Eat Out Eat Well

Eating with Family and Friends

Do You Eat Something You Don’t Want Just To Be Polite?

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Do you think you need to eat to be polite – even if you don’t want the food or you’re totally stuffed – because you don’t want to be rude or hurt someone’s feelings?

You really don’t have to feel obliged to eat out of courtesy – especially if you don’t want the food or you’re full.  Ditch the guilt – the calories are going into your mouth, not your host’s, your Mom’s, or your friend’s.

Who Are Food Pushers?

Food pushers pile your plate high with food and act insulted if you ask them to stop. Food pushers, despite your protests, insist that you try every kind of food.  Food pushers look at your plate and loudly ask why you’re not eating, if you don’t like something, or if you’re on a diet.  Food pushers are thorns in your side and don’t necessarily have your best interest at heart. Food pushers can be your partner, friend, parent, or sister. They may or may not realize what they’re doing.  What’s important is that you do.

What’s Your Game Plan?

You need to have a game plan for how you’re going to deal with food pushers.  A plan sounds clinical but it doesn’t have to be. It could be your saving grace.  Think about how you want to handle yourself in the face of food, family, someone’s special stuffing, your family’s traditional sweet potato casserole (which you may hate but always feel obliged to eat), and the array of desserts staring at you from seemingly every table and counter.

One size – or one plan – does not fit all.  You need to choose the plan of action and strategy that works best for you and your circumstances.

What are you going to do or say to the food pushers?  Are you going to stand firm and say you don’t want to eat the stuffing because you’re watching your carbs – and then steel yourself for the snarky look?  Are you going to say that you really need to watch your weight – or that you can’t eat that much – or that you get sleepy when you overeat and, unfortunately, you really have some work that you have to finish and you need to be alert?

Are you going to say that you really don’t care for pie – pumpkin or otherwise – and that your favorite dessert is fruit? If someone really hounds you about trying certain foods you can always claim an allergy or that you’re eating heart healthy (claiming an upset stomach might buy you an early exit or other guests avoiding you like the plague).

You’re In Charge

It’s so easy to default to shoving food in your mouth when faced with food pushers and potentially annoying family members, some of whom seem spend the entire time carping at one another.

Nothing is engraved in stone but if you have an idea about what you want to accomplish and how to go about it you’ll be far less likely to nibble and nosh all day and night. You’re the one in charge of what and how much food goes into your mouth. Take charge and remain in charge of you.

Do You Swipe Candy From Your Kid’s Trick Or Treat Bag?

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If you do, you can start shedding your guilt because you’re certainly not alone.

Let’s put it another way:  Is it almost a foregone conclusion that there’s Halloween candy in your future?

The candy assault on your senses is pretty hard to escape.   It’s everywhere in glowing Technicolor on shelf after shelf in big box stores, supermarkets, and drug stores.  It’s on desks, in restaurants, and even on the receptionist’s desk in my veterinarian’s office in a nice purple bowl with a dog bone painted on the side.

How Much Candy?

Halloween and the week afterward accounts for about 5% of all candy consumed for the year. The most popular types, in order, are:  chocolate, chewy candies and hard candy.

What’s In Your Kid’s Trick or Treat Bag?

If you’ve ever swiped candy from your kid’s trick or treat bag, you’re certainly not alone. According to the National Confectioners Association, 90% of parents confess they occasionally dip into their kid’s stash. I know I sure did.

Parents don’t just sample; they invade their kids’ Trick or Treat bags.  Estimates are that they eat one candy bar out of every two a child brings home.  Their favorite targets are snack-sized chocolate bars (70%), candy-coated chocolate pieces (40%), caramels (37%) and gum (26%).

In Case You Want To Pick The Least Caloric Candy . . .

Here are the calories in some popular Halloween candy – just in case you might want to minimize the caloric damage (no, that’s not a joke, candy has a big calorie and fat gram range)

  • Hershey’s Milk Chocolate: snack size .49-ounce bar; 67 calories; 4g fat
  • Snickers: Fun size; 80 calories; 4g fat
  • Tootsie Rolls: 6 midgee pieces; 140 calories; 3g fat
  •  Skittles Original Bite Size Candies: Fun size bag; 60 calories; 0.7 g fat
  • M&Ms: Fun size bag; 73 calories; 3g fat
  • Butterfinger: Fun size; 85 calories; 3.5g fat
  • Tootsie Roll Pop
: 60 calories; 0g fat
  • Starburst Original Fruit Chews: 2 pieces; 40 calories: 40; 0.8g fat
  • Brach’s Candy Corn: 20 pieces; 150 calories; 0g fat
  •  Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup:  Fun size; 80 calories, 4.5g fat
  • Peppermint Pattie:  Fun size; 47 calories; 1g fat
  •  Kit Kat:  Fun size; 73 calories; 3.7g fat

 

What Are Your Eating Triggers?

