2 Rich 2 Thin

If It’s Not Delicious, Spit It Out

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Consider this essay as “Garbage Disposal Behavior, Part Deux.”  In that essay, I cautioned against eating those last few leftovers rather than throwing them away or putting them away.  Now I want to shift the question– rather than “Should I take this last bite?” I want you to ask yourself, “Should I take this first bite?”

If you are a fully grown adult in reasonably good health, and you are not currently training for a marathon or attempting to build muscle mass for another athletic endeavor, your nutritional needs are pretty limited, especially when it comes to protein.  Once you have covered some minimal metabolic levels of essential amino acids and electrolytes, your body is just looking for energy, and for that it wants carbohydrates and fats.  Consider that people are sometimes kept alive for years on intravenous feeding, and the typical “recipe” for that diet is a portion of amino acids, an equal or larger portion of fats, and a triple portion (or more) of sugar.  (If you’re interested in this topic, search for “parenteral nutrition,” but if you don’t have a science background, your eyes are going to glaze over pretty fast.)

Does this mean I’m advocating a diet of 100% ice cream sundaes?  Of course not.  If you even think you could eat nothing but ice cream, try it.  I’m betting you don’t make it 48 hours before you’re craving a salad like you never have before.  Your body, and even your taste buds, are smarter than you think.  But beyond our basic metabolic needs, there isn’t really inherently good food and bad food.  There’s just food.  So maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with that food.

Eating As a Sensual Pleasure

Many health professionals would like to get us to think about eating only to fuel our bodies, but they’re going to have about as much success as trying to get people to think about having sex only to make babies.  The truth is that we eat for pleasure.  Unfortunately, a lot of us are doing both, eating what we think we should eat AND eating what we want to eat.  You just don’t have the calories to spare for both.  Eating a spinach salad does not cancel out the Snickers bar, it just adds on (and if you had the hard-cooked eggs and bacon dressing on the salad, you were better off with the Snickers bar).  Are you eating soggy cereal because you’ve bought that whole “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” malarkey?  If it’s so important, why aren’t you eating something you’d enjoy?

Before the first bite goes in your mouth, ask yourself why you are eating it.  If the answer is something like, “I’m supposed to,” “It’s good for me,” or “It’s lunch time,” just stop.  (The exception here is water, water, water.  Nothing in your body runs properly without enough water.  Even if you don’t want it, drink it.)  If the answer is “I want it,” take a bite.  If it isn’t as good as you thought it would be, stop.  If it’s fabulous, take another bite.  Continue taking bites as long as you can truly say “This is fabulous” while it’s in your mouth.  When you can’t any longer, you’ve probably had enough.  Stop.  And don’t be afraid to spit something out into your napkin, even in public.  I do it all the time with candy from unmarked boxes.  Why would I go ahead and swallow 90-100 calories’ worth of rum-flavored soft center when I hate it?

You’ll find your portions, especially of very fatty foods, are going to get smaller and smaller.  Deep fried goodies are truly only wonderful within a few minutes of coming out of the fat, and they only stay that way while they are piping hot.  If the first french fry is great, eat it.  If the fifth one is cold and soggy, why would you eat it?  You’ll also find that you stop eating fried things that other people have gone out and picked up; the chance of it still being delicious by the time it gets to you is almost nil.  Fat, especially saturated fat, is “juicy” when it’s hot and fresh but turns “greasy” very quickly.  The same thing will be true of sweet desserts.  If the first bite is Heaven, great, but a little may go a long way.  If bite #4 is less than the bliss you got on the first bite, let it be your last one.

Rethink Yummy

You’ll also find that the more time you spend thinking about each bite, the more slowly you’ll eat, and the more time your brain will have to tell your stomach you’ve had enough.  Are you going to waste a lot of food?  Yep, especially until you learn to order based on what you want rather than on what you have customarily been served.  But consider it an object lesson.  Maybe you need the visual of throwing away plates of food to realize how much you’ve been eating that you neither wanted nor enjoyed.

If you honestly consult your taste buds for the “fabulous” entries and you can only think about desserts, it’s time for some research.  Try sushi, hit a tapas restaurant or someplace that will let you put together a plate of appetizer portions and see if there aren’t some little protein gems that you find fabulous.  Try interesting canapé recipes.   Experiment with new fruits and vegetables, and try a variety of salad dressings until you find one (or more) that makes you love every bite of that salad.  (My current favorites are Newman’s Own Light Lime Vinaigrette and Annie’s Naturals Gingerly Vinaigrette; they also make awesome marinades for chicken and pork, respectively.)  I happen to like cottage cheese, but when I treat it like dip and eat it with a flavor-packed cracker (my current favorite is Triscuit Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil), I love it.

