Mindless eating... it's how we eat!

One of the books I relied on for good -- and fascinating -- information for How We Did It was Dr. Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think.

Dr. Wansink is called a "food psychologist." From his lab at Cornell University, he conducts experiments into the factors that lead us to eat what we eat. And you'd think that we eat what we eat because it tastes good, right? Wrong!

In some of his crazy experiments, Dr. Wansink has uncovered the many misguided reasons we eat. Among them are these:

• The size and shape of a bowl can almost double the amount of food you eat.
• Restaurants can get you to eat more by describing their menu items with adjectives.
• You will eat more candy if you throw away the wrappers as you go along than if you let the wrappers pile up.
• If you have bread served with dipping oil rather than with butter, you'll consume less bread but more calories.
  
• Grocery store signs that read 3-for-$3 rather than $1/each can more than double our purchases.

These are just a few of the fascinating facts Dr. Wansink has confirmed with his research. How can you apply this information to your food consumption? "By encouraging healthy, mindful eating, we can decrease obesity," Wansink says. "A keen awareness of all these hidden persuaders is an important step in controlling the amount and quality of food you eat."

For me, "mindful eating" means this:
I will not eat straight from a package. If I want some crackers, I'll put some on a plate.
I will not eat something just because it's there. Most chocolate made in the U.S. tastes like wax. I've stopped eating my son's leftover Halloween candy. If I want chocolate, I'll eat just a little bit of really good chocolate.
I absolutely do not shop when I'm hungry. The temptations are just too overwhelming. I'll have a small, healthy snack before I go, even if I'm in a hurry.
If I eat while watching TV, I choose the snack beforehand and set it out on the coffee table. No trips to the kitchen during a show!

How about you? What does "mindful eating" mean for you?

Fast food = slow progress

It's a beautiful day here in the Northeast, more like May than March. I'm going to strap on my sneakers and go walk around town in a minute.

Walking is a great activity for weight maintenance. But its benefit also can be deceiving. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking, "Oh, I just walked for a half hour. Now I can go get that hamburger I've been craving."

Most people overestimate the benefit of exercise and underestimate the damage that fat and sugar-laden food can do. For example, say you eat a Big Mac meal with medium fries. (Let’s assume a diet drink, just to be virtuous.)

According to McDonald’s nutritional information, a Big Mac has 540 calories, while the medium order of fries has 380 calories, so your meal totals 1,480 calories.

How long to you think you’d have to exercise to burn off those calories? An hour? Two hours? Guess again.

According to the most recent government data, a 154-pound person would need to walk briskly for more than three hours to account for this meal! A more sedate pace would require more than five hours of hoofing.

And consider this: Most people who have a plan for losing weight do it by trying to limit their daily calorie intake. That same 154-pound person might have set a limit of 1,500 calories a day. Wow! They'll have a whole 20 calories to play with that day!

And when we're talking fast food, we can't neglect to talk about fat content. Again, consider the medium Big Mac meal. Of the Big Mac's 540 calories, 260 of them come from fat. It contains 29 grams of fat -- fully 45 percent of the recommended daily value. And the fries? Of the 380 calories, 170 come from fat. Their 19 grams of fat are 29 percent of the recommended daily value. So together, the two items account for 74 percent of your daily allotment.

Is that meal really worth it?

Most people who talked with me about their weight loss for How We Did It pinned their weight dilemma on overindulgence in fast food. McDonalds, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Five Guys, Cinnabon, Pizza Hut--the list of fast food outlets is almost literally endless.

So, the next time you want to reward yourself after a workout, banish the thought of junk food. I'm usually starving after I swim my laps and need something with a little protein, so I put together some cheese and crackers and apple slices. What do you do?

We've hit the airwaves!

I was interviewed recently about How We Did It by Andy Farmer of KNEO radio. KNEO is a Missouri radio station that also reaches parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas.

Andy asked some great questions about the book: How DID people do it? Is weight loss a one-size-fits-all proposition? What are some of your favorite success stories in the book? (To which I replied: All of them!) What can we do about the childhood obesity rate in this country?

To listen to the interview, click on this link to go to KNEO's website. Enjoy!

Goodreads Author Q&A

For the next month, I'm hosting an Author Q&A on goodreads for How We Did It. To join the discussion, click on over to this goodreads link. I've started four discussion threads, but feel free to start another if you have something else on your mind. Thanks for stopping by!

Physician, step on the scale!

Time magazine recently offered up an interesting fact: Doctors who are a healthy weight are more likely to talk to you about your weight than doctors who are overweight.

In a Mayo Clinic study about how doctors cared for their overweight patients, 30 percent of doctors who were a healthy weight brought up the subject, but only 18 percent of overweight or obese doctors addressed the topic. And who can blame them? If I were the patient, I know what I'd be thinking: Hypocrite!

That's exactly what the players of a major league baseball team were thinking when their team doctor started opining about matters of health and fitness. In How We Did It, I talked with Dr. Ken Romeo, a sports doc, who recalls how a player stopped one of his lectures with a few well-chosen words.

"Why should we listen to you, doc? You're fat!" the player accused.

