,875 calories. (And that was on a day I did not go to a movie and eat half a tub of theater popcorn.)

I was eating 1,100 calories above what I needed to lose even a modicum of weight. The miracle was that I have gained ONLY 70 pounds over the past 45 years.

But calories are only part of the story. I also wanted to figure out how much sugar, carbs, fat, etc. I had been eating.

First the good surprises: I had been afraid that with all the processed food I ate, I had been taking in too much trans fat. But on that sample day I had eaten only 0.5 grams - all in one leftover brownie I had eaten as a 2 a.m. snack.

Another pleasant surprise: The three cans of pop I consumed on a typical day amounted to just 510 calories - a drop in the bucket compared to the daily total, though half as much as I needed to cut to get down to that 1,800 level.

One unpleasant shock was to find out how much sugar was in milk. Each glass had about as much sugar as half a box of Sno-Caps chocolate candy.

My ancestral dairy farmers and dairy owners had taught me that milk was God's gift to the human body. But now I saw milk's ugly side. Besides all that sugar, whole milk's 300 calories per glass was almost twice as much as a can of Mountain Dew.

Two glasses accounted for half of my total daily intake of saturated fat. And switching from whole milk to "2 percent" didn't help much - fat would go down, but each glass would still pack 260 calories.

But I discovered milk has virtues, too. It's packed with calcium to make strong bones and potassium to balance out all the sodium I ate all day. And milk's 16 grams per glass of protein was twice as much as the protein in that barbecued meat sandwich - in fact, almost half as much as the protein in the 6-ounce sirloin I ate for dinner.

And milk's protein is an especially good type that helps the body burn up sugar instead of turning it into fat. So milk seems to be a two-edged sword I will have to study - and write about again.

Another two-edged sword was what I had taken pride in as my healthiest meal - breakfast. The whole-grain Grape-Nuts cereal I most often ate contained almost half of all the (good) fiber I would eat all day, not including popcorn. It had little sugar.

But it had lots of "carbs," which Push's eating guidelines and the metabolic syndrome mafia consider anathema.

Following a urologist's advice to avoid getting another kidney stone, I drink cranberry juice cocktail and eat jellied cranberry sauce. But I discovered those both are loaded with sugar - the cocktail from pear and apple juices mixed with it, and the jellied sauce from added corn syrup. The single slice of cranberry sauce I ate almost every night had about the same amount of sugars as a glass of milk or a half box of Sno-Caps.

I began to wonder what other things I eat also contain added sugar or corn syrup. A better question might have been "What doesn't?"

Obviously, the pop and candy. But also the barbecue sauce. The canned fruit. The ketchup. The Campbell's beans. The bread. The rolls. AARGH!

But "AARGH!" also might describe my reaction to eating this newfangled New Age diet five times a day.

Talk to you 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.