Eat Out Eat Well

Calorie Tips, Healthy Eating, Food Facts

What Should I Eat?

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What Do I Want To Eat?

What Do I Want To Eat?  That’s a question we all ask ourselves.  Including me.  A lot. Standing in front of the fridge with the door open.  Staring at the shelves in the pantry.  In front of the deli case.  Trying to decipher a menu.  With no clear idea, the danger zone looms setting  up the perfect scenario for being easily swayed by all kinds of food that, perhaps, is not really the best for you.

What Should I Eat?

Then there’s the other question — one I get asked all the time as a weight management coach:  “What SHOULD I eat?”

What’s the answer?

Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have a specific one.  I can’t tell you, or my clients, what to eat. That’s your personal decision. What I can and do say is that deprivation doesn’t work.  Certainly not for long lasting and healthy weight loss and maintenance.  Restriction and deprivation mean a pendulum swing – restriction on one end and indulgence on the other.  How many times have you foregone a food that you love only to gorge on it when you hit an emotional low and toss resolve out the window. Constant dieting doesn’t work either.  It messes with your metabolism, and because dieting, by its very nature, means deprivation.  A healthy lifestyle is an essential component of long-term weight management.

What can you do to get out of the dieting cycle and manage your weight?

There’s no way around it:  the formula is energy taken in (calories) should equal energy output (physical movement and metabolism).  If you eat more calories than you use up, you gain weight.  To maintain your weight, your energy (calorie) intake and caloric expenditure (activity and metabolism) have to be in balance.  An imbalance means you either gain weight or lose weight.

Don’t throw in the towel just yet.  There are ways to help figure out how to eat  good and tasty food and not pack on the pounds.  Each of us has food that we feel we can’t live without and food memories that are associated with tradition, culture, and nurturing.  It’s hard to separate food for sustenance from any of these emotionally charged food behaviors.  And why should you?  Doing so certainly sounds like a set-up for discomfort and what may be taken as either lack of willpower or failure.

Some Questions To Ask Yourself

No eating strategy will work if you are not happy and physically and mentally satisfied (satisfaction can mean both feeling comfortably satiated and intellectually satisfied that you are eating well).

Armed with knowledge about what is healthy food and what is not, and what your body needs in terms of a ballpark number of calories and nutrients, here are a bunch of questions you can use to mentally evaluate your food choices – before you make them.  It sounds like a big deal, but it’s really not – you probably ask yourself some of these already.  It’s a workable system of “foodie checks and balances.”

Foodie Checks and Balances

There are a series of questions you can ask yourself when you’re contemplating your food choices. By doing this you gain valuable information to use to make you feel good and to control your weight.

  • What is my tried and true meal that can be my fallback or my go to meal for breakfast, lunch, or dinner? What type of food did I grow up with?  Did that type of eating give me energy, strength, and clarity?  There’s something to be said about eating the way our ancestors did (even if its only one or two generations ago).
  • How do I feel when I eat this food? If you feel like garbage after eating red meat or drinking a glass of milk, stay away from those foods.  Just because someone else eats them doesn’t mean you have to. A journal comes in handy so you can jot down what you eat and how you feel and look at the associations.
  • Is it delicious?  Why waste your calories on something that doesn’t taste good? Ditto for something with little or no nutritional value.  There are two sides to this coin.  Just because something is good for you doesn’t mean that it has to taste bad.  There are many ways to prepare foods.  Try a different preparation.  The other side of the coin is that maybe you’ll never like a certain food.  Who cares if it’s a nutritional superstar.  There are plenty of them.  Why eat what you don’t like.  This is not force feeding.  There are lots of delicious and healthy foods to go around.  Choose something else.  Don’t waste your nutritional budget on something that you don’t like.
  • Is it good for me?  Is it healthy?  Not “Is it good for my family, my spouse, or my friend.” As above – don’t waste your calories on something that doesn’t do anything for you. Some foods may be delicious (to you) but be downright unhealthy.  Give up on the empty and unhealthy calories.  What’s the point of eating stuff that does either nothing for you, or that may be bad for you?
  • If I eat this, how am I going to feel half an hour or an hour from now? Ever eat a big bowl of pasta at lunch and then need to prop your head up on a book to try to stay awake (or more likely, grab a monster cup of coffee).  Ever stop at a gas station on a long road trip to grab a candy bar – only to find yourself nodding off a while later?  Dangerous.  I once had pasta for dinner right before a movie and fell asleep during the trailer only to wake up when prodded by my husband and son when the movie credits were rolling.  Pasta makes me sleepy, so does candy.  What about you? Food certainly can have an effect on your levels of awareness and clarity. Learn to identify the relationship between certain foods and how your body physically and emotionally reacts to them.  Some make you sleepy, some make you crabby, some make you alert, and some give you energy.  Which foods do what for you?
  • Is this the right portion size for me? Portion control is essential for weight management.  Learn to eyeball portion sizes and commit to a personal “no seconds” policy.
  • Do I really want to eat this or am I doing it just because . . . (you supply the answer – some typical ones are: everyone else is eating it, or my kids love it, or Grandma made it, or it’s the specialty of the restaurant, or “I had a tough day, I deserve it”).

