Food for Fun and Thought

How Much (fun) Exercise Do You Need To Do To Burn Off Super Bowl Food?

February 1, 2014 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Check out these amusing (and possibly alarming) stats on how much and what kind of exercise you need to do to burn off some common Super Bowl food. Get ready to walk, dance, and act somewhat ridiculous for a lot of minutes! (Thanks to the Diet Detective for compiling these stats.)

Remember – it’s just one day so enjoy your favorite foods. You can compensate for the extra calories by adjusting the amount you eat the big day and the days before and after, mixing in wise choices with the splurges, and increasing your exercise.

Game Food and (fun) Exercise:

Downing six bottles of Budweiser means you’d have to do “The Wave” 4,280 times. And don’t drive.
Just four swigs of Bud Light (36 calories) means you’d need to play 8 minutes of professional football – that’s action time, not standing around on the field or on the sidelines.
If you eat a 12-inch Italian sub you’d have to walk the length of the Brooklyn Bridge more than 14 times (or 16.2 miles).
Six large Chili’s Fajita beef classic nachos means you have to run 242.5 football fields at 5mph. Six nachos is about half an order.
One giant New York City street or stadium pretzel clocks in at about 455 calories. You’d have to spend 111 minutes acting like a team mascot (no comment!!!).
Four Tostitos Scoops! Tortilla chips with guacamole means 122 end zone touchdown dances. Each chip is about 11 calories, each scoop of guacamole is 25 calories – maybe more. One KFC extra crispy drumstick and an extra crispy chicken breast means 203 end zone touchdown dances.
Five pigs in blankets (67.5 calories each) means taking over the job of a stadium vendor selling food for 36 minutes.
One 16-ounce bowl of beef and bean chili (about 550 calories) with a few tablespoons of sour cream and shredded cheese (another 150 calories) means 73 minutes of cheerleading.
Three slices of Pizza Hut Pepperoni Lover’s Pizza Works (440 calories a slice) means you’d have to clean the post-game stadium for 322 minutes – that’s more than 5 hours of work.
If you have 10 sliders with cheese (about 170 calories per slider) you’d have to perform with the marching band for 363 minutes.
If you want cheese sticks, four of them from Papa John’s dipped in their garlic dipping sauce with cheese (370 calories for 4 sticks and 150 calories for the dipping sauce) means you’d have to paint the faces of 23 “going nuts” fans.
One piece of crunchy cheese flavored Cheetos (7.14 calories) is equal to two minutes of waving a foam hand, chanting and pointing.
One Ritz cracker (16 calories) piled high with Cheese Whiz (45 calories for a tablespoon) will require 21 minutes of preparing, cooking, serving, and post Super Bowl clean-up.
One Doritos chip (12.75 calories) means that during half time you’d have to dance the entire 3.54 minutes of Bruno Mars’ “Locked Out of Heaven.” Imagine if you ate your way through the entire bag! Eating ten Lay’s classic potato chips with Kraft French onion dip means you’d have to dance to Madonna for 134 minutes.
Ah, wings. Fifteen Pizza Hut Buffalo Burnin’ Hot Crispy Bone-in Wings with ranch dressing (100 calories per wing and 220 calories for 1.5 ounces of ranch dressing) means you’d have to do the wave 9, 461 times. Of course by then your arms would hurt so much you wouldn’t be able to pick up any more food!

The Key Thing To Do To Develop A New Habit

January 9, 2014 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

It’s the second week of the New Year. Maybe you’ve decided to work on some new habits – Lose weight (how are you going to do that?), cook at home more (when are you going to do that?), eat less bread, butter, ice cream, candy, you name it (how much less?).

Specificity and baby steps help move you toward your new habit – but something else is key, too: practice. Your brain needs to decide that this new habit, the new behavior, is its default. How does your brain get the message? By you performing – doing – that behavior over and over again.

Remember this: What gets you to Carnegie Hall (or to the podium, or to the awards ceremony)? Practice. Think about this: What makes your new healthy habit stick? Practice.

If you’ve resolved to form new healthy habits, habits you want to keep and that fit in with your lifestyle, you need to keep repeating the new behaviors for that habit over and over again. It’s like learning a language or a new game. You need to keep practicing.

