Health Food Can Also Make You Fat

My client Jackie was a “health nut.” She shopped only in the health food store and bought organic foods. She ate a  vegetarian diet, took loads of vitamins, and preached (to anyone who would listen) about the virtues of eating “pure and healthy.” Yet, at thirty-four years old she was 55 pounds overweight. Jackie ate plenty of “health foods.” 
The problem was that she ate them to excess. Many foods give the appearance of being healthy, but actually pack in quite a few calories, fats, and carbohydrates— just stroll down the aisle at Whole Foods or Wild Oats, and really examine some of the food labels. You may be a little surprised by what you discover. For Jackie, the calories added up, and the pounds followed. When she came to me, she didn’t want to hear about any of that “mumbo-jumbo behavior stuff.” She was a perfect example of someone who had detached herself emotionally from her eating problems. Looking at her behavior was still too painful! Instead, she insisted that weight control was only about food and blamed her extra pounds on a slow metabolism and 12-hour shifts at the hospital where she worked. Jackie constantly citied studies from the latest news headlines: “nuts are healthy”; “a recent study shows that eating a slice of pizza once per day can lower your risk of certain cancers”; “chocolate may ward off heart disease”— and the list goes on. In reality, however, she was simply eating too much of the “right” foods, and some of the “wrong” foods as well. She used olive oil to stir-fry her foods, but the food was swimming in oil. Yes, there have been studies to show that some of the foods she was eating have health benefits, but they still have calories. To Jackie, however, reading that a slice of pizza once a day can lower the risk of certain cancers affirmed her desire to have a slice— and not once in a while, but every day. 
We solved Jackie’s eating problem by making her aware that eating natural or healthy foods doesn’t necessarily help you lose weight. People often confuse eating “health foods”— foods”— with eating healthily in order to lose weight and be healthy. When I showed Jackie the following information about some of the “healthy” foods she was eating excessively, she was finally able to understand that she was eating well— but eating too well.

Health Food Can Also Make You Fat

Rice Cakes
Believe it or not, these are still very popular among dieters. Their taste has improved over the years, but to me rice cakes are still the closest thing to flavored cardboard with calories. The food label of Hain’s Honey Nut Rice Cakes says that 1 cake is 50 calories, 0g fat, and 11g carbs— but how many of them do we really eat? Don’t get me wrong— if you compare rice cakes to a bag of potato chips, they’re definitely better. The problem is that rice cakes are not nutrient dense, which means you don’t get a lot, nutritionally-speaking, for your consumption, and you will most likely remain hungry.

• Quaker Nacho Cheese Crispy Mini’s (9 mini cakes): 70 calories, 2.5g fat, 11g carbs
• Quaker Chocolate Crunch Rice Cakes (1 cake): 60 calories, 1g fat, 12g carbs
• Lundberg Nutra-Farmed Brown Rice Cake (1 cake): 70 calories, 0g fat, 15g carbs
• Lundberg Nutra-Farmed Buttery Caramel Rice Cake (1 cake): 80 calories, 0.5g fat, 18g carbs 

 Frozen Yogurt
Yogurt has gained a reputation for being a healthy food for a variety of reasons, including improved digestion, prevention of intestinal infection, and reinforcement of immune function. But, regardless of the truth of these claims, we can’t ignore the fact that frozen yogurt still contains calories and quite a lot of sugar. And since many of us eat way too many calories as it is, any potential benefits from eating too much yogurt may be negated by the increased health risk of being overweight. In fact, frozen yogurt, which is typically on a dieter’s shopping list, may not have the same health benefits as regular yogurt, and in terms of calories, it is often closer to ice cream than yogurt. Nonfat frozen yogurt might seem like a blessing, but just because it doesn’t have fat doesn’t mean it’s calorie-free. Nonfat frozen yogurt can still contain plenty of calories and carbohydrates. When manufacturers cut fat in a product, they need to come up with some way to keep the flavor, which often means adding additional sugar. Check the labels on low fat products in your supermarket, and you’ll notice the trend.

