The Normalization of Snacking: BMI = 27.0

Canadians now snack so much that few people sit down to three square meals in a day anymore. Stopping my snacking behavior was probably the most difficult part of my dietary rehab. Now that I no longer snack, I really notice just how often people around me snack, and how often snack and/or take-out food is shown in movies and series.

I recently watched an episode of a cop show from the 70’s. The detectives spent a lot of time with coffee cups in their hands, but no one was eating. I watched a few more episodes and finally saw an old detective eating a lunch that he had brought to work in a brown paper bag. When is the last time you saw a workmate show up with a brown bag lunch?

I decided to watch an episode of a much more recent cop show. In the first episode I picked, the cliché of cops talking about a case while eating from Chinese take-out containers popped up. This sort of scene really is cliché now but would have been very out of place just 30 years ago. It’s not just cops, though, because even the bad guys seem to need snacks to plan a robbery. I recently watched Ocean’s Eleven and noticed Brad Pitt snacking throughout the movie.

These big bags of snack chips should be for a family or guests to share. I have to wonder how many of those bags get eaten by a single person in one evening. I know I’ve wolfed down a party-sized bag of snack-mix in an evening but at least I was embarrassed about it. These days you can open a giant bag of snack chips and leave them by your monitor to graze on all day at work and no one seems to think that is strange at all.

The snack food aisle is just for the salty snacks, though, because the cookies get an aisle of there own in the middle of the store.

Even the breakfast aisle is turning into a third snack food aisle. This section used to be for granola bars, but now there is more chocolate and caramel than grains to be found here. It’s not hard to see that the snack food market is the fastest growing segment of the food industry.

The baked goods section offers us some more snacks. One of my favorites used to be the one-bite brownies – I would finish the bag in an afternoon, one bite at a time.

The yoghurt aisle is the snack food aisle for people who don’t want to admit they are snacking. Hey, look, there’s some real fruit in some of that yoghurt.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to totally trash talk snacks. I just find it amazing that around half of the grocery store stock is now snack oriented food. The major problem with snacking is that it’s easy to not remember everything you ate in a day if you spent all day snacking and didn’t sit down for a meal. If you have a snacking problem, try taking a photo of everything you eat in a day. You might not like looking back on those albums but they might help you realize just how fast snacks can add up.

Tried a Weight Loss Diet: BMI = 27.2

I’ve been consistently shedding about a pound per week for the last several months, but I decided to see if I could speed things up. It’s summertime, so fruit prices have dropped, and I thought I would switch my breakfast core over from grains to fruit. I’ve done this before, and it didn’t work, so I have no idea why I thought it would work this time.

I dropped my hot cereal and began loading up on fruit in the morning. I also dropped a serving of grain from my other meals and increased my veggie intake. By the end of the first week, I realized that I wasn’t losing any weight at all. That’s when I decided to do a little experiment.

I started eating a big bowl of pasta with meat sauce in the middle of the day. It wasn’t the best choice in grains because I didn’t have whole grain pasta on hand, but I wanted to keep eating lots of fruit for breakfast and it seemed that I had to find a way fit some grain back into my diet.

The meat sauce is rather high in fat and I also often topped my pasta with a bunch of cheese. Well, second week of eating all that fruit for breakfast but with a big bowl of pasta in the middle of the day and my weight has started dropping again.

I think I’m going to go back to having a grain-heavy breakfast. I’m going to try to eat more fruit than what I was previously eating but a low-grain diet just doesn’t work for me. Why do I keep messing around with a plan that has been working?

Binge Eating: BMI = 27.4

Yes, I was a binge-eater. Yes, I felt ashamed about it. I tried so hard to control my eating but several nights a week I just couldn’t take it anymore and I found myself across the street buying a double pack of double cheeseburgers or a large bag of snack mix. If I managed to control myself until the corner store closed, I often wound up making a chicken nugget sandwich.

I used to source my proteins from the discount freezer at the discount grocery store. These nuggets are very unhealthy. Almost half the calories come from fat, less than 16% of the calories come from protein, and the rest come from highly refined carbs and dextrose. By the time I slammed 4 nuggets into a sandwich with red onion and mayonnaise, my late night ‘snack’ would deliver around 700 calories, with half of those calories coming from fat. Did I mention that I often made a second, and occasionally a third sandwich? On nights when I ate a third one I would roll around in bed half the night feeling sick.

