Eat Out Eat Well

Snacking, Noshing, Tasting

Is Your Workplace A Food Landmine?

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Your workplace can be a major food landmine when you’re trying to eat well.

We spend a lot of hours at work — whether that means time at the office, at home, in the car, on an airplane, in a hotel, in a retail store, or anywhere else you conduct your business.  The challenges are enormous — especially in the face of ever-present food – a good deal of which is carb and fat loaded – and an environment which can range from fast paced, stressful, and overwhelming to boring or downright exhausting.

Using Food To Cope, Manage, And Procrastinate

All of this can push you into using food as a means of coping, procrastinating, or looking for energy to ward off fatigue.

  • Try to identify what you usually do when you’re stressed, tired, or angry.  If your usual action is to grab a cookie or candy bar try to manage your stress without the reward foods. Instead of turning to a high-calorie, high-fat trigger foods to calm your nerves or as a reward, try some healthy, stress-relieving practices like deep breathing and meditation — and make them your default.
  • Make a deal with yourself to work some activity into your workday.  Instead of using eating as an excuse to take a break, make taking a short walk – even if it’s around your office or to another floor — an essential part of your day. The quick walk will get you out of the immediate environment, let you blow off some steam, and burn an extra calorie or two. If you travel, walk in the airport rather than plopping yourself down in the food court or bar.
  • If you eat out or order take out for any of your meals, scout out the restaurants, delis, salad bars – or even your own workplace lunchroom.  Identify the meal choices that are the best for you and make them your “go-tos” so you’re not caught in the trap of being starving or too busy to care when you order.   Have you ever been so hungry that you throw your best laid plans out the window and end up eating a whole pizza followed by a piece of chocolate cake?
  • If you plan your route to work to intentionally pass your favorite coffee shop with the absolute best blueberry muffins — or find yourself using the rest room on the next floor because you have to walk by the vending machine with peanut M&Ms — think about changing your route.   Don’t taunt yourself with temptation. Do some thinking and planning.  If you’re going to have a snack, plan for it –  know what you’re going to eat and stick to your choice.  Contemplating your choices while standing in front of a bakery display or vending machine filled with candy or salty treats is a sure fire recipe for caving in.  Don’t deny yourself food – just make it good food.
  • It’s always someone’s birthday — or it’s a holiday — or someone has brought in leftovers from their kid’s party  or a recipe that you just have to taste.  By the way, the reason they probably brought in the leftovers is because they don’t want them hanging around their house tempting them.  Have a strategy for the inevitable food fest of leftover cake, pizza, and bagels. Perhaps allow yourself a once or twice a week treat.  Just don’t make the snack room a routine place to visit to scrounge for the leftover cake.
  • Install your own personal policy for bowl dipping —  you know – the dipping into the candy bowl at the receptionist’s desk, the jelly beans on your partner’s desk, the chocolates on the counter. Use whatever reason you have to – maybe think about all of the other hands – and where those hands have been – that are also dipping into the same bowl.
  • If your desk drawer filled with reward food that stares at you every time you open the drawer, aren’t you tempting fate?  See it — eat it.   Need I say more?

 

How Many Calories Are You Putting Into Your Coffee?

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How do you like your coffee?  Black, light and sweet, regular?

Coffee Calories Can Sneak Up On You

Black brewed coffee has around two calories in an eight ounce cup. Not a bad deal for a nice, hot beverage.

What a lot of us fail to realize is how many calories are in the stuff we put into our coffee.

Here’s Some Caloric Stats

Half and half; 2 tablespoons (1/8 cup):  40 calories

Whole milk; 2 tablespoons:  18 calories

2% (low fat) milk; 2 tablespoons:  14 calories

Non-fat milk; 2 tablespoons:  11 calories

Sugar; 1 teaspoon:  16 calories

What Do You Put Into Your Coffee?

How much milk or half and half do you put into your coffee?  We all do a freehand pour.  Try measuring how much you pour and you might be surprised.

How much sugar do you add?

How many times a day do you drink coffee?

Add This Up

Say you have three grande (Starbuck’s) – or large (Dunkin donuts) – size coffees a day.  Each is 20 ounces or 2.5 times the size of a traditional 8 ounce cup.

If you add 4 tablespoons of half and half and three teaspoons of sugar to each that’s:

  • 128 calories for the additives and around 5 calories for the coffee for a total of 133 calories for each grande/large cup of coffee.
  • Have three of those and that’s 399 calories a day of coffee your way.
  • Do that every day for a year and that’s the equivalent of 145,635 calories a year or 41.61 pounds (add a little over a tenth of a pound in a leap year)!

Of course not everyone will drink this amount of coffee with this amount of half and half and sugar.  But, it does make you stop and think about how many calories you really are putting into your coffee.

Is The Breadbasket Doing You In?

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Shiny Packets And Small Pots

It used to be only butter on bread – big slabs, small pots, or foil wrapped rectangles.  You can still find all of these – what would a diner be without those sometimes rock hard, sometimes soft and squishy, gold or silver foil wrapped butter packets?

Butter or Oil?

Olive oil for bread sopping and dipping is giving butter some stiff competition.  Olive oil arrives green or golden, plain, herbed or spiced.  It can be plopped down on your table, or poured with flourish from a dark tinted bottle.  Some restaurants offer a selection for dipping – and attempt to educate you about the variation in flavors depending upon the olives’ country of origin.

How Many Calories?

Do you eat more calories from one or the other?  Hidden cameras in Italian restaurants showed that people who put olive oil on a piece of bread consumed more fat and calories than if they used butter on their bread. But, the olive oil users end up eating fewer pieces of bread than the butter eaters.

