Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable weekend.

I had planned to go to our local Elks Lodge for New Year's Eve Prime Rib and Cracked Crab feast, but I started coming down with a head cold on Friday.  Probably for the best, as I could stay on my diet, but unfortunately, lying low for the weekend hasn't made me feel any better, with respect to the cold.  If anything, it is getting worse.

I am eating health-fully and hope to start feeling better soon.  Here is the last few days of my food log:

Thursday:	Calories	Protein
Cheerios & 2% milk	136	6.3
cup of tea with sweetner and milk	20	1
1 fried egg	92	6.3
1 whole wheat english muffin	100	7
shepard's pie with ham	720	72
white grape juice	120
total	1188	92.6
Friday:
Herbal tea	6	0
white grape juice	120	0
left over shepards pie	360	36
tomato and pepper bisque	300	4
lobster tail	100	24
3 glasses sparking wine	234	0.6
Total	1120	64.6
Saturday:
English Muffin with Almond Butter	200	9.5
GF International Coffee	70	0
leftover shepherd's pie	360	36
steak & sauteed zuchini	403	53.2
2 glasses of sparkling wine	156	0.4
Total	1189	99.1
Sunday:
Cheerios & 2% milk	136	6.3
Eggs Benedict with hash browns	1000	43
Chicken Spinach Penne Soup	280	12
Slice of Multi Grain Toast	110	4
Herbal Tea	6
Coffee with Milk and Sugar 2 cups	140
Total	1672	65.3

Good Hair Color Can Make All the Difference in How You Feel

My hairdresser of more than ten years moved away to eastern Montana in August.  Since then, I have not found a new stylist and took over my own hair coloring.  I tried several products, with mixed results.  Though I seldom rave about products in this blog, I must say I got great results in less than a half an hour with the Clairol Natural Instincts product.  It is ammonia free, takes no more than 15 minutes to set, and comes with a great color enhancement pack to use a few weeks after the initial color application.  The product is also very reasonably priced, at less than $10. This morning, I read Facebook posts while I waited and it was SO easy!  So if you are looking for a less chemically, effective, quick hair color product--particularly right before New Years Eve, you might want to give it a try.

What I noticed about the last couple of days on my diet is that I did fine, if not a bit under my calorie goal, and kept my protein content high, but where was the breakfast?  I see that I don't eat anything before noon or one in the afternoon.  That changed today when I had a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast with 2% milk.

Here are my Tuesday and Wednesday results:

Tuesday:	Calories	Protein
lasagna	600	25.6
1/2 California Pizza Kitchen Sicilian	500	27
green salad	100	0
small slice pumpkin pie	229	4.3
water/diet soda	0	0
total	1429	56.9
Wednesday:
cup of tea with sweetener and milk	20	1
bobs red mill soup with sausage	400	23
three slices of ham	360	48
small slice of pumpkin pie	229	4.3
diluted grape juice	120
total	1129	76.3

I have not been hungry between meals and have not succumbed to stress eating, but I think moving some calories to first thing in the morning should help to jump start my metabolism.

Cocktail Parties and Staying on Your Diet

First day of food logging paid off, as I knew ahead of the holiday cocktail party what I still had left to work with.
Here was my food log through lunch:

Monday:	Calories	Protein
4 oz OJ with greens	30
2 cups coffee with  cream/sugar	140
1 slice orowheat 12grain/almond butter	211	6.4
gala apple	77
panettone bread 1/2 piece	70

528 calories through lunch, leaving me about a thousand calories for the rest of the day.  I chose the protein rich nibbles at the cocktail party and had two 5 oz glasses of wine and a small piece of leftover pumpkin pie when I got home so that my total day looked like this:

Monday:	Calories	Protein
4 oz OJ with greens	30
2 cups coffee with  cream/sugar	140
1 slice orowheat 12grain/almond butter	211	6.4
gala apple	77
panettone bread 1/2 piece	70
7 jumbo shrimp	100	18
cocktail sauce	60
2 glasses of chardonnay	240
two pieces of bread and cheese	85	4
mussels in tomato sauce	194	26.9
blue cheese stuffed olive	25
small slice pumpkin pie	229	4.3
total	1461	59.6

I know that every day is not going to line up like this one did, but I felt very satisfied--I got to eat the things that I wanted and stayed on my calorie budget.

12 Months and 10 Pounds

Well I have done it now.  Over the last year of working in a natural gourmet grocery store, putting in lots of hours at work, and not that many at home or exercising, I have put on 10 pounds in a year.  I think the day after Christmas is as good a time as any (why wait for a new year's resolution anyway?) to start my diet and exercise plan.  I am taking the advice I gave my students and am now food logging and exercise logging and will record it all here for you to see.

