Do monks use mirrors?
Yes. To shave.
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How monks so perfectly dressed without looking in the mirror?
I’m not an expert on hypoglycaemia, however, to avoid giving your blood sugar levels a rollercoaster ride, as well as to balance out the speed of absorption of carbohydrates by the body, you need to use certain foods to block the effect of those high glycemic index foods/carbohydrates.
To do this, you can eat more fiber/vegetables (which are quite safe to eat), fat (but only the good kinds) and protein.
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Yeah, fats are crucial for good health (and very useful to balance high glycemic index/load meals and foods). It’s a complex topic, but for a few rules of thumb, you want to focus on a few things:
1. Avoid rancid fats/oils
A lot oils—polyunsaturated fats being the most prominent—are very fragile, and even a small amount of heat (as well as light and air) can make them go rancid. Hence why people who are knowledgable of smoke points will say not to cook with such and such an oil (because if you do, it will become rancid and clog up your arteries). Examples of such oils are the usual oils used for deep frying, such as canola oil, soybean oil and peanut oil.
Another important and fragile fat is cholesterol (the good kind), but if you cook it—such as scrambling your eggs every morning—you’re basically not getting the cholesterol you need and you’re eating rancid fat.
2. Be careful of not eating too much omega-6
You obviously want to completely avoid eating rancid omega-6/polyunsaturated fat, but you also want to avoid eating too much of these. The reason being that very high amounts of omega-6 can cause a host of health and cardiovascular issues. Oils high in polyunsaturated fat usually contain the most omega-6.
3. Do try to consume monounsaturated fat
Monounsaturated fat doesn’t go rancid as easily (although you don’t want to cook with it). They also generally contain less omega-6. Examples of oils that contain a lot of monounsaturated fat are oils such as olive oil, avocado oil and macadamia nut oil.
4. Read up on modern scientific research about saturated fat
The research that was used to vilify saturated fat dates back to the 1960’s, by a man named Ancel Keys. He tried to reduce cardiovascular disease, but vilifying saturated fat resulted in cardiovascular disease skyrocketing (go figure). I won’t say anything else other than to do your own research rather to rely on 1960’s nutrition. 
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From personal experience, I find that gaining weight when eating one or two meals a day is very difficult—that is, if you don’t eat cake, drink large amounts of fruit juices, or consume other similar sweet foods. With one or two meals, even if they may be quite large (and with huge quantities of white rice), I find keeping the weight is actually the challenge (although I am managing quite well now).
To eat 1750 kcal, without sweets—say the other 500 kcal is from fats/other, totalling 2250 kcal—you would need to eat almost 9 cups of white rice (especially taking into consideration the meal probably also consists of vegetables, protein, etc.). That is a lot of rice to eat in one or two sittings, every single day. So, I’m guessing that monks who are obese are probably getting quite a bit of help from sweets.
I’d be interested in hearing how monastics experience weight loss/weight gain/stable weight with one or two meals a day (# of meals, meal size, types of food).
@Pasanna @anon61506839
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I’m young and had a good metabolism when I became an anagarika so I lost a lot of weight. I eventually learned to eat more food than is comfortable and my weight has settled. Generally I don’t eat much or any deserts/sweets. They don’t interest me.
I keep considering eating a more comfortable size main meal, but don’t really want my metabolism to adapt to less food. For me it’s a case of getting the balance right.
As an anagarika in a city vihara I get more say over what I eat and prepare for the community and try to make healthy choices. However, it’s rare to get an rdi of fibre in, and uncomfortable in one meal!
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@samseva Thanks a lot for the info you provided.
In Asia people use way too much vegetable oil and it’s really not easy to find the right kind of fats that will not eventually give you a heart attack or causes you to regurgitate in the evening (eyw!).
Just in case the topic may be revived in the future, I want to say that I really haven’t the slightest control over what I will be given to eat, each day. Aside from honey and sugar (mixed with tea), and occasionally allowed sweets (which are basically poisonous sugars! ), I haven’t been able to find durable ways to improve my metabolic situation, which is luckily not so severe. It was severe in some monastic cases I came across and most also can’t control the type of food they get, so this must be ruled out as a solution, in just the same way as having an evening meal, which actually would solve the problem nearly entirely, is ruled out as well! 
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So how does the body metabolism work? Eating more increases metabolism and also burns more? But what then determines the net result of gaining or loosing weight?
With metta
Ah, good that things are working out for you! 
@anon61506839 You’re very welcome.
Yeah, I imagine not having control over the food you get makes managing health more difficult. Also, it’s rather sad that Asian cultures have changed their cooking practices in the last few decades. In Thailand, food was usually cooked with coconut oil or animal fat. It is only recently and from I think Chinese influence that Thai people have replaced these fats with fragile vegetable oils.
Are you in Sri Lanka or Thailand (some wats in Thailand have a kind of buffet-style meal from all the alms collected by all of the monks at that monastery)? While you might not have choice over what you get, with some knowledge of how nutrition and the human body works, and the cuisine of where you live, you can more easily identify unhealthy foods and not eat them, as well as finding ways to mitigate or reduce the effects of some unhealthy foods you can’t avoid—and on the opposite side, knowing how to identify the health-protecting foods.
Like I previously mentioned for carbohydrates and blood sugar; fats, protein and fiber are highly useful to mitigate the effect of a high glycemic index/load meal. Not eating medium or large amounts of sugar on an empty stomach (goes directly to the bloodstream) is also important. Basic exercise like discussed earlier in the thread can go a long way to strengthening the body against food-related ailments. For oils, maybe sponging out some of it with a cloth, which is something I used to do with fat-soaked slices of pizza (although, if you are to lower your fat intake, do up your fiber and protein intake to avoid blood sugar issues).
There are solutions!
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It’s a bit tricky because the body is quite adaptive. If I were to consistently eat 1400 kCal for a month or three my boy would figure out how to run on this. Then exceeding this baseline would cause weight gain.
According to Dr. Layne Norton and others in the sports nutrition sphere you can reverse the adaptation by gradually eating more. I did this over a few years when I was an athlete and managed to move my set point up from around 1450kCal to about 2100kCal with minimal weight gain.
Here’s a paper which explains it better. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3943438/
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My weight suddenly went up and I’m stuck fluctuating a couple of kgs + or - from that. I’m beginning to think it is middle age spread! I don’t want to go against what is the natural course of things and try to get back to weight which isn’t probable, though my wife thinks otherwise! I did see some charts showing BMI increasing with age, so maybe it is normal.
with metta
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Maybe, but not always the time. My diet isn’t all that unhealthy, without going into specifics. I did notice what pasanna described -occassionally eating more but not always increasing weight to the same degree and some times eating less but still increasing weight. I think some set-point changed and it is fluctuating around that set point. A good reminder my body is not my self.
with metta
Like Pasanna touched on in her earlier posts, it probably has to do with your metabolism. Younger people have an incredibly high metabolism (due to having to grow). At a certain age, your metabolism slows down (due to not growing anymore). If you’re eating similarly as to how you were eating when you had a more active metabolism, you are probably eating more calories than your body needs, and hence the weight gain (the body stores the extra energy/calories).
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It’s complex. Why doesn’t the body regulate its hunger mechanisms?
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/classes/matl0501/coursepack/calories/text.htm
With metta
It probably does, it’s just that we don’t listen to our body. We should be eating less as we get older and our metabolism slows down, but food is quite delicious for many (and also out of habit). 
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It looks like we eat less (according the graph below), but maybe food has become calorie dense so that even with the little we eat, we are taking in too much.
with metta
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.