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

Consumer Reports released a list of weight-loss websites and their ratings. You can see it here:

• ConsumerReports.org – Weight loss on the Web: Where to turn for advice 9/06

I have never created a list like this. I tell you about things I find interesting, but I have never made a list of my favorite websites to read for information. Ironically, NONE of the websites Consumer Reports rated would make my list.

Via: Consumer Reports rates the dieting websites – Slashfood

Disney has made a decisive change in the food that is served in their amusement parks:

• Treatment Online – Disney Makes Strong Statement on Healthy Eating

By 2008, the following changes will be in place:

• No foods with trans fat

• Place a cap on total calories, which will result in smaller portion for children.

• Limit fat to a maximum of 30 percent of calories for entrees and side dishes, and 35 percent for snacks.

• Cap saturated fat at 10 percent of calories for main dishes, side dishes and snacks.

• Limit sugar to 10 percent of calories for main dishes and side dishes, and 25 percent of calories for snacks.

This is great news for parents whose children are clamoring for the sugary food that is just going to make them bounce off the walls while they wait in line. Treatment online says it best:

“Many companies have been moving to reduce or cut the use of trans fats in their products, but Disney’s announcement is doubly important for the reverberations that it will have throughout the food industry. If Disney, one of the most powerful brands especially among children, won’t do business with companies that make unhealthy products, it should force many of these companies to rethink their own behaviors.”

Now, Disney just needs to make sure that their sugary cereal that they sell follows the same guidelines.

Over the summer, I forgot that The Biggest Loser is the show that takes 30 minutes to weigh 13 people. The repetition and the way they drag things out to last two hours really got to me this time because I was watching it live last night. I used to tape them on my VCR and watch them last year, so I could fast forward through the neverending weighing when things got too much. This time, I was stuck with watching every grueling minute.

Let me tell ya. I’ll be taping it next time.

Oh yeah, I had also forgotten about the blatant commercials. Jello? Yep there it is. The girl who was voted off is eating Jello at home to “limit her carbs.” One-A-Day vitamins was given a couple of minutes with Bob introducing them to his team. Plus, One-A-Day had paid for two commercials during the breaks: one for women and one for men.

More disturbing were the commercials (two) for surgical weight loss during the breaks. Here in Utah, they were for a local company that promotes gastric bypass surgery and lap band surgery quite heavily. Those surgeries go against everything taught on The Biggest Loser. I wonder if there were similar commercials in other areas.

On a lighter note, did anyone notice that everyone is wearing Timex watches? I’m a watch fanatic, so I notice those sorts of things. At first, I thought, “Hey, there’s that HRM Timex that Mike has.” The second time, I thought, “I’ve looked at that watch… almost bought it.” The third time, I thought, “Oh, I get it. Timex gave everyone watches. Smooth…” I have an OLD Timex HRM watch (the first one they made) that is still going strong, so I really don’t have a problem with them providing watches to everyone. Long after they have been voted off the show, those watches are going to be reading their heart rates and timing their workouts.

Will I still watch the show despite all the commercials and trumped up drama? Yeah, but next week, I’m fast forwarding through the weigh-in.

Valerie at iPortion sent this link to an article about feeding children. I was raised by my mother, who did rather well feeding me and my grandmother, who gave me a long list of worries and habits that eventually mutated into my bingeing behavior. This article is right on about preventing eating disorders in children.

• So what’s all the fuss? Just don’t take yuck for an answer – National

Based on this article, the worst thing you can do to a child is label them a picky eater.

Nutritionist Rosemary Stanton said everybody was born with a taste for sweetness because breast milk was sweet. The worst thing a parent could do was brand their child as a fussy eater. “It leads to parents giving children junk food, saying it’s better than nothing. It’s almost never better than nothing; the child may go without food for a couple of days and it won’t hurt them in a non-famine situation,” Dr Stanton said.

