Food Selection & Dieting

[saevel25]

I was listening to The Nerdist. Which happens to be one of my favorite things to listen to right now. Cooking has always been a side hobby of mine. Alton Brown ran my favorite cooking show off the Food Network. The Nerdist interviewed Alton Brown back in 2012. Alton was talking about a new show he was going to do for the Food Network. One of the show's theme was on why diets fail. Then he got talking on how he lost 50lbs. He had a very good insight that most people might not think about. Basically there was two things Alton gave up eating. 

1. Diet Pop. Which he described as more insidious than regular pop.

2. Milk. Which I thought, Ok he gave up milk. Some people don't handle dairy well. Milk isn't really overly healthy. Humans really can't digest it well because it comes from cows. The reason why he gave it up is because he would eat other foods with milk, like cookies. So, he found out of he gave up milk then he wouldn't have a reason to eat other bad foods. It was an interesting premise that certain foods, which maybe OK to eat, cause you to want to pair them with other foods that are not good to eat. I don't think many people really think of it that way. 

Another interesting point Alton made was that if you want to keep weight off and change your eating habits then put on muscle mass. He said once he put on muscle mass he started to crave other healthier foods more than foods that are bad for you. He found that changing his body composition made his body want to crave other foods. He found that he started to crave nuts more after gaining muscle. Nuts are generally good for you in moderation. Just another interesting tidbit of information. 



 

[Gunther]

Interesting although his 3 concepts don't work for me.  I haven't drunk soda of any kind in 30 years and I've been off milk for 10, still I'm susceptible to gaining fat.  The muscle mass thing too.  Seems the more muscle I put on, the more fat I pile on top.  No idea why, may be genetic or that I eat more when I'm lifting.  I've tried heavy, light, low reps, high reps, no avail.  I tell people I'm a very strong fat man.

Currently on day 8 of a juice cleanse (so it's top of mind and why I came into this thread).  Bought a Ninja which chops the whole veg, opposed to discarding the fiber.  Down 5 lbs but looking for 20 more.  Initial goal was 21 days, we'll see if I can maintain or even extend.  Working out 4 days a weeks, 2 days lift, 2 days run.

Couple things I've learned:  1.  Everyone is different so there is no magic bullet; however, 2.  we all need more plants in our diet, 50% or more of our calories should come from plants.  I'm hoping to continue eating healthy after the cleanse.

[saevel25]

Interesting although his 3 concepts don't work for me.  I haven't drunk soda of any kind in 30 years and I've been off milk for 10, still I'm susceptible to gaining fat.  

It's not the end all to be all when it comes to dieting. 

Couple things I've learned:  1.  Everyone is different so there is no magic bullet; however, 2.  we all need more plants in our diet, 50% or more of our calories should come from plants.  I'm hoping to continue eating healthy after the cleanse.

For those who do not juice that would be very hard to do. Lets say you eat 2500 calories a day. So 1750 would come from veggies. That means you would need to eat 11.4 lbs of broccoli a day. Veggies are just not calorie dense. It would be very hard to do 50%. 

I am not a big fan of cleanses. I think a person should make life style changes in how they eat. That means identifying triggers that cause overeating, and what cravings you have.

 

[Golfingdad]

One of the show's theme was on why diets fail.

I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but my opinion has always been that it's because by their very nature, "diets" have always been something that people view as temporary.  They need to lose weight for whatever reason they deem necessary and try to follow whichever plan they feel will get them there the fastest.  And it's usually something that is less than ideal, from a taste or satisfaction standpoint, so once they reach their goal - if they're even able to make it that far - they stop following the diet.  Before long, they're right back where they started.

Then he got talking on how he lost 50lbs. He had a very good insight that most people might not think about. Basically there was two things Alton gave up eating. 

1. Diet Pop. Which he described as more insidious than regular pop.

2. Milk. Which I thought, Ok he gave up milk. Some people don't handle dairy well. Milk isn't really overly healthy. Humans really can't digest it well because it comes from cows. The reason why he gave it up is because he would eat other foods with milk, like cookies. So, he found out of he gave up milk then he wouldn't have a reason to eat other bad foods. It was an interesting premise that certain foods, which maybe OK to eat, cause you to want to pair them with other foods that are not good to eat. I don't think many people really think of it that way. 

The beginning of my weight loss started with giving up diet soda as well.  Well, sort of.  I didn't give it up completely, but rather just cut back from about 4 or 5 a day to one every day, or even only every two days.  Otherwise, pretty much all I've done is eat less and exercise more.