So why did I do it? I now know that I did it because I was starving. I had become so conditioned to high calorie-density food that I became averse to low calorie-density food like vegetables. Vegetables are very nutrient dense, but that doesn’t appeal to someone who is conditioned to eating a lot of comfort food. Without proper nutrition, I found losing weight to be impossible. Intellectually I knew what the problem was but emotionally I just couldn’t face up to it. Rather than correcting my diet, I just tried to starve myself all day – although I rarely succeeded.

I felt most in control in the morning, so I would skip breakfast. I would go as long as I could without eating and when I finally couldn’t take it anymore I typically grabbed a slice of pizza or some poutine at work. Having broken down and eaten something that was unhealthy, I just kind of said ‘screw it’ and spent the rest of the day nibbling on cheese, stray fries, and other calorie dense food – but I avoided having a meal because I was trying not to eat.

It was almost impossible for me to avoid the corner store as I arrived home, so I would try to limit myself to one pepperoni stick or maybe a small can of soda. I still refused to eat a meal even though I was still snacking on unhealthy food. By the time the corner store was closing, my willpower was eroded. It’s not as though my stomach was rumbling and my blood sugar was low – but I had spent all day trying, and failing, to avoid eating anything significant.

I now eat very substantial, yet healthy, meals. In an earlier post I discussed the importance of breakfast. For me, binge-eating was a side effect of skipping meals and trying not to eat. It was also the result of letting myself become conditioned to eating only high calorie-density foods and averse to nutrient-rich foods like vegetables. I had to put myself through a dietary rehab to learn to eat properly again. Everyone who has told me that they are a binge-eater has also admitted to skipping meals; most people brag about it, starting their sentence with, “Well, ALL I ate yesterday was...”

Eat for your health rather than starving for your vanity.

Reverse Aging: BMI = 27.4

I ran into an old workmate today who told me I look ten years younger. The last time I saw her was about seven months ago when my BMI was around 31.5. I dug up a selfie from around the time we last met and pasted in a selfie from today. I believe I do look ten years younger. I’m glad I started adding a decimal point to my BMI in this blog because it allows me to see progress on a weekly basis.

It pains me a bit that I am still overweight and that I likely won’t get my BMI under 25 before Christmas this year – but then I remember where I started, with a BMI of 43. I’ve defeated Class III Obesity, Class II Obesity, and Class I obesity. I can look back over the numbers and see that even though my weight loss has slowed down, I’m still making progress and can realistically expect to be thin within a year.

The years of trying to starve myself, only to end up snacking all day and then binge-eating most nights, are over. All I need to do is keep eating healthy, substantial meals to keep the unhealthy cravings from coming back. At some point I might lose focus and start gaining weight again but if that happens then at least I’ll know what to do about it.

Apple Cider Vinegar: BMI = 27.6

While there is a little evidence that apple cider vinegar may offer some modest health benefits, it is not a magical elixir that is going to melt off belly-fat. Whatever you do, do NOT start slamming apple cider vinegar shooters. Drinking undiluted vinegar can erode tooth enamel, and possibly even damage the soft tissues of the mouth and esophagus. Also, don’t go ordering apple cider vinegar tablets over the internet because a study of these products has revealed that they are of unreliable quality and many may not even contain apple cider vinegar.

My primary use for apple cider vinegar is making vinaigrettes. Since cutting most added sugars out of my diet, I have found that I crave more acidity in my food. I make my own vinaigrettes to avoid, or at least control, added sugars in my diet. Most prepared mustard doesn’t have any added sugar, and neither does Huy Fong Sambal Oelek. I keep an assortment of vinegars, mustards, and hot sauces around because they are guilt-free flavour enhancers. Some mustards and hot sauces are quite high in salt, but I’m only using them as condiments, not as primary ingredients in my meals.

You can make a great, sugar-free coleslaw with vinegar, oil, and some Mrs. Dash. Add a little sugar if you need it, but if you cut back on added sugars in your diet, over time, you just might find your tastes change enough that you no longer need sugar in your coleslaw.

I also like to marinade cucumbers and red onion in apple cider vinegar.

I’ve read claims that apple cider vinegar helps regulate digestion to avoid blood sugar spikes in people with onset diabetes, but none of those claims was backed up with a link to a scientific study. The best way to avoid spikes in blood sugar is to avoid foods that have sugar added and to source your carbs, instead, from whole grains.

Generic white vinegar is part of my fitness regime, but only because I refuse to give a gym my banking information. Pick up a couple jugs and use them in a home workout if you want vinegar to help you get fit.

Balanced Meal: BMI = 27.8

Preparing a healthy, balanced meal can be quite simple. In fact, you don’t even need to know how to cook. For lunch or dinner, I like to start with a cup and a half to two cups of chopped veggies. Make sure to include a dark green veggie and an orange veggie like carrot or butternut squash. I typically start with broccoli, carrot, red bell pepper, radish, tomato, snow peas, cucumber, and red onion. That’s it – no cooking required.

