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Jul 18, 2011

Avoiding Binging By Going Homemade

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No matter what, I will always be a food addict. They say alcoholics and drug addicts are never truly cured, and I feel the same way about food addiction. Presented with the chance, I’d gladly fall face first into a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts if I thought no one would notice. Even knowing the queasy stomachache I’d suffer afterward, I’d still dive right in to those doughnuts just for the momentary sugar high and the sweetness lighting up my taste buds.

However, the higher function parts of my brain know better, and so I (generally) resist. The consequences are too high and that burst of endorphins brought on by a sugary glaze will quickly evaporate and leave me feeling worse than before.

But lately I’ve discovered a little trick to regulating my eating. It came about unexpectedly, but makes perfect sense. A few weeks ago I took out the ice cream maker to make some ice cream for my daughters. My older daughter has a sensitivity to artificial colors and flavors, which makes buying store ice creams difficult at times. The safest ice cream for her is whatever I make at home, knowing exactly which ingredients are going into the bowl.

I bought all of the ingredients (expensive when you’re going all organic) and then pulled out everything needed to make the ice cream. A bowl, two measuring cups, a measuring spoon and a spatula later, the mixture was ready for the ice cream maker. Then we had to wait, wait, wait for it to change into ice cream. Thirty minutes later, I removed it from the machine and put it into the freezer to chill for another 15 minutes. THEN it was ready.

That was over an hour’s worth of work and half a sink full of dishes to make a little more than one pint of ice cream. But it was absolutely delicious ice cream.

After the kids went to bed, I found myself sneaking to the freezer for more ice cream. I took one small spoonful. Then another. Then another.

And then I stopped.

I stopped after three bites and put it away. Why? Well, first of all because it was very rich and tasty. But also because there wasn’t a lot there, and I remember all the effort I put into creating that small tub of ice cream. It had to be treasured, because I certainly wasn’t making any more until at least the ice cream maker was cleaned and refrozen!

Overeating isn’t a problem with homemade ice cream – I want to keep it as long as possible, so I savor a small amount and then put it away.

Two days ago I baked some zucchini muffins. Once again, I find myself reaching for only one and being content with that.

Is it possible that “homemade” might be one secret to avoiding the binge of tasty foods? I don’t want my food to be the cause of the overeater’s stomachache. Having made it myself, I respect the food more and don’t want to see all of my work gone in an instant. (Because I’m too lazy to make more.) 

Maybe it’s time to try creating more of my favorite foods from scratch? Now does anyone have a recipe for Krispy Kreme doughnuts?

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Jul 6, 2011

The Rogue’s Gallery of Foods That Nearly Took Me Down

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Whenever I whine about not losing weight fast enough, there’s always someone nearby to remind me, “Well, you didn’t get fat overnight, so you’re not going to lose it overnight.” I kinda hate it when people say that, even if they are right.

I’m well aware that I didn’t get fat because I ate one cream puff and *poof*…instant fat. It took a lot of effort and a lot of yummy food that found its way to my mouth over the years.

I’m not an indiscriminate eater. My mother would tell you I was incredibly picky about food as a child…it just so happens that most of the foods I liked were high-calorie and filled with sugar and fat. Basically, I loved a few foods a little too much, to the point of abusing them.

If I tried to think of the top foods that I overate when I was younger (which I clearly am trying to do according to the title of this post), I can think of five in particular that were my worst. These were foods that I was simply addicted to – I overate them regularly, sometimes to the point of feeling ill. Yet I kept coming back for more.

And now, presenting the top five foods (in no particular order) that paved the way to obesity for me:

McDonald’s french fries – “McDonald’s cheeseburger” may have been one of my first phrases as a toddler(it’s true), but it’s the fries that keep me coming back. As a teen, I was too lazy to walk one block home from school, but if my mom had the car I’d gladly walk the half mile to McDonald’s for my fry fix.

Even now I steal them from my children’s Happy Meals, rationalizing my theft with the comfort that they’re eating fewer calories if I take some away from them. I refuse to give them up, but I now limit myself to a small on most occasions. If ever there was a support group needed for a food addiction, it would be for these fries.

