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Super Bowl and Food: What Will You Be Eating?

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Super Bowl and Food

It’s amazing how food has become associated with football — from tailgating to Super Bowl parties to the selection of food sold in stadiums. Where there’s football there also seems to be many opportunities to eat, often mindlessly.

Even when you’re surrounded by a smorgasbord of highly caloric, fatty, salty, and sweet foods there are plenty of opportunities for eating deliciously well if you are a bit more mindful about your choices.

Some common Super Bowl food

  • Tostada with guacamole:  2 pieces (9.3 oz), 360 calories, 23g fat, 32g carbs, 12g protein
  • Salsa:  1 tablespoon 4 calories, .04g fat, 1g carbs, .2g protein
  • Nacho flavored tortilla chips, reduced fat:  1 oz, 126 calories, 4g fat, 20g carbs, 2g protein
  • Regular Nacho flavored tortilla chips:  1oz, 141 calories, 7g fat, 18g carbs, 1g protein
  • Potato chips:  1oz, 152 calories, 10g fat, 15g carbs, 2g protein
  • Potato chips, reduced fat:  1 oz, 134 calories, 6g fat, 19g carbs, 2g protein
  • Raw baby carrots:  1 medium, 4 calories, 0 fat, .8g carbs, 0 protein
  • Pizza with cheese:  1 slice (1/8 of a 12” pie), 140 calories, 3g fat, 20g carbs, 8g protein
  • Pizza, pepperoni:  1 slice (1/8 12” pie), 181 calories, 7g fat, 20g carbs, 10g protein
  • Grilled chicken breast:  one 4.2 oz breast, 180 calories, 4g fat, 0 carbs, 35g protein
  • KFC Fiery hot Buffalo wing:  one 1oz wing, 80 calories, 5g fat, g carbs, 4g protein
  • KFC extra crispy drumstick:  one 2oz piece, 150 calories, 6g carbs, 11g protein
  • Chili (Wendy’s, with saltine crackers):  8 oz, 187 calories, 6g fat, 19g carbs, 14g protein
  • Wheat bread:  1 slice, .9 oz., 65 calories, 1g fat,, 12g carbs, 2g protein
  • Italian combo on ciabatta (Panera):  1 sandwich, 1lb. 7 oz, 1050 calories, 47g fat, 94g carbs, 61g protein
  • Subway 6g of fat or less turkey breast & ham on wheat sandwich:  8.3oz, 296 calories, 4g fat, 48g carbs, 19g protein
  • Chocolate chip cookie:  2-1/4” from refrigerated dough. 59 calories, 3g fat, 8g carbs, .6g protein
  • Chocolate ice cream, Cold Stone Creamery:  5oz (like it), 326 calories, 20g fat, 33g carbs, 5g protein
  • Apple:  medium, 95 calories, .4g fat, 25g carbs, .5g protein

If You Want To Save Some Calories …

  • Stick with grilled meat, veggies, or baked chips rather than fried. Turkey, baked ham, and grilled chicken are better choices than wings and fried chicken.
  • Plain bread, pitas, or wraps are less caloric than biscuits or cornbread.
  • Go for salsa and skip the guacamole. Guacamole is made with healthy avocados, but is quite high in calories. You can always alternate guacamole and salsa, too.
  • Minimize calories by dipping chicken wings into hot sauce instead of Buffalo or Blue Cheese sauce.
  • Try using celery for crunch and as a dipper instead of chips.
  • Go for thin crust rather than thick doughy crust pizza. Choose the slices with vegetables, not pepperoni or meatballs. If you’re not embarrassed, try blotting up the free-floating oil that sits on top of a greasy slice (soak up even a teaspoon of oil saves you 40 calories and 5 grams of fat).
  • Cut your slice of pizza in half. When you go back for seconds, eat the second half. You’ll feel like you’re eating two slices, but you’re eating only one.
  • Try fruit for dessert – or have just one cookie or a small piece of pie – leave some of the crust on your plate. Home made pie crust has around 150 calories (single crust pie), so leaving some pie crust on your plate can save you some significant calories.
  • Alcohol adds calories and dulls your mindful eating. Try alternating water or diet soda with beer or alcohol. That can decrease your alcohol calories (alcohol has 7 calories/gram) by 50%.
  • Put your food on a plate rather than constantly picking, it’s a form of portion control. And step back from the buffet. If you can’t reach out and grab it and you can’t see it, you won’t eat it.