[Gator Hazard]

It's not the end all to be all when it comes to dieting. 

For those who do not juice that would be very hard to do. Lets say you eat 2500 calories a day. So 1750 would come from veggies. That means you would need to eat 11.4 lbs of broccoli a day. Veggies are just not calorie dense. It would be very hard to do 50%. 

I am not a big fan of cleanses. I think a person should make life style changes in how they eat. That means identifying triggers that cause overeating, and what cravings you have.

 

I don't know if 50% is the right number but you could easily get 1,250 calories a day from plant and plant based proteins if you were to add things that are higher in calorie density such as legumes (beans) peas, avocado, nuts, potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc.  LOL 11 pounds of broccoli, I would not want to share a bedroom with someone who ate that every day!

[nevets88]

I subscribe to simple solutions. Eat a little of everything. Eat real food. Learn how to cook. The better a cook you are, the more you cook, the more you control how much salt, sugar and fat goes into your food. 

Know that food marketers pull all sorts of manipulations to get you buy more. They are sneaky bastards. The more highly profitable foods and thus more processed is at eye level on the shelves and in the center of the grocery store. The unprocessed real food is along the perimeter.

The corporate environment is terrrrrible for maintaining a healthy diet. The amount of food, the spreads, free food, the portions, the vending machines. The culture that eating a lot isn't a bad thing. All the cookies, muffins, doughnuts and not enough fresh fruit.

I like seltzer, Perrier, sparkling mineral water, whatever you want to call it, to sate my carbonated drink compunction. Luckily, soda has never appealed to me, even when in school, I could have had all the soda I wanted from the soda fountain, but I usually opted for water.

Any kind of artificial butter, sugar, laced with stuff I need to take an organic chem class to read, I am usually wary of  Just have the real thing, but in moderation.

[Mr. Desmond]

I was reading a NY Times Article over the weekend about diets, and the no-fat craze.

Some fats are good, saturated fats are not. Even with "good" fats, have them in moderation.

We need to worry about the glycemic index and loads -- the non-fat, non meat people kill themselves with high glycemic foods, high carbs - which makes sugar, and causes a lot of our type 2 diabetes.

Go with more greens - naturally - low on the glycemic meter. Beans are good, too, as well as nuts in moderation - typically I find most touting almonds and Brazilian Nuts (for guys -- prostate). Need to find that article.

Our bodies make enough cholesterol so when you go protein, go healthy cholesterol.

Also, we tend to have the rewards factor when choosing foods -- we get a couple of items that are good for us and then counter it with choices that are bad for us -- a net no win.

When you go beef, go grass fed.

When you go chicken, go organic, free range.

Less meat, more veggies, less bread and pasta (especially white flour), and avoid white rice.

That is all ... for now.

[saevel25]

Some fats are good, saturated fats are not.

Myth. I am not saying eat 100% saturated fats as the distribution of your fat intake. All the studies in the past on Saturated Fats were done at a time when no one knew about how modern food messes up with your body. 

More and more studies are showing saturated fats are not bad for you like previously claimed. 

The rest of your stuff I pretty much agree on. 

[mailman]

This is something close to my heart.

the 31st of December 2013 I weighed in at around 130kg (nearly 300lbs) and was eating my self to death. Quite literally over night I decided to make a change so on the 1st of January 2014 pretty much EVERYTHING unhealthy in our house went out in to the rubbish!

Out went the sugary treats, bread, potatoes (carbs), processed foods and in came whole foods, cooked meals, fruits, nuts, FULL FAT foods! I will not touch low fat foods with a barge pole! Quite literally from the 1st of January 2014 for the next 12 months I did not eat one single chocolate, sweet, lolly, sugary treat at all! While I got rid of the "bad" foods, what I did not do was replace it with low fat foods! I treated food as my friend, not my enemy so in came butter, blue top milk, meat with fat etc!

By the end of January 2014 I had dropped 6kg and by the end of 2015 I weighed in at 90kg, dropping under 200lbs for the first time in about 30 years! The other thing I changed in 2014 was to increase my exercise activities, which I actually found really easy because I based everything around my regular 15km walk every saturday thanks to golf :)

I took up running, encouraged by my lovely wife and the first 5km (3miles) we did took me 52 minutes to complete and god damn nearly killed me! My fastest 5km time is now under 26 minutes and my aim is to eventually get below 22 minutes, thus taking 30 minutes off my very first run time! :) Im now doing half marathons and 10mile races FOR FUN!!!