Cookie dough – Long before anyone thought of adding chocolate chip cookie dough to ice cream, I was shoving spoonfuls of it in my mouth when my mom had her back turned putting another cookie sheet into the oven. I’d take my finger and scrape every last possible trace of the dough out of the bowl, too, savoring each sweet bite.

When they recently came out with the tubs of pre-made dough, I had to force myself to stop buying them after eating 1/4 of the tub before it even had a chance to make it to the oven. Salmonella be damned – the dough is so much better than the cookies!

Doritos – Many a night would end with my fingers stained orange from the nacho-cheesy-goodness of Doritos. My mom always bought the value sized bag, which usually equalled 2-3 servings for me. I could easily go through half a bag in one sitting, generally followed by a stomach ache.

It’s probably the post-feeding-frenzy stomachache that saved my life. While I will occasionally snack on Doritos now, it’s only in small amounts and the artificial cheese flavor quickly brings back those bad feelings. I refuse to end my days on this planet face down in a cloud of nacho cheese dust.

Fla-vor-Ice – Any child of the 80’s remembers these artificially colored and flavored treats. Freeze and eat popsicles, right? Or if you’re impatient like me, puncture and drink proto-popsicles. Yes, I shot them one tube at a time. We’d buy these in 100-packs and I’d sneak into the kitchen and drink 8-12 of them in under 30 minutes. Nothing like a concentrated sugar rush to keep a kid bouncing off the walls!

Sure, they claimed to have real fruit juice, but I have yet to find the fruit that tasted like any of these brightly-colored ice pops. I confess that I still have a fondness for Flavorice, but I generally avoid them since I’m sure I’ve reached my lifetime limit on artificial coloring.

SDS Subs – In my small college town, there is a pizza and sub shop that has some of the best subs around, delivers to your door, and runs a sub special every Tuesday night. When I was in college, Tuesday night was sub night. OK, sub and a single order of garlic bread night. And maybe Saturday night, too, if I didn’t have any plans. You get the point. I ate A LOT of those greasy, mayo and Italian dressing covered subs.

It became such a bad habit that my roommate and I started saving all of our sub boxes (cleaned out, of course), until we had a tower of floor-to-ceiling boxes in the kitchen. I’m not being figurative here – it was a tower, with boxes stacked from the floor all the way to the last inch of the space of the 8 foot ceiling. We even started a second tower on the other side of the trash can, too. I look back at the photos now and feel queasy at seeing the outrageous number of calories I consumed in such a short time, yet I know if there was an SDS box sitting in front of me, I’d open it and eat every bite of that sub.

So those are my worst offenders. What about you? Which foods did you lovingly walk hand-in-hand down the road to weight gain with, or which ones do you feel could knock you off track if given the chance?

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May 17, 2011

The Three-Day Diet

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Having been stuck at this plateau, hovering back and forth over the same 3 pounds, for over a month now, I decided it was time to try just about anything. I’ve been carefully logging every bite I eat, making time for intense workout sessions, and yet nothing would force the scale below 170.

I decided to try a three-day diet that promises major weight loss just by eating the specific foods in order. Now, I know that food combinations and the order of the food you eat doesn’t have any effect on weight loss. It’s all about calories in, calories burned, and it was easy to see this was a very low calorie diet. But I threw logic out the window and made up my mind to give it a go. Three days isn’t that long, right?

Actually, three days can feel like a long time when everyone around you is eating more than you.

The first day, I was hungry by mid-day. But I kept my eyes on the prize and didn’t stray from the plan. By the end of the day, I felt pretty good and wasn’t even hungry. Eating something every 2-3 hours helped fight off that hunger.

Day two was the hardest. While I was eating every few hours, it wasn’t a lot of food. I tried to drink extra water to make up for it, but my stomach was too clever to fall for that trick.

Day three was actually easier. I didn’t even eat my last snack of the day because I didn’t feel like I wanted to eat. I still had energy in spite of the low-calorie diet, and I had stuck to the plan. I was expecting big results when I stepped on the scale in the morning!

What I was not expecting, though, was to see 169 appear on the scale. Two pounds. Three days of a jumpstart diet and I only lost two pounds.

Even better? The next day I was back up to 170. Hahahahahahaha! So much for the super diet – my metabolism can beat up your puny diet!