If you are truly concerned that you are missing nutrients, take a multi-vitamin (it wouldn’t hurt even if you aren’t concerned).  If you have any diet-related health concerns, especially diabetic or glycemic problems, of course you have to eat within your doctor’s recommendations.  Your doctor will tell you what you can’t have, but be sure to ask what you can have, and you may find a way to work your favorite flavors into the medically-approved plan.  Make some new food relationships, and you may just find love after all.

Michael Pollan Plays With His “Food”

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In Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (Penguin Press, paperback edition January 2010, illustrated edition November 2011), Michael Pollan hopes to supply you with a back-to-basics food guide that you can read in 20 minutes, pore over and consider for hours, and then carry with you to restaurants and grocery stores to inform your every food-purchasing decision.  Kind of like Mao’s “Little Red Book,” only for food instead of Communism.  Sadly, he then put out a hardcover edition (illustrated by Maira Kalman) that costs twice as much and isn’t nearly so portable.

A lot of the rules will make you laugh, and hopefully think.  I love “Eat only food that will eventually rot.”  I have noticed that many bread products seem to have suspiciously long shelf lives.  When you have a nice fresh baked baguette that starts growing mold about Day 3 and a loaf of generic wheat sandwich bread that is four days older and looks perfect, be very afraid.

Other rules seem sensible until another rule contradicts it.  “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” is pretty clear, but then you get “Eat like the Japanese.”  I promise, my great-grandmother would have taken one look at tofu and used it as furniture polish.  (And “Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not.”  Tofurkey, anyone?)   Also, “Treat meat as a flavoring or special occasion food.”  If you sat my great-grandmother down to a table full of platters of grains and vegetables, she’d ask if the roast was still in the oven.

Rules Meant to be Broken

Then there are rules that simply make me question Mr. Pollan’s personal experience.  “Avoid foods that contain more than five ingredients.”  Really?  You don’t make a lot of soup, do you?  Darned few of my favorite recipes contain fewer than five ingredients.  As long as those ingredients are in themselves “food” by Mr. Pollan’s definition, I can’t see that taking them together as a group should be a problem.  Oh, and “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.”  I have an awesome whole foods restaurant near my house, and they have curbside takeaway.  I get it, he doesn’t like fast food, and neither do I, but a few of the rules seem to be more generalized than what I’m sure he’d like to say, which is “Don’t eat at McDonald’s.”

One of the most shocking rules to me is “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.”  Happily, I know how to cook and I enjoy it, so this would give me carte blanche to weigh 300 pounds in no time.  I don’t deep fry stuff very often, not because it’s a big deal, but because I know it’s bad for me (and I hate to waste that much oil, because I will NOT store and reuse it). This rule will certainly achieve Mr. Pollan’s goal of weaning you off processed food, because once you’ve tasted home-made potato chips, you will never want to open a bag again.  Unfortunately, a lot of food that is really, really bad for you is really, really easy to cook.  I am completely behind rule #63, though, which is “Cook.”  We are getting fat on stuff we’d never put in our mouths if it wasn’t handed to us in disguise.

The one that really bugged me was clearly there to be clever.  At least I hope so.  “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”  Can’t it be both?  A lot of canned and frozen vegetables are processed in plants, but they often retain more vitamins than fresh vegetables because they were left on the vine or tree longer and then harvested just before cooking or freezing (often within 24 hours– that head of spinach in your grocery store was on a truck longer than that).  And I am not going to buy cacao beans and render my own chocolate.  And if Mr. Pollan expects me to give up chocolate, we are going to have a problem.

Good Theory, Hard to Practice

But I’m with him on many things, like “Pay more, eat less” which has something in common with my “Eat like a Millionaire”plan.  Pollan believes, as do most foodies, that American food businesses have been so busy trying to make food cheaper that they have sacrificed both taste and nutritive value.  I’m lucky enough to live in a place where I can buy Prime organic beef (and right across the street) if I want to; not everybody can.  On the other hand, not everyone can afford to pay three times as much for organic bananas, especially when you’re going to peel them.

As with so many good intentions, Pollan’s rules ultimately run afoul of most people’s real lives.  How nice if we could all shop at nearby farmers’ markets and sit down with our families at a table for every meal.  Mr. Pollan was raised on Long Island, and now lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay area.  His wife is an artist, and they both work from home.  I’ve been in the situation of working at an office all day and coming home not to rest, but to start my second job caring for my home and family.  I will never criticize a working Mom who makes the occasional stop at Burger Sovereign or Pizza Palace in order to have five minutes to herself when she gets home.  Happily, there are increasingly available quality frozen meals that may have the odd long-winded ingredient in them, but that are orders of magnitude improvements over fast food.  Not all processed food is poison, and I wish Mr. Pollan had included “Read labels and become a smart consumer” in his rules.

