Diet and Exercise

Daily Dose of Diet – Popcorn

Diet and Exercise, Health and Wellness, Kid Talk /

TW’s least favorite scent in the world is burnt popcorn. Michelle’s favorite scent is popcorn. When Michelle is here, our house smells like cat litter (we have too many darn cats) and stinky dog (we have one who is old and deaf and blind and incontinent but otherwise too healthy to go wherever dogs who are done here go) and popcorn.

Michelle eats popcorn twice a day. It’s her food of choice, which is good since she has two moms who rarely cook. That’s how you know Michelle is living here, the scent of popcorn. When she lived with her dad for nine months in 2003-2004, there was a serious lack of popcorn scent and I was sad. She came back… popcorn scent… life was good. She’s been gone for NINE LONG WEEKS and we’ve made popcorn just twice. I miss popcorn. It masks the scent of the animals and reminds me of Michelle. Oops, I got off track, didn’t I?

Folks trying to lose weight often like popcorn almost as much as Michelle. It’s low calorie and if you don’t smother it in butter or oil or salt like at the movie theater then it’s a pretty healthy choice. And it can be a real lifesaver for folks trying to lose weight who are salty snack addicts like I am. It can also be a lifesaver for people using the WLC because that program is a firm believer in the National Academy of Science recommendations that 45-65% of all calories should come from carbs.

Popcorn is good.

Which is why I said “Ugh, not again!” when I saw this article come across my aggregator. UGH, NOT AGAIN!

Last year when we ran the story about the possibilty of popcorn causing lung cancer in factory workers people zoomed in on the “popcorn” and the “lung cancer” bits and totally missed the “factory workers” part. I had teenagers and dieters in a panic. You’d have thought we were facing a national disaster!

So do me a favor please – if you hear family, friends or coworkers talking about how popcorn can cause cancer, set them straight. It MIGHT cause lung cancer in POPCORN FACTORY WORKERS and if they don’t work in a popcorn factory then they’re pretty safe. If they do, then I’d encourage them to talk to their health care professional and possibly a job placement service.

Thanks, in advance, for any help you can provide me in preventing full scale panic among our people!

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Daily Dose of Anger – Starved

Diet and Exercise, Health and Wellness, Pet Peeves, Sights & Sounds /

I was seeing posts about this “new TV show about eating disorders” mentioned on message boards I was reading and wrote a note to remind myself to check out Starved. I’m glad I waited til after I was officially finished working. Had I looked earlier, it would have ruined what has been “Nancy White Day” around here and made it very difficult for me to keep on working. I’m just that ticked off about this.

* The picture on the network page was enough to trouble me. Not funny.
* Watch the preview clip. A man obsessing over the scale, an anorexic man, maybe the fact that he’s a man is supposed to take the edge off since most people don’t associate anorexia with men? Whatever, not funny.
* Then, we see him eating chocolate cake out of the trash, confessing to his support group and we see a woman in his support group say “If you were a dog, I’d kick you in the face.” Not funny (and where are the PETA people???)

There is NOTHING funny about this, nothing funny about eating disorders. Imagine all of the people out there who are hiding their eating disorders, it is a well hidden illness, having to sit through this show while their family members laugh. All of those people suffering in silence because they are afraid to tell people who love them. Those people won’t be laughing and they won’t find it any easier to tell once the first episode is over.

I don’t generally encourage people to boycott television shows or write to networks but today I am. Join the NEDA and tell these people what you think.

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Daily Dose of Diet – Memory

Diet and Exercise, Foodie, Memories /

TW says I have to blog about this and since she listened to me and blogged about gnomedex vs blogher, I will take her suggestion. I guess.

Is There a False Food-Memory Diet?

People develop food preferences as children and their food memories often determine their choices as adults. Well ummm, yea, that’s why the phrase comfort food actually means something to most people, right? This part of the study makes sense. What doesn’t make sense to me as what kind of students are these that would look at fake survey results, surveys they filled out, and not realize something was wonky here? I don’t think I could adopt a memory as my own based on a survey result paper handed back to me from some grad student or something. I’d need my mother to tell me some long drawn out story about my strawberry ice cream illness (would you like me to tell you about canned Franco American Macaroni & Cheese, cause that’s a memory I’ve got about food and illness…).

