Peer pressure around the holidays
I don’t think there’s an area in life where there’s more peer pressure than in eating- especially around the holidays!
In the past, when I have gone home to visit the family, there’s this false notion that I don’t like anything. My family completely bought into the low fat/high carb craze of the 1980′s, and still think that is just how people should eat. When I cut down on eating pasta (a staple food in my family growing up) about 10 years ago, suddenly, I was the one that wouldn’t eat anything. He’s picky! He’s obsessed!
Funny, because all I had done at that time was cut down on certain specific carbohydrates. I think the problem was that, like many people, they did not want to look at themselves and analyze their own eating habits- so it was much easier to categorize me and cast my eating habits aside (without even looking into the reasons or positive benefits a lower carb diet may provide!).
This Thanksgiving, I was reminded a bit of this while celebrating with friends. While I fully realize that Thanksgiving is not a time to preach or tell people how to eat, the subject of tryptophan came up at the dinner table. It always does! Many people think the amino acid l-typtophan in the turkey is what makes people tired after the meal. But of course as we know, it’s the carbs! So I pointed this out. “It’s not the tryptophan, it’s the carbs.” Well that was turned into the joke of the night, so everything after that was “No it’s the carbs!”. It was pretty funny, but at the same time, I think impossible for people to believe!
Not much of a chance of cutting out carbs at a Thanksgiving dinner, but some smart decisions can be made. Do you really need to pile on huge helpings of stuffing, mashed potatoes, rolls, and have 2 desserts?
I believe the trick to avoiding most of the inevitable peer pressure at holiday meals is to fill your plate. But, fill it with the good stuff like green salad and turkey. Take small amounts of most of the other items, so you don’t have people asking you “didn’t you try the ________”? it’s SO good, you should try it!” For dessert, ask for a small piece of pie. Yes, you might still be mocked, but if you just tell everyone you are SO FULL from dinner, they will back down.
December here we come! The average American puts on 10 pounds between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Stay tuned and don’t be one of them!
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A Healthy Thanksgiving?
Pretty much anything I can write here, coming from a health and fitness site, will probably sound like preaching and taking the fun out of one of America’s favorite holidays!
I’m not going to take a lot of time to berate people over eating poorly on Thanksgiving.
But, here are a few quick tips to enjoy the day and keep you health:
1. Do some exercise, but don’t feel like you have to run a marathon to burn off all the calories you are about to consume. Just going for a walk in the morning and after dinner is great!
2. Enjoy dessert, but keep the not-so-fun carbs to a minimum. For example, it’s perfectly fine to skip the potatoes and rolls, since you will likely be getting plenty of other carbs in your meal!
3. Keep alcohol to a minimum. This will surely impair your judgment and you will almost certainly overeat!
4. Don’t skip meals. Even if you are eating your Thanksgiving feast in the mid-afternoon as many people do, don’t allow yourself to get super hungry in the attempt to enjoy your food more! You will definitely overeat and pay for it with an expanding waistline if you do.
Also, inevitably, someone will point out that eating all that tryptophan from the turkey is what makes you tired. Nonsense! It’s the carbs, not l-tryptophan that causes you to crash after Thanksgiving.
Have fun & enjoy the day!
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11 – Fast food survival tactics
(duration 18:03)
Scientists claim junk food is as addictive as heroin
http://www.grist.org/article/scientists-claim-junk-food-is-as-addictive-as-heroin/
The more junk food you eat, the more you’ll find yourself having to exercise
Rodents are really a poor model to understand human psychology and even physiology
Lots of carbs coupled with lots of fat is a double metabolic wammy!
“Addiction” label can easily turn into self-fulfilling prophecy
Self-responsibility is key to taking charge of your own healthy and fitness
The 30 Worst Fast Food Restaurant Choices
http://features.fitnessmagazine.com/30WorstFastFoodRestaurantChoices.html
Beware big buns, which equate to excess carbs and thus fat storage
Look for fresh veggies, rather than deep fried madness (which can be loaded with free radicals)
If you need to do damage control for a bad meal, make sure you supplement with anti-oxidents
Beware a high carb to protein ratio (aim for 1 to 1)
Use nuts to obtain your good fat and energy and look for healthy salads with adequate protein
Nutrition protein bars will do in a bind much better than most fast food
Study: 40% of U.S. May Be Obese by 2018
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/17/health/main5683256.shtml
The Obese Don’t Always Know It
http://www.livescience.com/health/091117-obesity-body-size.html
Self-acceptance is a major component to coming to terms with one’s health and fitness ideals
Life is about flourishing instead of doing damage control!
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Why eating breakfast is important in staying fit (Part 1 of 2)
Lots of people who are trying to lose weight will skip breakfast in the attempt to avoid calories.
