Author Archive
More about the wisdom of simple eating
Posted by: | CommentsMore eating wisdom from Helen Nearing’s Simple Food:
“Simple eating need not be monotonous. Every meal of every day can vary if you like, but don’t be afraid of sameness. If you find a good thing you like, stick to it. Variety is not necessarily the spice of life, or of cooking. Appetite is. If you have excessive variety you eat too much. You flit from one thing to another and go back to the first, starting all over again and eating more than you need. All goes slopping down in quick time, with little chewing. In cooking as in eating, give your attention to fewer items and learn to appreciate them.”
“Simple foods (fruits, nuts, vegetables), simply grown (organically), simply prepared (with little peeling or cutting up), simply cooked (lightly braised, blanched, steamed or baked), simply garnished (with chopped up tender greens and no sauces or gravies), simply served (from stove to table in saucepan, with one wooden bowl for each person for the whole meal), or, better still, eaten raw: What could be simpler, unless you eat standing, and pick from the trees?”
Simple eating
Posted by: | Commentsfrom Simple Food for the good life, 1980/1999. Ostensibly about food and recipes, Helen Nearing’s book is really about simplicity and the mindful life. I’m rereading this book, and I continue to be amazed at how profoundly simple and useful her ideas are for the pursuit of a healthy and full life.
Here’s a sample (p. 10):
“The food I prepare and serve is meant to build healthy bodies, not to cater to corrupted taste buds that urge one to eat unhealthy things long after the claims of hunger have been satisfied. Enough is as good as a feast: better, in fact, because if you don’t overeat, you don’t get sick or fat.
The more appetizing foods are made, the more is eaten and the worse for the health of the body. If you wish to grow thinner, diminish your dinner, someone has said. If you eat twice as much popcorn when it is heavily buttered and salted, why butter and salt it? Eat a moderate amount of plain popcorn and then stop. If you are not hungry enough to eat unsalted popcorn, or bread without loads of butter and jam, or salad without a spicy dressing or sauce, why eat at all? Why not wait until you are hungry, without craving extra stimulants? If salt and seasoning makes you eat more of a food – leave off the salt and seasoning and eat less of a food. Its as simple as that.”
Simple but profound words of wisdom. Helen Nearing lived to be 91 (she died in an auto accident). Her husband Scott Nearing lived to be 100 years old. They both lived full, vibrant and healthy lives.
Lose weight and save money by going veggie
Posted by: | CommentsHere are a few money saving tips from Scott McCreddie in MSN Money for people on a vegetarian or mostly vegetarian diet:
- If you include an occasional piece of flesh (of whatever kind) in your diet, try to limit yourself to four or five ounces, which is about the size of a deck of cards.
- If you want to buy private life insurance, wait until you’ve been on a vegetarian diet long enough to improve your key health indicators (body mass index, cholesterol, etc.). It could save you thousands of dollars when an insurer reviews the results of your physical.
- Buy vegetable protein in bulk. Dried beans, rice, oatmeal and other similar commodities last a long time if properly stored, and they are far cheaper in larger quantities.
- If you get discouraged by the blandness of a vegetarian diet, buy cookbooks that explore Indian, Malaysian, Chinese or South American cuisines. Mixing novel spices and ingredients may perk up your taste buds and make the transition easier.
- If you can’t afford or prefer not to buy organic produce, remember that most experts think the nutritional benefits of eating conventionally grown fruits and vegetables outweigh the possible negative effects of pesticide residues.
Personally, I think that the best way to save money is to prepare the food yourself, cook in big batches (and prepare serving-size portions for meals later in the week), and avoid eating out. I think that eating out has become a stress management tool of some sort, something to reward ourselves for a hard day at work.
I used to spend a lot of money eating in restaurants, but as I became more serious in eating healthily, I found it increasingly difficult to go to places that were not only expensive, but also didn’t have the kind of food that I like to eat. If one is seriously pursuing a healthy “eating practice,” I think it’s quite difficult to find cheap restaurants that do not use a lot of fat, sugar and salt on their foods.
