Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

It seems that the 3,000 calorie a day diet that the Arkansas jail provides for Broderick Lloyd Laswell isn’t enough for him to maintain his weight.

• Kstp.com – 300-pound inmate complains Ark. jail doesn’t feed him well

Instead of being grateful that he is 100 pounds closer to a healthy weight, he is suing the county.

“If we are in a small pod all day (and) do next to nothing for physical exercise, we should not lose weight,” the suit says. “The only reason we lost weight in here is because we are literally being starved to death.”

At 3,000 calories a day, he might feel like he’s being “starved to death,” but that is nearly 1,000 calories more than the daily recommended average. I find it appalling that he is suing. People pay good money to go to places that will restrict their diet enough to lose 100 pounds.

Via: Rudd Sound Bites: An Unwelcome Weight Loss

I just watched this amazing video of a talk from Barry Schwartz about the paradox of choice.

I KNEW this lecture was going to be interesting when he flashed this on the screen.

These were how many choices he had when he went to his grocery store.

• 285 Varieties of cookies
• 75 Iced teas
• 230 soups
• 175 Salad Dressings

With all these food choices, you would think that it would make eating EASIER, but it hasn’t. It’s actually HARDER to choose a cookie, tea, soup or dressing. This vast freedom of choice means that we constantly have to make decisions. This can cause a variety of problems:

• Paralysis rather than liberation: If you have ever faced a menu the size of a book, you might understand how difficult it can be to make a decision. Often people choose to make no choice at all. If you set aside your food choices until you are starving, you end up making the decision when you’re unable to choose healthy food.

• Less satisfaction with your decisions: If you choose one healthy option instead of another, it’s easy to imagine that the other one would have tasted better or filled you up more. This makes the food you DID eat LESS satisfying. Whenever you are eating something, you are haunted by ALL the things that you’re not eating.

• Escalation of expectations: With all the different options to eat available, your expectations about what makes a good meal goes up. If you had less choice, you would be just happy to be full. When someone offers you ice cream at their house, you’re just happy to have whatever flavor they have. When you go to Baskin-Robbins with all their flavors of ice cream, you expect the ice cream that you get to be perfect. “The secret to happiness is low expectations.”

• Self-blame: When you eat something that doesn’t taste right or doesn’t make you feel full enough to last you, the only person to blame is yourself. You had all these choices and you chose WRONG. When you follow a strictly structured eating plan, like Jenny Craig, you can blame the plan or their food.

Barry Schwartz admits that some choice is better than none, but it doesn’t follow that more choice is better than some choice. We are overwhelmed with food choices every day and this has made eating a unsatisfying chore. If you decrease your choices, then eating is easier and more satisfying. “Everybody needs a fishbowl.” I believe this is why people are attracted to diets that limit the kind of food you are allowed to eat. It makes your choices easier and increases your happiness.

Via: Mind Hacks: 2008-05-30 Spike activity

This is a photo of my grandpa working in his garden back in 2005. From fourth grade to my Junior year in high school, I spent every summer working in that garden. I would cringe when my grandma would call down to the basement, “Time to pick the beans!” I have scars on my arms from picking the raspberries. I can shell peas faster than anyone I know. Every summer, I repeated the mantra:

When I grow up, I will NEVER pick vegetables again.

Here I am, twenty-two years later, considering planting a garden of my own. It’s too late for this summer, of course, but if I want a garden next year, I have to start planning right now. What on earth would convince me to plant a garden?

• My grandpa died last summer. Planting a garden would give me a connection to him that I can no longer have now that he’s gone.

• Fresh veggies are EXPENSIVE lately. Growing my own might defer some of that cost (if I don’t count my time planting, tending, weeding and harvesting).

• Vegetables from the store just don’t taste as good as my grandpa’s did. I remember being shocked at how wrong vegetables from the store tasted when I first got out on my own. I asked him about it and he said that it’s because they aren’t as fresh as his. I haven’t had a good tomato this season because my grandfather’s garden is fallow.

After years of cursing that garden, I find that I miss it incredibly and want to start one of my own. Only time will tell whether I do start my own garden or not, but this season, I will have store bought vegetables and only dream of snapping fresh green beans between my fingers.

Sometimes the most simple and traditional recipes turn out to be healthy. Take Toad in the Hole, for example:

This simple dish is delicious and healthy. Here is the recipe:

Toad in the Hole

Ingredients:

• One slice of whole wheat bread
• One egg
• Non-stick cooking spray
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

• Spray the pan with non-stick cooking spray.
• Using a glass, cut a hole in the whole wheat bread.
• Place the bread in the pan and crack the egg into the hole.
• Add salt and pepper.
• Put a lid on the pan and cook for four minutes.
• Toast the round piece.

Calories: Approx. 150 WWPoints: 3

I like to have this for breakfast because it’s very filling and will last me even if my lunch hour comes late in the day.

Enjoy!

