In Sunday's Pittsburgh Tribune Review, dietitian Betsy Klein states that fad diets, such as low-carb regimens, seem to be disappearing. She explains that they are declining because people are less obsessed with weight-loss and more concerned with what they're actually consuming. This change in eating can be traced as far back as the '70s culinary revolution in Berkeley initiated by chefs like Alice Waters. It looks like the trend is spreading to the rest of the country.
This past September, the New York Times printed an article about people starting to eat to enjoy food rather than solely to lose weight. Chefs are preparing healthful well-balanced meals that do not necessarily follow any extreme forms of dieting. I wonder whether people are eating to enjoy the culinary sensations on their palate or if they're eating to experience the food's medicinal properties. For example, some people consume honey because they believe it relieves a sore throat. In other words, some people eat with the objective to have food activate or shut down corporal pains and desires.
Even if we're eating for reasons both gastronomical and pharmaceutic, which culinary purpose dominates? How will our culinary perception evolve in 2009?
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.
Spring, Summer, Late Summer, Fall, and Winter make up the five seasons of the Chinese calendar; corresponding with the five Chinese elements and a number of their healing philosophies.
According to my knowledgeable friend Lora: "Each season is connected to a set of organs in the body. Corresponding foods that are fresh in each season are meant to cleanse, detoxify, and heal those organs. When we eat the same diet year-round without paying attention to seasonal foods, we ignore our bodies' needs to support and properly heal organs, which leads to lots of health issues (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, etc.)."
You probably remember hearing about The Miracle Fruit (containing the mysterious protein miraculin) earlier this year. It makes bitter and sour taste sweet, and, by altering those two flavors, makes everything taste like something else.
Surprise surprise, they turned it into a pill!
Available from ThinkGeek, the Miracle Fruit Tablets come in dodgy-looking packets of ten and will apparently blow your mind so much, they recommend only taking half a tablet to start.
Originally documented in France in 1725, the Miracle Fruit has been experiencing a renaissance of interest since 2007. We attribute the public fascination to the hope that one day cauliflower will taste like ice cream and vinegar will taste like ranch dressing. As people continue to invent crazy diets to lose weight, everyone is on the lookout for a way to make diet food taste more like Snickers bars. We wonder what it does to cabbage soup!
For now, people are mostly using the tablets recreationally. Two pills per person makes one heck of a crazy dinner party!
In every achiever's life there comes a time to go off the life-source. Diet. Health. A simple need to just calm down for a few weeks. There are lots of good reasons for cutting out coffee, I suppose. The trouble lies more in the hows rather than the whys.
The Diet Blog shows you how. And very well, too, I might add. I might possibly even take some of these suggestions. Possibly. Maybe sometime next week. Right now I'm really busy and...can't...
Here. Drink these down:
Substitute green tea -- its big taste and heady caffeine count can help you ween yourself off those four cups a day.
Address the social aspect of coffee - suggests drinks you can nurse instead of coffee while chillaxing with your friends at a cafe.
Avoid the carbs -- to prevent that mid-afternoon crash, reducing your desperate need for another cuppa joe.
All very solid suggestions, indeed. And there are others worth checking out on the site. Just be sure you're actually ready to take the plunge.
Now excuse me. It's almost time for my 3 p.m. Starbucks...
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.
Recently, German researchers fed lab mice separate "human" and "chimp" diets, and within just two weeks, were able to notice distinct psychological and genetic differences in the rodents.
There were three different diets: a raw food-only diet; meals from the researchers' local cafeteria; and a pure fast-food diet. The researchers found a huge difference in the livers of the mice with a chimp diet versus those with a human diet (I'm scared to hear about the difference in their hearts and arteries!) They found thousands of differences in the genes expressed in the mouse livers, which they think may be caused by our differences in diets.
...You got all that? Okay. The scientists also found that said genes seemed to evolve faster than other genes.
So, basically, our ancestors' adoption of meat and cooked foods may have shaped us into the carnivorous, brownie-eating, beer-guzzling beings we are today.
When science journalist Gary Taubes wrote an article for The New York Times magazine in 2002 arguing that (and I'm summarizing a lot here) that it's the excessive consumption of calories from refined carbs and starches that causes weight problems and not the excessive consumption of calories consumed from fat, he was attacked by everyone. Now Taubes has a new book out that expands on the topic, Good Calories, Bad Calories. And he's still being attacked.
I haven't picked up the book yet, but it seems like an interesting read. Unlike other diet and health books that talk about their diets in rather basic terms, this is a thick tome that really goes in-depth about the body, weight, and health, quoting various studies that have been conducted over the years. I think one of his theories even questions how much exercise a human needs.
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.
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?
Some might already be aware of the blog that Baier has been keeping for the past few months. In the Men's Health piece, Baier's battle is chronicled, but there are a ton of tips and tricks in there too for people who want to get into shape, especially busy travelers like Baier. Some of the "tips from the road:" Forget about the menu (decide what you want before you see all the options), invite a new client to dinner (studies show we eat less in front of strangers), and make sure you check out your hotel and the area to see where the best gyms are.
He says it's hard to eat well when the food on Air Force One is so good, but he's had success. He lost 20 pounds in 8 weeks.
Even though the official start of summer isn't until some time in mid-June, we all know that summertime really kicks off with Memorial Day weekend -- and for lots of us, that means lounging poolside for the first time this year, or hitting the beach. Time to get our bodies ready for swimsuits.
Lady Thrills has put together a list of the Top 10 Foods that Help Burn Fat. Granted, you can't just eat a teaspoon of cayenne pepper then sit around on the chaise lounge all day. Getting into shape means eating well overall and exercising. But a little kick along the way from these ten things can't hurt!
I admit it. There are times when I rely on fast food. It's usually during times of extreme stress at work, when I'm rushing to the office, so I drive thru McDonald's for an Egg McMuffin and a cup of coffee while on a conference call on my cell and sending emails on my Blackberry. Either that, or I'm driving thru the 24-hour Jack-in-the-Box at 2 AM for a quick-fix sobering burger to help with the hangover I'm sure to have the next morning.
Whatever the case, I feel guilty because fast food, all of it, no matter what because it simply is fast food, is bad for me and my waistline. Right?
Well, mostly right. It can't be all bad if WebMD reports that The Fast Food Diet can help you lose weight. Basically, The Fast Food Diet is a six-week plan for making the best (read "healthiest," not "tastiest") selections from virtually every major fast-food restaurant menu, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snacks. The guidelines account for 1,500 calories per day, and instruct exercise.
You didn't think you could eat a Big Mac, large fries and Diet Coke three times a day sitting around for six weeks, did you?
Sometimes the name of a product is just wrong. Just...wrong. And when you combine it with a photo on the package, it just gets worse. On the right is a photo of an actual product called Baby Bologna. Now, I'm sure the "baby" in the title refers to the size of the bologna. So why the heck did they put a picture of a human baby on the cover, smiling? Bizarre.
But there's more evidence that this is a growing trend. Will we soon see Kidsicles? Tater Tots?
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.
In every achiever's life there comes a time to go off the life-source. Diet. Health. A simple need to just calm down for a few weeks. There are lots of good reasons for cutting out coffee, I suppose. The trouble lies more in the hows rather than the whys. 
Think you're helping your weight loss because you're saving calories with artificial sweeteners?
When science journalist 
Late last year
That's the word from Fox News Channel Chief White House Correpsondent Bret Baier, who 
What the...??
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