There is no time like the present, right?

Happy Thanksgiving! Weight Watching Tips for the Holiday Season

Thanksgiving is two days away, and many dieters face the anxiety of all the food that will be available at family gatherings.  They aren't wrong.  Studies have shown that people tend to add one to two pounds of weight between Thanksgiving and New Years.

What to do then?  Here are some tips to keep in mind for sticking to your diet during the holidays

1) Stick to your same breakfast and lunch.  If you go out for a big brunch or a big lunch, you are going to have to cut way back on your holiday dinner.  To not offend Aunt Verdell by not eating the sweet potato fluff at dinner, don't blow out your calories at brunch earlier in the day.

2) Mind your cocktails.  Yes, alcohol makes the holidays more festive for many, but alcohol represents empty calories.  Many cocktails contain hundreds of calories each (margaritas, in particular), so sticking to wine spritzers and continuing to drink water throughout the day will help to reduce total calorie consumption at parties and family gatherings.

3) Remember how to portion out your plate.  Although there are many yummy starch side dishes during the holidays, your plate should be allocated 25% meat, 25% starch and 50% salads and green side dishes.  You can have a small taste of everything on the holiday table and not blow your diet if you keep your perspective on your plate and how much of each food group you are eating.

Enjoying the holidays and all they have to offer does not mean having to move up a pant size in January if you take a few steps early on to be mindful of how you are eating and drinking.  Happy Thanksgiving!

The Twinkie Diet Makes a Legitimate Point

The Twinkie Diet got more press this week. In this classroom study, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate a diet of protein shakes, canned vegetables, multi-vitamins and snack foods like Twinkies and chips for two months and lost 27 pounds.

What was his point? That losing weight is purely a mathematical equation. It has to do with consistently eating fewer calories than your body needs to burn each day and that the underlying food is irrelevant, at least as long as some of it is actually healthy.

So why all the emphasis on protein diets or vegan diets or low fat diets? They are all means to give people foods that may be more energy rich to drive less snacking. If a carbohydrate rich diet leads to a person being hungry every hour and a half and, as a result eating 3000 calories a day then, it is believed and has been proven in statistically large studies of dieters, eating protein at each meal makes it easier to get through the day and eat only 1800 calories.

If you are very diligent about food logging and very disciplined about your caloric intake, then you too can diet while eating only Oreos, Tostitos and Twinkies. That just isn't a reality for most people. Frequently, once they start snacking, dieters feel badly about abandoning their diet and take a plunge off the deep end of their diet--eating the entire family sized bag of Tostitos in one sitting, with cheese dip--rather than negotiating with themselves about how the snack will now mean that what they planned to eat for the rest of the day may have to change.

I think that the Twinkie diet makes a legitimate point that dieting does not have to mean suffering, and giving up all the foods you used to like to eat. However, it does mean a full-time commitment to negotiating caloric tables and sticking to your target caloric intake every day.

Reference Article: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-twinkie-20101115,0,405998.story

Dairy Management and the Big Government Cheese Conspiracy

It seems to me that there are multi-billion dollar opportunities to end government programs that are at cross purposes and lower the Federal budget. The most recent is Dairy Management, a subsidiary of the Department of Agriculture, as reported in the New York Times today, spending millions to persuade Americans to eat more cheese to boost prices and consumption for the US dairy industry (not to mention the millions in Federal farm subsidies) and the National Institute of Health telling us that the reason we consume too much fat in our diet is cheese. This is no different than the Federal government extracting penalty taxes from the cigarette manufacturers to pay for anti-smoking campaigns while continuing to subsidize tobacco growers.

 

The hypocrisy doesn't end there, when one considers the substantial subsidies that have been paid to ethanol producers. Ethanol does not become a cost effective fuel alternative until oil is $120 a barrel. So the Federal goverment subsidizes its production at the same time that it increases the percentage required to be blended into our gasoline, driving production of a heavily subsidized product. Moreover, ethanol takes corn out of the food supply, whether to feed humans or livestock, to burn in our cars.

I hope that the newly re-empowered Republicans are willing to have the guts to say no to these conflicting programs, cutting them back completely to zero, rather than only limiting program growth. How about gutting Dairy management? Repeal the tax on farmers that is used, along with over $5 million of US taxpayer money, to finance its budget and let Dominoes figure out on its own how to make a better tasting pizza. That will save $136 million right away.