At 315 pounds and wearing a 4X shirt, the doctor clearly had a weight problem. But, like most of us, he had never really seen his weight for what it was. We focus on features or character traits we think compensate for -- even hide -- our extra pounds... a pretty face, say, or a flamboyant personality.

Dr. Romeo suspected he might be fooling himself in this way. So he decided on a dramatic test. He took a brown paper grocery bag, cut out two holes for his eyes and put the bag over his head. Then, he looked in the mirror. This time, the mirror didn't lie. "I am fat!" he concluded.

Fortunately, Dr. Romeo took charge of the situation. He went on to lose 115 pounds using first the Atkins diet and then the Pritikin diet. He stopped smoking, too!

I wonder what he and his patients are talking about these days.

But what gives with the 30 percent figure anyway? That means more than two-thirds of healthy weight doctors aren't talking about weight issues, which--forgive me if I'm wrong here--also happen to be health issues.

When I was 30 pounds overweight and climbing, my doctor (a healthy weight woman) gave me my annual physicals and never said a word about my weight. Until one year, as she was literally going out the door of the exam room, and had her back to me, she said, "Watch the fats!" It wasn't a very helpful "conversation," to say the least. Would I have appreciated a more frank confrontation? I don't know. Would you?

To substitute or not to substitute

One thing I discovered while writing How We Did It is that any aspect of weight loss you want to name has a dividing line, and people on either side of it.

Calorie counting--yes or no? Eating in moderation or total avoidance? Can anything you do ever really burn fat?

Now, I've discovered another one: Change your eating habits entirely, or modify your existing recipes to make them healthier?

I've always fallen on the side of changing your eating habits entirely. I'm far too in love with my recipes to mess with them. I'd rather just have the real thing once in a while, instead of a substitute all the time. I remember once years back trying to substitute carob chips for chocolate chips. Ugh. I only did that once!

But all my friends on the South Beach Diet have been talking up a recipe that I just couldn't resist trying: Chovacado Pudding. It's chocolate pudding made with... an avocado! Really.

Here's the recipe I used. I messed around with it because I didn't have the ingredients it called for.

Chovocado Pudding

1 ripe avocado
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/4 cup raw agave nectar (I used honey)
1/4 almond milk (I used regular 1% milk)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. very strong coffee sweetened with 1 tbsp. sugar (my addition)

Peel and quarter the avocado. Put all the ingredients in a blender and mix until smooth.

The verdict? I tasted it after blending the first five ingredients. I thought it tasted flat, like decaf coffee tastes flat, so I added the sweetened coffee. Coffee and chocolate always go together in my book! The addition of sugar made it taste better, though my South Beach friends--and anyone who is avoiding sugar--wouldn't want to do that.

I topped the pudding with sugar-free Cool Whip. That's another substitution I generally avoid -- I like the real thing too much.

The verdict? I liked it okay; my husband thought it was odd. It was VERY rich. I couldn't finish my ramekin dish. I tried it the next day, and liked it less, though. Maybe something happens to the mix, but it was lumpy and tasted gritty, which isn't surprising since you don't dissolve the cocoa powder in anything hot.

I suppose I could solve these problems with some more tinkering with the recipe, but honestly, I don't see the point. I love avocados as they are, not buried. And I love chocolate, but am so-so about pudding. A worthy experiment, but nothing I'm going to try again. I definitely fall on the side of the dividing line with those who want the real thing now and again.

But isn't bariatric surgery cheating?

How We Did It got a nice mention in my local newspaper yesterday, The Times of Trenton. It's an article about a local woman who underwent bariatric surgery and lost over 100 pounds.

"But isn't that cheating?" you ask.

That's what I thought before I started to talk to people about weight loss surgery.

One well-known bariatric surgeon, Dr. Scott Shikora, chief of general surgery and bariatric surgery at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, says that realistically speaking, fewer than 10 percent of morbidly obese people will ever achieve weight loss without surgery. Those are some pretty bad odds.

The problem is that when obese people modify their diet, their bodies fight the perceived starvation. They try to exercise, but their weight and overstressed joints prevent them from accomplishing meaningful movement. It's a classic catch-22.

When excess weight reaches the point of endangering a person's health, sometimes surgery is the only possible way to bring them back from the brink of death. So, a person who carries 100 pounds over their ideal weight and has diabetes or high blood pressure may become a good candidate for the surgery.

In many ways, undergoing weight loss surgery requires the same commitment to diet and exercise as the person who chooses a weight loss plan. Eating is strictly controlled and a specific eating plan must be followed in order to prevent complications and weight regain. Exercise is encouraged as part of the patient's new, healthy lifestyle.

But of course weight loss surgery carries significant risks. One of the people in How We Did It who lost 120 pounds after gastric bypass surgery suffered several complications that put her back in the hospital. Yet, today, she is able to maintain her loss and rarely has side effects. But anyone considering weight loss surgery will, of course, have indepth discussions with his or her doctor. Most will also attend mandatory group sessions to determine whether they have the level of commitment necessary to make the surgery and its risks worthwhile.

Although she considered it her last resort, the woman profiled in my local newspaper, Georgette Brown, believed her surgery to be absolutely necessary. She has lost more than 100 pounds and is wearing a size 8, where once she weighed 283 pounds. Congratulations, Georgette!