mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Fat: the much-misunderstood nutrient

Just because I've been touting such low-fat food wonders as those non-stick cooking sprays (the ones that don't taste like ass, anyway) does not mean that I'm another of those anti-fat automatons out there in the diet-o-sphere. Fat as such is not an optional or superfluous nutrient--it is in fact vital to human health and proper body function. The type, quality, and quantity of fat consumed does make a huge difference--but you can't do without fat altogether.

Nor would you want to. As the mantra among gourmet chefs and fanatical foodies goes, "fat carries flavor." Fats, properly used, significantly enhance the flavor of foods whether as a cooking medium or a condiment. Fat also provides that extra little kick of satiation that makes a meal stay with you longer than than one without does. No magic in that--while the digestive process rips through a simple carbohydrate (such as a piece of fruit) in about an hour, complex carbs such as whole grains in two hours, and protein in 3 to 5 hours, fats can take as long as 6 hours to digest completely. Plus fat in the tummy slows the digestion of any foods it's been eaten with, adding to the satiation effect.

And when that fat is digested, some of it (depending on type) gets used for some extremely vital functions. Fats are the basic building blocks of cell walls. Nerve cells need fats in order to function properly--in fact, the composition of a healthy human brain is upwards of 60% fat. Fats are also components of certain hormones necessary to proper body function, and are essential for processing certain vitamins that are soluble only in fats.

However, very little of that fat, regardless of type, is used for the body's immediate energy needs. While fat is a much denser source of energy than the other nutrients--providing 9 calories per gram, as opposed to 4 calories per gram for carbohydrates and protein--it converts into energy much less efficiently than the body's preferred fuel, glucose. In fact, the body is wired to prefer glucose for its fuel needs over fats even if both nutrients are available in the metabolic pipeline. Meanwhile, fat goes into storage in the body very easily--and once stored, the body is marvelously stingy about releasing it again. While this is very useful from an evolutionary standpoint, in terms of surviving famines and such, it is rather a pain in the ass for modern humans living in much cushier cultures.

So one goal for the healthy dieter is to consume just the right amount of fat for optimum body functioning, and no more. Most reliable nutritional pundits out there recommend you consume a maximum of 30% of one's daily calories in the form of fats. In a 1400 calorie/day diet, this works out to a bit over 46 grams of fat. That in turn would equal, for example, a smidge less that 4 tablespoons of cooking oil--though for your daily fat intake you also have to take into account the fat "hidden" in other foods (in meats, egg yolks, dairy products, tofu, nuts, certain fruits and vegetables such as bananas and avocados, and of course by the ton in processed foods and fast-food meals). Under my food plan, I'm probably getting about 20% of my calories from fats max, and I'm feeling pretty good at that level.

The other major goal for the fat-savvy dieter is to choose the right kinds of fats. Yeah, it seems like every time you turn around there's another study saying this kind of fat is good, that one is bad, this one that we thought was bad is actually good, and vice versa, until you think your (fat-laden) brain is about to explode. A lot of that is confusion is more the fault of over-simplistic, over-sensationalized reporting of scientific studies by non-technical reporters in sound-bite-obsessed news media than anything else. But the fact is that our knowledge about fats and their function has increased dramatically over the past few decades, and it is worth your while to keep up with the best reputable info from non-brain-dead sources.

In order to understand the differences between different types of fats, you have to dabble a little in some basic chemistry--but don't freak, it's pretty painless. What you need to know: like all nutrients, fats are made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. The backbone of a fat molecule is a chain consisting of an even number of carbon atoms, off of which hang hydrogen atoms, plus various little branchy bits made of more carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Now a carbon atom is capable of having a maximum of four other atoms attached to it. If every single carbon atom in a fat molecule's backbone chain has got its full complement of four atoms attached to it (including its immediate neighbors in the backbone), then that molecule is said to be a saturated fat. If there is just one carbon atom in that chain that has only three atoms linked to it, the molecule is a monounsaturated fat. If there are two or more carbon atoms with less than their full quota of four atoms attached, it is a polyunsaturated fat.

Of these fats, saturated fats (nearly always derived from animal foods, typically solid at room temperature) have been shown by research to be strongly associated with health problems such as heart disease. Monounsaturated fats (typically, though not exclusively, from certain plant sources such as olives and peanuts) have been shown to be healthier for the body, and polyunsaturated fats (again, typically but not exclusively from plant sources) have an even better health record.