Being a picky eater can haunt your child all through adulthood unless they conquer it themselves. I’ve seen adults say that they couldn’t eat vegetables (and many other healthy foods) for reasons other than, “I just can’t swallow them.” After suffering with a stomach disorder that limited my food choices almost arbitrarily, I had little sympathy for them.

If you have a child who is a picky eater, keep offering them healthy food. If they don’t want to eat it, they must not be hungry enough. Don’t offer them Pop Tarts, let them learn that eating healthy is the only option. After a dozen or so exposures, they should be more willing to eat the healthy stuff.

More importantly, if you’re a picky eater, treat yourself the same. Expose yourself to foods that you “just can’t swallow” regularly. You will eventually earn a taste for the healthier food. You can conquer your own picky eating habits.

Laura,

Yesterday, you showed a picture of a lunch. Was that your lunch? Where did you get that bottle for the milk? Did you buy milk in a little bottle and take off the label?

H. J. Tillman

H. J.,

Yes, that was the lunch I ate on Thursday. I have been bringing a glass of milk to work using those bottles for a couple of years now. I looked at every store in Salt Lake City to find a good bottle to put milk in, but I couldn’t find anything.

Fortunately for me, Mike likes Powerade.

We bought two packages of Powerade in the small bottles. After Mike drank the blue stuff, I removed the labels and washed the bottles in the dishwasher. They don’t warp or get damaged, even when I use the heated dry (top rack). When they start to look a little gross, I throw them in the recycle bin and force Mike to drink more Powerade out of little bottles.

I know some people are worried that reusing bottles like this might be bad for your health, but that’s mostly an urban legend:

• Starling Fitness » Water Bottle Safety

This method of taking milk to work has worked really well for me and I heartily recommend it. Don’t pay extra money for milk out of a machine or smaller containers from the grocery store. Just fill your own each morning and you’ll save money and get your daily supply of dairy.

Thanks for writing,
Laura

Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough have written an article for Weight Watchers about how to perk up your lunch.

• WeightWatchers.com: food ideas – Brown Bagging It: 9 Ideas For Lunch

For me, it was always easier to bring a lunch to work than to try to go out to eat at lunch time. The restaurants are always so full and I hate worrying about being able to get back to work within an hour. Bringing my lunch was more about being able to enjoy my free hour calmly.

Bringing lunch to work is less expensive, too. I saved about five dollars every time I brought lunch instead of eating out. The cheapskate in me appreciates the thriftiness of bringing my own lunch far more than the health aspects.

In the end, bringing my own lunch to work made it so much healthier for me. I KNEW how many calories were in my lunch box. I didn’t have to guess like I do at most local restaurants. In the end, when I bring my lunch to work, I end up with healthier food, a calmer lunch hour and a fatter wallet. What more could I ask for?

Laura,

Do you just count calories then? Or do you pay attention to fat content as well? Just curious.

Ernie

Ernie,

I have been struggling with keeping track of my food since last March. About two or three months ago, I stopped following the Weight Watcher plan and stopped going to the meetings. I essentially started The F**K It Diet again.

I told myself that keeping track of my food was making me obsess about it. All I did all day was think about food: what I ate yesterday, what I was eating today, and what I was going to eat tomorrow. I thought the dieting was making me focus on eating all day long, so I stopped keeping track.

I gained about twenty pounds.

But I learned something really important: it wasn’t the dieting that was making me obsess about food. When I stopped keeping track, I still focused all day on what food I was going to eat. Even though I could eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, I still thought about my meals with a strange interest. It wasn’t the dieting that made me obsessive about food.

I’m obsessive about food no matter what I do.

So, I decided that if I’m going to obsess about food no matter what, I’m going to concentrate on eating healthy while I do it.

Right now, I’m easing off The F**K It Diet and back into a healthy calorie range. I am currently keeping track using Calorie King software. The company provided me with a free copy of the software to test it out and give a full review. I did a review of the software earlier this year (Starling Fitness » Review: CalorieKing), but they have just added the feature that will allow you to sync your Palm with your desktop computer. That missing feature before made it something that I didn’t want to use, so I’m testing it again.