In yet another counter-intuitive aspect of fitness and weight loss, skipping breakfast is actually more likely to lead to weight gain than weight loss.
The reasons are:
1. By skipping breakfast you are ensuring that you will have less energy and more hunger throughout the rest of your day, and this will lead to more sugar cravings and overeating.
2. Eating breakfast will allow your body to feel more nourished and satisfied, making portion sizes smaller and easier to manage.
3. When you allow yourself to go without food for long periods of time (15 or so hours from the night before if you wait until mid-day to eat!), your body act like you are in starvation mode- and store calories as fat in anticipation of another long period of time before eating again.
Next up: What constitutes a healthy breakfast?
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The Ultimate Tea Diet- Hype or Miracle Weight Loss?
As a daily drinker of tea, I am a big proponent of it’s health benefits, which include a high amount of anti-oxidants. I 
was excited to come across the book, The Ultimate Tea Diet, the other day at the bookstore!
Although I do love tea, I was pretty skeptical of what looked like another gimmicky-type diet with no scientific backing.
However, I think the author, Mark “Dr. Tea” Ukra, may be onto something.
He recommends drinking as much green, black, oolong, or white tea as you’d like. He claims that tea will “help us lose weight, reduce our cravings for sweets, suppress our appetite, increase our insulin’s effectiveness, lower our cholesterol, and stimulate thermogenesis, which helps the body burn fat for energy.” Sounds great! But the scientific studies showing this are lacking.
So is it bunk?
While the use of caffeine is a universal claim to help in weight loss, it’s actually another ingredient that the book discusses which was enlightening to me. L-theanine, actually counteracts the harmful effects of the caffeine in tea (which is already much lower than coffee and soda). This has been backed up by clinical studies referenced in the book.
Also, as we have covered before, green tea in particular contains EGCG, which increases the rate and efficiency of fat burning.
What about the diet part of it?
The author recommends eating 3 meals a day, and sticking with low fat and moderate carbohydrates, but no processed white carbs. Avoiding white carbs like rice and sugar is an excellent idea, but this is where Healthy Mind Fit Body will part with the Ultimate Tea Diet.
While the tea certainly can be a useful supplement to a healthy diet, ideally, you would want to eat much more fat that what Dr. Tea recommends. By going with a low fat diet, you are missing out on some important nutrients, as well as some tasty foods!
So my assessment is:
+ on the tea
+ on cutting out of the bad, processed carbs
- cutting down on fat
So drink up, but do not skimp on your fat intake!
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Mo's Bacon Bar- Review
I was in Whole Foods today doing some work, and as I bought my cup of tea I noticed an interesting item near the checkout: Mo’s Bacon Bar, 
which is a piece of applewood smoked bacon wrapped in milk chocolate! The idea is that people like salty things mixed with sweet things, and what doesn’t bacon or chocolate go with?
While a piece of bacon wrapped in chocolate sounds regrettably like something Homer Simpson would be drooling over, for fun, I checked the nutritional breakdown. Only 2 grams of protein per serving, 15 grams of carbohydrates, and 11 grams of fat.
If they were to add a little more bacon, take out some of the chocolate, and switch from milk to dark chocolate, I may be able to call it semi-nutritional- and okay to eat as an occasional treat. However, milk chocolate brings down the house here- too much sugar without the anti-oxidants to save it!
,
Still, the bacon aspect of the bar IS in fact fairly healthy, as it is not overly processed, and contains some good fat that will slow down the absorption rate of the chocolate into your bloodstream.
My conclusion? If you’re a bacon and chocolate lover, don’t deny yourself! Just keep in mind this is not exactly the stuff fit bodies are made of as part of a healthy diet on a regular basis.
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10 – Magic bullets and holy grail of weight loss
(duration 18:47)
Yoga can be good for your health
The 10 Most Beloved and Unhealthy Gaming Snacks by Shaun Clayton
http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/11/the_10_most_beloved_and_unhealthy_gaming_snacks.php
Beware the prepackaged, processed foodstuffs
Diet Pills Show Weight-Loss Promise by Brian Rooney and Bonnie Mclean
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/diet-pills-show-weight-loss-promise/story?id=9068287
Introspection is key to understanding your feelings related to cravings and eating habits
Acting like you’re possessed by an eating demon or like you’re a rapacious zombie is a sign of emotional self-estrangement and a lack of self-responsibility
Diet drugs are band-aides that don’t deal with the root cause of bad eating habits and mental states
Nutritional misinformation and oftentimes disinformation by the so-called experts keep people unhealthy
Dealing with psychological processes rather than “disease states” is most helpful for weight loss and health and fitness issues
Engaging in preventative maintenance is far better than doing damage control at the doctor’s office
No “magic pill” can substitute for psychological insight and self-reliance
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Transcript: http://healthymindfitbody.com/transcripts-hmfb10-magic-bullets-and-holy-grail-of-weight-loss/
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Low Carb Diet List
There are several great low carbohydrate diets out there that work, but what foods are best on these diets? I decided to make a low carb diet list to give some tasty options when it comes to proper eating, the low carb way!
