the Search for the Miracle Diet book

January is the time of year when the mighty masses, from lithe yoga instructors to heavy-set sallow-faced pre- and post- heart surgery patients make a beeline for the diet section of the bookstore. Fresh from college or retirement party, they gingerly pick at the vast selection of diet titles, or go straight for the latest fad-diet best-seller. Some leave empty-handed in frustration. 

Am I a vegan or a Paleo? Do I want to get healthy or skinny? Will healthy food make me thin? Will diet smoothies make me healthy? Will my kids eat this stuff??

Can we go home now?

Of course you can. It's a new year; time to ask the real experts, and get some coaching. If your doctor says you’re pretty healthy, come join a wellness workshop or combine a cooking class with a nutrition app to help you get started (again). If your doctor says you have metabolic syndrome, or “pre-diabetes” go immediately to a dietitian! This is no time to see what Her Royal Princess did, or trust the word of some website called “lose 100 pounds in 15 days”. Her Royal Princess doesn’t have a 4 to midnight schedule waiting tables, isn’t raising three rambunctious boys, dealing with family medical issues, or flying to sales conferences every week. And the site that claims you can lose 100 pounds in 15 days isn’t the Mayo Clinic. They ain’t objective.

Speaking of objective, nutrition science has been making huge advances lately in our knowledge base, but meanwhile everyone with a program or wellness product is cherry-picking “news” that makes them look like they have the secret to your weight loss and health. The true secret is, when it comes to your body, don't rely on something that sounds way too damn simple to be true. Your beautiful body is one complex organism. Your adult intestines are about 26 feet long!

Talk to someone who can put themselves in your shoes, or join a group of people IN your shoes, because what you put on your lunch plate has everything to do with where you are in life and where you’re trying to go. After that, you’ll know which book to buy. Do you need to eat on the go? Perhaps you should avoid the slow-cooker health plan in favor of an app that helps you find nourishing restaurants in any city. While the 25 healthiest foods may be the same for nearly everyone, your method of getting them is yours only.

Hey, Happy New Year!  May your wishes become your path to success in 2013.

Food and Politics: Time for a divorce!

Here's the beef: I want to be able to walk into any food establishment without having to "declare" my stance on gay marriage. Don't you?

As a nutritional wellness advocate and food lover, it disturbs me when people label food as "elitist" or "patriotic". Before the Dan Cathy Chick-fil-A vs. Muppet food fight over the rights of gays to marry, there was a small media firestorm over what (then) candidate Barack Obama put on his hamburger. Spicy mustard, what what? How "un-American", his opponents cried. (Ketchup, apparently, was a Republican domain.)

This is ridiculous! The only labels you should ever apply to food fall into these categories:

1. Health factors
2. Taste
3. Freshness
4. Real or Fake.

Some say you are what you eat, and in a nutritional sense there's some truth to that. But to claim that certain foods make you more or less American, religious, liberal, conservative, elitist or populist is just a bunch of bologna (unhealthy and lacking in taste). Good, healthy whole food and spices are for everyone, and artificial over-salted over-sugared food that clogs your arteries and fogs up your mind are for nobody. Well OK, there are times and places... the Thanksgiving pecan pie, the annual bar-b-que festival... when a little brain fog and indigestion is felicitous.

There's a lot of danger in applying political labels to food. That danger lies in more than our solidarity as a nation: the option of eating lunch with our co-worker without having to worry about the political or religious ramifications of our sandwich condiments. The real danger of politicizing food this way is when it takes away from the message of nutritional health, and causes people to gravitate to different camps. One camp full of "elitist" food like organic strawberries, soymilk, and all sorts of ethnically seasoned delicious fresh food while another "average Joe" group stays in the fast-food and potato-chip camp.

Here, from Chick-fil-A's website, are the ingredients in their signature Chicken Sandwich. You want to label food? Here's a label for you:

Chicken (100% natural whole breast filet, seasoning [salt, monosodium glutamate, sugar, spices, paprika], seasoned coater [enriched bleached flour {bleached wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid}, sugar, salt, monosodium glutamate, nonfat milk, leavening {baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate}, spice, soybean oil, color {paprika}], milk wash [water, whole powdered egg and nonfat milk solids], peanut oil [fully refined peanut oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness and dimethylpolysiloxane an anti-foaming agent added]), bun (enriched flour [wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate {Vitamin B1}, riboflavin {Vitamin B2}, folic acid], water, high fructose corn syrup, yeast, contains 2% or less of each of the following: liquid yeast, soybean oil, nonfat milk, salt, wheat gluten, soy flour, dough conditioners [may contain one or more of the following: mono- and diglycerides, calcium and sodium stearoyl lactylates, calcium peroxide], soy flour, amylase, yeast nutrients [monocalcium phosphate, calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate], calcium propionate added to retard spoilage, soy lecithin, cornstarch, butter oil [soybean oil, palm kernel oil, soy lecithin, natural and artificial flavor, TBHQ and citric acid added as preservatives, and artificial color]), pickle (cucumbers, water, vinegar, salt, lactic acid, calcium chloride, alum, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate [preservatives], natural flavors, polysorbate 80, yellow 5, blue 1).

http://www.chick-fil-a.com/Food/Menu-Detail/ChickfilA-Chicken-Sandwich#?details=ingredients 

I defy you to find sodium aluminum phosphate, TBHQ, calcium peroxide, or "yeast nutrients" in your home pantry. But that's a whole nuther blog.