Many reviewers have pointed out that a lot of the rules are common sense, and they are, but sadly, common sense isn’t all that common.  Most everybody who can walk and chew gum at the same time knows that to lose weight you need to eat less and exercise more, yet millions of diet books are sold every year.  Clearly many of us need a conscience to keep preaching common sense into our ear, especially when we’re passing a Krispy Kreme store, and that’s just what Pollan’s Rules are meant to do.  The last rule is, “Break the rules once in a while,” by which Pollan acknowledges that if Jiminy Cricket doesn’t shut up occasionally, he’s going to get squashed.  It’s worth a look; I recommend the slimmer, cheaper edition that fits in your purse.  Consider getting a few as stocking stuffers for friends and family who need a little nudge to get out of the fast-food habit.

And Now, For the Advanced Students…

If you want a little more explanation of Pollan’s views and you aren’t afraid of a book with more paragraphs than slogans, you might prefer Pollan’s previous work In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin, April 2009).  This book covers much of the same ground as the Rules, so if you get this one, you don’t really need the shorter work.  Pollan opens the book with his manifesto’s mission statement, “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.”  Of course, he then goes on for 256 pages to explain to you what he means by each of those words, none of which are as obvious as they seem. 

I agree with a lot of what Pollan has to say; in fact, my husband commented that a section “sounded like me,” probably because of Pollan’s use of the term “edible foodlike substance” to avoid calling overly-processed comestibles “food.”  Personally, I think Pringle’s are one of the signs of the Apocalypse, and not only do I not allow them in my house, I will not dignify them by calling them potato chips (which I love– see above).  I refer to them as “dehydrated reconstituted chopped, pressed, and formed processed potato food product,” for they deserve no better.  But I have spent some time in food processing businesses, and I simply don’t have the fear of them that Mr. Pollan seems to have.  I have neither the time nor the inclination to grow all my own food, and I’m happy to pay someone else to do it.  Often, I’m happy to pay a little more to someone who does it especially well.

Pollan’s 2006 work, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is best avoided.  Pollan really sets out to forward his vegetarian agenda and, I believe, unfairly characterizes much of the food industry.  Having begun my collegiate career looking to study veterinary medicine, I have a fair bit of experience with animal processing and slaughter facilities, and all I can say is that Pollan clearly went to different slaughter facilities than I did.  Pollan actually released a “Young Reader’s Edition” of Dilemma, and trust me when I say that if you give this book to your children, they may never eat again.  Stick to the “Food” titles unless you’re committed to giving up life as you know it and moving to a commune.  This omnivore will be here tucking into my steak.

 

Garbage Disposal Behavior

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Okay, I’m talking to the Moms out there, as well as those of you who eat mostly “meals for one”.  Take this one-question quiz:  When you have eaten enough to feel satisfied, and you notice that there is less than a cup or so left of whatever you ate, do you, A, carefully put it away in your refrigerator, B, throw it in the garbage disposal, or C, eat it?

I get it.  My mother was a child of the Depression, and she never threw anything away.  We had drawers full of paper clips, because she picked them up off the ground (“Look at that, somebody dropped a perfectly good paper clip and just left it!”).  I’m pretty sure she had grocery-store bags dating from the Carter administration.  I was raised on the adage, “As soon as you throw it away, you’ll need it,” as well as all those guilt-laden stories about starving children in impoverished countries.  I was trained not to throw “good food” away (or much of anything else).  Of course, I was also trained to clean out the refrigerator when those valuable leftovers became frightening science experiments, but our virtue was safe, because we didn’t throw the food away until it was bad.

On the other hand, it’s a lot of trouble to get out foil or a plastic container and put away a little bit of something, but you can hear your mother or grandmother delivering a lecture on waste inside your head, so rather than appear wasteful or admit you’re too tired or lazy to put away leftovers, you just eat them.  You take in calories from food you didn’t need, and didn’t really want.  Congratulations, you have successfully turned yourself into a garbage disposal.

Waste Not, Want Not, Whoa!

You know they belong in the garbage disposal.  You know that even if you put them carefully away, unless you make a plan for how you’re going to use them up, they’re going to turn colors and end up in the garbage disposal, hopefully before they achieve consciousness.  But somehow it seems evil to put them in the garbage disposal while they are edible.  Besides, we were trained to “clean our plates” and we got in trouble if we slipped some of it under a napkin, even if it was peas.  (My husband used to put his peas in his pockets, which was slightly more virtuous than his brother, who threw his behind the refrigerator.  Needless to say, I rarely serve peas.)

