Eat Out Eat Well

Eating on the Job

A Holiday Gift

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book-cover-free-downloadJust in time for the crunch of the holiday season —

My new book — 30 Ways to Eat Your Holiday Favorites and Still Get Into Your Jeans — is available as a free download for your kindle or kindle reader this Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (12/7 – 12/9).

The book is filled with useful and practical tips and info to help you navigate your way through the holiday season with your waistline intact and your belly happy.

Head on over to Amazon to download your free gift — and please share this info with anyone else who might be interested.

I hope you enjoy the book.  I would greatly appreciate it if you would leave a review on Amazon.

Enjoy the holiday season.

Did You Eat Too Much? Blame Your Buddies At The Table

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people-eating-at-table-graphic

How many people do you usually sit with when you’re eating? Not all the people surrounding you in a cafeteria or restaurant, but the number of friends or family at your table?

Amazingly, the number of people you eat with can make a big difference in how much you end up eating. If you have eight people at your table you might end up eating 96% more than if you ate alone!

That’s not to say that you should limit the number of friends you eat with—it should just make you aware that friends, unintentionally, can influence how much and how fast you eat.

How Come?

You tend to eat for a longer amount of time — and eat more — when you’re with people you like compared to when you eat alone.  It could be because you mindlessly nibble while someone else talks, or you’re using the good manners you were taught in fifth grade about not letting someone else eat alone, or maybe you’re just having fun and enjoying your food. Whatever the reason, most of us tend to stay at the table longer when we’re with others –and– the longer you stay at the table, the more you eat.

We also tend to mimic the other people at the table. It’s almost as though how much you eat and how fast you eat is contagious. If your friends eat fast, you eat fast. If they eat a lot, you eat a lot.

Friends and family influence how much we eat, too. Sometimes you get so involved in conversation that all monitoring of what you pop into your mouth goes out the window.  Have you ever looked down at your plate and wondered where all the cookies went or how you managed to work your way through the mile high dish of pasta or the four pieces of pizza?  How many tastes did you take of everyone else’s meal and dessert?  Those tastes aren’t like invisible ink.  Those calories count, too.

How Much More Do We Eat When We’re With Others?

In his book, Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink, PhD reports on a study that shows how strong the tendency is to increase how much you eat when you eat with others.  Compared to eating alone, you eat, on average:

  • 35% more if you eat with one other person
  • 75% more with four at the table
  • 96% more with a group of seven or more

What’s The Reason?

It’s a common pattern for adults to eat more when they’re in larger groups than when they’re eating alone. One reason is a phenomenon called “social facilitation,” or the actions or behaviors that result from the sight and sound of other people doing the same thing that you’re doing. When you’re eating in groups, social facilitation can help override your brain’s normal signals of satiety.

What You Can Do

  • Think about who you’re eating with – and why.  If you want to have a blast and don’t care about how much you eat – eat with a big group and chow down.
  • If you want to be careful about what and how much you eat, think about eating lunch with your salad (dressing on the side, please) friends rather than the pepperoni pizza group.
  • Without even thinking about it, you tend to adjust your eating pace to that of your companions.  So, sit next to the slow eaters rather than the gobblers if you’re trying to control how much goes into your mouth.

Want more tips — especially if you eat in dining halls of any kind?  Get my new book, now available on Amazon — 30 Ways to Survive Dining Hall and Dorm Room Food: Tips to Avoid the Freshman 15.