Raise a glass to choosing to feed yourself, your children, and your lovers fresh healthy REAL food, and not having to label yourself in the process.

Chinese women count calories? No way.

A common morning greeting in China is "Ni mai cai qu?" meaning, are you going to buy vegetables? The Chinese character cai means vegetable; it also means dish of food.*  The phrase stems from a typical thousand-year tradition of going to the vegetable and fruit market first thing in the morning.

For those same thousands of years, Chinese women, on average, stayed slim by American standards, but they didn't carry calorie counters or apps and they didn't start meals with the words "I shouldn't be eating this". I used to sit down to meals a lot with a Chinese grad student I shared my house with last year. "You eat less than me" Linfen would say, though clearly my waist was not as slender as hers.

It is true, she'd come to breakfast ravenous, and sit down with her son to steaming bowls of noodles, egg and greens. For lunch and dinner, mother and child got a bowl of rice, and they ate each bite with fresh cooked greens or bok choy, daikon radish, eggplant, meat, and fish. Tantalizing aromas rose from each dish. Neither showed much interest in sweet desserts.

Their "secret"? An entire food philosophy based on nourishment, balance, flavor, and knowing when they were hungry. And finally, not being expected to count calories or eat a certain portion. "You don't eat soup?" Linfen asked me one day about 2 months in. Yes, we do... I make soup sometimes, I replied. "Whenever there is a group meal there is always soup in the center of the table," she tells me. She tries to explain about yin and yang and the importance of warming foods.

(I cooked snow peas, yellow squash, and corn in a bean-paste with a TBSP of canola oil and then 1 TBSP each water + sweet hoisin sauce.)

I try often to re-create the aromas and Asian-style nourishment my friend brought to our kitchen. I'm not counting calories, I'm eyeballing nutrition. I'm balancing. I never knew Zen would make its way into our evening meal. But I'm glad it has.

_________________________________________________________

Here's a good recipe from Yummly. Notice the balance of flavors 

in the little chart. You can leave out the cornstarch... 

it's not supposed to be a thick sauce.

* from whythechinesedontcountcalories

5 Mistaken Beliefs, Part 2

In the previous post, the Bountiful Bite exposed the first three of 5 mistaken beliefs about eating better and losing weight.  I nabbed the headlines from Forbes.com’s 5 Mistaken Business Leader’s Beliefs, and magically applied them to your own business of shedding unwanted body fat or slimming down and getting in better shape. 

 These last two "Mistaken Beliefs" are ingrained beliefs we all struggle with. We get duped by force of habit. Why shouldn’t you

1.      4.  Believe That Because Everybody has always Done it This Way, It is the Best Way of Doing Things?

­Forbes gave a business example. Do you know why newspapers were always printed on large tabloid paper? Because in 1712 England, newspapers were taxed by the number of pages. But it wasn’t until about 2005 that American newspapers started cutting down their paper size.  For 300 years newspaper printers did what had always been done, even though it was costly and cumbersome.

Why do we order a big bacon, egg, and muffin breakfast at the hotel? Why do we have ice-cream every night in the summer? Sure, it tastes good, but we know it makes us fat. Yet, your neighbors eat this way, the server at the restaurant encourages it, your grandma always served it, and colonial farmers ate bacon with a big breakfast. Never mind that the colonials burned thousands of calories farming, building houses, and keeping warm, the server gets a bigger tip the more food he sells you, and grandma has heart disease.

Sometimes the standard way is not the best way.

2.      5.   Believe the Customer?

Forbes: “these people are already your customer; sure they are going to be satisfied with you.” They suggested business marketers talk to people who aren’t already customers.

You may be your own worst customer! I know I’m guilty of this. I love to drink coffee, and when I hear something beneficial about caffeine, I feel vindicated. When I hear something negative about caffeine, I tend to dismiss it as “pseudo-science” or consider myself immune to the negative effects. It took numerous messages to convince me to ever ask for decaf.

So, be a little a skeptical about your own dietary mythology. We’d all like to continue consuming what we’re used to, ignoring warnings about pesticide build-up in our bodies. We’d like to believe that the diet that lets us eat our favorite food (or junk calories) every day is the one that really works and makes us healthy. But we are the gasoline customer and the car. And when we fuel our engines with sodas, toxins and non-nourishing food, they’re going to sputter and break down.  It’s helpful to reach beyond the “customer” within you.

Read the Forbes business post here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/freekvermeulen/2011/05/30/five-mistaken-beliefs-business-leaders-have-about-innovation/