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Is it almost a foregone conclusion that you’ll stuff yourself to the gills when you go home to your parents’ house for holidays or other events?  Is it almost impossible for you to navigate your office without stopping at the snack room and the receptionist’s desk to sample the never-ending array of holiday specialties or someone’s birthday cake?  What about the routine lunch for a not-so-good friend that makes you go home and eat a pint of ice cream?

Know Your Triggers

Most of us can name situations that make us want to eat.  Sometimes it takes  dedicated thought to precisely identify what it is that starts the cascade of events that leads to not just wanting to eat, but the feeling that you absolutely must have a particular food — sometimes in large quantities.  Keeping a food journal where you record not only what you ate but the environment and what was going on while you were eating can help you identify the causative factors.

Sometimes those triggers are big red flags – for instance you know that having a piece of pecan pie — or any other sweet food for dessert at lunch will trigger nibbling on candy at the office the rest of the afternoon. But do you eat it anyway?

Or, do you intentionally go to store A instead of store B for a cup of coffee because you know store A always has lots of free samples of freshly baked cake and cookies?  Do you know that if cookies are in the cupboard and ice cream is in the freezer that you will sooner, rather than later, eat it?

Which Foods And Environments Are Your Red Flags?

Be honest 
with yourself and admit that certain foods and environments are red flags for you.   I know that I can’t have cookies in my house and I also know that I tend to overeat at family events.

There’s no reason to psychoanalyze why certain foods or situations act as your triggers.  Just know which particular things serve as your red flags — your triggers — and have strategies in place to deal with them.

Take A Cue From Athletes: Rehearse Your Party Eating Behavior

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What happens when you’re invited to a “command performance”  party or event with a long cocktail hour followed by a fancy multi-course sit down meal?  Or maybe you’re going to a gourmet holiday lunch at a friend’s house where there will be lots of hot mulled wine, her special entree, and fantastic cookies accompanying mousse for dessert. You’ve been extremely conscious about eating well but you want to be both polite and eat some of the special foods and still be careful about overindulging on high calorie foods.  How can you enjoy your food, be polite, eat what really appeals to you, and leave with your waistline intact?

What Do You Want the Result To Be?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer since we all have our own needs and preferences. You may swoon over ten- layer chocolate cake while I can ignore it but can never pass up cheese fondue.

Part of the answer lies in figuring out what you really want the end result to be.   Then you can create your own individualized plan  — your own foodMAP — that you can use as a template for what to do when you find yourself in the land of food temptation.

Visualize

Visualizing a situation that you might find yourself in and then rehearsing your actions in your mind ahead of time will help you successfully navigate a whole host of food landmines and eating challenges. That’s a technique coaches use to prepare their athletes. They’re taught to anticipate what might happen and to practice how to respond to a situation. Sports performance improves with visualization exercises—so can eating behavior.

To do this effectively you have to be clear on what you want the end result to be. Is it to enjoy every kind of food available but in limited quantities – or is it to skip dessert but have a full range of tastes of all of the hors d’oeuvres?  Visualize what the environment will be like, where you’re going to be, and with whom. Think about what food is going to be available, how it will be served, how hungry you’re likely to be, what your usual eating pattern is like—and what you would like it to be.

Will your host insist you try her special dessert and refuse to take no for an answer? Will you be eating in a restaurant known for its homemade breads or phenomenal wine list? Are your dining companions picky eaters, foodies, or fast food junkies?  Will your host be really annoyed if you don’t finish every course at the special sit-down dinner?

Proactive Not Reactive

Be proactive.  Figure out your plan in advance — earlier in the day or the night before. Visualize the situation and if there’s temptation or anxiety, close your eyes and picture it. Imagine what people will say and how you will respond in a way that will make you proud of yourself without giving in to external pressures and food pushers.

Armed with your rehearsed plan, go out, use it, and stick to it as best you can. You assume control, not the circumstances and not the food.  You are firmly in charge of what happens and what food and how much of it will go into your mouth.