The photo below is my 3 years ago and me back in July in Germany (working for the NZ Government:). While Ive dropped weight Ive also gone about putting muscle on as well. 

Regards

Mailman

 

Edited October 26, 2015 by mailman

[mvmac]

2. Milk. Which I thought, Ok he gave up milk. Some people don't handle dairy well. Milk isn't really overly healthy. Humans really can't digest it well because it comes from cows. The reason why he gave it up is because he would eat other foods with milk, like cookies. 

It's also calorically dense.

I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but my opinion has always been that it's because by their very nature, "diets" have always been something that people view as temporary.  

Yeah it has to become a lifestyle change. Also when they diet they go on a restrictive diet, something that can't last very long.

[boogielicious]

@saevel25

I am a big fan of Alton Brown's. But keep in mind, he put on a great deal of weight doing those road shows, which were awesome! 

[Mr. Desmond]

This is from the NYTimes ... they have non-restricted access to the first 20 articles per month you read.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/the-fats-you-dont-need-to-fear-and-the-carbs-that-you-do/?src=me

 

....Although health advice focused on saturated fats from high-fat animal foods, many people generalized the advice to mean all fats, choosing in their stead a panoply of reduced-fat and fat-free foods rich in carbohydrates, from crackers to sweetened yogurts. They especially increased their consumption of two kinds of carbohydrates, refined starches and sugars, that have helped to spawn the current epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

Experts now realize that efforts to correct past dietary sins that made heart disease and stroke runaway killers have caused the pendulum to swing too far in the wrong direction.

“The mistake made in earlier dietary guidelines was an emphasis on low-fat without emphasizing the quality of carbohydrates, creating the impression that all fats are bad and all carbs are good,” Dr. Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology, said. “It’s really important to distinguish between healthy fats and bad fats, healthy carbs and bad carbs.”

He explained that saturated fat, found in fatty animal foods like meats and dairy products, raises blood levels of cholesterol and is not healthy, “but olive oil is important — it’s beneficial for cardiovascular health and body weight.” Olive oil, like canola, avocado and nut oils, is monounsaturated, and while it has as many calories as meat and dairy fat, it does not raise serum cholesterol or foster fat-clogging deposits in blood vessels.

“We have to get out of the fat phobia mind-set,” Dr. Hu stressed, adding that we also have to abandon the idea that all complex carbohydrates are good.

Sugars are simple carbohydrates and starches are complex carbohydrates; all are ultimately broken down into glucose, the body fuel that circulates in blood. Sugars are digested rapidly, quickly raising blood glucose, but most starches take longer to digest.

Important exceptions are refined carbohydrates, like white bread and white rice. Starchy foods with highly processed grains that have been stripped of dietary fiber act more like sugar in the body. They are rapidly digested and absorbed, raising blood levels of glucose and prompting the secretion of insulin to process it. When consumed in excess of the body’s need for immediate and stored energy, refined carbs and sugars can result in insulin resistance and contribute to fatty liver disease.

Alas, potatoes, the nation’s most popular vegetable, act like sugars and refined carbohydrates. They have what is called a high glycemic index, the ability to raise blood glucose rapidly. Potatoes, Dr. Hu explained, are made of long chains of glucose easily digested by enzymes in the mouth and stomach, and the fat in French fries slows the process only slightly.

The concept of a glycemic index, proposed in 1981 by David Jenkins and his colleagues in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, has since been validated repeatedly and is now accepted as a good way to distinguish between the kinds of carbohydrates that are health-promoting or at least neutral and those that have negative health effects.

In 2002, Dr. David S. Ludwig, a pediatrician, endocrinologist and nutrition researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital and professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, published a comprehensive review of how glycemic index influences human physiology, clearly demonstrating its importance to preventing and treating obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Had Americans and their physicians heeded it then, we might have been largely spared the fix we’re now in.

The index was developed by testing the glucose response to a standard amount of carbohydrate against a reference food, either pure glucose (index number 100) or white bread (71). High-glycemic foods like baked Russet potatoes (111), white baguette (95), cornflakes (93), white rice (89), pretzels (83), instant oatmeal (83), rice cakes (82), Gatorade (78) and French fries (75) induce higher blood glucose levels than ordinary white bread and are best consumed infrequently and in small quantities.

At the other end of the glycemic spectrum, oatmeal (55), pasta (46 for spaghetti, 32 for fettuccine), apples (39), carrots (35), skim milk (32), black beans (30), lentils (29), prunes (29), barley (28), chickpeas (10), grapefruit (25), peanuts (7) and hummus (6) have a smaller effect on blood glucose, and green vegetables like broccoli have too little an effect to be measured.

