As we head into the holiday season, aka the Season of the Endless Buffets, portion control sticks in the back of any health-conscious or body-conscious mind. You know, at least while that mind is sober.
How are your portion control skills? Check them here on WomensHealthMag.com in a test where you are presented with pictures of two separate servings of pretzels and you have to guess which one you think is the 100 calorie serving. Sound tough? It is!
I got it wrong. Whatever, I just ate a pint of Ben & Jerry's. That's about 100 calories, right?
Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to declare that all those 100 calorie packs totally bite, except maybe the Wheat Thins. They taste like the cereal version of whatever they're supposed to be. When I want Oreos, I don't want 100 calories worth of hexagonal Oreo-inspired crisps.
Everyone knows the secret of a good diet is to go ahead and eat what you crave, just don't eat too much of it. My entire pint of Ben & Jerry's? Well, I guess I'm not on a good diet today. Blame the economy. I don't know why, just do it.
Remember all the hype surrounding Beyonce and her occasional detox diet?
It's now officially being referred to as the Def Jam Diet. For some reason, everyone associated with the record label is drastically dropping pounds. However, now that Beyonce's (supposedly) pregnant, she can't do drop the pounds with the extreme dieting. (Well, duh, Beyonce, you're gaining weight because you're pregnant.)
You know when you are eating your fourth tofu salad of the day for the eighteenth day in a row of this hell we call "diet before bikini season?" And on the salad there is a slab of stupidly healthy tofu that when you bite into it, you close your eyes and tell yourself it's actually a piece of chocolate cake?
The March issue of Glamour Magazine features an article on scary celebrity diet tricks that no woman (or presumably, man) should try. The article gives a run-down of some pretty insane weight-loss tactics, and then suggests alternatives for each them. The alternatives, however, basically just negate the aforementioned trick (ex: instead of using laxative teas, don't use laxative teas). So while I didn't find the article very useful, it's always a bit fun to glimpse the absurdity of lifestyles of the rich and famous. I mean, $3,000 for cleansing supplements?
My favorite diet-trick of the article was to "obsess over the tabloids," because I know that's what I always do when I feel like shedding some pounds. And remember, it's important to eat solid foods.
Perhaps one of the reasons we're having trouble with our efforts at weight loss is that we can't visualize what we are consuming. In other words, when you look at a plate of fried chicken with a heaping scoop of mashed potatoes and a brick of mac n cheese, you can't really tell how much fat and how many calories you're about to consume.
Website Foodsel is a tool that not only gives you detailed nutritional information of popular foods, but lets you visualize energy, sugar, and fat. For example. if you were to eat an entire 12" Pizza Hut cheese pizza, you'd be consuming 4.4 sugar cubes, one entire stick of butter, and would have to burn the equivalent of 87.5 D batteries. That's a lot of energy to burn.
Think you're helping your weight loss because you're saving calories with artificial sweeteners?
Put down that pink/yellow/blue packet and step away from your latte.
New research from scientists at Purdue University claim that artificial sweeteners, long thought to aid in dieting, actually makes it tougher to lose weight. Because sweet foods normally prompt the body to get ready to take in a lot of calories, the body gets confused when the taste of sweetness from an artificial sweetener is not followed by a calorie flux. You'll eventually end up eating more, or burning fewer calories.
Guess that means I'm going back to plain old sugar.
Every year I make food resolutions. Oh, sure, there's the inevitable "eat better, exercise more, lose weight" resolution that 98% of us make, but I'm talking about resolutions that have to do with specific foods and specific eating habits. Here are some of mine for 2008.
1. Drink more alcohol. Yes, that's right, more alcohol. For some reason I haven't had much in the past year or two, but alcohol (especially red wine) has a lot of health benefits (as long as you don't overdo it, because too much will negate the benefits you get). So, 2008 will become the Year of More Alcohol for me. I think this is one resolution that will be easy to keep.
I hate to be the one to do it to you, especially after trying to pawn off organic gummy bears and Fruit Roll-ups on you as "candy," but someone has to do it. Someone is going to remind you how many calories are in that Snickers bar you just swiped from your kid for yourself, and it may as well be me.
Website A Calorie Counter has a fairly decent table of calorie counts for some of the more popular chocolate and candy bars. It's a side-by-side comparison to see how they all stack up against each other in terms of their nutritional content and ingredients like saturated fat , sugar, and trans fat. The funny thing is, most of the bars within a certain category flutter about the same calorie count. For example, most chocolate bars are about 200 calories, so you really aren't saving much by choosing a Nestle 100 Grand Bar at 180 calories over a Heath Bar, which is 210. You're better off going to a completely different category like hard and powder candies, but to really save calories, you know that the best thing to do is not eat it.
By now, you all know I have an odd fascination with energy drinks. Part of the reason is that my over-stressed, overworked and underslept body body need them -- I think I've had so much coffee in my life already that I've developed a tolerance to the effects of the caffeine in it. Part of the reason is that...nothing. I don't know why else I would want to drink a beverage that almost always tastes like over-sweetened Capri Sun with the bitter chemical aftertaste of say, nail polish remover.