Create a habit of asking yourself these checks and balances questions when you’re faced with food choices:

  • How do I feel when I eat this food?
  • Is it delicious?
  • Is it good for me?
  • Is it healthy?
  • If I eat this, how am I going to feel half an hour or an hour from now?
  • Is this the right portion size for me?
  • Do I really want to eat this or am I doing it just because . . .?

Have A Game Plan

SocialDieter Tip: Having a game plan ready before you eat will help you stay out of harms way but also allow you to eat portion appropriate healthy and delicious meals.

The choice is yours. What are some of the questions you ask yourself before eating?

What The Heck Is The Difference Between Low Fat And Reduced Fat . . . and light, lean, and extra lean?

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The Signs Are Everywhere

How much time do you spend in the supermarket aisle confused by the labels on mayo — or yogurt — or milk?  Reduced fat, low fat, light, fat free, low in calories.  You need a spread sheet to sort out the calories and the nutritional stats.

The same thing is true on menus, in deli cases, and the little labels perched next to the choices in salad bars.  Are the calories in the low calorie tuna salad less than the calories in the reduced calorie?  Can you even believe those calligraphied labels behind the glass cases?

Check The List Of Ingredients

Most packaged food labels list ingredients in descending order by weight, not amount. The first ingredient listed has the greatest amount by weight, the last ingredient is the one with the least amount by weight.

Fatty Labels

Labels have to include the total amount of fat, saturated fat and unsaturated fat.  This carves the way for the low, reduced, and fat free categories.

  • Low fat means 3 grams of fat or less per serving (or per 100 grams of food)
  • Reduced fat means the food product contains 50% (or less) of the fat found in the regular version
  • Less fat means 25% or less fat than the comparison food
  • Fat free means the product has less than 0.5 grams of fat per serving, with no added fat or oil

Salty Labels

  • Reduced sodium means at least 75% less sodium
  • Low sodium means 140 milligrams of sodium or less per serving
  • Very low sodium means 35 milligrams of sodium or less per serving
  • Sodium free (salt free) means there is less than 5 milligrams of sodium per serving

Sweet Labels

  • Sugar free means there is less than 0.5 gram of sugar per serving
  • No sugar added means there’s no table sugar added but there may be other forms of sugar like dextrose, fructose, glucose, sucrose, maltose, or corn syrup

The Low down On Low, Light (Lite), Lean, and Reduced

  • A label that screams reduced calorie means there’s at least 25% fewer calories per serving than in the regular product
  • Low calorie means 40 calories or less per serving and less than 0.4 calories per gram of food
  • Light (fat) means 50% or less of the fat than in the regular version
  • Light (calories) means 1/3 fewer calories than the regular version
  • Lean means less than 10 grams of fat, 4.5 grams of saturated fat, and 95 mg of cholesterol in a 100 gram serving of meat, poultry or seafood
  • Extra lean means less than 5 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat, and 95 mg of cholesterol in a 100 gram serving of meat, poultry or seafood

SocialDieter Tip:

Confused by the ins and outs of labeling?  Why shouldn’t you be – it’s downright confusing.  Try to be as savvy as possible. For instance, take the reduced fat label, which means a product contains at least 25% less fat than the original version. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the reduced fat version is low fat. For instance, you buy what is labeled as a reduced fat muffin. If the fat content in the original full fat muffin is 30g, and the fat has been reduced to 15g, which, with a 50% reduction allows it to say it is reduced fat, the reduced fat muffin still has a fat content five times higher than the 3g of fat per serving that officially qualifies as low fat. The trick is to look carefully at the calorie count and fat breakdown on the nutrition label and note the numbers for each.  A check of the ingredients label will also give valuable information. Remember, these regulations are for packaged food, not prepared food like you find in salad bars and deli cases. Those foods may be labeled, but you are putting your trust in the preparer of the food to be approximately accurate (and truthful).  In New York City and other municipalities, fast and chain food outlets of a certain size must give caloric breakdowns.  The new Health Care Reform Act will require this nationwide for restaurants with more than 20 outlets.

Turn Your Nightmare Salad Into A Delicious Daydream

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If It Says Salad Does It Mean It’s Healthy?

Short answer:  No.  Maybe your salad is healthy and delicious, or maybe it’s just delicious and far from a healthy meal.

This is something I see all of the time:  You are in line at a buffet or waiting to order your meal in a cafeteria.  The person in front of you hems and haws over his or her choice – mumbling about trying to “be careful about calories.”  He or she then goes on to say, “Oh, I guess I’ll have a salad,” like it’s the best choice of “diet food” even though it’s not really what the belly and mind seem to be craving.

In the pursuit of cutting calories, the salad might be a far worse choice than, for example, a turkey or ham sandwich with mustard and veggies, or grilled chicken with veggies.

There are some very nice choices of healthy salads and there are some pretty bad choices, too.  In many cases you can do well or horribly in the same restaurant, depending on what you select to eat.

Here are some examples of fast/chain food salads — but remember that each is just one menu item.  In each restaurant you have plenty of other options.

Calorically Good To Reasonable Choices:

  • Panera Bread’s BBQ Chopped Chicken Salad, with mild BBQ sauce, no dressing (350 calories, 10g fat)
  • Wendy’s Chicken Caesar Salad with Grilled Chicken Fillet, with home-style garlic croutons (490 calories, 32g fat)
  • McDonald’s Premium Southwest Salad with Grilled Chicken, without Creamy Southwest dressing (320 calories)
  • Burger King’s Tendergrill Chicken Garden Salad with Ken’s Ranch Dressing (490 calories, 30g fat)

Then there’s the:  “how many calories, you’ve got to be kidding” salads.

  • Outback Queensland Salad with Bleu Cheese Dressing (1075.8 calories, 81.6g fat)
  • Cosi Signature Salad (130 calories, 45g fat)
  • Ruby Tuesday’s Southwestern Beef Salad (1139 calories, 81g fat)
  • Wendy’s Southwest Taco Salad (680 calories, 39g fat)
  • Olive Garden’s Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad, without Caesar dressing (850 calories, 64g fat)

SocialDieter Tips:

If you are putting together your own salad at a salad bar – or making your own at home – here are some tips to keep your salad healthy and delicious.

  • Dressings are not just decorative – they can be disastrous. If you have enough flavorful stuff in your salad, you may not even need dressing.  If you do, the creamy stuff usually is more caloric (you can always dilute it with vinegar).  Most vinegar has almost no calories so pour it on.  There are many choices of light or calorie free dressings.  Most places glop on dressing – you’d be surprised how little you need for taste. A dieter’s trick is to ask for dressing on the side and dip your fork into the dressing before you snare a mouthful of salad.
  • Mayonnaise has around 90 calories a tablespoon.  Think about how much goes into chicken or tuna salad.  Use light mayo, mustard, or low fat yogurt instead.
  • Go for reduced fat or fat free cheese instead of liberally sprinkling on the full fat stuff. ¼ cup of reduced fat (2%) shredded cheddar has 80 calories, 6g fat, 7g protein; fat free feta has  40 calories, 0g fat, 7g protein.
  • If you are going out to order a salad order from a place that has low fat dressing choices and lean proteins (grilled chicken, tuna without mayo).  You can always use only half a package of salad dressing instead of a whole one.
  • Lay off the croutons and wontons.  Sure, they’re crunchy, but you’re not getting anything nutritious from them.  Get your crunch from carrots, cucumbers, or a very light sprinkling of sunflower seeds or nuts (caloric but healthy).
  • Salads with dark green lettuce and colorful vegetables add more vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals.
  • Make your salad more of a meal by adding lean proteins: poultry (grilled), seafood, a hardboiled egg, or beans. Add whole grains like brown rice or quinoa, without dressing, to really beef it up. Leftover lean proteins and veggies can be chopped up and added to salad the next day. Keep a supply of canned tuna, anchovies, and beans for quick calorie sparing protein additions.
  • Certain extras pile on calories.  You could have fries and a bacon cheeseburger for the same calories as a salad loaded with creamy dressing, shredded or crumbled cheese, bacon, avocado, mayonnaise salads, meat, nuts, and croutons. Instead, heap on tomatoes, asparagus, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, scallions, onions, mushrooms, peppers, cucumbers, arugula, spinach, and herbs. Olives add about 4 calories apiece – but, add an enormous amount of flavor and may help you forego dressing.
  • Check out the nutritional info before you order – and remember to add in the totals for dressing, croutons, and other “extras.”  Some municipalities currently require calorie counts to be posted in fast/chain food restaurants.  The new health care bill will require posting in fast/chain food restaurants with more than 20 outlets. Almost all chain restaurants list their nutritional stats online.

