Category: Diet

Now, I am not a medical authority, so I cannot recommend any particular diet plan, but in the last few months I have been trying to lose some weight.  My sister passed on to me a tip for watching one’s calories while eating out that has caused no end of laughter whenever we’ve used it.  And it works too!

Scenario:  You’ve ordered a standard meal — and restaurants tend to portion such meals to an adult male — and find that you’ve eaten enough to satisfy you.  You could ask the waiter to box it up for you to take home, but by the time you flag him down and he brings you a box you have finished eating the meal through picking at it.  Even if you manage to hold off and take home the leftovers, they are more likely to become your midnight snack rather than tomorrow’s lunch.  What do you do?

One solution:  Ruin the food. 

Yes, that’s right.  Make the food unpalatable.  After all, if you leave it on the plate the restaurant will throw it out anyway.  The staff won’t box it up and send it to the starving kids in China or even to the local food pantry.  It goes in the trash.  So, you might as well have fun with the food before it is disposed of.

For example, after seeing Revenge of the Sith Saturday night with my sister, we went to Denny’s for dessert.  We each ordered a chocolate sundae, not realizing that the portions were going to be huge.  (We could easily have shared one if we had known beforehand the size of the portions.)  So, when I ate all I knew I should eat, I picked up the pepper shaker, unscrewed the lid, and dumped some pepper into the remains of my sundae.  My sister did likewise to hers with sugar packets and table litter.  Voila!  The sundaes were no longer appetizing and we had a ball while depriving ourselves.

It’s especially fun when the wait staff notices what you have done.  One waiter actually missed a step when eyeing another dessert to which I’d added a liberal amount of salt.  When asked to explain — which has happened once or twice — the wait staff I’ve encountered have loved the idea and have said they’d be trying it too.

One caveat:  Not everyone will be impressed by your brilliance in happily destroying your leftovers.  I’ve had friends plead with me not to do it in their presence because they are either grossed-out or want my leftovers for themselves.  As long as they are willing to lay claim to the food and thus remove the temptation from me, I am more than happy to accommodate their more delicate sensibilities.

Feel free to share your own diet tricks in the combox.

In one of his recent posts, Jimmy made reference to cold pizza in such a way as to make one speculate that he appreciates the occasional refrigerated snack. I have nursed a private affinity for chilled foods for some years, but until now have never publicly acknowledged my secret.

Hello, my name is Tim, and I like cold food.

I’m not talking about things you would normally eat cold, like yogurt or deli meat. I’m talking about those things that you would normally heat up before consuming. The merits of cold fried chicken, of course, are well documented. That’s one that would fall into the category of socially accepted cold food. One could eat this without receiving weird looks from friends or family.

I am advocating more adventurous and creative dishes: cold mashed potatoes and gravy, cold chicken and rice casserole, or (my personal favorite) the cold spaghetti sauce sandwich. The latter has to be made with meat sauce, and the more meat the better. Vegetable-only spaghetti sauce just won’t hold together. It should also be  made with some good bread; leftover garlic toast or a hoagie roll work nicely. Steer away from the pasty white sandwich bread. The same can be done with cold chili.

Cold food has several advantages over warmed-up food: It is great when you are in a hurry, it requires no sauce pan or anything like that, and it will never FRY THE ROOF OF YOUR MOUTH as a result of being heated far beyond natural limits in a microwave oven. A piece of microwaved pizza can be a real health hazard, far hotter than anything served straight from a regular oven. Molten cheese behaves like napalm at those temperatures.

Now one thing I have noticed about cold foods: This seems to be a phenomenon associated with the x/y chromosome combo. In other words, it seems to be a guy thing. Often when indulging my cold-food jones, I am met with incredulous looks from the female members of the household, and remarks like "Aren’t you going to warm that up?", or "Put that on a plate, you’ll enjoy it more.". Obviously this is a pleasure that simply remains opaque to many bystanders.

I am no longer ashamed of my love for congealed beef stroganoff. If the French can have their vichyssoise, I am entitled to my wedge of macaroni and cheese or a quivering slice of chicken and dumplings.

Mm-m-m-m-m…

Did you know that the Dark Side is not the only aspect of the Force that parents should fear? The new movie Revenge of the Sith is luring kids to the Fat Side. Or so say Wannabe-Nanny Groups that pose as Advocates for The People:

"Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith promotes unhealthy eating, according to a review conducted by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC). Sixteen separate food promotions feature twenty-five different products, most of which are devoid of nutrients, filled with empty calories and targeted directly to young children.

"’The quantity of nutritionally deficient Star War’s food being marketed to children is staggering,’ said nutritionist Jane Levine of Kids Can Make a Difference. ‘In the midst of an epidemic of childhood obesity, once again junk food marketers have shown that they have no restraint when it comes to targeting kids. The Star Wars promotions demonstrate why we need restrictions on food marketing to children.’"

GET THE STORY.

Spare me. I didn’t take along a child when my sister and I saw Revenge of the Sith this past weekend (indeed, my sister, who is a mommy, was horrified to see a stroller in the theater in which we watched the film), but I would have had no trouble explaining to a child that he couldn’t have whatever candy-cum-snack he thought he must have based on having seen the movie. And what, exactly, these nanny groups have in mind as their concern puzzles me. They appear to be referring to the food products that have advertising from the movie on them.  Sheesh.  Just refuse to buy, for pity’s sake!  Parents are parents because they are supposed to be able to say "no" to their children when their children would otherwise make unacceptable choices.