5 Quick And Easy Calorie Saving Tips

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Single chocolate chip cookie with a single bite

  1. A chocolate chip cookie—or oatmeal raisin for that matter—should be about the size of the rim of a soda can. Some cookies are four times that size—and with four times the calories and fat content!
  2. Don’t be duped by turkey, fish, and veggie burgers and sandwiches. They sound healthier and less caloric than beef, but that might not be the case. At Red Robin a grilled turkey burger has 578 calories, 29g fat. Burger King’s Premium Alaskan Fish sandwich has 530 calories, 28g fat while a Whopper Jr. without mayo has 260 calories, 10g fat. A Sedona Black Bean Burger at TGI Fridays has 870 calories, 49g fat.
  3. Bottled water isn’t always just water. Some are just water or water with flavor essence but lots of them are naturally or artificially sweetened, flavored, and colored. Don’t be duped. For instance, many Vitaminwater flavors have 50 calories in a serving (8 ounces), but the bottles are usually 20 ounces which makes the contents around 120 calories and 30+ grams of sugar. There are no-calorie Vitaminwater Zeros, too.
  4. Skip the bran muffin for breakfast. We think bran muffins are “healthy” because they have the word bran in their name, but they’re actually made with a lot of sugar and fat. A Dunkin’ Donuts Honey Bran Raisin Muffin has 480 calories with 15 grams of fat and 79 grams of carbs (it does, however, have 5 grams of fiber). In general, a 4 ounce bran muffin has around 350 calories—but, have you seen the size of most muffins—they sure don’t tip the scales at 4 ounces.
  5. Cans and boxes that look like single servings may have two or three. They may look small enough to be for one, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Check out how many servings are in your can of soup or box of mac and cheese.

Want more tips — especially if you eat in dining halls of any kind?  Get my new book, now available on Amazon — 30 Ways to Survive Dining Hall and Dorm Room Food: Tips to Avoid the Freshman 15.

A Dozen Really Common Reasons We Eat When We’re Not Hungry

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12 reasons for eating graphicEating when you’re not hungry, or when you’re bored, angry, tired, procrastinating, or celebrating can push your calorie intake way up.

The biggest problem is that we often don’t realize that we’re shoving food into our mouths – either because we’re distracted, we don’t want to know, or we just plain old don’t care.

What Makes Us Do It?

1.  “Cheap” calories: the kind you find at all you can eat restaurants, freebie tastes in markets, the basket of broken cookies in the bakery, and “value and super sized meals.”

2.  Bread and extras like butter, olive oil, and olives on the table or bar peanuts or pretzels.  Way too tempting to pass up – especially if you’re hungry or you’ve walked in with the attitude that you “deserve” it because you’ve had a tough day.

3.  Walking into your kitchen or the snack room at work and having your favorite snacks staring you in the face (see it = eat it).

4.  Procrastinating or avoiding doing what you have to do by having a snack.

5.  Watching TV with a bag of chips or a bowl of candy on your lap.

6.  Parties— especially when you drink — causing you to lose count and control of what you’re grabbing to eat.

7.  Food and coffee shops on every corner that offer lots of food, lots of variety, and are open all the time.

8.  The in(famous) sugar/fat/salt combination in baked goods, fast food, candy, fast food, frozen food, and processed food.

9.  Food that your family or roommates insist must be in the house – or that you think they want in the house.

10.  Feeling tired, stressed, overwhelmed, bored, angry, or “out-of-sorts” and turning to food as a “pick-me-up” or for comfort.

11.  Mindless bites – a piece of candy from the open bowl on a desk, a taste of your partner’s dessert, finishing your child’s food (especially dripping ice cream cones).

12.  Being a member of the clean plate club – which also extends to polishing off leftovers and finishing the last bits left in the pan or serving dishes as you clean up.

Seven Ways To Cut Down On Pizza Calories

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pizza-pie“Let’s order pizza.”  Have you heard those words recently?  Have you had “a slice” recently?  Take comfort that you fit the stats:

  • American men, women, and children eat, on average 46 slices of pizza a year.
  • 94% of Americans eat pizza regularly
  • In the US, 61% prefer regular thin crust, 14% prefer deep-dish, and 11% prefer extra thin crust
  • 62% of Americans prefer meat toppings; 38% prefer vegetables
  • 36% order pizza topped with pepperoni

What’s Good, What’s Not-So-Good?

It’s difficult to estimate the number of calories and fat grams in a slice of pizza because the size and depth of the pies and the amount of cheese, meat, or other toppings vary enormously.