Is Your Salad A Nightmare?

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A Healthy Meal Or A Caloric Fat Fest?

It’s time for lunch or perhaps to pick up a bite for dinner on your way home.  It’s Monday after a weekend of a bit of overeating.  Time for something light and healthy.

How about a salad?  Here’s a chance for plenty of vegetables, other healthy stuff, and a chance to save some calories, too.  Yeah, right!!!  Think again and read on.

Wonderful Reasons To Have A Salad

There are a whole bunch of good reasons to chow down on a nice big salad.

  • It’s easy to make your own from the salad bar at the local market, to order one for delivery, or to rip open a bag of lettuce and plop a piece of grilled chicken on top.
  • The nutrient rich plant foods that make the base of a salad are high in antioxidants — especially the dark green and orange vegetables, and legumes.
  • Most of the vegetables are full of fiber – good for your cholesterol, your GI functioning, and as a way to feel fuller for a longer period of time.
  • Salads take a long time to eat – much longer than sandwiches or pizza that you can scarf down far more quickly.
  • Salads can look really appetizing and can cost very little (they can cost a lot, too, depending upon the add-ons).
  • Salads are a great way to recycle leftovers – just toss them in the mix.

Where’s The Nightmare?

Answer:  Hidden in the fatty and sneaky high caloric add-ons and dressing.

  • Generally, at least ¼ of a cup (frequently more) of dressing is added to a tossed salad. A ladle of creamy dressing has about 360 calories and 38g of fat (a cheeseburger’s worth).  Vinaigrette dressing, usually 3 parts oil to one part vinegar, adds its own fat blast.
  • Tuna, macaroni, and chicken salads, the holy grail of delis and salad bars, are loaded with mayonnaise, which of course, is loaded with fat.  On average (for a half cup):  chicken salad has 208 calories, 16g of fat; tuna salad  has 192 calories, 9g fat; tuna pasta salad has 397 calories, 9g fat; macaroni salad has 170 calories, 9g fat.
  • Cheese, please – or maybe not. For a 1/4 cup serving:  Shredded cheddar has 114 calories, 9g fat;  blue cheese has 80 calories, 6g fat;  feta has 75 calories, 6g fat.
  • Portions:  The calorie counts above are for ½ cup of salad, ¼ cup of cheese.  Those are pretty small portions.  Do you have that kind of restraint?
  • Croutons and Crispy Noodles: ¼ cup of plain croutons has 31 calories, 0g fat; 1 serving of  McDonald’s Butter Garlic Croutons  has 60 calories, 1g fat;  ¼ cup of crispy noodles has 74 calories, 4g fat
  • Dried cranberries: ¼ cup has 98 calories, 0g fat
  • Nuts and Seeds (1/4 cup): Sunflower seeds have 210 calories, 19g fat; chopped walnuts:  193 calories, 18g fat
  • Avocado (1/4 cup) have 58 calories, 5g fat
  • Bacon: 1 tablespoon of bacon bits has 25 calories, 2g fat
  • Bread (often used to sop up leftover dressing):  1 piece of French bread has  82 calories, 1g fat; 1 dinner roll has 78 calories, 2g fat
  • Dressing sopped up by the bread or roll:  lots of extra fat calories!

