The problem with “Healthy eating”

I’ll admit it. For most of my life I really didn’t care if I was eating healthy or not. Simply because no matter what I ate I was always bone skinny. So I constantly snacked on Doritos and Orios and chocolate chips and cookies and whatever else I could quickly grab out of the pantry which, save a few cashews and almonds, was all very, very, unhealthy.

And yet I was sick all the time.

Somehow I never made the connection in my head. That healthy eating was about more than being skinny, it was about, well, being healthy.

After all, my sister’s friends didn’t exactly sit around saying things like: “Oh, I don’t want a second piece of pie, I’m trying to avoid the flu bug going around.”

There were no advertisements in the magazines saying, “Eat our wonderful nutrition bars and your immune system will improve drastically!”

The only reason to be healthy, as far as I could tell, was to loose weight.

I’m sure my mother must have told me otherwise, but it never sank in until I was diagnosed as allergic to cane sugar. This had two results.

1. I was constantly constantly reading ingredient labels. Sugar can be hidden in nearly everything. Of course I was no stranger to ingredient labels, but this was month after month of pretty much eating nothing unless I had read the label first.

And then, I read the label of some organic cheerios. And I was amazed beyond words. Because I knew what every single thing on the label was.
That’s when I started really noticing how many strange and odd ingredients I was really eating.

1. At Christmas time, amazingly, others seemed to be doing worse sickness wise than I was. And my Aunt Becky said, “Well of course. We’re all eating these sugary goodies, but you’re not eating any of them.”

That was when I really started to put forth a conscious effort to eat healthier. Of course it helps that I’m allergic to cookies and chocolate and doritos and things like that, as they all contain sugar. But really, I’m not too good at eating healthy yet. I’m just trying. I used to not try at all.

But here’s the thing. The annoying thing that drives me nuts about healthy eating.

Whenever I find at article that looks helpful but not boring, titled something like “5 foods that you never realized were unhealthy,” I am sorely disappointed. Because it will say things like…

While Orange juice seems like a healthy drink, it really has all kinds of calories.

Or

Dried vegetable chips seem to be healthy, but they actually have lots of calories!

And I sit there thinking, “wait…calories are bad?”

I mean, I know that eating too many calories is bad, and eating the wrong kind of calories is bad, but not eating enough calories is bad too, right?

I don’t know for sure, but I would suspect, with how skinny and sick I am, that I really should be eating more calories than I do.

So what do I do about it? How do I find out if these foods are actually unhealthy or just calorie loaded? Where can I find short, easy to understand articles with great tips on how to eat healthy just to be healthy, and not to loose weight?