Closely related to the glycemic index is the glycemic load. While the glycemic index measures how quickly a particular food raises blood sugar, the glycemic load takes portion sizes into account. Hence a food like watermelon, with a high glycemic index, has a low glycemic load, since much of the fruit is water.

High-glycemic foods are a particular problem for people trying to control their weight. The amount of insulin released to lower blood glucose can overshoot the mark and result in a rapid return of hunger. A low-glycemic food, on the other hand, has no such effect. And those that are rich in wholesome fats, like peanuts or avocado, can actually delay the return of hunger, though the calories can add up quickly if consumed to excess.*

*there is more.

[mcanadiens]

I had a fish and rice dish for dinner last night. And no beer. That's pretty good for me.

Doing the same or better tonight is now the question.

[Mr. Desmond]

I had a fish and rice dish for dinner last night. And no beer. That's pretty good for me.

Doing the same or better tonight is now the question.

Try brown rice... lol but seriously.

[mcanadiens]

Try brown rice... lol but seriously.

I know, but common. Baby steps. Gotta give me credit for the no beer part.

[Mr. Desmond]

I know, but common. Baby steps. Gotta give me credit for the no beer part.

Credit given - congrats. Typically, we take a wise choice and counter it with something that gratifies us more - negating the healthy effect -- you did the right thing for you.

[Gator Hazard]

In general we try and eat healthier, where I used to make 4 chicken breasts and rice and a vegetable I now make more of a Mediterranean Monday with either steak or chicken kabobs that include onion and red, orange, or yellow bell peppers and mushrooms.  Hummus with some paprika and good olive oil and naan bread (it is not whole wheat but we eat very little of it between the four of us and is a lot better than pita taste wise).  So we fill up a lot more of vegetables and hummus than on rice and what not.  My daughter loves her tacos so Tuesday is homemade taco Tuesday but the wife and I make taco salad bowls consisting mainly of lettuce, organic grass fed ground beef, cheese, plain Greek yogurt (excellent sour cream substitute, you don't really tell the difference) and hot sauce with some organic blue corn tortilla chips crushed on top.  Wednesday is "wild card" so can be anything from home made beef Pho soup (with very little beef used) to pork chops with steamed broccoli.  Thursday is usually a whatever we are in the mood for dinner and Friday is typically our cheat dinner and we go out and eat, whether that is pizza or chicken wings at a chicken wing spot or whatever.  Weekend meals can be more involved as I have more time to prepare and cook.

Breakfast is simple, my daughter drinks lactose free 2% milk and has some type of a protein bar and my wife and I drink breakfast chocolate shakes.  Our son gets breakfast at daycare so not sure what she feeds him but I know it is healthy as they are regulated.  Lunches I try and eat vegetarian with either a Caesar salad or something along those lines.  I also like a Mediterranean type salad with hummus, avocado, cucumber, tomato, toasted sesame seeds, blue or Gorgonzola cheese and a little bit of a vinaigrette salad dressing.  Once a week I may go to the Vietnamese restaurant and pick up some beef pho or something but I try to not eat meat for lunch to help cut back on my meat intake and my wife does the same.  Almonds and sunflower seeds are my nuts of choice for snacking on and I am trying to get back into eating my raw carrots, celery, and broccoli as a second snack.  

Popcorn is my Achilles heel.  I can and sometimes do it it air popped and plain, but typically I like it cooked in oil, topped with a mixture of topping oil with real butter melted in it and salt, sometimes topped with the cheddar cheese stuff.  I hate popcorn because I love it so much but I try and only snack on it about twice a week now instead of every other night.

For me, portion control is a problem and the way I eat.  I am sure plenty can relate, busy lifestyle with work and all that and have to get things done so I have a tendency to eat fast and as a result I can fall prey to overeating.  I am working on that part too as I need to shed a few pounds myself and we have started going back to the gym.  The best thing I have observed so far at the gym:  hardly anyone in the lap pool, which is one of my favorite things to do for overall body work out and cardio.

Edited October 27, 2015 by Gator Hazard

[Mr. Desmond]

The worst part for me is giving up most cheese -- which is lots of fat and sodium, and then there is the sour dough baguette - it hurts less because people in TX do not make a really sour sourdough, so it is not missed.

I'm the guy who orders a thin crust wheat pizza very very light on the cheese with loads of veggies. When I take it home, I pour spinach leaves over it, put it in the oven for 3 minutes,  hit it with red pepper, and there you go.