Some ways back, the food industry picked up that polyunsaturated fats were healthier than saturated fats, so they started processing unsaturated fat into a solid form that could be used like saturated fats, but didn't go rancid as fast as the unsaturated fats. They did this by packing in extra hydrogen atoms (hydrogenation), producing so-called partially-hydrogenated fats. What these bright lights didn't take into account, however, is that packing those hydrogen atoms onto those carbon chains was basically turning the polyunsaturated fats back into saturated fats--and worse, it produced a new type of chemical known as a trans-fatty acid, which is even more unhealthy for you than a naturally-saturated fat molecule. So--all those partially-hydrogenated margarines and shortenings whose labels proudly proclaim that they're healthier than animal fats? They lie like a rug. (How food labels lie about "low-fat" and other such much-abused phrases is a huge topic in itself, which I plan to hit in some future post).

Then there are fat-related substances such as cholesterol, derived from animal food sources.  Keeping the several types of cholesterol straight can really make your brain hurt, especially because high levels of some types in your blood stream (the high-density lipoproteins, or HDLs) are beneficial to heart health, while high levels of others (the low-density lipoproteins or LDLs) are bad for you, and can lead to those cholesterol-laden plaques in arteries that can wreak havoc on your heart. Cholesterol does serve vital functions in the body, but the body is wired to manufacture all the cholesterol it needs for those functions without the need to get any from food. Therefore, the less cholesterol you consume, the better for your overall health.

Finally, there is a special subclass of poly-unsaturated fats known as essential fatty acids (EFAs). Whenever a nutritionist uses the word "essential" to describe a nutrient, it means the body cannot manufacture that nutrient from raw materials on its own, and therefore must get it from its food intake; unlike a lot of polyunsaturated fats, EFAs come from many animal sources as well as plant sources. Studies have shown EFAs to have far-reaching health-enhancing properties for general health, brain health (including mood as well as memory), and relief from inflammatory health problems.

There are two main types of EFAs, omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6 fatty acids. Typically, American diets are plenty rich in omega-6s, but lag far behind in omega-3s, so boosting your omega-3 intake is an excellent thing to do. Alas, a lot of the fatty high-on-the-food-chain fish that are the premier source of omega-3s are the very same fish that tend to concentrate mercury and other toxic pollutants in their fat. Fortunately there is a wealth of fish oil supplements available from health-food stores. Make sure to choose supplements that offer the highest concentration of omega-3s, and that specify that they have been purified to remove any toxic contaminants. Seeds such as flaxseed are also excellent sources omega-3s; admittedly the form of omega-3 they contain is a bit less efficiently processed by the body than those from fish, but flaxseed is still a great resource for vegetarians needing up up their omega-3 content.

So, having waded through all that, what is a person intent on healthy eating to do?

• Cut down on, BUT DO NOT ELIMINATE, fat from the diet
• Cut way down or totally avoid saturated fat, cholesterol, partially-hydrogenated fat, and trans-fatty acids
• Choose mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated fats for your daily fat alottment
• Get some omega-3 fatty acids into your life.
• Read food labels like crazy
• Avoid like crazy fast foods and pre-packaged processed foods, which tend to be packed with tons of fat to make up for their flavor deficits.

And have a happy Fat Thursday!

"Eat More Veggies" Recipe: Kick-Ass Ratatouille

I had always thought of myself as a good vegetable-eater. As a kid, I ate with gusto vegetables usually notorious as kiddie turnoffs: broccoli, spinach, even brussels sprouts (still love them thar little cabbages). And one of the first cooking implements I bought for my first grown-up living-on-my-own kitchen was a big rolled-steel wok so that I could do big veggie-laden stir-fries. I even flirted with vegetarianism in my 20s (didn't work--way too much of a carnivore I am).

But as the years rolled by, somehow my vegetable consumption began to fall off, until somewhere in my 40s I looked up and realized that I was going days without eating any plant-based product other than french fries and the occasional tomato slice on a burger. So, I went on a campaign to re-kickstart my veg consumption, a campaign only intensified by my recent jump back on the weight-loss bandwagon.

And almost immediately I ran into a sad fact: because most Western cuisines are so heavily focused on meat-as-entree and vegetable-as-side, vegetable recipes have all too often gotten short shrift in cookbooks. Even in many vegetarian cookbooks, entrees seem to be intensely focused on the protein ingredient, or else a starch such as whole grains and pasta. The number of entrees where the vegetable takes the starring role are relatively small, and ones consisting of nothing except (non-starchy) vegetables are even more rare.