. . . eat as the ancient Romans did!

HERE’ZA BUNCHA RECIPES TO GET YOU STARTED!

So here’s what I had for my NewYear’s dinner (a.k.a. "lunch"), all courtesy of my neighborhood Vons supermarket:

* Hormel brand smoked pork chop (0 net carbs)
* Vons brand blackeyed peas (13 net carbs)
* Glory Foods brand seasoned southern style collard greens (4 net carbs)
* Talk o’Texas brand pickled okra (0.25 net carbs per pod)
* Old South brand sweet pickled watermelon rind (8.5 net carbs per square)

A grand total of 26.5 carbs, which is high for a single meal for me, but hey, it’s New Years.

So here’s what I had for my NewYear’s dinner (a.k.a. "lunch"), all courtesy of my neighborhood Vons supermarket:

* Hormel brand smoked pork chop (0 net carbs)
* Vons brand blackeyed peas (13 net carbs)
* Glory Foods brand seasoned southern style collard greens (4 net carbs)
* Talk o’Texas brand pickled okra (0.25 net carbs per pod)
* Old South brand sweet pickled watermelon rind (8.5 net carbs per square)

A grand total of 26.5 carbs, which is high for a single meal for me, but hey, it’s New Years.

Quick! What’s something you can get eat in Scotland and (probably) nowhere else?

Haggis, right?

Well, that’s not all!

You can also get something that is probably even worse for you than the Monster Thickburger at your local Hardees.

Actually, there are several deep-fried somethings that you can buy in Scotland but nowhere else.

These are so uncommon that even many Scottish officials thought they were mythic, but they did a survey and discovered they were not. (Unlike the Loch Ness Monster, apparently.)

In fact, they found that 22% of "chip shops" (whatever a "chip shop" is) sell them and another 17% used to.

What are they?

Well, for a start . . .

HOW ABOUT DEEP-FRIED MILKY WAY BARS?

Only in Scotland they call them "Mars Bars."

Okay, New Years is a-comin’, and that means it’s black-eyed pea time.

Y’see, growing up, every year my family would eat black-eyed peas on New Years’ Day for good luck.

Old tradition. I try to keep it up even though I’m out on my own now. (Though I can’t eat much as the peas aren’t low-carb enough, so you can’t go hog wild.)

Apparently, some folk also eat collard greens on New Years.

Don’t know about that.

We ate a lot of collard greens (as well as mustard greens and turnip greens), just don’t remember us eating them on New Years.

Might have to try that this year, though, as greens probably are low-carb.

HERE’S AN ARTICLE ON THE SUBJECT, ALONG WITH COOKING SUGGESTIONS.

(Cowboy hat tip: Southern Appeal.)

Maybe I’ll pull out a bottle of pickled okra out of my cupboard and start a new New Years tradition. As Crow T. Robot says, "There’s no tradition like a new tradition!"

MORE ON BLACK-EYED PEAS.

MORE ON COLLARD GREENS.

The possible answer may surprise you!

Perhaps Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko should try an "Olestra diet" to rid his body of dioxin.

It wouldn’t be the first time that
the "fake fat" product was used as an emergency agent to flush out
dioxin, one of a group of chlorinated hydrocarbons that are toxic,
lipophilic (attracted to fat) – and persistent in the environment and
animal tissues. About five years ago, two Austrian women suffering from
dioxin poisoning were given olestra snacks, which resulted in removal
of dioxin at 10 times the normal rate, according to some reports.

In
an as-yet-unpublished study, researchers at the University of
Cincinnati School of Medicine, along with Trevor Redgrave at the
University of Western Australia, treated a patient with PCB toxicity
over a two-year period with olestra in the form of fat-free Pringles.
The patient’s chloracne disappeared and the PCB level in fat tissue
dropped dramatically.

GET THE STORY.

(Cowboy hat tip: Southern Appeal.

Remember a number of years ago when a man on trial for a criminal offense offered what has since been termed “the twinkie defense”–i.e., that he was driving to commit his crime by eating sugar-laden twinkies?

Well, twinkies not only may not be a good defense in court, they also may not be a good defense for being overweight as a teenager.

A recent Harvard study finds lack of correlation between snack food consumption and obesity in teens.

This flies in the face of traditional diet “wisdom” that snack foods are uniformly bad for you and are to be avoided in preference for other sugar/starch/carbohydrate-laden “healthy” foods like fruit, bread, and pasta.

The study has some sharp limitations, which make it difficult to draw significant dieting advice from it (i.e., it wasn’t fine-grained enough to identify specific eating habits that produced desirable weights among teens vs. specific eating habits that produced undesirable ones), but it did appear to show two things that cohere quite well with the diet strategy I am personally convinced of:

1) Except in one particular group (see next point), eating so-called “snack foods” or “junk foods” do not appear to cause more obesity than eating allegedly “healthy” foods (i.e., foods judged healthy by the United States Department of Agriculture‘s give-your-children-diabetes-while-helping-us-sell-more-grain-based-products food pyramid).

2) In one particular group–those who had overweight parents–consumption of “snack foods” was correlated with obesity, suggesting that obesity may be in significant measure a product of genetics. This could be in part due to eating habits passed on from parents to kids in the home environment, so separated twin studies would need to be done to show how much of it is due to genetics, but any time you have a physical trait (like obesity) running in a family, there is a good chance that it is in part genetic.