I order kids meals.
People tend to assume fruit is good and innocuous because it’s “natural”, but the reality is that fruit has been subject to a whole lot of selective breeding and a lot of it doesn’t particularly resemble the “natural” forms of that fruit. One of the things they’ve been bred for is sugar content. You can definitely overdo it on fruit.
Fruit is still better than eating a candy bar or whatever, the fiber and cellulose layers lead to slower absorbtion and a lower glycemic hit, they still have some nutrients, etc. But they’re not as a great a health food as people think. Fruit juice, on the other hand, is pretty much all bad. People think they can drink a lot of that, but you might as well be drinking pepsi afer all they do to it.
Carefully. This blogger has some really good suggestions: http://keepingoff200.com/?s=Restaurant+
I will go so far as to state that the physician’s advice to drastically limit fruit is definitely outside the mainstream (other than the very low carb crowd). Standard guidelines are aiming for around 2 cups of fruit (and 2 1/2 cups of vegetables) per day. I would hazard a guess that very few got fat by habitually overeating fresh fruit.
The amount of sugar in fruit is actually not so much – a medium apple has 19 grams of sugar in its 95 calories along with about 4 grams of fiber and a host of good phytochemicals, a large banana 17 grams of sugar with its 121 calories and the same amount of fiber (a not fully ripe one will have less sugar and also have resistant starch which feeds beneficial elements of the microbiota and helps satisfy longer). You can overeat fresh fruit but you have to work at it. It tends to fill you up and takes some time to eat relative to its calorie count. Eating so much fruit that you do not get adequate vegetables and adequate amounts of quality protein and healthy fats is definitely a bad idea for obvious reasons. Even the fructose is a toxin maven Lustig states that fructose in fruit is okay --“because it is packaged with its antidote.”
Fruit juice is concentrated sugar content and keeping that in moderation is standard advice. That said the other stuff in it has benefits that lower stroke risk and raise HDL.
Here’s (pdf) an interesting old study. Fruits and nuts only 6 months and those near ideal body weight stayed there while the overweight lost. Not advising it mind you.
Does anyone have experience with protein powder supplementation? My post workout recovery time is just awful, I’m having a hard time maintaining the schedule I want, and I’m wondering if that would help. So many of the claims surrounding supplementation and nutrition are bullshit so I don’t know where to look. I figure it’s unlikely to hurt - I mean, they’ve got powders that are like 80%+ protein by weight without much in the way of non-protein calories, so it probably couldn’t hurt and might even end up making you eat less due to the satiating effects of protein.
Any type/brand recommendations? Looking at this stuff recommended by a friend. Hate that you have to buy 2-5 pounds up front though without seeing if you like the flavor, wish they had a sampler pack. Also, would it go well with almond milk?
Ah, sorry. I like to read these kind of threads because like most Americans, getting enough exercise and eating healthy can be a struggle, and I have health issues that make it pretty important for me to stay committed to leading a healthy lifestyle. And I like recipes and snack ideas. But I should probably keep my mouth shut on weight-related topics since I have little to offer personally. I just see a lot of my IRL friends who are in the process of making healthy lifestyle changes, struggle to find realistic role models and ideas of what their ‘after’ will or should look like. So I have this knee-jerk ‘take genetics into account!’ response.
You have a pretty consistent pattern of that sort of stealth bragging around the boards (and in fact if you had showed me the text of the post blind, and asked me to guess who that was, you’d have probably been the guess - one or two others in the running). You could’ve just left it at “she looks really amazing for her age but even with that amount of work a lot of people simply couldn’t do that so don’t have unrealistic expectations”, but you had to sneak in the part about how you were perfect and it came to you effortlessly and all you fatties shouldn’t even get your hopes up trying. I find it implausible that your intentions are as pure as you state, but if what you say about your intent is true, you could find non-condescending ways to express it.
Edit: I may be rushing to judgment on the condescending thing. It’s plausible that the stealth-bragging aspect was the important part to you, and that you weren’t deliberately trying to insult anyone. That’s actually fairly likely, so scratch the parts where you’re necessarily being negative towards everyone else.
Thanks! She does have a lot of great tips.
