Here's more on another book I liked

December 22nd, 2009

David Kessler's new (2009) book is ttitled The end of overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. Kessler knows his territory, both professionally (he's a former medical school dean and former FDA commissioner) and, from my read, personally. His premise is we've been, absolutely deliberately, conditioned to overeat. he's talking about Americans and the US food industry, but I think his comments are applicable widely, especially as the "American Diet" has made its way to many other countries. He discusses animal research which showed that sugar and fat, in combination, could override heredity. He also talks of how an executive of the food industry said they know and use the fact that combinations of  sugar, fat and salt make foods more pleasurable. They've spent large amounts on making prepared foods, especially quick foods more appealing to our senses.

The result, of course, has been expanding waistlines and increased average weight, significant contributors to a host of health problems. Kessler, in the latter part of his book, outlines a comprehensive approach to what he calls "Food Rehab." I think this is a book well worth reading and will give you a link to Dr. Kessler's website http://theendofovereating.com/

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I'm amazed I ate the whole thing and I'm still lean

December 13th, 2009

Last evening we had two couples over for dinner; they're all extremely  interesting people and have lived around the world. We planned an over-the-top menu: a piquant Georgian beef stew over rice with cardamom pods, microwaved asparagus spears, a tomato-basil-mozzarella salad, good bread, minimal appetizers (a variety of olives + pistachio nuts), several wines (bubbly to start with and an excellent merlot), and a Russian Apple Charlotte for dessert. The conversation flowed as freely as the wine; we used good china and crystal and our company came early, helped with the final dinner touches and stayed late.

Prior to the dinner, I weighed 151.4 pounds, six tenths under my goal weight. We ate cereal and fruit for breakfast, a yogurt and pear salad for lunch and worked hard at the gym. Today I weighed 151.8, still under my goal, while Lynnette actually lost a little.

The point of this post is although we're in the midst of the holiday seasons  (Thanksgiving through New Years) and I plan to enjoy myself and will undoubtedly eat more than usual, I'm still trying to be smart about it.  I wouldn't be doing this at all if I hadn't lost the twenty-five pounds over the last six months to reach we final goal. I wouldn't be able to do this without some "Won't Power," as I call it. I'm deliberately going into eating events from the low side of my weight goal, exercising hard and eating only one larger meal.

I've said things like this in previous posts, but want to emphasize the point; if you think you're too heavy, avoid holiday splurges, but if you're at target weight, eat and be merry...after planning ahead.

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More on Pollan's book: "In Defense of Food"

December 11th, 2009

I wrote a brief blurb on three excellent books in the diet/lifestyle arena recently, cogitated a bit and decided I needed to spend some more time on each of the triad. Let's start with Pollan's books. I really enjoyed The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006). There he discusses (and he and his family try) four American food chains: food from standard supermarkets, from large-chain supposedly organic stores, from farmers markets and, finally from his attempts to be  a hunter-gatherer. After my wife read the book, we started haunting the farmers markets, bought a bison and a lamb and bought three EarthBoxes.

Our diet changed, although it wasn’t ever “bad.” We cook at home  a lot, use fresh produce whenever possible, eat lots of vegetables and fruits and consume red meat sparingly. After reading Pollan’s latest book, 2008 paperback, In Defense of Food: An Eater 's Manifesto (IDOF),we've gone a lot further. For instance, early in IDOF he comments we should avoid foods that make health claims, because those “food products” aren’t really food.

Pollan’s advice on food products is exceedingly sound: he recommends we avoid those that contain ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number or contain high-fructose corn syrup. I’ve actually been doing this much of the time for years; I now do it much more frequently.

We live in an age where nutritionists and a huge food industry shape the shopping choices of most Americans. Yet our health statistics don’t reflect the claims made in favor of this or that food product or supplement. It’s time to get back to basics, eat food that isn’t shipped 6,000 miles, ignore the latest diet fads and widen our food choices, including trying plants we’ve ignored previously.

Read IDOF; it’s well worth your time.

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Three great books

December 8th, 2009

I've been reading a lot in the general field of dieting/lifestyle and, among twenty or so other books, came across three I'd highly recommend. I'll tell you about them in no particular order.

I had read and enjoyed "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Michael Pollan's  previous book in the field. Now I found his newer book, "In Defense of Food", published in 2008 by Penguin. Pollan has three simple rules for what we should eat to aim for health and they make a lot of sense. I'll let you find out how he words the rules, but basically he advocates staying away from processed foods, eating primarily fresh veggies (plus fruits and whole grains) and limiting your overall caloric intake. It's a wonderful read!