In the study, done by the food psychology laboratory at Cornell University, 341 restaurant goers were randomly given olive oil or blocks of butter with their bread. Following dinner, researchers calculated the amount of olive oil or butter and the amount of bread that was consumed.

How Much Butter, How Much Oil, How Much Bread?

Adult diners given olive oil for their bread used 26% more oil on each piece of bread compared to those who were given block butter, but they ended up eating 23% less bread in total.

The researchers found:

  • Olive oil users used 26% more olive oil on each slice of bread compared to block butter users (40 vs. 33 calories)
  • Olive oil users ate 23% less bread over the course of a meal than the people who used butter

The olive oil users had a heavier hand than the butter users – for individual slices of bread.  However, over the course of the meal when the total amount of bread and either oil or butter was accounted for, the olive oil users used more per slice, but, overall they ate less bread and oil over the course of the meal.

They also took in 17% fewer bread calories:  264 calories (oil eaters) vs. 319 calories (butter eaters).

Butter, Oil, And Bread Add Significant Calories

  • A tablespoon of olive oil has 119 calories, a tablespoon of butter has 102 calories, one pat of butter has around 36 calories.
  • Butter and oil are all fat; olive oil is loaded with heart healthy monounsaturated fat, butter is filled with heart unhealthy saturated fat
  • Bread varies significantly in calories depending on the type of bread and the size of the piece
  • Most white bread and French bread averages around 90 to 100 calories a slice. Most dinner rolls average 70 to 75 calories each.

What’s Your Bread And Butter (or oil) Plan?

The bread and butter or olive oil pre-dinner (and maybe during dinner) ritual can create a real caloric bump without much nutritional value.  So many of us chow down mindlessly on bread and butter or oil before a meal – because we’re hungry – or because it’s there for easy nibbling.

Choose to eat it, limit your amount, or don’t let the breadbasket land on your table.  The choice is yours – just be mindful of the calories.

Do You Season Cold Food More Than Hot Food?

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Season cold food “generously but judiciously” according to the Sept/Oct 2011 edition of Cook’s Illustrated.

According to their “25 Tips For improving Flavor,” chilling foods dulls flavor and aroma so it’s important to compensate with more aggressive seasoning.

Cook’s Illustrated says that to keep from going overboard you should season with a normal amount of salt before you chill your food.  After it’s chilled sample it and add more seasoning to taste just before serving.

The “Power” Of Coffee

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Most of us recognize the energizing, wake-up character of coffee – but too often we forget its other “power.”

A Power Outage

Connecticut was hit very hard by hurricane Irene.  As I write this there are still half a million people without power and in an area like mine — a lot of homes have well water and no gas source — you may not have water, a working stove – or flushing toilets for that matter.  We have an abundance of trees and outside of my small town’s downtown area most of the power, phone, and cable lines are overhead making us especially vulnerable in any major wind, snow, or rain event.  We have no mass transit other than a Metro North spur line – which is still down for the count. In other words, it can feel like you’re disconnected from the world and functioning within your own little sphere.  Your lifelines become food, water, and your iphone or blackberry (if you can find a place to plug in your charger).

Coffee Shops Act As The Town’s “Water Cooler” And General Store

In my town of 20,000 we do have a Starbucks, a Dunkin’ Donuts and a handful of other coffee shops – and they have become the office water cooler, the town general store, the coffee klatch of times gone by, and the source of an electrical outlet and wifi.  Downtown has power so the coffee shops have power.

Thank goodness the post hurricane weather has been phenomenal.  So, what do you do – you get into your car where you can listen to the radio desperately hoping for an estimate for power restoration (which you don’t get) and go hang out in town at – where else – the coffee shops, or sidewalk benches, or restaurants (especially those with outdoor seating).

By far, the most popular places are the coffee shops.  Yes, the caffeine is a drawing card – but so is the conversation and sharing of war stories while you wait in the line that extends out the door onto the street.  Unshaven men and women without a stitch of make-up smile and converse.  Kids beg for donuts (and in most cases get them ‘cause their isn’t a whole lot of produce to be had  — and who could wash it and/or cook it, anyway).

The Golden Ticket

Our local Starbucks must be breaking all sales records.  It has the golden ticket.  Aside from coffee and bathrooms, it has outdoor space with tables, a lot of seating on chairs and retaining walls, and a major bonus:  wifi and for those in the know – outdoor electrical outlets built into the retaining walls. It is so crowded that you have to launch yourself in the direction of an empty space when someone vacates.

The amazing thing is that everyone is friendly and cooperative.  Tables are shared.  The Starbucks staff, overworked, has been as friendly as ever.  The coffee is flowing – but most importantly, the place itself has reverted to the general store of old – the downtown center – the water cooler in the office.  It is the place to share stories, to connect with humanity, to speculate, to rage at the power company and the cable provider.  It is the place to recharge your mind and to recharge – literally – your cellphone, iPad, and laptop!

So, for those in many towns and cities who sometimes protest the proliferation of coffee shops, or bodegas, or local bars or restaurants – think about what they offer.  It’s not only food and drink but the humanity and kinship that goes along with it – not only during crises but when you stop in everyday for your morning coffee – or your Sunday breakfast at the diner – or your burger and beer to watch the game.  For many of us, these places become part of out social structure – something that is heightened during times like power outages or critical events.

Time To Post

It’s time to get into my car, turn on the radio, drive into town hoping to spot a utility truck working on downed wires, go to Starbucks to get a cup of coffee and an update on power restoration (opinion, true or not), and stake a claim to a perch outside where I can grab on internet connection and post this online.