So it didn’t work. Ah well. It was only three days, and while it required some discipline, it wasn’t torture. I took a few tips away from it as well. Eating every 2-3 hours did help keep my energy level up. And eating smaller meals kept me from feeling run-down and bloated like I often feel after a large meal.

There was a tiny glimmer of good that came after the diet, too: days later, my weight has dropped back to 169 again. It’s quite possible the diet gave my body a slight wake-up call to get back in the game again. At least I’m going to hope that’s what it is. ‘Cause I’m really sick of the 170’s.

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Want to read about why I like fitness DVDs as a way to get in shape? Well, you’re in luck – I’ve written an article on just that topic over at Diets in Review. Go check it out!

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Apr 11, 2011

Calorie Counting

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As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not someone who can just try to eat until I feel full, or simply make a few substitutions in my diet to lose the weight. My body’s hunger signals have long been screwed up, probably thanks to those emotional binges of entire bags of Doritos in my teen years. Food and I are too closely linked on an emotional level at this point to consider letting hunger signals guide my intake.

So instead, I count. In the past, I’ve counted points using Weight Watchers, and that has worked very well. At the moment, I’m counting raw calories. I use a free iPhone app called Lose It! (also available in website form, too) to keep track of all of my calories each week. It’s easy to use: I input my current weight, tell it how much weight I’d like to lose per week, and then log all of my food and exercise. Since my iPhone is always with me, it’s easy to remember.

At first it’s hard to count calories, especially when you have a daily limit you don’t want to exceed. It’s easy to eat too much during the day, then find yourself with few calories left for dinner. Or worse: starve yourself all day – not wanting to be without calories for dinner – then binge at dinner from being so hungry. Often it’s eye-opening to see how many calories are in your favorite foods, too. Who knew a serving of french fries could be more calories than a 7oz steak?

Lately I’ve become pretty savvy at working my calories. Just look at everything I ate yesterday:

Breakfast: 1 piece of 10-grain bread with peanut butter

Lunch: Applebees Grilled Dijon & Portobello Chicken with roasted potatoes and broccoli (450 calories total!)

Dinner: Spinach & mushroom deep dish pizza (Lean Cuisine) and Skinny Cow ice cream sandwich

Snacks: string cheese, 2-bite strawberry shortcake cupcakes (3)

All of that food, and I was still under my calorie budget for the day! I had 200 calories left that I could have eaten, but truthfully I was full on all of that.

Now, I’m in no way saying that is my healthiest day of eating. The cupcakes were a last minute splurge at work before midnight, and strawberry filling doesn’t exactly count as fruit.

Looking over that day, I needed some fruit in there somewhere. Could have probably added it to breakfast or switched out the ice cream sandwich for some strawberries and whipped cream. Plenty of protein for the day, though, and a decent amount of vegetables for me.

I like counting calories, though, because I can use them to plan, and seeing my calories over an entire day, or spread out over the entire week helps me realize that it’s OK to indulge a little, as long as it all balances out. I knew I had the calories for those mini-cupcakes, so I didn’t feel guilty about eating them. And if I choose to have McDonald’s for a meal this week, I can see that one day of going slightly over won’t wreck anything.

How do you approach food when it comes to losing weight? Do you count calories, measure your foods, eat until you feel full, or something else?

(And just because it needs to be said in this era of full disclosure, I am not affiliated with Lose It! and was not asked to promote their app or site. They have no idea who I am – I just like the app.)

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Mar 31, 2011

Poisoning Kids With Bright & Colorful Foods

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When Cordy was first diagnosed with autism, we looked into everything we could to help her. Therapy was expensive and involved long waiting lists, but in the meantime there were several doctors promoting supplements, medications, and diets that promised anything from a little help to a complete miracle.
I tried to be skeptical, or as skeptical as one can be when first finding out your child has a lifelong neurological condition that you would pay nearly anything to see disappear. I dismissed the big promises as junk science, but one topic kept coming up over and over: food additives.
Eliminating artificial food additives from my daughter’s diet was a simple enough solution to try, I thought. After all, it required buying no supplements or paying for some guide to the secret foods she must eat to behave properly. I just needed to read labels a little more closely, right?

Ha.