Next up is David Kessler, a former med school dean at UCSF and Yale and an ex-FDA commissioner. Dr. Kessler's 2009 book is titled, "The End of Overeating," and is published by Rodale.  This one is more scientific in its verbiage, but its main theme, I thought, was spot on. He believes the food industry has used a variety of combinations of sugar plus fat in their creations and in doing so has hooked us, nearly addicted some of us. They've also thrown in salt and lots of chemicals, but their approach to the complicated preparation of processed food seems to me to be a deliberate attempt to sell more "food," whatever the consequences to the customer. I've read that some of that is finally changing, but we just don't eat "fast food:"

The third author is Dr. Dean Ornish. We own several of his books, cook from them and actually contacted his Preventive Medicine Research Institute recently about one of our long-time favorites, fruited grain.  Dr. Ornish's 2008 book, "The Spectrum," published by Ballantine, is superb. It has a detailed discussion on Ornish's approach to lifestyle and diet, a DVD of guided meditations, and lots of recipes by Oprah's personal chef, Art Smith.

These three books provided, for me, a cross section of current thoughts in the diet/lifetsyle field. They're all different; they're all worth reading

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Before and after traveling

December 5th, 2009

We've been on the road (both literally and figuratively speaking). Actually the latter came first as we flew to the DC area where our nine-year-old grandson is appearing as Tiny Tim in Dickens' Christmas Carol at Ford's Theatre. We're really proud of Jordi; this is his third professional show in a year. We flew from Denver to Dulles airport and stayed with a good friend who lives near to there. We had dinner at her place the first evening, ate lunch with several old friends the next day, had two restaurant dinners with our kids and ate out with Jordi after his performance at the wonderful cafeteria at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian.

I left weighing 151.4 pounds, six tenths under my goal weight. I really stuck to my diet and exercise program in the days preceding the trip as I knew I would likely gain weight during it. We also walked an hour or more each day while we were in the DC area.

I was right about the weight gain; the day after we came home I was up five pounds, clearly above my trigger point of 155. Anytime I get there, three pounds above my goal weight, I go back on the diet for real and head straight to the gym. By the next day I had lost two pounds, but I'll stay on a stricter version of my diet and exercise program until I'm back to the 152 range (give or take a half pound).

Today we drove to Denver for a wonderful Genghis Khan exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. A friend joined us for the traveling exhibit (go see it if you live anywhere near Denver or it comes to your city later)  and my wife and I ate a late lunch in the city at a very nice Thai restaurant. I made that my larger meal of the day.

But let's put this in context. I'm down roughly twenty-five pounds from my June 2009 diet re-start and was under my final goal; most of what I gained on the trip was "water weight," really meaning salt and water weight and I'm back to exercising daily and eating two small meals and one larger one. When I travel for a longer time period, I don't eat anywhere near as much (that was true on two earlier trips this year).

What happened here was I was down to my goal weight, allowed myself latitude for a few days and had a great time with friends and family.  By next weekend I'll be back at goal. Don't let your diet, if you're on one, prevent you from enjoying life. Don't fool yourself either; it's really easy to fall of the diet/lifestyle cliff, gain a few pounds and think, "I can't get back on my program." You can too.

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The day after Thanksgiving

November 27th, 2009

I just responded to one comment, but several other people asked if I was going to write a blog entry on or after Thanksgiving. The last of our company (two adult cousins and their three kids ages 11 to 15) just rolled out heading to a college football game and leaving behind various leftovers. We ended up with fifteeen family members at dinner yesterday afternoon and everyone brought something. I weighed 1.4 pounds less than my "final" goal weight yesterday morning, ate quite heartily the rest of the day and didn't even think of weighing myself this morning.

Today I made turkey omelets with the kids for breakfast, shared one last piece of apple pie with my wife and now will resume our usual routine. We'll spend several hours at our health club this afternoon and go back on our diets. I don't mind at all that I eat as much as I did yesterday; it was a great family event with one cousin doing magic tricks for the five kids that were there at the time, lots of horseplay (I wrestled with a fifteen-year-old cousin; he had no idea that I had wrestled in high school and college ~fifty years ago), five different pies and a gum ball sheet cake for dessert. I won't use this as an excuse to stay off my diet or to change my lifestyle plan. Bet you I'll be back at goal weight by Monday.

Holidays and for family and fun; enjoy them.

Posted in Holiday/travel eating | 5 Comments »

What to eat before Thanksgiving (and other holidays)

November 24th, 2009

Like most of us I tend to chow down a bit at Thanksgiving (and other holidays), sometimes more than a bit. This year we're hosting and will have fifteen family members coming to our house for dinner. We'll eat a fairly traditional meal: turkey and stuffing, gravy, yams and cranberries, pumpkin pie. So the question is what to do in the week beforehand.

I've been to the gym daily (burning about 650 calories on a recumbent bike) and really stayed on my diet. This morning I was actually below my current goal weight, but we had planned to eat dinner at our favorite local Thai restaurant. So this evening I picked a dish that my wife often eats, garlic pepper chicken. It has more veggies than almost anything else on the menu and I had eaten lightly earlier in the day. We skipped dessert and came home where my spouse made one of her wonderful concoctions, in this case a mixture of non-fat vanilla yogurt with one T. of pumpkin puree, a packet of Splenda and some cinnamon and cloves.  We felt virtuous, but also decided that tomorrow will be a vegetarian day. We need to use up some cabbage and carrots, but I'm sure I can find a recipe in Mark Bittman's wonderful book, "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian."