There are some cookbooks out there that do put the focus squarely on the veg, such as The Victory Garden Cookbook (a fabulous reference) and Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking (the whole first chapter is page after page of marvelous vegetable dishes). But I soon realized that if I was going to get any further in my vegetable quest, I was going to have to start my own stockpile of killer veg entree recipes.

Ratatouille, the Provencal eggplant/tomato/zucchini stew, is of course an old standard in many cookbooks. I've been tinkering with my own take on ratatouille for literally years; but it really took off into another dimension when I started roasting some of the ingredients before combining them. The resulting dish is much richer in flavor, almost more of a caponata than a ratatouille. The use of cooking spray in this case is not just a dieter's convenience but almost a necessity--if you use olive oil for roasting all those veggies, the resulting dish runs the risk of winding up unpleasantly over-oily. If you really hate the cooking sprays or can't find one that isn't nasty, just use a light-flavored olive oil and apply with an extremely light hand (or get one of those oil misters that my buddy Kirk recommends so highly :-) ).

Note: all measurements are approximate--I'm of the "put in till it looks right" school of cooking.

Ingredients:

• One large "globe" eggplant
• Lemon juice--a tablespoon or so
• One big can whole peeled Roma tomatoes, including juice
• 3 to 5 small zucchini (smaller ones are better than larger ones)
• 2-3 bell peppers, your choice red or green
• One large onion
• Several cloves of garlic or to taste
• One bunch fresh basil
• One big bay leaf
• 1-3 dried red chilies (optional but recommended)
• Good olive oil--a tablespoon or so
• Non-stick cooking spray
• Kosher salt; black pepper (preferably fresh-ground)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350 deg. F.
2. Peel the eggplant, trimming off the stem cap and blossom-end. Cut in large chunks; sprinkle with lemon juice to prevent it discoloring from air contact. Peel the onion and cut into chunks. Peel the garlic cloves. Halve the peppers, remove stems, seeds, and white membranes, and cut into thick strips. Trim the stem and blossom ends off the zucchini, and cut into big chunks. Pile all the vegetables into a big bowl, spray generously with the cooking spray, season lightly with salt and pepper, and toss the veggies until the spray and seasonings are well-distributed. Pick a whole bunch of leaves off the basil, roll clumps of leaves like little cigars, and slice thinly crosswise to get a nice chiffonade.
3. Take a couple of rimmed cookie sheets or sheet pans, and spray with cooking spray (if you want, you can line them with foil first for easy cleanup afterward). Distribute the veggies evenly on the pans, and slide them into the oven. Roast for about a half-hour, stirring occasionally, until the veggies take on some significant browning (the eggplant and zucchini won't caramelize all that much, but the onions and peppers will definitely caramelize a lot, and the garlic will get really mellow and start to melt into everything else).
4. Gently dump all the roasted vegetables into a colander set over a bowl to drain for a few minutes; reserve the drained-off juices, plus any juices that might have been left in the roasting pans.
5. Put a large pot over medium heat; put in a tablespoon of olive oil. When the hot oil's fragrance rises up out of the pot, add all the roasted veggies and toss gently to coat them with the hot oil (a little olive oil flavor goes a long way). Add the canful of tomatoes with their juices; break up the tomatoes with the side of your stirring implement. Also add in the juices from the roasted vegetables. Add the dried chilies, the bay leaf, and most but not all of the chiffonaded basil; adjust salt and pepper seasoning. Bring just barely up to a boil, then back the heat down to low, cover tightly and simmer until the flavors have had a chance to combine--might be as short as 15-20 minutes.
6. Tweak seasoning one last time if needed, and serve, with some of the reserved basil as garnish.

This is definitely one of those dishes that is even better the next day. It's excellent either hot, chilled, or at room temperature. You could additionally garnish this with some shreds of a nice parmesan if you wanted, but it's fine as-is. I often make a big vat of this stuff and basically live on it for the following several days--it's one of the few dishes I seem to never get tired of.

Weekly weigh-in -- wow!

Had my weekly class and weigh-in this morning. Down another four pounds?!? Wow.

I'm still not exactly sure how this magic is occuring. Yeah, I'm doing all the stuff I've been writing about in this blog, and keeping my food really clean--but while I had no major splurges this past week, I did have a couple of, erm, sorta free-form moments this past week. Like when I went to a club to hear a friend's band play--and decided to treat myself to two bourbons on the rocks. I also found myself in not one but two church supper situations (casseroles galore!).