As soon as I know whether CalorieKing works for me, I’ll do another review. For now, I’m keeping track of calories, but I might just end up going back to Weight Watcher Points.

Thanks,
Laura Moncur

Weight Watchers Points make keeping track of calories very easy, but they are overkill. The Weight Watchers formula has been registered as a patented formula for giving values to food using calories, fat and fiber. I have a couple of problems with the Points Program:

• Fat is counted twice: Fat is a macronutrient that accounts for nine calories per gram, so the Weight Watchers Points system counts it once with its calories and again as fat grams. It entices people to choose low fat foods, which might be a healthier option, but I find it to be inaccurate for calorie calculation.

• Fiber is overrated: Fiber is an important macronutrient, but the Weight Watchers Points system weighs it far heavily than it should. Additionally, many diet foods have caught on to this and have added fiber to foods where it doesn’t occur naturally. If you carefully look at the food labels, many manufacturers have started adding the equivalent of a teaspoon of Metamucil to their food in order to lower the Points value.

Weight Watchers originally created this elaborate formula to encourage its people to eat foods that are lower in fat and higher in fiber. That’s a great philosophy, but it’s not good accounting. Keep track of what really counts: calories.

But Weight Watchers Points are so easy…

You’re right. They are. If you want to keep track of your food using the Weight Watchers Points, go ahead. It’s a relatively accurate system of monitoring your intake, and it’s better than not keeping track at all. If you are familiar with it and you like the program, stay with it. The first rule is to write down everything you eat. If you keep track of your calories using the Weight Watchers Points, it’s really just a shorthand and will work. If you don’t know the Weight Watchers Points, then don’t follow their system, just keep track of your calories. Calories are more accurate anyway.

Bonking happens when you are exercising and your glycogen stores run out. It’s like running your car on fumes, except your car doesn’t have fat storages to draw from. It has been described as painful and long distance racers avoid it by loading up on high calorie supplements like Gu Energy Gel and PowerGel.

You can find out more information about bonking here:

• Dr. Mirkin – BONKING

• Bonk (condition) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bonking is actually a very rare condition and usually only shows up during extreme exercise. Of course the marketing for products like Gu and PowerGel don’t want you to know that. They hype their products by providing them for free to the extreme athletes who need them, focusing the cameras on Lance Armstrong when he sucks down a mouthful of the sugary stuff.

Most of us are exercising to get rid of the fat in our bodies. Consuming mass quantities of sugary goo is counter-productive to that goal. If you are going to be exercising for more than an hour, eat half a banana before your workout. Longer than that should probably be broken up into two workout sessions.

There is also the idea that doing extreme exercise in the morning before breakfast, when glycogen levels are low, burns more fat than doing the same amount of exercise after eating. This hasn’t been proven and can lead to dizzyness and shaking. Be careful and listen to your body.

Tish is toying with the idea of dieting again.

• love and hope and sex and dreams: Diet Culture

She’s in that uncomfortable spot of not liking her body the way it is, but not really wanting to jump into dieting again.

“Take me as I am–chubby and all.”

“But that’s not the point. There are times when I’m uncomfortable. And I don’t like my underwear size.”

“So, I’m toying with the diet thing again–wondering if I can do it, even for a couple of months, to lose a couple of pounds.”

If you are feeling like you want to be thinner, but don’t want to diet, I have two words for you, “Don’t Diet.” Seriously, dieting will only make you feel deprived.

What to do about the body image issues?

My answer has always been to start with exercise. I allow myself to eat whatever I want, but I insist that I exercise regularly. Once I work up to six sessions a week, it seems more natural to eat healthier. It’s almost as if the exercise makes my body crave healthier food.

I never really lose any weight when I’m eating whatever I want and exercising, but it leads me to the place where I can actually consider eating healthy again.