Then I can approach the holiday with a clean conscience and a very healthy appetite.

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Our Veggies

November 19th, 2009

Last summer we got into container gardening. Our larger, raised-bed garden gets so overgrown with weeds, it's hard, with our schedules, to find enough time to grown anything except raspberries and a few herbs.  So we purchased three EarthBoxes, bought a trellis for one and filled all three with potting mix from Miracle-Gro and added a strip of fertilzer (ultra Vigoro's all Purpose Plant Food 12-5-7). They have a screen one inserts into the box to leave a reservoir for water at the bottom and a watering tube you fill through.

We grew field greens, tomatoes and peppers of many sorts (from green bell peppers to habenaros) . The latter were a surprise addition to what were termed Caribbean peppers, but were clearly habenaros. I faithfully watered the three boxes through their plastic watering tubes and waited.

It was a wonderful summer of fresh veggies, clearly free of any pesticides. Their taste reminded me of the Farmers market veggies or those I could buy when I was growing up in Wisconsin sixty+ years ago. We had an abundance of salad green, more tomatoes than we could cope with and lots of fresh peppers. As best I can tell the boxes are reusable, so we saved them for next season and will try another assortment of choices.  I'd strongly recommend the EarthBox idea if you have limited time and/or room to garden. We had a bigger raised bed garden in Texas twelve years ago, but then owned an acre and a third and, before we retired, seemed to have more time. Now, with a small yard on a hillside and, for some reason, less time to garden, we put our container gardens on a back patio and consider the experiment a roaring success.

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Organic or not?

November 17th, 2009

I've been debating this for some time. When we buy from one of our Farmers' Market vendors, I can be reasonably confident I'm getting food that most would term organic, but when we go to the local supermarket I have some choices that are and some that aren't. A good friend who is a little further along the pathway to healthy eating than we are told us we should avoid pesticide exposure by buying the organic variety of apples, berries (when possible), leafy greens and basically anything you consume all of. Melons and bananas have a thick enough skin so she thinks they don’t have to be organic.

I believe her, but sometimes it's tough to find organic berries here in Fort Collins and sometimes I think just by eating more fruits and vegetables and less processed food I've made enough of a change for now. Reading books written by a number of the healthy-living gurus, I note that several of them agree with me.

I mentioned in a previous blog what we've done about meat choices, but obviously I still need to cogitate on the organic fruit and veggie issue some more. Organic is presumably good, for instance, if it helps me avoid pesticide exposure, but I'm not always sure if things labeled that way really meet the criteria that I think of when I use the term. Is it worth the extra expense or not? What do you think?

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Yes, we do eat meat...some meat

November 9th, 2009

I've thought about this a lot as our diet has shifted over the past few years and especially over the past few months. I do believe we should eat more vegetables and fruits and less meat, at least less red meat. We both like fish and chicken, but a steak tempts me once in a while. So let me tell you what we have done in this regard. First, when I eat red meat, I eat much smaller portions. I used to love to order a 16 oz. steak, now I'm much more like to order an 8 oz. portion and actually rarely do so when we eat out.

What I did, roughly two years ago was to buy a buffalo, actually a bison, of course, but I tend to use the terms interchangeably. I put together a consortium of four families and bought 380 lbs. of boneless, skinless buffalo from the Lakota Sioux in South Dakota. Three of the four families loved the bison meat and want to order more. We've got a replacement for the one family that was less content. The meat is very lean as the animals are grass-fed and grass-finished. We've subsequently found a family in our immediate area that raises bison and does not corn finish the animals (there apparently is another group in our area that does corn finish theirs). Our 95 lbs. was about half steaks and other cuts, half chopped bison. The chopped is dry enough so we've usually made it as pasta sauce; it's great that way. The other cuts have been wonderful, although we had to put the one piece of ribs (it had small bones) into a slow cooker to get it tender.

Subsequently we bought a young sheep from the Hi Ho Sheep Farm after trying some chops. They're usually at one of our local farmers' markets and the meat is "organic.' We ended up with roughly seventy-five lbs. and split that with another family. The lamb has also been superb and we'll buy from them again.

Recently we found a Colorado firm that offers grass-fed, grass-finished Beefmaster beef and bought a small amount, about 18 lbs. as 1/2 of a family pack. I'm very concerned about eating hamburger from the supermarket. I've read several articles about one hamburger containing meat from multiple sites in a number of countries. This way I think we'll only get hamburger from one animal, certainly from one herd. I absolutely loved their meat and we'll buy more eventually, if I can put together a large enough group so the price of the meat is reasonable.

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