However, I did work all these occasions into my food plan--for instance, I counted the two bar drinks as carb exchanges, and chose pure spirits instead of sugary mixed drinks. And as my congregation is full of health nuts, there were actually huge green salads available at both church functions--with all dressings, including a vinaigrette, on the side rather than slathered all over--and so I basically tanked on those and had only a minimal helping of the casserole-stuff. And the number on the Almighty Scale seems to confirm that my choices worked out okay.

Nonetheless, I did say last week, after a 4.5 pound loss, that I didn't want to be losing weight quite that fast. So I am now going to cautiously increase my planned daily food intake by a couple of exchanges, to see if I can edge the throttle back to 2 pounds a week.

Still, this is certainly the kind of problem one likes to have--as opposed to, say, plateauing at a given weight for weeks on end. Or, god forbid, actually going up in weight.

Spa cuisine: borrowing a few tips and tricks

My parents, children of the Depression that they were, raised me to be a bit of a tightwad, and while I may rail at their memories for some of the weird attitudes about food and dieting they foisted on my brain, the tightwad lessons I don't regret at all. So there are certain splurges that I have never felt the slightest bit of temptation to try, and fancy spas used to fall into that category. What--I'm gonna spend a huge amount of money to have people prod and harrass my bod, and then feed me lawn clippings for lunch? Fuggeddaboutit!

Nowadays, however, with my renewed interest in healthy living, spas do sound a bit more attractive--all except for the pricetag, that is, which is every bit as daunting as it's always been. All hope of spa-ing myself, however, is not lost, because there are certain aspects of spa regimens that one can implement in the comfort (financial and otherwise) of one's own home. And spa cuisine is the easiest of all.

I was randomly web-surfing for something else when I stumbled upon this article on spa cuisine deep in the bowels of the online home of Weight Watchers. Some of the hints in here I've already implemented (like using ground turkey and silken tofu), or am in the process of actively researching (like recent suggestions to try an olive oil mister instead of aerosol cooking sprays). Others, though, I'd never thought of before, and are really turning me on. Like the idea of pureeing asparagus as a substitute for some or all of the avocado in guacamole--I love asparagus, and now I'm thinking of several other vegetables that would really rock as bases for dips.

This is actually how I treat most recipes, by the way; it's very seldom I do a recipe exactly as written, and sometimes I just mine it for an interesting concept which I then adapt for my own purposes. So I'll probably do some more Googling for spa cuisine, to see what other neat ideas I can borrow for my own regimen. Lifestyles of the frugal and famous-in-their-own-minds? Heh. Works for me.

Fistful of Attitude -- a little personal history

On one of Lily Tomlin's records (I think it was Modern Scream, but I don't have a copy to check) there is a clip in which Lily, in character as Edith Ann the four-year-old wiseacre, is taking questions from the audience. Somebody has the wit to ask her "Where do babies come from?" to which she responds, "What, you don't know either?"

"A lot of people ask me that in Slippery Rock," she continues, and then proceeds to pass on a fairly accurate if still kidlike version of the ol' "birds and bees" talk as if it was the most urgent message to the kid underground--complete with the closing admonition: "Now go tell as many people in town as you can."

Where the hell is she going with this? you're probably wondering at this point. Well, it's an attempt to explain some of the attitude I bring to this blog.

I've already ranted about the crapload of mistaken info and guidance I have received over the years concerning weight and diet. That history has understandably made me a bit passionate about the subject matter of this blog. After all, this is all info that could have spared me huge amounts of angst, aggravation, wasted effort and even damage to my health--if someone had passed it on to me way back when I was basically coerced into starting the dieting thing in my teens. So if sometimes a note of evangelical zeal--or for that matter smart-ass know-it-all-ness--creeps into my writing, well, you can blame it on that.

I should add that, if it sometimes sounds like I am totally self-assured and really know what the hell I'm doing on this weight-management thing, well, some of that is a little shakier than it may sound. It's true that I mostly feel a lot more confident and motivated to see this through than I have for a long time, and that feels really good. It doesn't hurt that, so far, I'm progressing very well. But another part of me was almost afraid to type that last sentence for fear of somehow jynxing myself, like that superstition about never stating out loud to a pitcher the fact that he's working on a no-hitter.

In the post I linked to above, I say a bit about how my dad died. My mother's death is also fueling a lot of my attitude here, but in a different way due to her different circumstances. She died back in 1987, at the too-young age of 57--but it was not any complication of her life-long overweight that got her, but metastasized breast cancer, missed by an inattentive doctor. Now some six months before the cancer diagnosis, Mom had started to "inexplicably" drop weight like crazy--a classic early symptom of active cancer, as well as of a number of other serious health conditions. But my mother, another lifelong unsuccessful dieter in thrall to the cultural imperative to be thin at all costs, didn't even think to question this weight loss. She simply went "hurrah, I've finally figured out how to diet!" and went on her merry way.