Update 03-18-10: I learned last month that this dish is NOT called Toad in the Hole. That is a sausages in Yorkshire Pudding dish, which I have never made nor tasted. This dish is called Eggs in a Nest. Mike’s mom always called this dish Toad in the Hole, so that’s what I called it here (since he taught me to make it). If you would like to see a variation of this recipe, here is another version:

• Starling Fitness » Eggs In A Nest

This is a 1968 advertisement for Rexall Drugs’ Super Plenamin vitamins. If you look closely at the label, you can see that they were “selected for use by the U.S. Olympic Team.” It feels almost sacrilegious to say anything negative about vitamins. We need them to stay healthy, right? We’ll get rickets and stuff if we don’t take our vitamins, won’t we?

Well, I don’t know too much about that. I’ve heard nutritionists say that if you eat a healthy well-balanced diet, that you shouldn’t need vitamins. I’ve also heard them say that they won’t hurt you if you take them just in case. Case in point:

• Ask the Dietitian – by Joanne Larsen MS RD LD – Supplements – Vitamin

What I DO know is that the sale of vitamins is a business. Not only do legitimate companies like Rexall tap into the vitamin business, multi-level marketing (MLM) and social marketing companies have noticed how much money they can make. From a business standpoint, you can’t lose. You can say that vitamin supplements can improve your health and no one will argue with you. They cure scurvy and stuff, right?

It’s easy for me to look at that old bottle of Plenamins and think to myself, “Those pills didn’t do anything.” The bottle looks so old that they look like snake oil. Rexall is STILL selling Plenamins, though.

When I look at this bottle of Plenamins Plus from Rexall, it looks like something I would take every day after I brush my teeth. They’re from a big company like Rexall Drug, so they help me, right?

I’m almost to the point that I want to experiment. What if I STOP taking a multi-vitamin? How long before I develop rickets or scurvy? What if I make sure I eat a well-balanced diet? Am I safe then? How long until I realize that I was just peeing out expensive urine?

Via: Found in Mom’s Basement: Bottle of Super Plenamins vitamins from 1968

What should you eat? What is healthy? Which foods will help you live longer? It’s obvious that we were meant to eat both meat and vegetables. We are omnivores, after all. What should an omnivore eat?

The science of it all is a little sketchy and the way we look at food (Nutritionism) can make the whole experience of eating very confusing.

Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, explains what he believes is Nutritionism and how to see through the myths:

1. The important thing about any food are the nutrients it contains (i.e. fat, protein, carbohydrates, vitamin, etc.)

2. If nutrients are all that matter in food, and they are basically invisible to the naked eye (you can’t smell, taste or see a nutrient), then you need an expert to tell you how to eat. It’s a little like a religion.

3. Like any religion, Nutritionism divides the world into good and evil. Sometimes, the evil nutrient is protein, carbohydrates, fat, etc. The good nutrient also changes.

4. The whole point of eating is health. Historically, there were many reasons for eating, such as pleasure, community, family, ritual purposes (religious), or to express identity.

Unfortunately, all of this dedication to eating for health hasn’t really helped us be healthier. Michael Pollan’s simple advice is, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

You can see more from Michael Pollan here:

The truth of the matter is that we haven’t totally figured out how food helps us be healthy and how our digestive system works. Michael Pollan suggests that we take back control over our eating from the corporations that we have allowed to cook for us. We have learned that they don’t cook very well. They cook with lots of salt, sugar and fat because we are hard-wired to like those tastes. Salt, sweeten and fatten up your own whole food and you’ll do a better job of it, even if you’re not a good cook.

Via: Good Food, Eating, and Diet Advice Talk by Michael Pollan: Some random bits scribbled by Jeremy Zawodny

Of all the things that my dad taught me about eating, the most healthy is Egg Thing. He never called it that. He used to have a name for it, but I can’t remember what it was called. I’ve called it Egg Thing for years, but I rarely made it for myself. It’s very filling and fairly low in calories, but the way my dad taught me to make it, well… it looks kind of gross.

So, after years of making it for myself, I’ve finally found a way to make Egg Thing appealing. It looks good, doesn’t it?

Here’s the recipe:

Egg Thing

Ingredients:

• One Egg
• 1 Tbsp. of mayonnaise
• 1 Tbsp. of mustard
• 1 Tbsp. of ketchup
• Non-stick cooking spray

Instructions:

• Using an egg separator, separate the yolk from the egg white. Set aside the yolk.
• Mix the mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup in with the egg whites.
• Spray your pan with non-stick cooking spray.
• Pour the mixture into pan and add the egg yolk on top of it.
• Cook for four minutes on medium heat.

Servings: 1 Calories: approximately 150 WW Points: 3

When my dad made Egg Thing, he would just crack the egg in the pan and squirt the condiments onto the egg, which was less than appealing. By mixing in the condiments with the egg white, it tastes the same and looks better.

By the way, don’t just mix them all together with the yolk. I tried the scrambled egg version of Egg Thing and it changed the egg texture so that it stuck to the pan, was too thin and difficult to eat. If you want easy, just squirt the stuff on the top of a normal egg.