High nutrient breakfast
Posted by: | CommentsThis is my typical high nutrition breakfast nowadays:
100 grams or more of blueberry
1 whole peach, cut up into small pieces
12 grams flax seed (ground up in cofee grinder)
12 grams wheat germ
(optional: sometimes I add one more serving of fruit, e.g., a banana, a plum, other berries – depending on what I have in the kitchen)
Occasionally, depending on my appetite, I add a combination of ground up seeds (up to about 30 grams total) such as sunflower, chia, pepitas, and unhulled sesame seeds.
Nutrition: best practices
Posted by: | CommentsHealthy eating, weight loss and IGF
Posted by: | CommentsNutrient density & weight loss
Posted by: | CommentsWeight loss diets and macronutrient composition
Posted by: | CommentsFrom Medscape:
The quick summary: “Dieters ate different amounts of protein, fat, and carbohydrate — but, after 2 years, most were still obese.”
Here’s some more detail: “While weight-loss diets claim unique nutrient compositions that guarantee unusually rapid and effortless success, comparative studies — usually with small populations and short follow-ups — have yielded widely disparate results. Now, a large long-term multisite study suggests that all these diets result in similar outcomes.
Researchers randomized 811 overweight adults (81% white; 62% female; 69% college graduates; mean body-mass index, 33 kg/m2) to four restricted-calorie eating plans:
* High fat, high protein
* High fat, average protein
* Low fat, high protein
* Low fat, average protein
Carbohydrate intake ranged from 35% (in the first plan) to 65% (in the fourth) of total calories. All meals were prepared at home, and participants ate from a single menu with each dish’s components adjusted to reflect each diet’s emphasis; all participants were offered weight-loss counseling.
Changes in weight and waist circumference at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months were indistinguishable among groups: At 2 years, only about 15% of each group had lost at least 10% of body weight. Attendance at group counseling sessions strongly predicted successful weight loss. At 2 years, hunger and diet-satisfaction scores were all similar. Food diaries and urinary nitrogen analyses indicated that the actual nutrients consumed might have been more similar among groups than had been planned.”
I think that this situation is to be expected. Deprivation, as a general rule, is extremely hard to maintain over the long haul. It’s better to gradually change by learning how to eat plant-based, whole foods. Bottom line: its not the macro-nutrient balance that counts. It’s the micro-nutrients (and of course physical activity) that ultimately determine health and fitness.
Sweet cravings, calories, and weight loss
Posted by: | CommentsDid you know that the brain can respond to the calorie content of food, even in the absence of taste?
Scientists have known that when people taste sweet foods, dopamine levels increase in the ventral striatum, a brain region related to reward and reinforcement. Our neural pathways have been established for palatability (the power of a food to make one eat it spontaneously and with gusto) as food is being eaten.
Research about the brain’s dopamine-reward system can explain why people who drink diet sodas still gain weight. A mismatch between artificially sweet taste and zero calorie content can lead to rebound eating because our brain is wired to respond to both calorie content and sweetness.
The researchers from Duke University also found significant differences in dopamine levels during eating, regardless of the ability to taste food. Normal mice showed a rise in dopamine when they gobbled the artificial sweetener solution, indicating palatability even without calories present. Mice without sweet taste released dopamine only during sucrose intake, even though they could not distinguish between the taste of water and sucrose. This confirmed that dopamine can be released by either sweet taste or caloric content.
It may mean that the role of dopamine transmission (the pleasure principle) in overeating and obesity might not be restricted to taste alone – dopamine signaling also can influence behavior by indicating a food’s caloric value.
How do you apply this to your weight loss goal? Wean yourself from sodas, and try to eliminate processed sugar from your diet as much as possible. The second idea is to practice “stimulus control” — which means keep junk food out of the house. Out of sight out of mind. Remember your brain is a calorie seeking missile.