Do You Want To Eat Delicious Food That’s Amazingly Healthy – and Manage Your Weight, Too?

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Sunday afternoon meal in Ancient Epidaurus, Greece

Eat Like A Greek . . .

or like others who live in Mediterranean countries. I was born and raised in New York City and grew up eating a Mediterranean-type diet at home. My father is Greek and I went to Greek day school so this type of eating pattern was what I knew. It was our way of life — not a studied, intentional choice. We ate lots of olive oil, fish, vegetables, and cheese — the mainstay was feta in brine from the barrel in the Greek grocer’s across the street from the Greek church. Olives came that way too, straight from the barrel, straight from Greece. And, we spent a lot of time eating with family – and friends of the family.

But, living in NYC and hanging out with my neighborhood friends, that healthy diet became infused with “staples” of the standard American diet. That infusion came in the form of food like bagels, butter for the bagels, burgers, English muffins, the occasional coca cola, egg creams, cheese Danish, movie theater candy, and Velveeta (for grilled cheese made with soft white bread). In NYC there was always the attraction of pizza (sold by the slice) and Good Humor trucks for that after dinner summer treat.  All in all, not too bad — in large part because, at that time, there wasn’t a fast food shop on every corner and eating between meals wasn’t a common (or acceptable) practice.

I just returned from a family trip to Greece and after eating food straight from the farm and fished from the sea, I’m convinced (and this is backed up by many research studies) that the diet I grew up on – the Mediterranean diet — is an extremely healthy dietary pattern and a very healthy way of life.

The Mediterranean Diet Is A Way Of Life

Dietary data from the Mediterranean region show that people who follow a Mediterranean dietary pattern have the lowest recorded rates of chronic diseases and the highest adult life expectancy. The health benefits are backed up by more than 50 years of epidemiological and experimental research.

The Mediterranean dietary pattern is not the type of restrictive program that we usually think of when we think “diet.” It’s a way of life – even the Greek word for diet, diaita, means way of life.

Traditional Mediterranean meals, the kind eaten for thousands of years by people who live in the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea, are filled with fruit, vegetables, beans and legumes; bread, pasta, rice, semolina and other grains; nuts and seeds; copious amounts of extra virgin olive oil; lesser amounts of fish, poultry, eggs, and even smaller amounts of lean red meat; cheese and yogurt; and moderate amounts of wine, usually red.

The “Mediterranean diet” (very similar to the Dash diet for high blood pressure) doesn’t have a strict list of allowed/not allowed foods.  It’s a dietary pattern of lots of plant foods; small amounts of fish, dairy, and animal protein;  and very few saturated fats. Physical activity is a given as is leisurely dining with friends and family in pleasant surroundings with everyone taking pleasure in their meals. Even with plenty of healthy fats and some alcohol, weight problems are not common.

Why Is The Mediterranean Lifestyle A Good Choice?

The Mediterranean lifestyle – including foods, activities, meals with friends and family, and wine in moderation with meals — has been studied and called one of the healthiest in the world. It is also a dietary pattern filled with delicious and flavor-filled food and meals. The health benefits are not from diet alone but from the whole package.

According to the Mayo Clinic, a recent analysis of more than 1.5 million healthy adults showed that people who follow a Mediterranean diet have a reduced risk of overall and cardiovascular mortality, a reduced incidence of cancer and cancer mortality, and a reduced incidence of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

Studies published in the medical journal BMJ and The New England Journal of Medicine showed that healthy people who follow a Mediterranean diet had a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes and that a restricted calorie Mediterranean diet can be more effective for weight loss than a low fat diet.

An analysis of 50 studies linked the Mediterranean diet to lower odds of getting metabolic syndrome, a group of factors (high blood pressure, high blood sugar, unhealthy cholesterol levels, and abdominal fat) that increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and stroke.

All of the fruit, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, beans, seeds, fish, olive oil, and some alcohol in the Mediterranean eating pattern provide an astounding number of micronutrients, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals which, in combination with the Mediterranean lifestyle, produce health benefits that can’t be obtained from supplements.