• Haagen-Dazs Strawberry Cheesecake Frozen Yogurt (1 cup): 460 calories, 12g fat, 72g carbs
• Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked Frozen Yogurt (1 cup): 420 calories, 7g fat, 78g carbs (a bit better than their Half Baked Ice Cream counterpart which has 560 calories, 28g fat, 68g carbs per cup)
• Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie Low Fat Frozen Yogurt (1 cup): 380 calories, 5g fat, 72g carbs
• Edy’s Heath Toffee Crunch Frozen Yogurt (1 cup): 240 calories, 8g fat, 36g carbs Also, keep an eye on yogurt-covered snacks; some varieties are more like candies in disguise!
• 1 cup yogurt peanuts: 921 calories, 63g fat, 72g carbs • 1 cup yogurt covered raisins: 750 calories, 22 g fat, 139g carbs
• 1 cup yogurt covered pretzels: 391 calories, 14 g fat, 61g carbs

Veggie Chips
Amazingly, some of these snacks taste great— even better than the some of the so-called fattening ones— but there’s a reason why. Most of the time you may save a few calories or fat grams, but in the long run, you may end up eating foods you would never normally eat at all. For instance, I really like Stacy’s Simply Naked Baked Pita Chips, which are just slightly lower in calories and fat than potato chips. However, I would never eat potato chips in the first place, and with these, I find myself eating at least half the bag— about 390 calories, 12g fat, and 54g carbs. That’s the equivalent of eating 3 bananas or 5 apples— but at least with the fruit, you get some real health benefits, and also feel more satisfied. Then there are those Terra Chips. They look so healthy, packaged beautifully, and again, they are lower in calories than potato chips, but are they REALLY good for you? Just 1 ounce contains 140 calories, 7g fat, and 18g carbs— but have you ever heard that advertisement, “Bet you can’t eat just one? “ It may not be for Terra Chips, but the advertisement still hits the nail on the head.

• Good Health Veggie Stix (3 oz): 420 calories, 21g fat, 54g carbs
• Pirate’s Booty (3 oz): 384 calories, 15g fat, 54g carbs
• Kettle Five Grain Yellow Corn Tortilla Chips (3 oz): 420 calories, 18g fat, 54g carbs
• Kettle Organic Sweet Brown Rice & Black Bean Tortilla Chips (3 oz): 360 calories, 18g fat, 48g carbs

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The Food Audit: A Three-Day Challenge

The Food Audit: A Three-Day Challenge
Simply by eating one extra tablespoon of mayonnaise each day you will end up gaining about 10 pounds in a year— and the reverse is also true. Just by cutting out one tablespoon of mayonnaise, you can lose 10 pounds in a year.

Even your smallest food choices matter more than you might ever have thought. 
Therefore, the first thing you need to do to create a livable diet is to accept my Three-Day Food Challenge. I challenge you to take a good hard look at what you eat every day for three full days. The goal: to audit your food choices by keeping track of what you normally eat. Doing that is how you will discover the clues that will allow you to start creating a diet that works. I highly recommend that you write everything down in the notebook I’ve asked you to get, but if you’re not willing to do that (or you don’t have your notebook with you) just write on a scrap of paper, or even on the palm of your hand if you have to. Just write it down. I suspect you’ve probably been asked to keep a food diary before, and the very idea of it may be a real turn-off, but this is just for three days, and the pay-off will be worth any inconvenience, I assure you.

The Food Audit A Three-Day Challenge

I realize, however, that not everyone will be willing to do that. So if you’re really opposed to doing my Three-Day Challenge, writing everything down, either because you want to start implementing changes right now, or because you simply don’t think you need to, well that’s okay (at least for now). In that case, do the Alternative Three-Day Challenge: Try writing down everything you ate in the past three days from memory. (Keep in mind, however, that people typically underreport what they eat by about 50%, so overestimate your portions sizes by about that amount; more on this later.) Either way, you can use the sample food diary and instructions in Appendix A to help you get started.


A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words 
The New York Times has reported that a writer named Tucker Shaw has been photographing every single thing that he eats. He labels the photos with the date, time, place, and food. He’s doing it to create an historical record, but what a great idea as a way to keep a three-day food diary. If you don’t want to write it down, use a small digital camera (or even a disposable camera) to take photos of every single thing you eat for three days. Make sure to put down the date, time, place, food, and mood.

The problem with trying to keep a mental list is that your mind can play tricks on you, and you might just “forget” the little snacks you grabbed on the run, the candy you took off your office mate’s desk, or whatever else it might be that you really didn’t want to remember. And writing things down will also give you a permanent record to consult when you begin the negotiating process.
Also, keep in mind that while you’re taking either Challenge, you don’t change your eating habits just yet; all you should be doing is becoming aware and keeping track of them. If you start to change what you eat just because you’re “noticing” it, you won’t be creating a realistic starting point.