In case you're thinking my mother was just being dumb here, think of all the times you've ever heard someone joke about how they came down with the flu or a stomach bug or food poisoning or some damn thing, and then said something like "yeah, I was sick as a dog, but I lost weight so at least one good thing came of it." What the hell is up with a culture in which weight loss is celebrated even if it was a direct result of bad health?!? Whatever it is, my mom's case is IMO only an extreme case of this same cultural illogic, a case that underlines its danger.

Anyway, my mom ignored that early warning signal, and her doctor didn't call her on it either ... and then she started getting obviously, undeniably sick, and by then it was really too late.

Not only does this story piss me off all over again every time I think about it, but at the risk of sounding overdramatic, it also does cause the slightest tinge of anxiety to cross my mind concerning my current ease in dropping weight. Paranoid much? But you see, this is exactly why any experience of misguided advice from medical authorities is so deadly--and IMO literally criminal. I've gotten burned, and I've seen loved ones burned, by crap some trusted professional handed us as gospel truth. Not only was our health damaged, but my trust in such professionals has also taken damage.

On some fronts, things in the medical community have gotten a bit better--hell, the program I'm now attending through my HMO is major proof that at least some of the medical community has learned a thing or two about this dieting trip. But there is definitely still crap going on. I had to fire one doctor only a couple of years ago after he persisted in bringing up weight loss surgery multiple times, even after I told him repeatedly that I was dead-set against any such medical quackery--and when I confronted him about it, he was completely stubborn and unrepentant.

So I fired his ass. End of problem for me. But what about other patients who will take this turkey's advice at face value and let their guts be irreversably sliced up and broken, at risk of truly frightening and life-ruining potential side-effects, only to find at the end that they are now sentenced for life to follow a more rigid diet than they ever had to face before? And all for what? Just to lose weight at a dangerously fast rate? What next? Solving the problem of plantar fasciitis by a modern version of Chinese footbinding?!? And all across the nation the marketing for this quackery just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I think you can see how stuff like this might lead to one metric buttload of attitude.

Oh, and there's more crap too, but this post is already threatening to turn into a novel, so I'll leave off for now. Suffice it to say that I've got a lot of history heating up this issue for me, and somehow I find it helpful to my progress to haul pieces of that history out for public viewing. It would be additionally sweet if anything I write here winds up helping even one person who has run into similar crap. They don't necessarily need to then turn around and pass it on to as many other people as they can--but if they did, that would be especially cool.

Diet foods that don't suck, round two

For your consideration: a couple more diet foods that have passed my most severe anti-suck scrutiny:

• Trader Joe's non-stick cooking sprays--aaaaah, those damned cooking sprays. In theory they should be a boon to anyone wanting to moderate their fat intake, but the reality seldom lives up to the theory. The leading brands blandish promises of real butter-like flavor or real olive-oil content ... but they also deliver a dose of really-icky-tasting artificial flavor, as well as assorted artificial preservatives and additives. Not particularly what you'd call good eats.
        Trader Joe's non-stick sprays, however, actually taste neutral to decent. The can of their canola oil spray I currently have in the house contains (in addition to the propellant) only "100% expeller pressed" canola oil, soy lecithin (the soybean's version of a nutrient found in all living cells), and water.
        I really like using cooking sprays, as they allow me to reserve my daily allotment of fat for more condiment-type uses--like a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil on a salad, or a dollop of sesame oil in an Asian dish. So thank you once again, Trader Joe's, for supplying a product that I can actually use.
     
• Orville Redenbacher's Smart Pop Microwave Kettle Corn -- I swore I'd never get into microwave popcorn, as a result of one too many run-ins with the dreaded Microwave Popcorn reek. In fact, most nuke-corn seems to suffer from similar issues to most non-stick cooking sprays--too many artificial ingredients with sketchy flavor and odor profiles. And after you survived the stink, the actual popcorn wasn't much to write home about. One might as well be eating those styrofoam peanuts used for to cushion breakables for shipping.
        So imagine my surprise when I nuked up some of Orville's "light" kettle corn, and not only did not get reeked out, but found the stuff to be damn tasty! Mind you, this is hardly an additive-free product; the sweet component of the kettle corn, for one thing, is Splenda/sucralose. However, its use is so subtle that I could detect no tell-tale artificial-sweetener aftertaste, and it's balanced nicely against an equally subtle saltiness. And this stuff is also low-fat too. So for those of you who have to wean yourself off a volume-snacking jones, this stuff could be a real life-saver.