Let’s step out of our own kitchens for a minute and think about eating at a restaurant.  Answer the same question, do you clean your plate out of childhood habit, do you ask for a box, or do you let them take some of the food away to their garbage disposal?  One of the reasons Americans are getting fatter so quickly is that restaurant portions have grown to ridiculous amounts.  I have taken to ordering in most places with a mind to taking home fully half of what I’m served, unless they are flexible enough to serve me an appetizer portion as my entree.  (If I play my cards right at my favorite steak house, I can eat dinner and take home tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch, and sometimes dinner.)  Most people will ask for a box, which will likely suffer the same fate as most leftovers in your frig, and that’s assuming they make it home.  Ask the manager at your favorite restaurant how many boxes of leftovers they throw away because the patron left it on the table.  (It’s a lot.)  Most people who don’t ask for a box will leave some food on their plate.  Often, it’s the automatic sides, like the rice and beans at a Mexican restaurant.  You didn’t order it specifically, and you didn’t really want it, so it’s somehow okay to let it get thrown away.  Maybe it’s like peas.

One of the cardinal rules of weight control is to stop eating when you feel satisfied.  I actually enjoy finding creative ways to use up leftovers (check the Recipe tab for some of them!), but if you don’t, then skip the fuzzy mystery stage and just give yourself permission to throw the leftovers away.  And above all, do not treat yourself like a garbage disposal.  You are worth so much more than 49 cents worth of pasta, and sticking to your eating plan is a virtue in itself.  Yes, food is going to waste.  But at least it’s not going to waist.

Diet Bankruptcy?

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I keep waiting for the analogy of diet and finance to break down, and it just won’t.  Well, I thought, there’s no analog to bankruptcy; how do you wipe away a huge calorie debt by taking one extreme step that will have serious long-term consequences?  And then it hit me– gastric bypass is diet bankruptcy.

Too Far Down the Hole to See Daylight

When you find yourself so overextended that you just can’t see a way out financially, you declare bankruptcy.  Your first step should be to see a credit counselor, because sometimes there are much less extreme remedies.  Creditors would rather have something than nothing, so you can often play “let’s make a deal” (especially with credit card companies) to skip payments, reduce interest rates, or simply negotiate a lower balance to pay.  It will take longer to get out from under your debt, but you won’t have a bankruptcy on your credit history affecting the next decade of your life.  Sometimes, though, the debt monster is so huge that bankruptcy is your only option.

So let’s equate this to your weight.  If your everyday diet and exercise efforts (or lack thereof) have left you more than 100 pounds over your healthy weight, that’s a huge calorie debt monster.  That much weight is likely to do significant health damage before you can get it off via even a medically-supervised diet plan unless you can afford to do nothing for several months except devote yourself to diet and exercise (the “Biggest Loser” method).  That’s when diet bankruptcy becomes an attractive option.  Just as with your finances, your doctor should counsel some less extreme plans.  You should both agree that you’ve tried enough other methods to know that you’re not going to be successful without big-time intervention.

I have two friends who went through gastric bypass, and they are tiny, happy, and positive that it’s the best thing they ever did.  I have two more friends who lost a lot of weight initially and then saw their weight creep back up.  They are now again fighting a daily weight battle, but they’re fighting it at a lower weight than they were pre-surgery.  (Check the fine print– most gastric bypass “centers” count a success in their statistics if you lose 50% of your excess weight.  I wonder how they’d feel if you paid 50% of your bill?)  I have one friend who is heavier now than before surgery.  With financial bankruptcy, you can file again in the future if you need to, but there are darned few doctors who will perform a second gastric surgery if you went back to double-meat pizzas and Krispy Kremes (and even fewer insurance companies that will pay for it).

Will It Work?

Success with both diet and financial bankruptcy depends mostly on two factors.  First, find a professional who will be with you for the long haul.  You’ll have questions at many points in the process, and you’ve got to have someone to answer those questions, and act as both cheerleader and taskmaster.  If you had been able to fix the problem on your own, you wouldn’t have gone for bankruptcy.  Accept that you need help and find someone you will be able to work with.  It also wouldn’t hurt to find a forum and talk to some people who have been where you are.