For protein I buy ready-cooked, roasted meat. This week I’ve been eating chicken. I bought a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store and simply deboned it and kept all the meat in reserve.

Chop up 3 ounces of ready-cooked meat and toss that on top of the veggies.

I make a vinaigrette with grapeseed oil, mustard, and apple cider vinegar. Usually I throw some Sambal in there but whatever I do I never add any sugar or honey.

Add some vinaigrette to your meal.

For whole grains, I like crisp bread. There are several varieties and they crunch up to make great croutons. So, top that salad up with freshly crumbled crisp bread to fill out this balanced meal with some carbs that will keep you full to the next meal.

So that’s it. Set the table and make sure to choose good, old-fashioned water as your beverage.

Nutrition Labels: BMI = 27.9

When my diet was at it’s worst, I dreaded reading nutrition labels. Learning to objectively evaluate the nutrition of my food was a difficult yet necessary step. Today I grabbed three boxes of healthy-looking cereals. Even now, it takes me a while to evaluate the labels. For this reason, I usually just look at the ingredients and avoid anything that has any form of sugar added to it. The problem with the above labels is they give the nutritional values for tiny portions that aren’t nearly enough to fill me up until lunch. The box on the left suggests a 160-calorie breakfast. Give me a break! I eat about 600 calories at breakfast. Even if I chose the box on the right, I would need to either eat two servings or grab a muffin on my way to work. The ingredients are mostly visible for the box in the middle and reveal sugar, corn syrup, honey, molasses, dried cane syrup, malt extract, and monoglycerides. That’s seven sources of sugar. Nope. The worst part is that the middle box is the least sugary. It has 10 grams of sugar in a 210 calories serving. Remember that sugar is 4 calories per gram. That means that 40 of the 210 calories (19%) are derived from sugar.

My Red River cereal has no added sugars, so a 140-calorie serving has a mass of 180 grams – a LOT more than the meager 50-gram portions for the above cereals. That kind of bulkiness sticks to my ribs and helps me avoid snacking. I’ve already posted about all the other things I eat at breakfast in my last entry so I’ll forego rehashing that here and move back onto labels.

I tend to avoid breaded foods like this – even though there are cooking instructions to reheat them in the oven. The problem is that, in most cases, the fat content is as high as for a deep-fried version of the same dish. The 11 grams of fat in the suggested portion constitutes 99 calories (9 calories for each gram of fat). Those 99 calories are almost half the 220 calories in the serving. I’m not trying to go super low on my fat intake but I avoid eating anything that derives more than 30% of it’s calories from fat.

Here’s a meal that doesn’t contain much fat or sugar – but also doesn’t contain much food. At 190 calories, I’m going to need to eat 2 or 3 of these things to get full and by the time I do that I’ll have had 42 to 63 percent of my fat intake for the whole day in just one meal.

Yum! A pound of mac’n’cheese! At 510 calories this is a full meal but, sadly, it is spiked with 55% of a day’s worth of salt. I avoid meals that have more than 30% of daily salt requirement. I’m not very concerned with the 18 grams of fat, but the fact that nearly half of that fat is saturated or trans fat isn’t good. This meal doesn’t claim to be healthy though, only to be a satisfying and delicious meal. I believe that claim but will look for something healthier.

Oh no, here’s the info on the snack mix that I used to wolf-down. They suggest a 50-gram serving and that wouldn’t kill me. What was killing me was that I would plow through a 280-gram bag in about an hour just before bed. That meant 1400 calories, 72 grams of fat, and 2520 mg of sodium as a bed-time snack. Ouch. After trying to starve myself all day, though, I couldn’t resist.

Stouffers calls this a ‘fit bowl’. At 340 calories, I think it is a bit shy of being a full meal. Having 24 grams of protein and yet only 8 grams of fat, I tend to agree that this bowl is fit. It isn’t loaded with sugar and has only 1/3rd of daily salt intake. It isn’t a low sodium meal, but at least it isn’t totally spiked with salt. The rice is whole grain, and there are black beans. I’ll have to stretch this meal out a bit, but I decided to buy it.

I decided to add some hulled barley, low-sodium chicken broth, and about a cup of chopped carrot and broccoli. That will bring the above meal up over 500 calories, double the whole grains, and ensure I’m getting enough veggies.

I cooked my barley in the lower part of my steamer and then put the ‘fit bowl’ in the top to heat it up.

With a little Sambal, this turned into a great and really filling meal.