Stay tuned for the next thrilling installment of this series! :-)

P.S. Sharp-eyed readers of this blog may have already noticed that formatty things on the webpage are continuing to shift around a little. I'm essentially "rearranging the furniture" this way and that as I keep trying out software features to see how I like them. Eventually, one of these rearrangements will consist of re-doing all the blog categories so that, for instance, there's a whole section for these Diet Foods That Don't Suck entries--but until then, they'll always have the "Diet Foods That Don't Suck" phrase in their title. Enjoy!

Divide and conquer--the "many small meals" strategy

Growing up, I got the typical American indoctrination into three square meals a day--with dinner being the Big Square, rivaled only by Sunday brunch. Additionally, as a child of the greater New York metro area, I started drinking coffee early (like, age 12), and by adulthood was well-entrenched in the Vestigial Breakfast practice--you know, only a cup of coffee for breakfast, with the milk and sweetener in the coffee the only real nutrition.

Further, most all the diets I became acquainted with from youth onward only reinforced this pattern. Either they were extremely rigid about three meals with no snacks allowed; or they only cared about net calories/food units consumed per day, so that the temptation was huge to hoard up those food units into a couple of what I thought of as "normal"-sized meals (which were definitely a bit heftier than what most mortals think of as "normal").

Little did I know that I was actually making life harder for myself by doing this. Since those days, however, there has been considerable research to suggest that eating several small meals throughout the day is actually more effective for weight loss than the same amount of calories clumped together in just two or three larger meals.

How is this possible, you may ask? Isn't it just calories in = calories out, no matter how you slice the baloney? Well, no actually--as I have frequently argued with many wise-acres (many of whom have never had to diet in their lives), the body is not just a passive tube through which food is poured, it is a very complex living organism, and performs in more or less optimum ways depending on a whole number of variables.

Hell, even an automobile can be seen as having different "nutritional" needs depending on whether the engine's cold, or has warmed up, or has been driving in stop-and-go traffic, or been hauling ass on freeways for three hours--that's why the damn thing performs so much better when it's properly tuned and its fuel-injector working right, so that the engine's getting the optimum amount of fuel in its air/fuel mix for its state at any given moment. If even an inanimate engine is that persnickety about the timing and quantity of its "food," how much more so a constantly-changing organic "engine" such as the human metabolism?

When I wandered into the first meeting of my weight-management class this past January, the instructor was very strong on the benefits of the many-small-meals strategy. According to her and the study materials provided by my HMO, whenever your body intakes food, your metabolism shifts into an active state to digest it, expending energy in the process. The digestive portion of the metabolism then gradually ramps down over the next few hours until the next meal.

If you eat according to the standard American pattern of two or three big meals with several hours of essentially fasting in between, you wind up with these peaks of digestive activity and nutrient intake, followed by sloughs in which those calories not immediately needed by the now idling metabolism get stored as another increment of excess weight.

Whereas if you eat the same daily total of food in several small meals spaced evenly thoughout the day, the digestive part of the metabolism never gets a chance to shift back into low gear, the body gets just the right dose of nutrients and energy for its needs at the moment, and thus there is much less chance of getting more excess stored on your bod.

Obviously, all of this is assuming you are making healthy food choices throughout, as opposed to, say, several small meals of Cheetos daily. And certainly exercise makes a difference in metabolism rate and calorie expenditure. But all other factors being held equal and assuming you're not goofing off with the Cheetos or whatever, the above-described pattern holds sway.

So with a certain amount of trepidation--because, like many heavy eaters, I had really gotten attached to that feeling of consuming mass quantities in one sitting--I embarked on the many small meals thing. And I have to say, so far it's been working like a champ. I have never had such an easy time dropping weight without negative side effects as I've done on this routine. (I have dropped weight faster on Stillman and Atkins, but oh the nasty repercussions on my health!)

Even better, I have had a much easier time with achieving food satiation on healthy food than on many previous diets. How can you not, when every couple of hours you're eating again? It's long been observed that numerous overeaters get so busy inhaling mass quantities that they totally miss the body's signal that it's satiated until they've eaten way past that point, and past what their bodies need at that moment. Now I eat a small meal, and pause--because that's the end of the meal, damn it!--but then, in the pause after the little meal, the satiation signal finally catches up with my brain, and I find I am satisfied after all.