Second, and more importantly, recognize that you need to make some changes.  Financial bankruptcy sometimes results from catastrophic medical bills that were unforeseen and unlikely to repeat, but those 100 pounds didn’t just creep up behind you and tap you on the shoulder one day.  You need the diet equivalent of cutting up your credit cards and buying a shredder for all those pre-approved credit applications that will still come in the mail every week.  You’re still going to pass temptation on every corner, so you need a calorie budget.  Work with your doctor or a nutritionist to develop a reasonable plan, and dial in the occasional splurge.  Be realistic about how much you will work out.  Above all, recognize that this is forever, so be sure your budget is one you can live with.  Forever.

Bankruptcy, diet and financial, comes with some serious negatives.  But it also offers a fresh start that may be the incentive you need to get your life back on track.  Get lots of advice, and do a lot of thinking, then make a plan that has the best chance at success for you.

Juicing Your Java

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If you’re a double-whip, half-caff, mocha slappuccino kind of person, you cannot be saved.  You have replaced a reasonably virtuous medicinal beverage with a dessert, and not even a very good one.  If you need to add a Krispy Kreme donut’s worth of fat and calories to your coffee to make it palatable, please leave the brew to the grown-ups who will use it as directed.

Are they gone?  Good.  Honestly, if I’m going to have chocolate and caramel syrup and whipped cream, there had better be a couple scoops of ice cream under it.  At least then I’ll know I’m having dessert, and I will dial those calories into my plan for the week.  Seriously, before your next stop at Starbuck’s, check their nutrition facts and see what you’re getting.  Be sure to correct for the size and other variables (2%, soy, etc.), because they helpfully suggest a smaller size than the one you’re probably having for their default calorie count.

If, like me, you lack higher brain function in the morning without coffee, you probably spend most of the day with a half-drunk cup somewhere.  You probably get refills before you’ve emptied the cup, such that you don’t actually know how many full servings you’ve had in a day.  Unless you drink it black, you could be taking in hundreds of calories per day that you haven’t even thought about, let alone considered in your diet plan.  Time for some research.

Know What You’re Adding

If you drink cream in your coffee, you probably add your creamer more by look and taste than by measure.  If so, and if you’re trying to save calories by using milk or non-dairy creamer instead of cream, you could be derailing your efforts without knowing it.  The whiteness and smoothness of creamed coffee is mostly imparted by fat; take out the fat, and you need a lot more of whatever else replaces it, be it milk solids and lactose or the starch that most non-dairy creamers use.  By the time you’ve added enough non-cream to get cream’s result, you may have ended up with more calories than you would have if you’d just used the cream.

Try this experiment sometime: add 50 calories’ worth of heavy cream, half-and-half, milk, and non-dairy creamer to four cups of coffee, and see which you like best.  Then try 25.  You may find that milk suits you perfectly.  You may find that you’d rather have a teaspoon of cream than a tablespoon of creamer.  But you’ll know, and you’ll know how many calories you’re taking in.

About sweetener.  If you read It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature, you’ll know I’m not a big fan of artificial sweetener.  I don’t think you should teach your taste buds that sweet things have no caloric consequences.  But unlike cream, you probably are adding a measured amount of sugar or sweetener (though if you’re using a flavored creamer, you may be forgetting the whopping load of sugar most of those have).  When was the last time you reconsidered the “one lump or two” decision?  Our tastes change, if we let them.  When I was a child, I put enough sugar in my iced tea to stand the spoon up, and now I can’t stand to have any sugar at all in my tea.  Try cutting your sweetener amount down, and see if you really want that much, or if it’s just a habit.

If you’ve jumped onto the “french press” bandwagon, or you drink a lot of unfiltered espresso, you should be aware that you are not only taking in fat that a filter would have removed (that oily-looking stuff on the top of the coffee is, in fact, oil) but also other compounds in coffee oils  that can increase your blood cholesterol levels.  It’s not a huge calorie issue, but it might be a huge health issue if you have a cholesterol problem.

The best plan is to start your relationship with coffee from scratch.  Many of us started adding stuff to our coffee because we were drinking the cheap, overcooked junk in the pot at the office.  Try some fresh-ground, good quality beans, and really experience what coffee tastes like.  You may find you can “go black” after all, and you’ll save some significant calories every week.

Scary Halloween Leftovers

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I hope you were strong.  I hope  you didn’t let the diabolical marketers who put the Halloween candy out in July or August entice you into buying it, seeing it around the house, and then eating it so you were forced to buy it again.  Personally, I think there should be a law that stores cannot put Halloween candy displays out before September 15th (or later).  Write your representative.

But the day is here, and in theory, adorable tots should be showing up at your door to remove all the calorie-laden goodness and take it home to ruin their dinners for many nights to come.  But if you’re like me, and you live on a major street in a safe, kid-friendly neighborhood, you’ve laid in enough candy to decorate every witch’s house from here to Düsseldorf, and that means you’re going to have leftovers.  So unless you want to fit into that Santa suit without padding by Christmas, it’s time to get creative.