I suppose my main hang up is the social portion of traveling for work. I’m a woman and an engineer and I am on a team right now with older, more work experienced men and I think I’m just trying to fit in. I ate way more at dinner last night than I normally would have and I ate the cookies they had I’m the lobby of my hotel. It’s more of that emotional eating I’m trying to stop. At least today is a new day to try again.
Yep, every day is a new day, and not only that, every moment is a new moment. If you’ve made a calorific choice one moment, you can make a different choice the next moment.
The research is moderately solid that 15 to 20 grams of protein after a work-out (many claiming that it is best to be within an hour of the work-out) will help maximize muscle gain (and that includes slow twitch for the endurance athletes). Some carbs are needed along with it to aid recovery. (Protein causes a decent insulin spike, and glycogen is often depleted after a good work-out even for those who are not on low carb diets. No carbs and protein after a big work out will likely drive sugar low enough to feel very wiped, and likely hungry.) Whey is the usual go-to protein as it is quickly absorbed and the branched chain amino acids it is rich in seem to be both most associated with maximizing muscle gain and with the satiating effect of protein. FWIW I (admittedly with not great consistency) will take a whey protein powder bought at Costco and mix a serving size about 15 to 20 grams worth in a glass of half carrot juice and half OJ/pomegranate/acai/whatever I got around on my way up from my basement gym and after shower mix myself a small bowl of Greek yogurt mixed with stuff like hemp seed, flax, chia seeds, raw cocoa powder, All-Bran buds, and some dried fruit, diluted maybe with some kefir. After that I’m good til dinner with just a few handfuls of unsalted almonds or such here and there.
YMMV.
A protein powder should go fine with almond milk.
DSeid, I love it when you pop into these threads.
I can’t speak to the specific neuropsychology of drug addiction vs. compulsive overeating, but I will say that treating my junk food problem like an addiction has been very effective for me. I could relate to SO MUCH of your post - eating healthy food is easy for me, I eat healthy food all the time. The problem is I used to cancel it out with junk food binges. Like I would just decide I needed cookies and would make a special trip to the store just to go get cookies. If I was depressed, I gave myself a sugar boost. If I was tired, I gave myself a sugar boost. Rough day at work? Bring on the pizza. It became my coping mechanism for life.
I don’t know why it took me so long to see the ways that hurt me, but it occurred to me that this is a very serious problem that would literally kill me if I did not resolve it. I think if some people treated food addiction as seriously as they did drug addiction, it would be a good thing. For me, personally, I’m even considering never eating junk food again, because I don’t think I can safely limit my consumption of that stuff. I really mean never. So far it has been 28 days of clean eating and I feel better than I ever have in my life. Even my depression has been relieved. What I found is that once I took away the daily treats that even we dieters think we need to succeed (because nobody wants to feel “deprived”), I don’t really feel the need for all that added sugar. In fact, it’s starting to really throw me for a loop whenever I eat too much. For example, I had a lightly sweetened raspberry vinaigrette dressing on my salad today, and I used closer to 2 servings than one. I actually felt a difference, it was too much to the point of being unpleasant.
I guess my point is, this junk that we think we need, we MUST HAVE, it’s actually not even that good. We just don’t know it because we’re hooked on it.
Yeah, my trainer is baller.
The opportunity just basically fell in my lap. There’s this guy I’ve known since 4th grade (we didn’t talk much in high school.) He moved out to Texas, he’s like this hardcore military type - he trains soldiers to survive being POWs. So he became my Facebook friend and we had fun arguing about politics, and then one day I sent him a message asking what types of exercises he would recommend for general conditioning. I was seriously looking for a list of like three exercises to get me started. Instead he started sending me instructional videos that he made specifically for me and he assigns me daily workouts, and he won’t take money.
So I basically have a free trainer indefinitely. From how he talks I think he plans to help me as long as possible - maybe years. I am incredibly lucky because we’ve only been working together four months and already I have changed in so many ways. I’m a person with a lot of insight into myself but he has led me to see a lot that I never saw before. My whole worldview is being transformed.
If it’s not a literal addiction, it does seem very addiction like. The way some people describe their food cravings sounds similar to the way a drug addict describes his cravings.
You can look at food as both a source of nutrition and a drug. If you’re hungry, give your body nutrition, don’t give it the drug. If you’re hungry at 10, eat nutritious food, don’t take shot of heroin. Your undeniable craving for a decadent burrito is a big problem. It’s your drug. You have to kick the habit just like a heroin addict has to.