In fact, I've started occasionally choosing more nutrient-dense foods (i.e. cooked vegetables as opposed to raw) because I no longer felt this desperate need to fill my stomach with raw food-volume to achieve satiation. I've even had a couple of days in which it's been an actual struggle to finish my day's allotment of food! And when I've gone on my little permitted-splurge experiments, I've discovered that even with permission to eat a lot, I don't consume anywhere near the volume I used to. Can I have actually succeeded in shrinking my stomach?!? And without scary bariatric surgery, either! (Of course, I'm sure I could always stretch it back out again with practice, but I'm not planning on going back to that particular kind of practice, thank you very much.)

Of course, the small meals pattern requires a whole different approach to meal planning. Since our culture is so focused on The Big Meal, structuring little meals is sort of terra incognita. Fortunately, with the rise of small-plate dining out in the foodie world (restaurants into tapas both traditional and multi-culti fusion), there is now a lot of culinary creativity out there for the small-meal novice to draw on.

And while I at least don't have to worry about dealing with the eating patterns of a spouse or dependents, people who do share their meals with others might have to do some creative meal logistics to mesh their new pattern with the rest of the family. But not only are these problems solveable, you may find the small-meal pattern appeals to others in your household as well (if it's not already happening on a defacto basis due to kids and adults running off to soccer and clubs and whatever).

With any and all dieting tips, one size most definitely does not fit all, so the "many small meals" strategy is hardly guaranteed to work for everyone. But if you've been going through your own struggles with a diet--found yourself at a weight plateau even though you're following your food plan to the letter--try re-arranging your meal patterns into a series of smaller meals, and see if that helps kick-start things.

Seduced by George Foreman

As much as I pride myself on being anti-prejudice, I must confess to a huge prejudice against any gizmo sold through infomercials. I figure if the product is anywhere near as cheesy as the show that touts it, I want nothing to do with it. And even if the product is decent, buying it only encourages its marketers to blight the airwaves with even more of those damn hour-long commercials.

But when I moved into my new roommate situation and discovered not one but two George Foreman grills gracing the kitchen, irritation at the glut of infomercial-fodder soon gave way to raw curiosity. It was not long before I had slapped a slab of animal protein on one of those puppies ... and discovered how well it actually worked.

At this point--well, I'm not ready to become an infomercial MC myself, but I am definitely singing a new tune about those damn grills. They are fast, they are versatile--and yep, you can sure get a helluva lotta grease to sluice right out of your turkey burgers with 'em. The versatility thing is what really won me over. Like another of my culinary heroes, Alton Brown, I abhor unitaskers in the kitchen, especially ones that claim valuable counter space. But it turns out the Foreman grill is no unitasker--you can persuade it to grill just about anything you can get to lie flat between its cooking plates, including vegetables, slabs of marinated tofu, panini, you name it.

One of the biggest stoppers to healthy eating habits is that fast food is so, well, fast. And convenient. Much easier to just hit the nearest Burger Doodle drive-through than to cook the ingredients for a healthier meal. And sometimes even dedicated cooking enthusiasts come home from work exhausted and can't summon up the additional iota of effort to go for that healthier option. But gizmos like the Foreman grill make healthy cooking so nearly effortless that one need never again give in to the lure of the easy drive-through. (Damn! I do sound like an infomercial, don't I? Oh well ... )

Of course, like any good net-geek, I had to start Googling around for more info on these grills. Predictably, recipes using the gizmo abound, varying in quality from the pedestrian to the outlandish, as is usual for net-recipes, And then there were links like this fascinating story, part of an on-going NPR series entitled "Hidden Kitchens." Seems the Foreman Grill has become a favorite of SRO hotel-dwellers determined to cook decent meals even in such humble surroundings. Sure beats the tar out of "Hotplate Heaven at the Green Hotel" (as Frank Zappa called it).

So--yes, infomercialeers, I concede you've won this round. But don't expect to see me buying any Super-Gazelle Thigh Blasters or Magic Samurai Food Choppers anytime soon, mmkay?

Today's weigh-in

I went this morning to the regular weekly meeting of the weight management group that my HMO set me up with, climbed on their big high-falutin' precision scale, and discovered my weight was down a whopping 4.5 pounds from last week. Wow--and that's with my latest little controlled splurge experiment this past weekend too. Otherwise, I kept my food pretty clean, but it wasn't like I was undereating or anything--so why the big drop after a few weeks of steady two-pounds-a-week loss?