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Creating A Livable Eating Program

The most important factor to consider when you begin to think about creating a livable diet is accommodating your own individual food preferences and your personality when it comes to food. If you don’t do that, you’ll be feeling deprived, you’ll be suffering, and you won’t stick to the diet you’ve chosen because it won’t be satisfying. In fact, the Journal of Nutrition reports that taste is the single most important reason people choose the foods they do, and that this is also an important factor for regulating “hunger, satiety, and voluntary food intake.” That finding is supported by the work of Lisa Sanders, M.D., a researcher from Yale University who has determined that finding your own food preference is a key factor in satisfying hunger and the diet’s success. 

Creating A Livable Eating Program

As we’ve previously discussed, most diet programs are prescriptive; they ask you to follow their program, which works great in the short term. But once you get tired of their program, you go back to your program. And your program of choosing what, when, and how much to eat doesn’t work. So what you’re going to do is come up with food choices that are acceptable to you, that you think you can live with. It’s going to be a negotiation process, but unlike most bargaining situations, you will not be negotiating with another person but with yourself.

Here’s an illustration of how you’ll be negotiating with yourself and still remain within your comfort zone.

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Confidence and self-esteem

Self-esteem is a key indicator of psychological wellbeing. People with high self-esteem tend to have high life satisfaction, resilience and greater achievement in education and work. On the other hand low self-esteem tends to be associated with mental illness, anxiety and hopelessness. Self-esteem can be defined as the sum of a person’s perceptions of their competence in several areas of their life; for example, academic, emotional, social and physical. Of these areas the physical aspect of self-esteem (i.e. one’s competence regarding stamina, strength, sport ability and body attractiveness) has been shown to have a strong influence on overall self-esteem.

Physical activity is a behaviour which has a strong influence on physical self-esteem and a smaller but significant influence on overall self-esteem. Studies have found that people who participate in physical activity typically have greater physical and overall self-esteem. This relationship has been found in children, adolescents, young adults, adults and older people, and across both males and females.
A review of 113 physical activity studies found three factors that influenced how much impact physical activity interventions have on a person’s self-esteem. The greatest gains in self-esteem occurred for people who initially had low self-esteem, those whose fitness increased during the intervention, and those who were active on more days per week. All types of physical activity were equally effective at increasing self-esteem. Overall the researchers concluded from their review that physical activity interventions which aim to increase self-esteem should include physical activity that is moderately demanding and lasts for 12 weeks or more.

As all types of physical activity have been found to be equally effective, people should choose a type of physical activity based on what they enjoy doing. Another important factor to consider when using physical activity to enhance self-esteem is that physical activity should provide opportunities to experience feelings of accomplishment. Physical activity goals should be set so that they are achievable and result in feelings of success. For this to be achieved the duration, type, intensity and frequency of physical activity in any programme should be set in relation to an individual’s physical fitness and previous physical activity experience.

Confidence and self-esteem

Dementia and cognitive decline in older people:
Increasing life expectancy and a growing population of people aged over 65 has led to an increase in the number of people living with dementia and cognitive decline. Dementia affects some 800,000 people in the UK, and the number of people with the condition is steadily increasing because people are living longer. It is estimated that by 2020, the number of people with dementia in the UK will have increased to around one million. With no known cure, ways to improve the lives of those living with the condition are vital.
The main symptom of dementia is memory loss; it is a progressive disease which results in people becoming more impaired over time. Decline in cognitive functions such as attention and concentration also occurs in older people, including those who do not go on to develop dementia.
Physical activity can protect people against developing dementia and for people who have already developed the disease can delay further declines in functioning.
Studies show that adults participating in daily physical activity have a 20-30% lower risk for dementia. Physical activity also seems to reduce the likelihood of experiencing cognitive decline in people who do not go on to develop dementia.

Exercise throughout a person’s life plays a significant role in reducing the risk of developing dementia, a study spanning 35 years has found. The Cardiff University study, which began with 2,235 men from Caerphilly in 1979, found factors including diet and not smoking had an impact on preventing illnesses developing in older age. However, exercise had the single biggest influence on dementia levels. People in the study who fulfilled four of these factors had a 60% decrease in dementia and cognitive decline rates, with exercise named as the strongest mitigating factor. The study was funded by the Medical Research Council, the Alzheimer’s Society and the British Heart Foundation.

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