This morning on the “Happier” podcast Gretchen Rubin gave a truly shocking statistic:
“Research suggests that Americans consume an astonishing 30% of their daily calories in the evening, after 8:00 p.m., and as the day wears on, we tend to choose increasingly unhealthy options.” (from the show notes for the 10/23/19 episode)
There’s some controversy about whether or not this evening snacking causes actual weight gain in and of itself; in other words, are calories consumed in the evening more likely to be stored as fat than those consumed during the day? According to Healthline, which I’ve found to be a pretty good online resource: “You won’t gain weight by merely eating later if you eat within your daily calorie needs. Still, studies show that nighttime eaters typically make poorer food choices and eat more calories, which can lead to weight gain.” As Gretch and Liz say in the podcast, you aren’t going to be eating celery sticks or scrambled eggs at 10:00 PM; you’ll be eating junk/snack/convenience food. (Liz mentions Cheez-Its.) Of course, one way to keep yourself from eating junk food at 10:00 PM is to not have the junk food in the house.
But I digress. Doesn’t it just make sense that you’d want to eat when you’re actually going to be doing something other than sitting on the couch or going to bed? In the talk that I’ve given about eating real meals and especially eating breakfast, I include the fact that when you go to sleep all of your bodily processes slow down, including digestion. So, if you think about it, that nighttime bowl of ice cream is just going to . . . sit in your stomach all night. Right? Then, when you get up in the morning, the last thing you’ll want to do is to eat breakfast. This is only about the twentieth time I’ve said this: If you’re one of those people who says, “I don’t eat breakfast; I don’t like breakfast; the thought of food in the morning makes me sick” then you are almost certainly one of those people who eats in the evening. Stop doing that and I can guarantee that you’ll want breakfast!
Gretchen suggests, once again (and I’ve mentioned this tip before also), that you floss and brush your teeth right after dinner, thus signaling to yourself that all eating is over for the day. She mentions this idea to Liz, who says, “Huh. I’ll have to try that.” I think it’s come up before, Liz! Weren’t you listening to your own podcast?
On to the second item in the title: unintentional weight loss. Over the past few weeks I’ve been kind of neglectful about grocery shopping and cooking for myself and my family, for various reasons mostly having to do with taking trips or, ironically enough, preparing for big food-related events. When I’m embroiled in baking dozens of cookies or a big meal for others, I tend not to eat much. Because of how October has gone (a trip to the hot-air balloon fiesta the first weekend, our Chorale concert the next, and then the women’s retreat this last one), I’ve tended to think, ‘Oh, I don’t want to buy much in the way of regular food, since we’ll be gone/the fridge will be crammed with supplies for these events.’ And I lost several pounds in this process. Nothing dramatic: maybe 3-4 pounds. Enough to make my jeans a little looser, which is always nice. And I thought, ‘Hey, I’ve reached a new setpoint.’ Please understand here: I’m not touting weight loss as always being a good thing, and the morning I weighted in at 114 I got a little concerned. But as I thought back over October I realized that I’d been going around hungry much of the time. I needed to get back into eating regular, nutritious meals. But I could lower the upper limit just a bit. My big thing about weight control is the above-mentioned ban on evening eating and front-loading the day with a solid breakfast and lunch and a light dinner. If I stick to those principles I should be able to maintain my weight at the new level of 117 or below. And remember—it’s not just the numbers on the scale that are important for me. Keeping my weight at a certain level means that I can’t eat much in the way of sweets, which is all in the service of controlling my blood sugar. I have written on the calendar that Nov. 1 is the next day for me to take an A1C test. I have a home test on hand. The last time I was tested through the doctor’s office I clocked in at 6.2, which is under the diabetes threshold but well within pre-diabetes. I’m hoping to be below 6.0 when I take the test again.
I have a couple of weekends without big food events, and then it’ll be on to the Cherry Creek Chorale’s retreat for which I’ll make breakfast. Do be sure to make plans to come to our Christmas concert! We will be performing the nights of Dec. 13 and 14, and tickets are already up for sale on our website. We are also going to be performing with the Lone Tree Symphony the previous weekend. So much fun! And so much food. It’ll be great.
Just in case you need a good cookie recipe for the holidays, let me direct you (as I do so often) to Sally’s Baking Addiction and her fabulous “Maple-Cinnamon Star Cookies.” I actually used the gold glitter and the white-chocolate glaze, but I used my fall cookie cutters instead of star-shaped ones. Let me just camp a bit on these cookie cutters,* as they are so cute and so well designed. (Of course, I have no pictures to show you of my version, but I’ll try to do better when I make something similar for Christmas.) If you’re a cookie baker, you know that cutting out cookies can be a totally frustrating experience. The dough sticks to the counter unless you flour it heavily, and then the cookies get tough. Okay, that’s a solvable problem. You roll out the dough between two sheets of parchment paper and stash the dough in the freezer until firm. Then you peel off the top sheet of parchment, put it back, flip the whole thingy over, peel off the parchment from that side, and now you have a non-stick, non-goopy dough situation and can cut out your cookies easily. (You can watch an episode of America’s Test Kitchen called “The Perfect Cookie” that shows you how to do this roll-out technique; start watching at about 23:30 for the relevant part.) Except that the dough sometimes doesn’t want to come out of the cutters. I can’t remember my exact thinking process, but I got to thinking last year that maybe there was such a thing as cookie cutters with some type of plunger that would push the finished cookie out of the cutter. And there they were! And they even make little designs on the top of the cookie if you want to do that. So you push the cutter down on the dough, then press the little plunger to stamp it, then left the cutter up, taking the cut-out cookie it, then push the plunger when you’re where you want the cookie to be on the baking sheet and it pops right out. Now, instead of refusing to make cookies that demand cutters, I’m all in! I have some adorable snowflake ones* for Christmas.
Well, better quit. Do you have a strategy for holding the line on weight loss you’ve achieved?
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