I mean, it's not like I'm displeased with the loss--far from it!--but at the same time I don't really want to be losing quite that fast, for fear of waking up the gout monster. As it is, I was experiencing mysterious little gouty twinges in my feet last night--well, at least I now have some idea what might have caused those. But I want those gouty twinges to stay just twinges, thank you very much!

I'm thinking that the big weight drop this week might have something to do with my period having just arrived last night--perhaps the hormonal gear-shifting made me dump any water-weight my body might have been retaining due to PMS. Or it might be something totally random: perhaps, for instance, somebody re-calibrated the HMO's high-falutin' scale in the intervening week.

Anyway, I'll keep watching ... if I'm back to a more reasonable rate of loss, I'll just leave things as they are. If it ain't broke, and all that.

Safe, sane splurging?

It would be really nice, for my continued sanity and contentment while making a long-term commitment to healthy eating, to work out ways to allow myself the occasional safe and sane splurge.

Some diets I have known and hated seemed to operate on the assumption that there was no such thing as "safe" splurging--that you were just a hopeless food addict, and any deviation from a rigid set of guidelines would give your addict-brain an excuse to run wild, turning the exception into a rationalization for blowing off the diet completely. Others used various hunks of woo-woo nutrition to explain how the diet as designed was causing your metabolism to go into some kind of optimum weight-loss mode, a mode that would be completely derailed by any deviations.

None of these diets seemed to make any accommodations whatsoever for the quality-of-life aspects of certain beloved but un-diet-y foods--nor for the reality that, for many people (myself included), the implicit message that you can never eat those beloved foods ever again ever, backfires bigtime. There is a part of my brain, my inner two-year-old, that if you tell it "no" will start getting all two-year-old about it--and that, my friends, has been the seed of a major part of my diet fear-and-loathing. Whereas if the message had been "yes, under these circumstances and with these sensible rules," I might have been able to mollify the damn two-year-old in my brain, maintaining my peace-of-mind--not to mention my weight loss regimen.

Now, just a couple of posts ago, I did cop to being a meat addict. And one of my answers to dealing with that has been to up the "meat-like" qualities of healthy non-meat foods I am consuming so I can be better satisfied with my low-protein food plan. However, not only have I not stopped eating meat, but I have already conducted a couple of controlled splurges--including a steakhouse prime rib dinner. Not only did I not immediately go nuts and start uncontrollably inhaling cheeseburgers, but at the following week's weigh-in confirmed that my rate of weight loss was unchanged.

Now mind you, this is safe sane splurging I'm talking about here. In the case of the prime rib dinner, I shuffled my food exchanges around that day to allow ample room for the splurge within my daily food limit, eating very lightly the rest of the day--so while I was over on my protein allowance that day, it was only by a few ounces, and everything else was within bounds. I also made sure my eating for the rest of the week was well within plan. I'm sure that if I allowed myself several back-to-back splurges in a week, I would definitely see it on the scale--but I didn't, so I didn't. Moderation in all things, as the old cliche goes.

I'm still cautiously testing the limits of just how much freedom I can allow myself in a safe splurge without upsetting things in unacceptable ways. This past Saturday, I allowed myself a dim sum meal (which was absolutely delicious, by the way, and a real treat). I deliberately went into it giving myself permission to semi-ignore my food plan for that one meal--but afterwards, estimating the damage in terms of food exchange units, I found that, unconsciously or whatever, I had still not strayed too far from it. And instead of coming home with the urge to keep eating like that and turn it into a binge, I felt so satiated that I didn't even want to eat for the rest of that day.

Interestingly, the next day I had major digestive stress--gas and indigestion--leading me to wonder if eight weeks of healthy eating had rendered my system more sensitive to rich food. Or perhaps it had been this sensitive for some time, but the effects had been drowned out by a general pattern of rich food consumption. It's true I had been experiencing continual general low-level GI unsettledness for some years now, so maybe it's only now that my system is a little cleaned out that I can see the distressing effect of a single very rich meal. If this becomes a pattern, the negative reinforcement may serve as an additional brake on any indulgences I allow myself--yeah, it tastes good at the time, but how often do I want to risk that kind of king-hell gas attack for it?

And I still have to see if/how much this latest splurge experiment affects my next weigh-in to fully judge its results. That'll be tomorrow (Tuesday), so tune in then for the data. If it stops my weight loss in its tracks or reverses my progress, well, then I'll know that dim sum splurges will have to be a much less frequent event. But I still won't tell myself *no, never, no-how, no way." Just not right now, and not very often. This is very much of a trial-and-error process, but "just say no" has already had its trial with me and failed miserably.