"dieting" news and stories

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?

Wait, am I the only one who does that?

SoyJoy Bars are something like that.

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.

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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.

How's that for some visual non-stimulation?

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.

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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.