Give It Away, Give It Away, Faster, Faster

The simplest solution is to avoid leftovers in the first place by becoming increasingly generous as the evening wears on.  If you’re giving out one or two pieces of candy early in the evening, and you can see that you’re going to have more candy than you need, start passing out double portions.  The older kids tend to be the ones out well after dark, so it actually makes sense to hand out more candy per trick-or-treater at 8:00 than you did at 6:45.  If you play your cards right, you can empty your candy bucket and turn your lights out when the traffic dies (around here, that’s between 9:00 and 9:20).

If November 1st still dawns with pounds of sugary bliss left in your living room, start looking for places to give it away.  A lot of schools and churches have leftover candy drives.  Take it your next meeting.   Take it to the police or fire station.  Do not take it to work, as it will sit in a bowl on your desk and you’ll still eat most of it.  Look for places to take it so that other people will eat it.

Yesterday’s Candy, Tomorrow’s Baked Goods

If you really want to get creative, and you can do some advance planning, start looking at the candy in a new way.  If you do Christmas baking like I do, you will soon be buying the ingredients for that baking, and if you think about it, you’re going to be buying a lot of the same stuff you just gave away.  Next year, before you buy your Halloween candy, take a look at the recipes for your Christmas baking.  M&Ms can go into cookies and Rice Krispies treats.  Hershey Kiss cookies?  Hershey’s Special Dark bars and nuggets can be chopped into chocolate chips or melted down for icings, fillings, and more.  Jolly Rancher candies and Life Savers make gorgeous “stained glass” cookies.  Do a search for “leftover candy recipes” and you’ll probably find some way to use up whatever you’re stuck with, and you might find a new recipe you really like.

If you don’t bake, you might have a neighbor who does, and you can work a trade of ingredients for finished baked goods.  If you like toppings on your ice cream, you can crush most chocolate candy bars into sundae toppings.  Crush them up and place them in well-marked bags in your freezer; that way, they’ll be out of sight (and hopefully out of mind) and you’ll use them by the spoonful instead of by the bar.  If you are really virtuous, you’ll simply buy candy you don’t like yourself, so you’ll never be tempted by the leftovers.  Write and tell me what that kind of virtue feels like, because I sure don’t have it.

The bottom line is, get them gone.  Get them out of the house entirely, or earmark them for another purpose and get them into the freezer.  Otherwise, you’ll hear them calling you in their little chocolate voices every time you pass by the bowl.  And you don’t want to pack on extra pounds now, because turkey, stuffing and pie are waiting right around the corner.  Boo!

Rewarding Your Just Desserts

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How many times have you heard diet pundits advise, “Never reward yourself with food”?  How ridiculous is that?  The phrase “comfort food” wouldn’t have any meaning if we didn’t get an emotional boost from our favorite foods.  Besides, from the time we’re toddlers, we get the clear message that when we endure something bad, we get a sweet treat as a reward.  No?  Didn’t you get a lollipop from your doctor after you got a shot?  From a medical professional, no less.

On the other hand, those same diet gurus will tell you to find something else that makes you happy, like buying shoes, and they’ll recommend you reward yourself for sticking to your diet by treating yourself to shoes.  Congratulations, you’ve dropped two dress sizes, but you can’t buy a new wardrobe because your credit cards are maxed out from buying all those shoes.  You simply substituted one compulsion, overeating, with another, impulse buying.  You traded one problem for another.

U Earned It

There are two lessons here.  First, we need to embrace the concept of an earned reward.  We worked for it.  The doctor didn’t give us a lollipop to make our arm hurt less, he did it to reward how brave we (hopefully) were.  If you are sad, and you eat in the hope that it will make you happier, you will be a depressed size 22 in no time.  If, however, you do an extra 20 minutes on the treadmill, you have earned the calories you burned just as surely as you earn your paycheck by going to a job every day.  And just as, once the essentials are covered, you are free to spend your money on anything you want, you are free to spend those earned calories on a hot fudge sundae if you want to.  Of course, the prudent thing is to put the extra money in savings, and use the calories to pay down some of your calorie debt (i.e., your fat), but sometimes it’s nice to have that pair of shoes.  And that hot fudge sundae.

The second lesson is to match currency.  If you work an extra shift or brown-bag for the week instead of going out, you will have gained money.  That’s your currency.  Your reward for your virtue should use the same currency.  Buy those shoes, or get a mani/pedi.  Do not eat a whopping slice of cheesecake.  If you bust your rear end at the gym and have salads for lunch every day, you will have banked calories.   Have the cheesecake.  Earn money, spend money.  Earn calories, spend calories.