My dad is one of the people in my life who actually TAUGHT me how to binge, but Egg Thing is one of those dishes that is relatively healthy and very filling. Try it and see if you like it!

Egg Thing is featured in the online fictional serial, Merriton, in the following episodes:

• Merriton » Elvis said you folks pulled in late last night.

• Merriton » God, tourists everywhere.

• Merriton » Celebratory Egg Thing

When I saw this advertisement, I laughed at the description: Pure Delicious Vegetable Fat. Sure, adding fat to your food can enhance the flavor, but do any of us consider Wesson Oil to be delicious?

I love to look at old advertisements because they seem so wrong. It makes me feel smart and I think that I am impervious to advertising. Then I look at the current ads for Wesson:

• ConAgra Foods: Wesson

They are STILL using the same “delicious” advertising that they used back then:

Pure Wesson Cooking Oils have been at The Heart and Soul of Good Food for 100 years. Pure Wesson Cooking Oil provides fried foods with a crispy, golden outside and a juicy inside, while allowing the cook’s own seasoning to shine through. Great chefs agree and recognized Wesson with the American Tasting Institute’s Gold Medal Taste Award in 2001.

Oh?! They won an award?! Well then, they MUST be delicious.

The truth of the matter is that we need some healthy fat in our diet. Canola oil, which is one of the oils that Wesson sells, is a method of adding that healthy fat. I don’t need an advertisement to tell me that and I certainly don’t need the mom from the Brady Bunch telling me that it’s “All Natural.”

If you can’t sell me the oil, how about the bottle?

In the end, companies are trying to sell us their food by any means possible. Next time you see an ad to the TV or in a magazine, remember that.

Photo via: Found in Mom’s Basement: Vintage Art Deco ads for Wesson oil, 1920s

There have been some studies that show that cinnamon can reduce insulin resistance.

• USDA – Cinnamon Extracts Boost Insulin Sensitivity

ARS chemist Richard A. Anderson and co-workers at the Beltsville (Maryland) Human Nutrition Research Center assayed plants and spices used in folk medicine. They found that a few spices—especially cinnamon—made fat cells much more responsive to insulin, the hormone that regulates sugar metabolism and thus controls the level of glucose in the blood.

If it seems like you are hungry every two hours or if you constantly crave sugar or bread, you might have insulin resistance. It has been said that a dose of a 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon a day can help reduce your cravings and correct your body’s reaction to sugar.

• About.com: Health Benefits of Cinnamon – Cinnamon for Diabetes and Insulin Resistant

Several studies have shown improved insulin sensitivity and blood glucose control by taking as little as 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon per day. Improving insulin resistance can help in weight control as well as decreasing the risk for heart disease, so this has a lot of people interested. Although the results of preliminary studies are somewhat mixed, the majority of the research seems to be pointing in the direction of cinnamon being beneficial.

But watch out, it’s possible to eat too much cinnamon. Here are some of the common negative reactions:

• Skin rashes
• Irritation to the tissues of the mouth or stomach
• Mild anti-clotting effect in the blood
• Stimulating effects on the uterus (not recommended for pregnant women)

In an effort to increase my cinnamon intake, I created this cinnamon tea, which I’m rather fond of.

Cinnamon Tea

• 7 ounces of boiling water
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon of heavy whipping cream

Pour the boiling water into a coffee cup. Add the 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon and mix well. This takes quite a bit of time since cinnamon isn’t easily soluble in water, but if you keep stirring, it will eventually mix into the hot water. Add the cream and continue mixing.

I keep the spoon in the cup and keep stirring between sips because the cinnamon will sink to the bottom otherwise.

Calories: 50 Carbohydrates: 0 WW Points: 1

This treat has replaced my evening sugar-free cocoa. Strangely, it tastes a little sweet, even though you don’t add any sweetener. It’s perfect for people following Weight Watchers and Atkins, since it’s low-calorie AND low-carb.

You could substitute 6 ounces of heated skim milk for the cream and boiling water to make a low-fat version with the same amount of calories. I haven’t tried this, so I don’t know how well the cinnamon would mix with milk. If you try it, leave a comment telling me how it is.

Enjoy!

Dannon has been advertising a new yogurt called Activia that is supposed to help you with “digestive issues.” You can see the commercial here:

My first thought was of all the years I suffered with digestive troubles. It had nothing to do with age and everything to do with a bad infection. When I took the antibiotics to kill the infection, it killed all the good stuff in my body as well, so I had stomach trouble for over five years.

My experience was more like this skit from Saturday Night Live:

I haven’t had stomach troubles at all for over three months, which is when I stopped eating carbohydrates. Can a low-carb diet cure Irritable Bowel Syndrome? Well, it’s the COMPLETE opposite of the diet that the stupid gastroenterologist recommended. Of course, when I ate his diet, I suffered MORE. I haven’t taken fiber supplements or acidophilus for two months and I haven’t had one incident like the skit above.

I don’t think I’ll be needing any Activia any time soon.