I haven’t written much while we’ve been on our trip, although I hope you got the recipe in the previous post for the white chocolate-cream cheese frosting, a true winner. At some point I’ll do a calculation of the sugar content of it and the buttercream, but that’s a subject for another day. In this post I want to give some random ideas on vacation eating, a topic I’ve discussed rather thoroughly before. But hey! There’s always room for more info about eating mindfully and well.
I thought that I had covered the major fad diets out there but realized that there are a few more to aim at. Before I plunge into more of these scams, I figured it would be a good idea to write more generally about how to make informed decisions about your health or anything else. Ridiculous new ideas are coming down the pike every day. Here are some guidelines you can use:
I wrote last week about some of the complications that can arise from following a vegan diet, and I want to follow up with more, perhaps rather scattered, observations about this lifestyle. I’ll be including links to two articles written by young women who struggled while trying to follow veganism. One decided to start including some animal protein into her life and saw some dramatic improvements in her health; the other steadfastly refused to do that but was able to re-jigger things so that she was getting enough protein (understandable) and, you may be surprised to hear, cholesterol. Yes, that horrible substance that causes heart attacks. Too-low cholesterol levels are
So far I’ve discussed the keto, paleo, Whole30, food sensitivity, and Tom Brady diets, and there are many more out there. I’m going next to veganism as a lifestyle. As I’ve said before, there are two principles to keep in mind in looking at these various eating plans:
1) People are free to choose how they eat, and
2) Personal convictions/conscience should not be violated.
I have a dear friend who said that she always looked at her birthday as the start of her own personal New Year. I feel the same way. Sunday was my 67th, and I had promised myself that I’d take an A1C test then, which I did yesterday. After a glitch with the first test, I got a result with the second. (Don’t worry—I’m going to get my money back.) It was (ta-da-da-da-a-a-a-h!) 5.3. If the test is correct, then I’ve managed to get down to well below the new, lowered threshold for pre-diabetes of 5.7. (There’s some controversy over whether or not this stricter definition is warranted, as people are being put on
I mentioned in a previous post that I was facing foot surgery, which took place on March 11. So it’s been about 2 ½ weeks since then, and I didn’t feel that I could stand on the scale without my surgical boot or shoe until the 2-week mark. Guess what? I was four pounds up. FOUR POUNDS.
Why did this happen? Well, my activity levels had gone way, way down. I went nowhere at all for about the first week except for my doctor’s appointment, and I spent a lot of time lying on the couch with my foot up on pillows. I
Now you know what I’m going to say:
If it’s a fad, forget it.
And if there were ever a fad diet, Whole30 is it. It has become especially popular among young(er) people, with Facebook groups and the whole nine yards. Meanwhile, actual nutritionists and dieticians, people who study science, are clutching their heads and moaning.
I could just re-write the posts I wrote on the food-sensitivity tests for my material on this eating plan, but I won’t, because there are some additional fats in the fire (ha!) here. First, let me tell you a story:
So, this woman I know said that she had been in a town where she had lots of old friends, and a group of them decided to go out to dinner.
What’s the bad advice? I’ll quote two statements (actually imperatives) from the back of the bag: “Snack Often with Our Guilt-Free Ancient Grain Chips!” and “great for all day snacking.” What’s the good source? This locally-owned company, Soloman Baking Co., that produces a range of pita bread and pita chips. My mother-in-law had bought a bag of their chips on sale and boy, were they good! I liked them so much that I bought a dozen bags online. (Small bags.) But here’s the thing: they’re very tempting just to eat on their own, and their overwhelming encouragement on the bag is to eat the chips as snacks. I’ve eaten two of the bags, I think, and while I’ve tried to eat them as an adjunct to a meal probably most of them were eaten between meals–the dreaded s-n-a-a-a-a-a-a-c-k-s. I plan to use the rest of the crackers as part of a concert reception and use them up that way. They’re just too tempting! (I normally buy chips and crackers to use for parties
In the previous post I discussed what the popular “food sensitivity” tests are actually testing, which is exposure and not actual food reactions. This one fact explains why the lists of forbidden foods that people get are so similar: a conventional American diet is going to have lots of gluten, dairy, and corn, with probably a lesser amount of soy. Getting rid of these four items will mean, for most people, a huge shift in their eating, often coming with the possibility of the loss of important nutrients. But the
The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts that Make Us Overeat by Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D., originally published in 2017, now available in several formats. I accessed the book via Audible.com.
This is a book that mixes immensely practical, down-to-earth information and advice about our current diet and health issues with somewhat-technical information about the actual biology of the brain. I found some of the biological sections to be rather frustrating, as Guyenet seems to subscribe to the idea that all of our thoughts, desires, motivations, decisions and choices can be boiled down to biochemical reactions at the cellular level. So in an early chapter he goes into an explanation about how our “lizard” brain (or, in this book, our “lamprey” brain) functions, with “feedback loops” putting in “bids.” Guyenet is careful to say that whole process is how scientists understand this all might work, as there’s no way