It’s interesting to note (well, it is to me, because I am a huge word geek)  that the use of the word dessert as ‘what we deserve’ dates to the 13th century, while the word dessert as ‘a dish served after the rest of the courses have been cleared from the table’ dates only to the 16th century.  As charming as the idea is of “just desserts” meaning ‘nothing but cookies and ice cream’, the real meaning is what we have earned, what justly belongs to us.  Keep that in mind and walk that extra mile so you can enjoy your hot fudge sundae and know you have earned it.  Deserve your dessert.

 

The Long, Dark Tea-Time of Your Diet*

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If you’ve tried keeping a Food Journal, you may have noticed that the most heinous offenses against sensible eating seem to happen in the late afternoon.  That’s when you reach for the potato chips, the cookies, the granola bars (or the Snickers), plus something to wash it down with.  With very little effort, you may find that you have consumed an entire meal’s worth of calories in that “snack” meant to tide you over until dinner.

Why should this be?  Part scheduling, part boredom, part actual hunger.  Most people in the financial district have a strict policy to leave for lunch at 11:30 to “beat the lunch rush.”  Of course, since everybody does it, we ARE the lunch rush.  If we were honest, we’d admit that it helps the morning end more quickly, and since most of us are on our third cup of coffee by then, we need to get up and move (at least to the bathroom) anyway.  This is incredibly short-sighted when you think about it, because since few of us will actually be out the door at 5:00 we have made a long afternoon even longer by starting it at 12:30 instead of 1:00 or after.

The same thing happens at home.  You get the kids on the bus, the kitchen tidied and the laundry started, and since you didn’t eat when you fed the kids, you figure you might as well eat now before you get involved in some big project.  Then soccer practice runs late, or Dad gets delayed at the office, and dinner gets pushed further and further back.  You look at the clock and realize that dinner is at least another couple hours away, and you’re hungry.

Our English Allies to the Rescue

Our friends across the pond came up with an elegant solution to the problem– tea time.  At 4:00, everybody takes a break for a cuppa, and maybe a biscuit (a cookie) or a sausage roll (kind of like a pig-in-a-blanket but way better).  It’s a mini-meal that leaves you satisfied and ready to face the rest of your afternoon.  Among the upper class, of course, it is elevated to an enormous meal with courses of sandwiches, scones, and sweets.  Since the elegant may not dine until 9:00, they actually think they need a larger meal at 4:00.  (Here’s a travel tip:  If you’re ever stuck in Britain without a dinner reservation on an occasion like Valentine’s Day when everyone is all booked up, ask if they will seat you at 5:00.  Since their reservations don’t normally start until 7:00, they’ll know they can serve you and clear the table before the booking after you, and they’ll probably agree.  Just don’t be surprised if they ask you where in the States you come from, because only Americans will eat at 5:00.)

It’s not important that it be tea if you don’t like tea, but part of the ritual of taking the break is in the steeping and serving (ask the Japanese– drinking the tea is the least important part of the classical tea ceremony).  It’s not only important to put something in your mouth, but to take pleasure in it and focus on it for just a few minutes.  If you can put it in a pretty cup, even better.  I love making a full cream tea in place of a weekend meal; I make a mean scone, and I love cucumber sandwiches (though smoked salmon is even better).  Pepperidge Farm Very Thin breads work really well for tea sandwiches (only 45 calories per slice).  Finish with a tiny but amazing cookie like Bahlsen Afrika (22 calories per cookie), and for the calories in a handful of potato chips you can have an elegant little meal break that will keep you going happily until whenever dinner finally happens.

So take a tip from the English and take a few minutes for yourself when the clock strikes four.  You’ll never dread the afternoon again, and you won’t miss the potato chips.

 

* with apologies to Saint John of the Cross, who described “the long, dark night of the soul,” and Douglas Adams, who borrowed the phrase for his book, The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

Hen Party Taste Tests

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So you’re probably already getting together with the girls for purposes of Bunco, Tupperware, book club or the like, and the conversation probably turns, as it so often does in groups of women, to your diets.  Why not double-down on your get-togethers and do some low-cal market research at the same time?

There are tons of lower calorie food products out there just waiting for you to discover them; unfortunately, it’s more of an investment than most people want to undertake to buy several types of, say, light salad dressing on the chance that you’ll really like one.  On the other hand, if you’re getting together with eight other women and you all bring one, you can all try nine.  It will take a little organization to make sure you don’t all bring the same one, but soon you’ll be in-the-know on more supermarket shelf items than the store employees.  Why is this worthwhile?  If you can replace your favorite Ranch dressing (140 calories for 2 T) for a dressing you’ll eat every night that only has 25 calories per 2 T, you’ll save enough calories in a month to lose a pound.  Or to offset more than a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts.