I don’t know if you’ve been reading labels lately, but just about EVERYTHING has artificial food dyes in it. Candy, mac and cheese, juices, fruit snacks, crackers, grape jam, cereal, baked goods, applesauce, chips – the list goes on and on. If it’s designed for kids, it’s even more likely to have artificial dyes in it. When I first tried to swap out her regular favorite foods for dye-free foods, it was nearly impossible. Everything had dye in it, even when it didn’t need to. (Why would something WHITE like white cheddar mac and cheese need dye in it?)

Now the FDA is turning its attention to food additives this week – specifically food dyes – and I’m carefully following the news to see what conclusions they draw. Since Cordy’s diagnosis, I am now convinced that food dyes play a role in her behavior, and when she avoids them her behavior is much better. She’s like a Jekyll & Hyde depending on if she’s ingested artificial food dyes or not.
Research shows that many children exhibit signs of hyperactivity when they consume artificial food dyes, and limiting the diet to remove these dyes often results in a dramatic improvement in behavior. The proof is enough for the European Union to require warning labels on foods containing artificial food dyes, resulting in fewer foods containing the dyes in European countries.
I’ve done my own experiment. It went something like this: Detox Cordy from all dyes for 5 days. Then give her a candy that has nothing artificial in it. (Plain rock candy sticks are great for this test.) Wait for any behavior change. In this case, no behavior change.
Then the next day, give her candy with food dye in it. (Blue lollipops are her favorite, and also her downfall.) Wait for any behavior change. After eating it, 30-45 minutes later she was a monster: unfocused, quick to tantrum, hyperactive, irritable, unsettled and sometimes feeling tired and ill. These changes can sometimes last 3-5 days from one exposure.
Suddenly it all made sense. I now know why holidays and birthdays were so traumatic in the past (colored icing on cakes and cookies!), why she always acted up more after a lollipop, and why cupcakes made her sick to her stomach.
Artificial colors are poison to my daughter. They alter her behavior, cloud her mind, and leave her unable to cope.
The worst part? They’re in most kid foods, and there’s no need for these dyes. Their only purpose is to make junk food look pretty and colorful so you’ll want to eat more of it. And there are plenty of perfectly good natural dyes that can be used in their place. Just look at the Annie’s brand of fruit snacks – all natural colors, but still bright, and my kids still beg for them.
It is maddening to find dye-free foods for my family. We often have to shop in the organic section of the grocery store to find safe foods, and because they’re in the organic section they cost more.
Teaching Cordy about what she can and can’t eat has been difficult, too. She is old enough now to understand that dyes make her sick. She’s even admitted to us that she feels “bad” (as in sick or unwell) when she eats something full of dyes. She can’t read labels yet, however, so she has to rely on adults to tell her what’s safe and what’s not. (Although she’s getting good at seeing most brightly colored candy and saying, “That will make me sick.”)
But we still have to take away 80% of her Halloween candy and trade it for safe snacks. And it’s hard when even the schools encourage her to eat Skittles as rewards in the classroom, or popsicles on the playground because all of the kids are getting them. They think they’re being fair to her, but they’re only hurting her. Fair is actually NOT giving her the popsicles the other kids are eating, so that she’ll be able to function in the classroom after recess.
I’m tired of food manufacturers saying that artificial food dyes are safe. They’re not. Most are made from coal tar or petroleum. Some have been labeled carcinogens. I don’t need Red #40 in my ice cream to know it’s strawberry – that’s why I have taste buds.
I e-mailed Kraft Foods over a year ago and asked why they needed to add yellow food dye to their famous blue box of mac and cheese when there are safer natural yellow dyes that could be used instead. The response was that the FDA had declared it safe to use, and they have no plans to change their ingredients. It was a beautifully written pat on the head with an underlying tone of, “Well, bless your heart, you poor crunchy nut. We don’t care what you think because kids like neon glow in the dark mac and cheese.”
I hope the FDA won’t bow to the lobbying from the food industry this time and will, at the minimum, require warning labels on any foods containing artificial food dyes. And then maybe Cordy’s favorite mac and cheese will decide it’s time to change their ingredients so she can eat it safely.
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Filed Under: Autism, big issues, Cordy, daily life, healthy living ·