Why? Our brains are lazy. They like to default to what’s easy for them – and usually that’s an old habit (both good ones and bad ones). That default behavior is easy, nice, comfortable, and doesn’t require the extra energy necessary to do something unfamiliar. Doing something that’s very familiar can be done without much thinking or energy — like eating a certain thing everyday at the same time or going for a daily run at the same time and on the same route.

The way to create a new habit and to make it “stick” is to create a new “default” pattern to replace an old one. That requires the repetitive practice of doing the same behavior over and over again – like creating a path through grass or weeds by walking on it day after day.

Some Additional Tips For Forming New Habits

Try one change at a time. Create one new habit and then begin to work on another. Since our brains are, in a sense, kind of lazy, they don’t like too much disruption or change at a time. They’re used to doing something one way, so pick one change at a time and create a habit around it.

Be committed and willing to work on your habit (goal). Decide if you’re really willing to make change(s) in your life. Are you serious or half-hearted about what you want to do? “Kinda,” “sorta” goals give you “kinda,” “sorta” results. Realistic, achievable goals produce realistic results.

Start small and specific. So many of us are guilty of all-or-nothing thinking and overly ambitious goals. Guess what happens? We shoot ourselves in our collective feet and call ourselves failures. Do it often enough and a “no can do” attitude gets solidly embedded. Aim for what you think you can do and keep doing it. That doesn’t mean not trying, it just means scale it to what you think you can accomplish with some effort. If, for example, your aim is to exercise more frequently, schedule three or four days a week at the gym instead of seven. If you would like to eat healthier, try replacing dessert with something else you enjoy, like fruit or yogurt or a very small portion of a favorite indulgence — instead of saying you’re going cold turkey and will never eat a dessert again.

Unhealthy habits develop over time. Working on healthy habits to replace unhealthy ones also requires time. Be patient. And practice.

A 13 Step Plan To Create Healthy New Habits

January 6, 2014 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Are you tired of refusing to go out to eat because you’re on the new popular diet? Are you avoiding eating with your family because you don’t want to have the same tempting food?

What about forming some healthy new habits that will help you steer clear of wacky diets and deprivation? Healthy new habits that will stick around for a while!

How Long Does It Take To Create A New Habit?

There are many factors that can affect the process, but essential for any change is doing a new behavior consistently and repetitively – which is also necessary for creating the neural connections in your brain that underlie the new habit.

We’ve been led to believe that forming a new habit takes between 21 and 28 days. Actually, there’s no solid evidence to support those numbers. The length of time it takes to form a habit is unique for each of us because of the factors that surround and influence our behavior.

In a study of habit formation published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, it took study participants 18 to 254 days, with an average of 66 days, to form their new habit. So, it could take a shorter amount of time – or it could take a lot longer — especially if you’re trying to form a new habit to displace one that’s multifaceted, that’s been around for a long time, or is a replacement for something that you love doing.

Work on one new habit at a time. Trying to create multiple new habits at the same time is confusing, difficult to do, and often ineffective. Your brain prefers simple and familiar rather than confusing and new so try not to overwhelm it with too many new behaviors at once.

The Steps

You’re ready to do what it takes to create a new habit. What do you do and how do you do it? Here’s the process:

Describe, as specifically as possible, what you want to do. Instead of saying “I want to eat less,” identify how many calories or how many meals. Instead of saying “I’ll drink more water,” identify how many glasses you’ll drink a day.
Write your new habit down. The most important thing is not that it’s inscribed but that writing it down reinforces it in your mind.
Visualize the successful end result — like being in shape to run a 5K after creating new eating and workout habits. It might help to visualize yourself doing your new behavior and the results that will come from it.
Enlist as much support and accountability as you can from people you know who will be willing to help – identify the naysayers and saboteurs and ignore or avoid them. Remember, you’re focusing on the positive end result, not on the problems you might encounter getting there.
Buddy up with a friend who already has the habit you want to create. This serves as an accountability check and is also positive motivation. If you go to the gym with a friend who already has a habit of going to the gym it’s quite likely you will continue to go. Going with a friend who moans and whines about the gym and is ready to quit when the slightest breeze blows is not a likely predictor of success.
Set up triggers to help cue the new action for your habit each and every time that you do it. Leave yourself notes, have a coworker remind you, put a rubber band on your wrist, set up roadblocks to temptation or to the vending machine down the hall from your office.
Create a ritual around your new behavior – do the same thing every time and the same way each day so that it becomes second nature (and embedded in your brain’s hard wiring.) Habits are time and energy savers and brains like comfort. Doing the same thing the same way makes it nice and easy for your brain.
Think of potential obstacles, animate or inanimate, and plan on how to deal with them. Make the desirable things easy to do and the “bad” things difficult to do. Remove temptation, i.e. throw out the junk food and don’t walk past the bakery with the tantalizing smells that waft onto the street.
Take baby steps. It’s admirable to say that you want to walk for an hour each day. First work on getting out of bed early enough to fit in the time for exercise. Make it easy and leave your walking clothes in plain sight. Leave your running shoes where you’re likely to trip over them (don’t trip over them just make it hard to ignore them). Get out the door and commit to walking ten minutes each day. Hold yourself to the ten minutes, just do it every day until that part of the habit becomes embedded. Then build on it. Walk for 20 minutes, then thirty.
Make positive choices. Each time you’re at a decision point as to whether or not to carry out the action for your new habit think about why you want to do it. Why is the new habit important, what is the long-term benefit, how great will you feel when you accomplish it? If you’re giving up an old space and time-taker-upper habit you need to replace that behavior with something else. If you’re trying to create a habit of not watching so much television what are you going to do with that time instead?
Keep a visible reminder of your progress, no matter how big or small. Make graphs, use pictures, applaud each time you have fruit instead of cake for dessert, use a pedometer to calculate how many steps you walk each day. Yell hallelujah when your pants zip up without having to suck in your stomach. Positive feedback is essential.
Anticipate imperfection. The road may be bumpy, so have a plan to regroup. If something in your action plan doesn’t work, reevaluate. If you really can’t get out of bed at 5:30 AM to exercise then stopping at the gym on the way home from work might be a better solution (hint: don’t go home first because it requires megamotivation to get back out to the gym). Your interest may start to wane in a couple of weeks or so into the new actions so keep your cues and triggers in place to remind you to stick with it.
Be confident. Believe that you can achieve what you have set out to do. Celebrate all your achievements no matter how big or small.

What To Eat For Good Luck In The New Year — And What To Avoid!

December 30, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Pork products, fish, beans, cakes with coins, grapes, and pickled herring?

Food and symbolism play important roles in celebrations around the world. On special occasions different countries use certain foods not just to celebrate but often as a symbol of luck, wealth, and health.

What Not To Eat (Hint: Don’t Look Or Move Back)

Different cultures have foods that are supposed to be eaten at the stroke of midnight or sometime on January 1 to bring luck, fortune, and plenty (both money and food).

There are also foods not to eat. Things that move or scratch backwards — like lobsters, chickens, and turkeys — are to be avoided because they symbolize moving backward instead of progressing forward. To avoid any looking back, setbacks, or past struggles only things that move forward should be eaten.

In some cultures, a little food should be left on the table or on your plate to guarantee – or at least to hedge your bets – that you’ll have a well-stocked kitchen during the coming year.

Why Tempt Fate — Some Lucky Foods To Consider

There are many New Year’s foods and traditions — far too numerous to list – that are honored by people all around the world. Wouldn’t you want to consider piling some luck on your plate on January 1? Why tempt fate?

Here are some of the more common groups of good luck foods:

Round foods shaped like coins, like beans, black eyed peas, and legumes, symbolize financial prosperity, as do greens, which resemble paper money. Examples are cabbage, collard greens, and kale. Golden colored foods like corn bread also symbolize financial rewards in the New Year. Examples of round good luck foods are: lentils in Italy and Brazil, pancakes in Germany, round fruit in the Philippines, and black-eyed peas in the Southern US. Green leafy vegetables that symbolize paper money are collard greens in the Southern US and kale in Denmark.
Pork symbolizes abundance, plenty of food, and the fat of the land (think pork barrel legislation). It’s a sign of prosperity and the pig symbolizes plentiful food in the New Year. The pig is considered an animal of progress because it moves forward as it roots around for food. Pork products appear in many ways – ham, sausage, ham hocks, pork ribs, and even pig’s knuckles. Years ago, if your family had a pig you were doing well! Some examples of good luck pork products are roast suckling pig with a four leaf clover in its mouth in Hungary; pork sausage with lentils in Italy; and pork with sauerkraut in Germany.

In some countries, having food on your table and/or plates at the stroke of midnight is a sign that you’ll have food throughout the year.