Which Has Fewer Calories — a Ham and Cheese Sandwich or a Salad?

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calories-in-salad

Do you feel virtuous when you order a salad for lunch?

So many of us think a salad, instead of a sandwich, is the way to go if we’re trying to be healthy and/or calorie conscious. Somehow we’ve embraced the idea that salads are always a light and healthy choice. Sometimes they are – but all too often they aren’t.

Sometimes a sandwich is the clear winner in terms of calories and fat. A ham and cheese sandwich ranges from 350 to 450 calories depending upon how much ham and cheese there really is, the type of bread, and whether it comes with mustard or mayo (and, of course, without fries or chips).

And sometimes the salad is a better choice — depending on what goes into it. The nutrient rich plant foods that make the base of a salad are high in antioxidants — especially the dark green, orange, and red vegetables. 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.

The Green Base For Salads

The green stuff that’s the base for most salads isn’t the problem. Most greens are very low in calories and pretty nutritious.

  • 1 cup shredded Romaine: 8 calories, 1 gram fiber, 1 gram protein, 0 gram fat
  • 1 cup of Arugula: 6 calories, 1 gram fiber, 1 gram protein, 0 gram fat
  • 1 cup raw spinach: 7 calories, 1 gram of fiber, 1 gram protein
  • 1 cup chopped kale: 32 calories, 1 gram of fiber, 2 grams of protein, 0 gram fat

Calorie Savers

High calorie add-ons and dressings can make salads a “no thank you” choice.

  • 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 worth).  Vinaigrette dressing, usually 3 parts oil to one part vinegar, adds its own fat blast.
  • Tuna, macaroni, egg, and chicken salads, the holy grail of delis and salad bars, are loaded with mayonnaise. On average (for a half cup): chicken salad has around 208 calories, 16g of fat; tuna salad has 192 calories, 9g fat; tuna pasta salad has 250 calories, 9g fat; macaroni salad has 170 calories, 9g fat. (Remember, ½ cup is pretty small.)
  • Then there’s cheese. A ¼ cup (which is really small) serving of shredded cheddar has 114 calories, 9g fat; blue cheese has 80 calories, 6g fat;  feta has 75 calories, 6g fat.
  • 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: ¼ cup sunflower seeds: 210 calories, 19g fat; chopped walnuts:  193 calories, 18g fat
  • Avocado, ¼ cup: 58 calories, 5g fat
  • Bacon bits, 1 tablespoon: 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, 78 calories, 2g fat. Dressing sopped up by the bread or roll:  lots of extra fat calories!

Should Salads Go On Your “Not a Good Choice” List?

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 salad.  There are even good choices in fast food and chain restaurants (and plenty of really, really bad ones).

Sandwich Tip

Having a sandwich for lunch?

  • Substitute mustard for mayo and save 100 calories.
  • Leave off the slice of Swiss cheese for another 133 calories.
  • Ditch the two slices of bacon for another 84 calories.
  • Put your turkey, ham, or roast beef along with lettuce, tomato and onions on a whole grain pita (74 calories) instead of between two slices of rye (180 calories).
  • you’ve saved a total of 423 calories.
  • Walk to and from the deli or around the block several times and you’ve easily saved yourself 500 calories.

Resolutions: Perfection Just Might Be The Enemy Of Good

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Resolutions

It’s a week into the New Year.  Your pants are uncomfortably tight and the number on the scale is in the wrong zip code. Trying to right the ship you resolve – swear — to never again eat another chocolate chip cookie — or maybe you’ve taken an oath to lay off potato chips forever or to go to the gym six days a week at 6AM.