Here are 6 foods to consider when eating low carb:
1. Nuts. I can’t live without my nuts! They can help keep you satiated and provide you with great monounsaturated fats and protein. Great for snacking between meals. Almonds, walnuts, cashews, macadamia nuts…all good. Keep in mind that peanuts are not nuts, although they do contain a good amount of healthy monounsaturated fats as well.
2. Berries. Blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries are loaded with antioxidants, have fiber, and are some of the most healthy foods you can eat.
3. Eggs. Make sure to go for the free range kind. Eggs are loaded with nutrients. Don’t worry about dietary cholesterol in eggs- recent studies have proven that eating cholesterol does not cause high cholesterol.
4. Fish. We need omega 3 fatty acids and fish is the best place to get these. Mercury may be a concern with eating a lot of fish, so taking high quality fish oils can be just as effective.
5. Meat. The key with meat is quality. For beef, make sure you are getting grass fed beef, which has far more omega 3 fatty acids, more nutrients overall, and from far healthier cows than regular beef. For lunch meat, make sure you are getting the preservative-free kind of meat- no nitrates or phosphates!
6. Think Thin bars. Yes, I’m throwing in a non-whole food option (sometimes eating whole foods is just not convenient). I just discovered these last year. They have many great flavors and each bar has 20 grams of protein!
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Does it take fat to burn fat?
Even as the information about the benefits of eating dietary fat become more widespread, it still seems counter-intuitive to many people to eat fat to burn fat! It does seem like at the literal level, if you eat fat, you would naturally get fat.
And the anti-fat mania that started in the 1980′s is still believed to be true today by way too many people.
We should probably have two different words to describe these two things, since it doesn’t work like that. In fact, diets that are higher in fat have been shown to be much healthier than the traditional high-carbohydrate diet.
So how does eating fat burn body fat?
1. Dietary fat, along with protein, both tell your brain that you are full, and it’s time to stop eating. Carbohydrates don’t do this at all! You can continue eating carbs for as long as you want, and the part of your brain which tells you you’re full will not be activated.
2. Dietary fat also burns much slower than carbohydrates. This results in staying full for longer (as mentioned above), and having sustained energy for longer, eliminating the need to eat as many calories as with low-fat, high-carb diets, which rely much more on will power and exercise regimens than do low carb diets.
Lastly, fat tastes good! I know that traditionally, people believe that if something tastes good it must be bad for you. But, outside of trans fats, replacing carbohydrates with tasty fats in your diet, like almonds, avocados, olive oil, coconut oil, etc. will allow you to burn more fat- and get down to your optimal weight.
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Does Lou Dobbs have a weight problem?
As many have already heard, Lou Dobbs, the controversial CNN talk show host, has resigned and will be leaving the network.
All the talk is about his stance on immigration and what he will do next.
I’m only singling Lou Dobbs out because he is making the most recent news, but it amazes me how many overweight men go on TV on a regular basis, being seen by millions of people, and this is completely acceptable. Women don’t have it so easy. It is much more difficult to carry extra weight as a woman and to become an anchor or reporter on a major television network.
Even more amazing is overweight men like Dr. Phil selling diet and nutrition books and supplements!
Why do we have double standard here? Should being overweight be okay for TV personalities, male or female, or should this be unacceptable?
As we have discussed on our podcast and in our book, carrying extra weight is often a psychological barrier that must be overcome- through self-analysis and understanding, rather than through grinding workouts and exercise routines. Nutrition, of course, also plays a huge role in fat loss or achieving optimal weight, however, even with the perfect diet prescription, it is very difficult to get down to or maintain this ideal weight.
Having this double standard doesn’t serve anyone. It makes it okay for men to be unhealthy, and puts far too much pressure on women to go above and beyond what men have to do to make it in TV land.
The issue here is the “should” that is involved. Should women have to be a certain size to get on TV? Should it be acceptable for men to be overweight in the public eye? We have to bring this down to an individual level. If someone wants to be healthy and fit, then yes, they should be concerned about extra weight they may be holding.
Can we make up universal rules for society to stick to in terms of health and fitness? No. But what we can do is understand the importance of our own personal health, and make decisions in our own lives that benefit us, both on the emotional and physical level. At the same time, it can help to stop worrying about television personalities and what they may look like, or what “society” thinks is acceptable.
To get back to the original point here: Dobbs, while not obese, is likely a great candidate for our plan. If he spent 1 week doing some of the written sentence completion exercises in our book, and two weeks getting rid of any carbohydrate addictions, he would be well on his way to having a fit and healthy body!
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