Keep nutritious food with you at all times. Make sure you have things like granola bars, apples, oatmeal (you can eat it dry), etc. with you. You want things that are good for you but won’t make your body feel like it’s getting a drug. When you get hungry at 10, you won’t have an excuse to go to the cafeteria.
I would recommend you try going totally junk free. Consider junk food as heroin. If you can’t do it, then you know you have a problem, and it’s more important that you get off it.
Legalized crack, I call it (crack because it’s cheap and crappy.) And there are several crack stores on every street, with crack advertisements on every channel, and everybody is always talking about how wonderful crack is and trying to shove it down your throat, and your family members use it all the time. And people say, '‘Crack is fine in moderation," and popular advice is to have just a little bit of crack every day so you don’t binge and overdo it. It’s freakin’ *absurd *if you think about it, that on top of all these social and psychological influences, people are judged harshly for giving in to temptation. Our society is literally (intentionally) structured to make us fail at eating in moderation.
I know that sounds extreme, but I finally realized food addiction really IS extreme. It’s killing us.
Early on in this process, I was bitching to my Coach about how shitty I felt when I didn’t eat sugary foods. I’ve had problems in the past where I start eating healthier and I just get sick and weak and feel like shit. I said, ‘‘I need to know that I’m not just trading one kind of feeling like shit for another kind of feeling like shit.’’
And he said, ‘‘I’m not going to be able to convince you that you’ll feel better any more than I could convince a heroine addict that going clean is going to make him feel better. It’s going to be hard.’’
And once I accepted that it was going to be hard, I don’t know. It was liberating.
And that’s what’s kept me clean eating for the last month. This idea that I know it feels good, and it would be easier to eat junk food, but that ultimately it’s not worth the destruction it has caused to my body and my life.
I don’t think food is addictive in quite the same way heroin is - but I may be wrong, maybe for a lot of people the brain chemistry bears it out. But it certainly is harder to manage those addictions. The best way to cure an addiction is to just go cold turkey, accept that you’ll never have it again, and move on from there.
With food, you have to eat every day. You can never distance yourself from it. It’s so easy to slip up. It’d be like a raging alcoholic had to drink 3 or 4 beers throughout the day still - it would be hard to limit yourself in that fashion, constantly being exposed to your weakness.
One way to help with this is to limit your diet in a strict fashion. For example, prohibit dairy and gluten (gluten is in wheat). I had to do that once for a medical reason and I lost a good amount of weight while on it. It wasn’t so much that the diet was special, it’s that it prevented me from eating so many junk foods. No bread, cheese, ice cream, cake, cookies, sandwiches, cereals, etc. And gluten is in a lot of processed foods as “modified food starch”, which meant many prepackaged foods were off-limits. There are gluten and dairy substitutes, but they aren’t as pleasing, so I wouldn’t eat as much of them. Food became something I ate for fuel as opposed to something I enjoyed for pleasure.
If you do this, do not allow slips of any kind. If you allow yourself a bit of dairy every now and then, you’ll find it easy to include dairy throughout the day. But if you say no dairy (like saying no heroin), it’s easier to stay on track.
Some people have a free day in their diet, but you need to be very careful. It’s like the heroin addict saying he can binge once a week. Get yourself clean first and then see what you can handle.
Yeah, if we never had to eat again, it would be much easier.
I had a half a burger, a beer and 20 french fries for lunch. So not healthy but way better than the whole burger, 2 beers and whole order of fries I would have normally had.
And now, predictably, I am hungry.
The thing I liked about MFP when I first used it was that I could check something before I ate it. That lovely bagel in the break room? Hmmmmmmmm, maybe no cream cheese. Quick check and damn, that’s 400 calories, min, without the schmear. My phone is dying, and I can no longer properly use the app. as a food diary, but I do keep it to check on suspected offenders.
How many carbs are we talking about? Are you sure this still applies to people in ketosis? I thought in that case your muscles just ran directly off ketones and bypassed the glycogen entirely, which is why you don’t get crashes when working out on low carb where your body switches to burning fat directly - since it was already steadily doing that in the first place.
Official weigh in this morning, I’ve lost the 1.5kg I’d put on whilst I wasn’t tracking, woohoo! I’ve also lost a point from my daily allowance, boohoo! 