Resolutions Can Be Tricky

Count yourself among the legions of people who have a specific end game in mind and then set broad – huge – resolutions and goals to try to get there. Those resolutions and goals usually aim for perfect achievement – something that’s virtually impossible to accomplish.

Aiming For Perfection

Be honest.  You know that aiming for perfection means lining yourself up for a big time fall. Inevitably, you end up feeling awful when you step over the theoretical line – or maybe it’s more like you fall off the cliff.  Why must sticking to a resolution or accomplishing a goal be done that way?  Perfection, in this case, is really the enemy of good.  In the real world, isn’t movement toward achieving your goal good enough?

Two Tips

1. Ditch the all-or-nothing thinking and overly ambitious goals. Drastic changes usually don’t sync with daily life and probably won’t last more than a few weeks.  Cycle through the drastic changes often enough and you solidly embed a “no can do” attitude in your brain. Remember, your less than ideal behaviors have taken time to develop and replacing them with more ideal, healthier ones takes time, too. Don’t reassess/alter everything at once. Instead, work toward changing one thing at a time. Human brains don’t like too much disruption all at once – they like their familiar way of doing things.  Pick one thing at a time and create a new habit around it. Then go on to the next thing on your list.

2. Not having succeeded before doesn’t mean you won’t succeed this time. Everyone has made and broken resolutions. We’ve all tried to lose weight or eat more fruit and veggies.  Adopt a positive attitude and frame your resolution in positive terms. “I will eat vegetables instead of French fries twice a week” or I’ll have cereal only on Saturday mornings” is much more positive than “I’ll never eat French fries or cereal again.” It’s easier to put a new habit in place than to change an old one, so embed the positive behavior not the negative one.

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

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NewYearsFoodGraphic

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.
  • Chinese New Year, an all East and Southeast Asia celebration, is known as “Spring Festival” in China, begining on the first day of the first month in the traditional Chinese lunar calendar. It’s filled with tradition and ritual and usually considered the most important traditional holiday for Chinese people around the world.
  • The holiday is celebrated with lucky red envelopes filled with money, lion and dragon dances, drums, fireworks, firecrackers, and feasting on traditional sweet sticky rice cake and round savory dumplings that symbolize never-ending wealth. On New Year’s Eve extended family come together for a meal that includes fish as the last course to symbolize abundance. In the first five days of the New Year people eat long noodles to symbolize long life and on the 15th and final day of the celebration round dumplings shaped like the full moon are shared to represent the family unit and perfection. Source:com
  • 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. As for resolutions — they’re not quite as tasty as many food traditions, but they do have longevity — they date back 4000 years to the ancient Babylonians!

I’ll be baking vasilopita and sharing it with my family.  Each one of us will be hoping we crunch down on the piece with the hidden coin.

I wish you a Happy and Healthy 2016.

Does All That Milk and Cookies Create a Problem for Santa?

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SantaCookieGraphic4

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. That might be a tough task with that belly and a 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.

What Are Santa’s Stats?

According to NORAD, Santa tips the scale at 260 pounds and he’s 5’7” tall, giving him a BMI of 40.7 — which, unfortunately, makes him obese.

Walking.about.com guessing that Santa weighs 250 pounds and thinking that he’s a pretty fast walker because he does have to get his deliveries done in one night, estimates that Santa burns 13 billion calories on Christmas Eve.

If Santa climbed stairs when he delivered his presents, Big12Hoops calculated 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 so thin that he could slip through a crack on Christmas morning.

Does Santa Need All The Milk and Cookies Left Out For Him?

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 from all of the milk and cookies.

What If Santa Snacked On Veggies Instead Of Cookies?

If Santa had a cup of carrot and celery sticks rather than cookies and milk at each house, he’d be consuming just 50 calories — which would add up to 4.6 billion calories for the evening. Since he burns off 13 billion calories by walking, he’d actually lose so much weight that he’d disappear from sight.

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

But … Santa has been delivering presents and eating cookies for a very long time. He magically reappears every year as jolly as ever. He seems to be doing quite nicely with his usual routine, don’t you think?

Ho Ho Ho! Merry Christmas!