I was at the bike store-coffee shop this morning for an Americano between clients (Cyclelogik has great Americanos – featuring beans from Francescos….mmm…) and was feeling a little snacky. It was almost 1130 and I had another couple of assessments before lunch. So I noticed the snack offerings they had today: a big oatmeal raisin cooking and a protein bar. Not thrilling, but I considered them enough to look at the nutrition numbers for each. The power bar looked decent: less than 250 calories, and it was somewhere in the 3:1 to 4:1 carbohydrate to protein ratio. It has fat, but fat is really not such a big deal – unless there is so much that it increases the calorie content too much. In fact some would call fat essential. And by some, I mean smart people who understand nutrition: The “Essential” in Essential Fatty Acids is not just a marketing thing.
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If you listen to Gary Taubes (author of Why We Get Fat, and Good Calories, Bad Calories), you would believe that the reason we are fat is because we eat too much carbohydrate, and that the way to solve the problem is to stop eating carbohydrates.
I’m not sure that the facts exist to support Taubes’ thesis. One hole, is that we in North America are fatter than virtually everyone else in the world (32% of men and 35% of women in the US are obese), but we eat less bread than they do. In fact North Americans ate an average of 60 lbs of bread per capita in 2000, which is less than half of what the skinnier Spaniards (15% of men and 21% of women are obese), Danes (no data found), and Germans (20% of men and 21% of women are obese) ate.1,2
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I decided last week to give Precision Nutrition a try. It’s been on the back of my mind for some time, and I’ve also been half-heartedly trying to drop 5-10 lbs for some time, but without success. And one day, I just realized that if I want different results, I have to try something different.
I am generally not a fan of most “diets”, or even “nutritional approaches”. They just seem to be spending too much effort trying to convince people of their merits. I don’t know why that turns me off, but it does. Maybe because in that process, they tend to ignore a lot of truths to support their thesis.
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Eat outside McDonald’s.
Seriously.
Bring your healthy meal and eat it outside of McDonald’s. Or Pizza Hut. Taco Bell. KFC. Whatever your guilty pleasure.
This thought came to me yesterday as I had to do a quick dash across the street to the mall for something fast to eat before my next client session. I grabbed a booster juice and was drinking it as I walked back through the parking lot, behind the McDonald’s. Specifically, I seemed to have walked right past a vent from their kitchen. So as I was drinking the smoothie, I was also smelling Big Macs and McDonald’s fries. It kind of felt like I was actually eating McDonald’s. That got me thinking back to someone I used to work with who had lost his sense of smell from an accident as a child. He said that he has no trouble keeping a normal weight because the loss of his sense of smell meant that he had no sense of taste either. So food was not a pleasure for him. I thought of this deep connection between our senses of smell and taste.
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I snack. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I try to snack a bit less often, and I try to keep most of my snacks relatively healthy. But snacks definitely have a place in my life.
For a while I was on a mission to find those great tasting snacks that are still reasonable in terms of calories. And boy did I find some. Ever had Chapman’s Frozen Yogurt? Wow. It’s seriously tasty. I recently had some Caramel Pecan Crunch. I’m amazed that it tastes that good at only 140 calories per 1/2 cup serving. I was thinking that this is amazing – basically the same nutritional impact as boring old yogurt, but tastes like ice cream (seriously – it’s good). Obviously this has to be a regular snack item.
But sadly there is a problem. Read more…
Millions of North Americans are trapped in some stage of the weight loss cycle:
- Thinking about dieting
- Buying into a diet book/program
- Dieting
- Giving up on the diet
- Feeling bad about themselves for giving up
- Gaining weight
- Thinking about dieting…
Some people actually succeed and make the necessary and sustainable changes that lead to a new and healthy life. Unfortunately, most are stuck in some stage of that cycle.