Products Begging to be Tried

Light salad dressings: Everybody brings a bottle, no more than 80 calories per 2 T.  Hostess provides lettuce for dipping (romaine works best), sliced tomatoes, cucumber, etc.

Snack crackers: Everybody brings a box, no more than 10 calories per cracker.  This is harder than you think; Ritz have 16 calories per cracker and Triscuits (which I love) have 20.  That’s more per cracker than some cookies, and since crackers are typically the vehicle for something else, loading on still more calories, it adds up scary-fast.  Hostess provides low-fat, low-cal dips.  (Here’s a tip– process low-fat cottage cheese in your food processor until it’s smooth, and use it with dip mixes in place of sour cream.  It’s far fewer calories than even fat free sour cream [ick, why bother?], and loaded with protein and calcium.)

Yogurt/gelatin desserts:  Everybody brings 2 packages (of the same item).  Hostess provides spoons and sparkling water for cleansing the palate between tastes (it’s dairy, you’ll need it).  Yoplait, La Crème, Jell-O and several other brands have gone into the market with pre-portioned refrigerated dessert items for around 70-150 calories per serving.  Most of these contain artificial sweetener, though some do not; La Crème Mousse and Jell-O Temptations Cheesecake flavors are sugar-sweetened.  La Crème initially released a chocolate mousse in this line that tasted exactly like real chocolate mousse (but for only 120 calories!), without the sour tang all chocolate yogurt products seem to have.  It was amazing.  And they discontinued it.  I met some lovely people on the yogurt aisle at my supermarket while we all stared mournfully together at the empty space where the chocolate mousse should have been, until the official announcement that it was being discontinued.  (Call them and complain; tell them I sent you.)

Chocolate:  Any way to get chocolate to the mouth without blowing a meal’s worth of calories.  My current favorite is Betty Crocker Warm Delights Minis, warm, gooey goodness for 150 calories.

Anything Goes:  Everybody brings enough to share of their favorite food item that they think packs the most bang for around a 100-calorie-per-serving buck.  Hostess provides a prize for the nosh voted tastiest.

Use your imagination, and keep your eyes peeled in the grocery aisles.  If you’ve seen a low-cal product and been interested in trying it, chances are your girlfriends have, too.

 

Easy Microwave Hollandaise

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Yes, Hollandaise is incredibly high in fat.  It’s also delicious, and unlike a lot of sauces and gravies, it has no carbs.  Zero.  Zip.  Nada.  Okay, there is a trace of carb in the egg yolk, so if you consume the entire batch, you might get around a gram of carbohydrate.  But if you’re trying the low carb lifestyle, now is definitely the time to learn to make this decadent traditional French sauce.

I love to cook, but I hate to wash dishes, so the thought of a double boiler makes me cringe.  But it turns out that almost anything that requires a double boiler can be done in a microwave oven– the key is short bursts of time.  The only cooking equipment you need for this recipe is a measuring cup and a wire whisk.  Oh, and a strainer for the lemon juice.  The bottled stuff is fine for your water bottle or iced tea, but for this sauce, you’re going to want lemon juice on the hoof, so to speak.  The flavor difference is huge.

1/4 c (1/2 stick) butter
1 T fresh-squeezed lemon juice
2 T  water
2 egg yolks
1/2 t  salt  (if you use unsalted butter you may need more, but you an always add that later)

Melt the butter in your microwave.  Whisk in the lemon juice and water.  Test the temperature (sticking your finger in it is fine– I’ll never tell) and make sure it is cool enough not to cook the egg yolks on contact.  Whisk in the egg yolks and salt.  Microwave for 20-30 seconds.  Remove (yes, it’s scary-looking) and whisk.  Return to the microwave and zap for another 20-30 seconds.  Depending on the wattage of your microwave, you made need a third round of zap-and-whisk, but you should end up with a smooth, lovely, pale yellow sauce that is basically a convenient vehicle for conveying butter and lemon to your mouth. 

Use it on any protein or vegetable; my husband would eat an old shoe if I put enough Hollandaise on it.  This makes a small batch, but it does not keep— the egg yolk works well as a thickener, but not as a long-term emulsifier, so the butter and liquid will start to disagree with one another as the sauce cools.  You can warm it again for a few seconds and re-whisk, but it will eventually overcook.

Use your leftover egg whites in omelettes or souffles (another high-fat low-carb treat), or angel-food cake if you are allowing yourself enough carbs.