Should Salads Go On Your “Do Not Touch” List?

No way, absolutely not. The healthy stuff in salad tastes great, fills you up, and is good for you.  There are plenty of ways to cut down on the fatty and caloric add-ons and still end up with a really tasty meal.  There are even good choices in fast food and chain restaurants (and plenty of really, really bad ones).

SocialDieter Tip: don’t stop eating salad, just be aware of what add-ons and dressing can do.  Check my next post for some very helpful info on choosing and making salads and for the low down on a few fast and chain food “good” and “don’t even think about it” choices.

Can You Guess How Many Calories You Consume In A Day?

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How Many Calories Do You Eat In A Day?

If you don’t have a clue, you’re not alone.  A lot of us don’t know how to estimate the number of calories in a meal – and on top of that, according to a Cornell study, almost everyone consistently underestimates calories as the meal size gets larger.  Accuracy in estimating the number of calories we’ve eaten is determined by meal size, not the size of the person eating it.  The smaller the meal, the more accurate the estimation, the larger the meal and the more people eat, the less accurate they are in estimating the number of calories. To add insult to injury, Brian Wansink, author of the book, Mindless Eating, says, “When people are eating in a restaurant that they think is healthy, people grossly underestimate how much they eat by about 50 percent.” Ouch!!!

Posted Calorie Counts Go Big Time

The health care reform act (Public Law 111-148) contains a mandate for chain restaurants to list calorie counts on their menu boards and for calorie counts to be posted next to food sold in vending machines and in retail stores. Places with 20 or more nationwide locations have to post calorie counts “in a clear and conspicuous manner,” with “a succinct statement concerning suggested daily caloric intake.” The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 required the nutrition labels that you are used to seeing on food packages purchased in markets. That law exempted restaurants, the new law doesn’t. Some cities and states already have local laws requiring posted calorie counts. New York City was the first to require chain restaurants with more than 15 outlets to post calorie counts on their menu boards.

What Will The Labeling Law Do (or hope to do)?

Perhaps the new law will make us aware of what we’re eating and the food providers aware of what they’re serving. Improved food choices and better portion control – and menu offerings – will go along way toward healthy eating and weight management.  Associating a calorie count with a portion size and meal type (big, greasy sandwiches do have lots of calories) will help educate both adults and kids.  Then, perhaps, consumers will put pressure on food vendors to offer healthier choices.

Is Calorie Counting Hard To Do?

With the right tools, calorie counting isn’t difficult — although accuracy can be a challenge.  There are all kinds of tools, too.  There’s an array of books listing calorie counts and nutrients.  There are tons of websites and phone apps that can do it for you with a minimum of effort.  All packaged foods are required to have food labels and many prepared foods do as well.  Posted calorie counts will be a big help.  The biggest challenge is guesstimating the calories in restaurant and prepared food that doesn’t come under the calorie posting requirement.  This requires guessing portion sizes – or pulling out scales and measures in a restaurant – and also guessing about a dish’s ingredients and how heavy the hand is of the person pouring the oil and greasing the griddle in the kitchen.  The key is to accurately and completely write or log the accurate amount of food when you eat– not at the end of the day when it’s tough to remember the random handful of bar nuts or the snagged candy from someone’s desk.

SocialDieter Tip:

In his blog, Weighty Matters, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff calls calories “the currency of weight.” Calories are the most important factor regardless of whether you want to maintain, gain, or lose weight.  You can’t see calories, or touch them, or feel them. A dish of food doesn’t sit there and say I have 549 calories in me. Instead, calories can be downright elusive. Counting calories is work – but work that can take a minimum of effort once you get the hang of it and in the habit of doing it.  We don’t eat all that many different kinds of food.  By measuring and learning portion sizes, then looking up calorie counts, you soon will be able to reel off the calorie counts of the food you eat all of the time. There are plenty of visual aids to help with portion eyeballing – eventually you get pretty good at it.  Like so many other things, habits play a big role in what you eat, where you eat it, and how much of it you eat.  Your brain is on your side, however – it likes habits – they make life easier.  So, create some healthy new ones around evaluating the caloric content of what you eat.