Keys To The Mediterranean Way Of Eating and Living

Fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains: 
The majority of food is from plant sources: fruit, vegetables, potatoes, breads and grains, rice, pasta, beans, nuts, and seeds. Greeks eat little red meat but average nine servings a day of fruit and vegetables – which may explain why the Mediterranean diet is associated with lower levels of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. The majority of food should be a variety of minimally processed, locally grown (if possible), seasonal fruit and veggies (7 to 10 servings a day). Focus on whole-grain bread and cereal, rice, and pasta. Bread is important but is eaten plain or dipped in olive oil. The majority of grains are whole grains like wheat, oats, rice, rye, barley, and corn, best eaten in whole, minimally-processed forms.

Nuts:
 Nuts are part of a Mediterranean lifestyle. They are high in fat — around 80% of their calories come from fat — but most of it isn’t saturated. Because nuts are high in calories, try not to eat more than a handful a day.

2500 year old olive tree in Nea Epidaurus, Greece

Healthy fats:
 Olive oil, a monounsaturated fat that can help reduce LDL cholesterol levels, is the principal fat. “Extra-virgin” is the least processed and contains the highest levels of antioxidant protective plant compounds. Use olive or canola oil for cooking, too. The Mediterranean diet doesn’t focus on limiting fats, but on making smart choices. It does discourage eating saturated and trans fats (hydrogenated oils), which contribute to heart disease. Total fat should range from less than 25% to over 35% of calories with no more than 7 to 8% saturated fat.

Wine:
  According to some research studies, alcohol, in moderation, is associated with a reduced risk of heart disease. The Mediterranean diet includes a moderate amount of wine, usually red — no more than 5 ounces daily for women (or men over 65), and no more than 10 ounces daily for men under 65 (unless there are reasons not to drink). If you don’t drink alcohol, you don’t have to start. Purple grape juice might have some similar benefits (although it is high in sugar).

Dessert and Sweets:
  Eat sweets in small portions. Fresh fruit is the usual daily dessert and the typical way to end a meal. Desserts and sweets with a significant amount of sweetener, usually honey, should be eaten only a few times a week.

Herbs And Spices:
  Herbs and spices add flavor and aroma and reduce the need for salt and/or fat. They also contain a broad range of health-promoting antioxidants.  They’re used liberally and contribute to the dishes that differentiate the various Mediterranean cuisines.

Fish and Poultry:
Have moderate amounts of fish and poultry once or twice a week (fish is favored over poultry). Healthy choices include cold-water fish: fresh or water-packed tuna, salmon, trout, mackerel and herring. Eat your fish grilled or sautéed, not fried, in a small amount of olive oil.

Meat: 
Eat lean red meat only a few times a month – no more than once a week for animals with four legs. Substitute fish and poultry for red meat. Poultry is a good source of lean protein without the high levels of saturated fat found in some cuts of red meat. Keep meat portions small (about the size of a deck of cards) and avoid sausage, bacon, and other high-fat meats. With ground meat, choose 90 percent lean/10 percent fat.

Low fat dairy:
Eat cheese and yogurt daily, but in low to moderate amounts. The calcium in cheese and yogurt is important for bone and heart health. Limit high fat dairy products like whole or 2% milk and full fat yogurt, cheese, and ice cream. Switch to non-fat, skim, and 1% products when possible.

Eggs: 
A good source of high-quality protein, eat up to seven eggs a week – this number includes those used in baking and cooking.

Regular Physical Activity: 
Daily physical activity is important for overall good health. This includes strenuous exercise like running and aerobic activity as well as slower-paced activities like walking, housework, yard work, and taking the stairs instead of the elevator.

Seaside tables in Gythio, Greece

Meals with Family and Friends:
A key component of the Mediterranean lifestyle is sharing and enjoying meals with family and friends of all ages. Don’t rush through meals but sit and enjoy both the food and the company.

Make It your Own

There’s no single Mediterranean diet. Countries and regions customize the basic diet by taking advantage of locally available food and the cultural preferences of that geographic region.

The Mediterranean diet is a prescription for good health. Aside from all of the other health benefits, there might be a weight advantage because being physically active and eating a nutritious diet of mostly filling and satisfying whole foods can help with weight management.

The Mediterranean diet is a healthy, enjoyable lifestyle and dietary plan that is easy to follow, flexible, and best of all, good for you.  It doesn’t matter where you live.  Locally sourced foods are best, but if your only choice is to buy more plant-based foods and fish in the supermarket, that’s still a step in the right direction. Try making small changes – each change is incremental and starts to add up.  Just don’t forget to eat delicious fresh food, move around, eat leisurely, and share your eating experience with friends and family.