Seafood, with the exception of the backward swimming lobster, symbolizes abundance and plenty and is a symbol of good luck. Fish also symbolize fertility because they produce multiple eggs at a time. It’s important that a fish be served whole, with the head and tail intact to symbolize a good beginning and a good end. Examples are herring and carp in Germany, pickled herring in Poland, boiled cod in Denmark, dried salted cod in Italy, red snapper in Japan, and carp in Vietnam.

Eating sweet food in order to have a sweet year is common in a number of countries. In Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Cuba, Ecuador, and Peru 12 sweet grapes, one for each month of the year, are eaten at midnight in hope of having 12 sweet months. The order and sweetness of the grape is important – for instance, if the fifth grape is a bit sour, May might be a bit rocky. In some places the goal is to eat all of the grapes before the last stroke of midnight and some countries eat a 13th grape just for good measure. There seems to be an awful lot of hedging of bets all around the world.

Another symbol for good luck involves eating food that’s in a ring shape – like doughnuts or ring shaped cakes. This represents coming full circle to successfully complete the year. Examples are Rosca de Reyes in Mexico and Olie Bollen (doughnuts) in the Netherlands.

Long noodles signify a long life. The Japanese use long Buckwheat Soba noodles – but you shouldn’t cut or break them because that could shorten life.

Sweets are symbolic of a sweet year and/or good luck. Cakes and breads with coins or trinkets baked into them are common in many countries. Greeks have a round cake called Vasilopita – made with a coin baked inside — which is cut after midnight. Whoever gets the coin is lucky throughout the year. Jews use apples dipped in honey on the Jewish New Year, Norwegians use rice pudding with an almond inside, Koreans use sweet fruits, and Egyptians have candy for children.

So fill your plate with a serving of luck. Don’t overlook resolutions. They’re not quite as tasty as most (not all) food traditions, but they do have longevity — they date back 4000 years to the ancient Babylonians!

Material in this article is taken (with the author’s permission) from “Symbolic Foods Eaten Around the World for New Years,” originally published on http://MamaLisa.com. Visit Mama Lisa’s World, which features the internet’s largest collection of international children’s songs and a lively blog focused on parenthood and world culture.

For more interesting tips about food and eating visit the iTunes store to get Eat Out Eat Well digital magazine for your iPad or iPhone.

Do All Those Cookies Create a Problem for Santa?

December 22, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

It seems that Santa has some weight challenges – no small wonder with all of the cookies and milk left out for him on Christmas Eve! Plus, he uses a sleigh pulled by reindeer so he just slides down the chimney which might be tough with that belly and big bag of presents, but it doesn’t use up a whole lot of calories.

On Christmas Eve, Santa visits an estimated 92 million households. Walking.about.com figures that if all households were evenly distributed across the earth, Santa would travel 0.78 miles between houses — for a total of 71,760,000 (71.8 million) miles.

Guessing Santa’s weight at 250 pounds and that he moves pretty quickly – he does have to get his deliveries done in one night – it’s estimated that he would burn 13 billion calories.

If Santa climbed stairs delivering his presents — Big12Hoops calculates that he would climb the equivalent of 9.5 billion stairs – he would burn 0.11 calories for each stair, or 1.045 billion calories. That’s far fewer than 13 billion calories – but it’s still a whole lot of energy expenditure that would leave him mighty thin – maybe too thin to be seen – by Christmas morning.

But what about all the milk and cookies left for him in front of fireplaces and Christmas trees?

Can Santa Burn Off All The Milk And Cookies?

Two small cookies and a cup of skim milk (no full fat dairy for Santa, he might have cholesterol issues) clock in at about 200 calories. If Santa snacked at each of the 92 million households, he would chow down on 18.4 billion calories.

That would mean he would gain 1,529,350 pounds every Christmas. If he walked instead of rode in his sleigh –Rudolph is probably well-trained enough to take the lead without Santa’s hands on the reins — he’d have to circle the earth 1,183 times to burn off the extra calories.

What If Santa Snacked On Veggies Instead Of Cookies?

If Santa had a cup of carrot and celery sticks rather than cookies and milk he’d have just 50 calories at each house — which adds up to 4.6 billion calories. Since he would burn off 13 billion calories by walking, he’d actually lose all of his weight and disappear.

Maybe the best idea for him would be a nice combination of veggies at most households and cookies and low fat milk every thousand or so households to keep him in caloric balance!