Food Selection & Dieting

[Gator Hazard]

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.

My wife and I love cheese too, brie, smoked Gouda, etc.  My favorite pizza to make at home is thin crust with light amount of mozzarella cheese and prosciutto with fresh basil leaves.  You get a lot of mileage out of a little prosciutto.  Can also sprinkle arugula on it as well instead of basil or do a little of both.

[nevets88]

I love pasta, bread, pastries, ice cream, rice, risotto, chocolate and especially cheese. I still eat them, I'm not going to give up anything for any diet, I'll have smaller portions, miss a meal here and there, add extra miles to the run/ride/swim, walk 27, whatever.

[Mr. Desmond]

I love pasta, bread, pastries, ice cream, rice, risotto, chocolate and especially cheese. I still eat them, I'm not going to give up anything for any diet, I'll have smaller portions, miss a meal here and there, add extra miles to the run/ride/swim, walk 27, whatever.

After gaining too much weight from the sources named below, I ran 5 miles, 5X per week for a couple of years, going from 197 to 170 lbs. For me, tension, bad marriage, unease at work, and poor eating habits were more highly effective at screwing with your veins than the benefits of running. And that's after 2 years of better eating, but not great. Take it from a guy who had 4 heart attacks - if I hadn't been in decent shape, I would have died ... on the golf course.

Choose your food wisely, keep running.

Edited October 27, 2015 by Mr. Desmond

[nevets88]

After gaining too much weight from the sources named below, I ran 5 miles, 5X per week for a couple of years, going from 197 to 170 lbs. For me, tension, bad marriage, unease at work, and poor eating habits were more highly effective at screwing with your veins than the benefits of running. And that's after 2 years of better eating, but not great. Take it from a guy who had 4 heart attacks - if I hadn't been in decent shape, I would have died ... on the golf course.

Choose your food wisely, keep running.

Duly noted. I used to eat a lot more of these "sin" foods, but I've since learned moderation, really moderate and variation and to savor good eats.

[Dave2512]

I see a lot of dieting fails because people talk to me about it due to my lifestyle, I eat clean most of the time. Biggest misconception is eating healthy means eating less. Also many I see that struggle have weird food hang-ups, somewhere probably going all the way back to what they were exposed to as kids has them thinking they only like certain foods. Usually the bad stuff.

Our office assistant has been with since Nov. 2010 and listening to her talk she been on a diet the entire time. She has a health coach, has been to WW, Curves, JC and attends various lifestyle classes at the local hospital and the entire time I've known her my guess is she hasn't dipped below 250 lbs. It's all because she makes bad choices and has no idea how many calories she actually takes in. Rather than educate herself she wants a quick drive-thru fix.

Just a few hours ago she grabbed a container from the fridge and showed me her "healthy" snack, some Mex inspired quinoa thing she found on the net. Looking at it I could see it was a 24 oz or so container full and it had avocado, beans, corn and a few other things in there, probably some oil so I figure a minimum of 600-700 calories. This just hours after eating a sizable bowl of oatmeal, something she mentioned as healthy, and about an hour before here lunch which will no doubt include food considering she mentioned the snack which is typically between meals. Until she learns how many calories she's eating she will never lose weight. Won't matter what she cuts from her day because all her choices are throwing darts.

[Gator Hazard]

I just had some broccoli and red bell pepper with a little bit of ranch dressing  about 45 minutes ago but the package of Smart Balance Deluxe Microwave Popcorn (that has to be any oxymoron, funny, says it supports healthy cholesterol levels) in my desk keeps calling to me.  I usually am not a microwave popcorn eater and typically make it with an air popper at home or stove top; I do have an old school popcorn cart and machine that you put the stuff in just like at the movies but that is for entertaining occasions.  

[boogielicious]

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.

 

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[Dave2512]

FWIW my daily stats bounce around quite a bit including how many diet sodas and other things that often get a bad rap. I am a frequent diet pop abuser, most days no less than 2 Coke Zero's and for sure the first thing I consume every day without fail is a Monster Rehab.

Yesterday it was 52.2g Fat - 29.6g Fiber - 192.6g Carbs - 62.5g Protein. Everything might be completely different today and the next day and no matter how many Coke Zero's I drink the scale will be in my favor every day until my calorie intake becomes more than I burn. For the next couple weeks it will be a fairly significant daily deficit, my HRM showed my calorie burn yesterday was nearly 5000 cal. I could toss a double whopper in there and still move the scale down.

[boogielicious]

Here is an interesting article.

http://www.clickhole.com/article/5-salads-more-calories-big-mac-3357