Okay, so that's a little harsh.
It doesn't really taste like Capri Sun.
Now there is a new class of drinks that takes energy to the next level. These drinks claim not to be zero calories, but negative calories, because the chemical formulation actually causes you to, well, burn calories. Granted, energy drinks do the same, since technically, with all that increased "energy," you will run around like a chicken with her head cut off. If you recall, we posted about Enviga last year, which has the same marketing spiel - drink a can of Enviga, you potato del couch, and you will lose weight just sitting there eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos dipped in Blue Cheese Dressing! (I did not try this, but don't think I wouldn't). I tried Enviga. I didn't lose weight.
Celsius is a new energy drink in this category. I tried it. It was...interesting.
We want to believe that there is a magic pill that will melt the fat off our bodies. We even hope there's some secret formula that nobody else knows. In the end, however, in our heart of hearts, we always know that "the formula" for staying trim is no formula at all. Quite simply, we have to exercise more and eat less.
Right?
Well, not exactly. According to various bits of research done here and there and compiled by AOL Diet & Fitness, it seems that for one particular trouble spot for a lot us, abs, eating more might be key.
Hold your horses, Soon-to-be-Taut Tonto. You can't just go eating everything in sight, thinking that the more potato chips and bacon you cram down your throat, the tighter your abs will be. There are specific nutrients in foods that seem t help fight ab fat. Unfortunately, potato chips isn't one of them. What are they? There are five things, and the matrix above is just a few suggestions for ways you can incorporate these into your diet that will get you to flatter abs:
Hooray! Yet another article about the end-all, be-all method to finally, yes finally (!) lose weight!
Ugh.
Strangely enough, the tips in an article by Sally Squires of the Washington Post are absolutely normal, and if I'm going to poke fun at anything at all, it's the fact that the logic behind the Energy Density method is absolutely sound.
Basically, you replace food with a high energy density with foods that have low energy-density. It sounds fancy. It sounds scientific and complicated. Energy density? Do we need to carry around little notebooks with an entire database of foods and their energy densities?!?!
No. Energy density is just a fancy way of saying "caloric bang for your buck." You want to eat foods that give you less caloric bang for your buck, and remove foods that have a higher number of calories for the volume of food you eat. For example, an apple is low density. Mashed potatoes with butter that's the same size as that apple is high density.
It's not rocket science, but if you need more concrete to-dos, here's a list from the article:
Add fruits and vegetables to cut calories
Get more fiber
Add a course to your meal like salad to cut down on a higher density main course
Sip on soup
Cut out fat where you won't be sacrificing too much flavor
Late last year, a TV production company filmed a new reality program in England. Nine volunteers set up camp in the Paignton Zoo in Devon, next to the ape house and for 12 days, ate like the apes did. This meant that they consumed nearly 11 pounds of fruits and vegetables a day as part of a three-day rotating diet that was designed by a nutritionist. They also were given small amounts of honey and nuts, and during the second week ate some cooked fish.
On average, each of the participants lost 10 pounds and experienced significant reductions in blood pressure and cholesterol. The majority of the participants signed up because they were experiencing health concerns and needed to do something drastic in order to improve their health.
I realize that this is sort of old news, but I just heard about it and I found it intriguing. I'm also very curious if this will become one of the many reality TV shows exported to the United States. Americans are willing to try a variety of drastic measures to lose weight. Will eating like an ape be one of them?
People who participate in the program send photos to a diet and nutrition expert via their cell phone cameras. The experts analyze their dietary intake and send results back to the participants within three days, along with advice.
Like I said before in the post about Sprint's service, this seems a "little too late." Getting information after you've already eaten a 10,000 calorie burger with a side of super size fries that you probably shouldn't have done that seems futile. Wouldn't it be better if you sent a picture of your rare steak dripping with blue cheese butter and have an instant text message reply that says "No!"
As we head into the holiday season, aka the Season of the Endless Buffets, portion control sticks in the back of any health-conscious or body-conscious mind. You know, at least while that mind is sober.
Remember all the hype surrounding Beyonce and her occasional detox diet? 
The March issue of 
Perhaps one of the reasons we're having trouble with our efforts at weight loss is that we can't visualize what we are consuming. In other words, when you look at a plate of fried chicken with a heaping scoop of mashed potatoes and a brick of mac n cheese, you can't really tell how much fat and how many calories you're about to consume.
Think you're helping your weight loss because you're saving calories with artificial sweeteners?
Every year I make food resolutions. Oh, sure, there's the inevitable "eat better, exercise more, lose weight" resolution that 98% of us make, but I'm talking about resolutions that have to do with specific foods and specific eating habits. Here are some of mine for 2008.
I hate to be the one to do it to you, especially after 
Hooray! Yet 
Late last year
We've already psoted about 
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5 Things You Didn't Know About Turducken
10 Catchiest Food Jingles We Love to Hate