Here’s the good news: pizza can be a healthy food choice filled with complex carbs, B-vitamins, calcium, protein, vitamin A, and vitamin C and calorically okay if you choose wisely and don’t eat more than your fair share.

The not so good news:  the amount of fat, calories, and portion size. If your mouth starts to water at the thought of golden brown crust and cheesy goodness — here’s the downer:  that luscious slice of pizza that should be about the size of two dollar bills – not the size of a small frying pan or a quarter of a 12” circle.

7 Ways To Build a Better Slice of Pizza

  1. Order thin crust rather than a thick crust or deep dish.
  2. Resist the urge to ask for double cheese — better yet, go light on the cheese or use reduced-fat cheese (if they have it).
  3. Ask for a pizza without cheese but topped with veggies and a little olive oil. You can always sprinkle on a little grated parmesan for flavor; one tablespoon has only 22 calories.
  4. Instead of cheese go for big flavors like onion, garlic, olives but use them somewhat sparingly because of the oil.  And don’t forget anchovies  – a lot of flavor for minimal calories – but you have to like them!
  5. Choose vegetable toppings instead of meat (think about the fat content in sausage, pepperoni, and meatballs) and you might shave 100 calories from your meal. Pile on veggies like mushrooms, peppers, olives, tomatoes, onion, broccoli, spinach, and asparagus. Some places have salad pizza – great if it’s not loaded with oil.
  6. Order a side salad (careful with the dressing) and cut down on the amount of pizza.  Salad takes longer to eat, too.
  7. If you’re willing (and not embarrassed or grossed out), try blotting up the free-floating oil that sits on top of a greasy slice with a napkin. Blotting (it’s easy to do this on the kind of hot slice where the oil runs down your arm when you pick it up) can soak up a teaspoon of oil worth 40 calories and 5 grams of fat.

Domino’s:

Check out the difference in calories for the same size slice (1/8th of a pie) between the classic hand-tossed pizza, the deep dish, and the crunchy thin crust for the same toppings.  Then check out the difference in calories for the toppings.

Domino’s 14 inch large classic hand-tossed pizza

  • America’s Favorite (Peperoni, mushroom, sausage, 1/8 of pizza):  390 calories
  • Bacon Cheeseburger (Beef, bacon, cheddar cheese), 1/8 of pizza:  420 calories
  • Vegi Feast (Green pepper, onion, mushroom, black olive, extra cheese, 1/8 of pizza):  340 calories

Domino’s 14 inch large ultimate deep dish pizza

  • America’s Favorite (Peperoni, mushroom, sausage), 1/8 of pizza:  400 calories
  • Bacon Cheeseburger (Beef, bacon, cheddar cheese), 1/8 of pizza:  430 calories
  • Vegi Feast (Green pepper, onion, mushroom, black olive, extra cheese), 1/8 of pizza:  350 calories

Domino’s 14 inch large crunchy thin crust pizza

  • America’s Favorite (Peperoni, mushroom, sausage, 1/8 of pizza:  280 calories)
  • Bacon Cheeseburger (Beef, bacon, cheddar cheese), 1/8 of pizza:  310 calories
  • Vegi Feast (Green pepper, onion, mushroom, black olive, extra cheese), 1/8 of pizza:  230 calories

Mall Pizza:  There’s A Range

  • A slice of Sbarro’s Low Carb Cheese Pizza has 310 calories and 14 grams of fat.
  • A slice of Sbarro’s Low Carb Sausage/Pepperoni Pizza has 560 calories and 35 grams of fat.
  • A slice of Sbarro’s Fresh Tomato Pizza clocks in at 450 calories with 14 grams of fat.
  • Any of Sbarro’s “Gourmet” pizzas have between 610 and 780 calories a slice and more than 20 grams of fat.
  • A slice of Costco Food Court Pepperoni Pizza has 620 calories and 30 grams of fat.
  • “Stuffed” pizzas are even worse—790 calories minimum and over 33 grams of fat per slice.