I am just not buying it that these students didn’t choose ice cream on the follow up simply because they decided to believe a piece of paper was true even though they didn’t have a vivid memory or a mom telling them that this was what happened. You notice they still chose chocolate chip cookies, right? Could it be that strawberry ice cream simply isn’t all that popular of a dessert item, especially not next to chocolate chip cookies which probably hold a lot more positive and REAL childhood memories than some fake strawberry ice cream memory?

This study goes further and suggests that students selected asparagus (on a form, they didn’t serve these kids actual food – they’re college students who may be starving and will in reality eat almost anything generally) because they were given fake positive childhood memories. Couldn’t it just be that 20 year olds have grown up and actually had a decently cooked asparagus rather than some floppy and soggy thing from a can that they’d been served in childhood?

I think it probably is possible to give people false childhood food memories over time and/or through hypnosis but by handing them back a fake survey that they supposedly completed themselves? That just makes no sense.

And besides, if this did work, would you really want to trade off 25lbs of fat for the loss of real memories and live your life with false ones? There really are better ways to lose weight, trust me, I know these things.

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Daily Dose of Exercise (or is it diet?)

Diet and Exercise /

According to this article from WebMD, Drop in Physical Activity in Adolescence May Promote Childhood Obesity, it’s not the calories taken in, it’s the calories not burned.

I really hate studies like this, or maybe what I hate is the articles that report them because I don’t have time or energy to go and track down the full study and see what REALLY happened.

I am just not buying the idea that it’s only a lack of exercise and not a combination of diet and lack of exercise. Actually, I’m not buying that it isn’t an overall change in lifestyle.

The teen years are the years when kids take more control over their food. They’re in the cupboards after school and they’re choosing “interesting” lunches while at school. They’re hanging out at the mall or the corner coffee shop and they are definitely taking in a different TYPE of calories. That’s GOT to play a role.

I believe, generally speaking, that the way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you eat and I’m generally of the belief that the TYPE of calories doesn’t much matter. BUT, I have my limits there.

If my teen daughter ate 500 calories worth of fast food and friend ate 500 calories worth of fruits and vegetables and both were just as “sedentary” I fully believe that after 6 months of that, my daughter would no longer be skin and bones.

And let’s take that further. Let’s pretend M ate 500 calories worth of fast food AND got a wee bit of exercise. She likes to skateboard; she occasionally does some Tae Bo and might even do some yoga. Let’s pretend that her pal still at 500 calories worth of veggies and fruit and just sat back and watched M… I don’t think we’d see the pal gaining weight anyway and I’m not sure we’d see M holding her own. All of that fat, all of those simple carbohydrates and all of the sugar have to be processed differently by the body – both when hanging on to create fat and then again when being burned by exercise.

Articles like this and studies like this just drive me nuts. It’s not as simple as saying “teen girls aren’t getting any exercise” and tada there’s the answer to childhood obesity.

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Daily Dose of Diet

Diet and Exercise, Foodie, Health and Wellness /

I suppose it’s fitting that I kick off the first REAL daily dose with a dose of diet. And a troubling dose it is…

Both McDonald’s and Burger King have some marketing folks that I’d like a word with. TW and I have succumbed to their skills twice in the last five days, that might be ok for the normal American but we are vegetarians. Not the PETA nutty type or the Health nutty type, but yukky tummy type.

I’ve got a history of disordered eating and TW went on a diet altering trip to Italy where the furry meat would put anyone off carnivorous behavior for life, not to mention she has ulcerative colitis which makes tummy trouble really troubling.

What’s really troubling about our forays into fast food, besides the tummy troubles, is that we didn’t even GET the Amazon gift card we went for (they ran out!)and TW got a measly pet pet toy that isn’t worth the $2.75 we paid for the Happy Meal!

Someday we will learn to ignore those marketing people, won’t we?

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