Eat Out Eat Well

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Thinking About Chowing Down At A Barbecue This Weekend?

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Memorial Day Weekend – the “unofficial” start of summer weekends. Hometown parades with floats and kids in baseball uniforms.  Veterans handing out flags.  The lazy, hazy days of summer with lots of soda and popcorn and beer.  Also lots of barbecue and desserts – and lots of seemingly never ending caloric temptation — and bathing suits to get into!

Celebration and Remembrance

Just a bit of a reminder.  It’s wonderful to celebrate the unofficial beginning of summer.  But, there’s a reason for all of the parades and flags. In the states, Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who died in our nation’s service.  First observed on May 30th, 1868 when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery, in 1971 Congress extended it into a three-day holiday weekend.

Parades, Picnics, And Barbecues

Memorial Day is a day of national ceremonies and small town parades, but also of barbecues and picnics. For many of us Memorial Day also signals the start of a whole different set of thoughts:  how to avoid the glut of cheeseburgers and hot dogs; the mayonnaise laden potato and macaroni salad; the plates full of brownies and cookies; the dripping ice cream cones (sprinkles are mandatory); the freshly baked blueberry and peach pies; and the beer, wine, soda, and lemonade to wash everything down.

Gotta Have A Plan To Handle The Food . . .

Or you might never take off the bathing suit cover-up.  So, as you remember the people who gave service to their country, please honor yourself by choosing to eat what’s best for you.  Holidays and celebrations present food challenges.  A one-day splurge is a blip that doesn’t account for much.  A one-day splurge that opens the floodgate to mindless eating all summer long is something else.

General Tips For Mindful Eating All Summer Long

  • Before you grab some tasty morsel, ask yourself if you’re really hungry.  Odds are, with a tempting display of food in front of you, you may not be hungry but you just want to eat what’s in front of you for reasons not dictated by your stomach.
  • A good question to ask yourself is:  do I really need to stand in front of the picnic table, kitchen table, or barbecue?  The further away from the food you are the less likely you are to eat it.
  • If you know that the barbecued ribs, the blueberry pie, or your cousin’s potato salad is your downfall, either build it into your food for the day or steer clear.  For most of us swearing that you’ll only take a taste is a promise doomed to fail.
  • If you’re asked to bring something to a party, picnic, or barbecue, bring food you can eat with abandon – fruit, salad with dressing on the side, berries and angel food cake for dessert (no fat in angel food cake).  That way you know you’ll always have some “go to” food.
  • Don’t show up absolutely starving.  How can you resist when your blood sugar is in the basement and your stomach is singing a chorus?
  • Really eyeball the food choices so you know what’s available.  Then make a calculated decision about what you are going to eat.
  • Take the food you have decided to eat, sit down, enjoy it without guilt, and be done with it.  No going back for seconds.
  • If you’re full, stop eating and clear your plate right away.  If it hangs around in front of you, inevitably you’ll keep picking at it.
  • Give yourself permission to eat – and enjoy — the special dessert or a burger or ribs.  If you don’t, you’ll probably be miserable and there’s some chance that you’ll get home and gobble down everything in sight – because you made yourself miserable by not eating the good stuff in the first place!  Eat what you want and enjoy it (no seconds and no first portions that are the equivalent of firsts, seconds and thirds built into one).
  • If hanging around the food gets to be too much, go for a walk, a swim, or engage someone in an animated conversation.    It’s pretty hard to shove food into you mouth when you’re talking away.

Iced And Frozen Coffee Drinks: Refreshing But A Caloric Bomb

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The weather is heating up and the drinks are cooling down.  Unfortunately, some of those delicious iced and frozen coffee drinks that seem to be offered everywhere can really bump up your calories and fat grams.

Keep in mind that you can always order plain old iced coffee or even an iced Americano (almost no calories for 16 ounces) and doctor it with non-caloric sweetener and skim milk.  You’d even come out ahead if you use controlled amounts of sugar and a bit of half-and half. Or have an iced brewed coffee with classic syrup:  12 oz (tall), 60 calories.

Calories in Some Iced And Frozen Coffee Drinks

Note that despite the differences in names for various sized cups, all stats (with the exception of Burger King) are for a 16 oz. size cup.

  • Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino with whipped cream, 16 oz. (grande): 400 calories, 15 g fat (9 g saturated), 64g carbohydrates.
  • Starbucks Mocha Light Frappuccino with nonfat milk, 16 oz. (grande): 130 calories, 0.5g fat, (0 g saturated), 28g carbohydrates.
  • Iced Caffe Latte with nonfat milk, 16 oz. (grande):  90 calories, 0g fat, 13g carbohydrates.
  • Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Coolata made with whole milk, 16 oz. (small):  240 calories, 4 g fat (2.5 g saturated), 50g carbohydrates
  • Dunkin’ Donuts Vanilla Bean Coolatta, 16 oz. (small): 420 calories, 6g fat (3.5g saturated), 92g carbohydrates
  • Dunkin’ Donuts Iced Latte made with skim milk, 16 oz. (small):  80calories, 0g fat,   13 g carbohydrates
  • Baskin Robbins Cappuchino Blast Mocha, 16oz (small):  400 calories, 13g fat (9g saturated), 65g carbohydrates
  • McDonald’s: McCafé Iced Caramel Mocha, 16 oz. (medium) made with whole milk and whipped cream:  300 calories, 14g fat (8g saturated), 36g carbohydrates
  • Burger King: Iced Seattle’s Best Coffee Mocha, 22 oz. (medium):  260 calories, 3.5g fat (2.5g saturated), 54g carbohydrates

Bottom Line:  Ways To Shave Calories From Iced Coffee Drinks

Try these:

  • Ditch the whipped cream.
  • Swap full fat milk for 2% milk, 1% or skim.
  • Watch the sugar:  ask for one pump instead of two, ask for sugar free syrup, add non-calorie sweetener instead of sugar, don’t sweeten at all.
  • Change the size of the drink that you order:  instead of a venti or an extra large order a grande or large – or drop down to a tall or a medium (or even a small) sized drink.
  • If you have a two a day (or more) habit – like a coolata in the morning and a frappuccino in the afternoon – substitute a plain coffee or iced tea (easy on the milk and sugar), or even a latte with nonfat milk for one of those choices.

Should I Eat This?

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What do I want to eat?  What should I eat? Two questions we all ask ourselves.  Including me.  A lot. Standing in front of the fridge with the door open.  Staring at the shelves in the pantry or in front of the deli case – or when staring at a menu.  With no clear idea, the danger zone looms — setting up the perfect scenario for being easily swayed by all kinds of food that, perhaps, isn’t really the best for you.

What’s The Answer?

Sorry to disappoint you, but there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.  I can’t tell you what to eat. That’s your personal decision. But here’s some helpful guidelines:

  • deprivation doesn’t work.  Certainly not for long lasting and healthy weight loss and maintenance.
  • restriction and deprivation almost always end up in a pendulum swing – restriction on one end and indulgence on the other.
  • how many times have you deprived yourself of a food that you love only to gorge on it when you hit an emotional low and toss resolve out the window?
  • constant dieting doesn’t work either.  It messes with your metabolism, and dieting — by its very nature — means deprivation.

How Do You Figure Out What To Eat?

There’s no two ways around it:  energy taken in (calories) should equal energy output (physical movement and metabolism).  If you eat more calories than you use up, you gain weight.  To maintain your weight, your energy (calorie) intake and caloric expenditure (activity and metabolism) have to be in balance.  An imbalance means you either gain weight or lose weight.

There are ways to help figure out how to eat delicious food and not pack on the pounds.  Each of us has food and food memories that we feel we can’t  — and don’t want to — live without.  Sometimes it’s hard to separate the food we eat because we physically need it from the food we eat for emotional, cultural, religious, or traditional reasons.  Sometimes the two can’t and shouldn’t be separated.

Foodie Checks and Balances

When you know what is good for your body and what isn’t, and how much food your body needs for the amount of activity you do, there are a bunch of questions you can use to evaluate your food choices – before you make them.  It sounds like a big deal, but it’s really not – you probably ask yourself some of these already.  It’s a simple system of “foodie checks and balances.” The answers can give you valuable information to use to make good food choices – wherever and whenever.

  • What is my tried and true meal that can be my fallback or my “go to” meal for breakfast, lunch, or dinner? What type of food did I grow up with?  Did that type of eating make me feel energetic and clear-headed?  There’s something to be said about eating the way our ancestors did (even if its only one or two generations ago).
  • How do I feel when I eat this food? If you feel like garbage after eating red meat or drinking a glass of milk, stay away from those foods.  Just because someone else eats them doesn’t mean you have to. A journal comes in handy so you can write down what you eat and how you feel and then figure out what foods make you feel good or bad.
  • Is it delicious?  Why waste your calories on something that doesn’t taste good or that has little or no nutritional value.  There are two sides to this coin.  Just because something is good for you doesn’t mean that it has to taste bad.  There are many ways to prepare foods so try a different preparation.  The other side of the coin is that maybe you’ll never like a certain food.  Who cares if it’s a nutritional superstar.  There are plenty of them.  Why eat what you can’t stand?  There are lots of delicious and healthy foods to go around so choose something else.  Don’t waste your nutritional budget on something that you don’t like.
  • Is it healthy?  Is it good for me — not Is it good for my family, my spouse, or my friend?  Don’t waste your calories on something that doesn’t do anything for you. Some foods may be delicious (to you) but be downright unhealthy.  Give up on the empty and unhealthy calories.  What’s the point of eating stuff that does nothing for you, or that may be bad for you?
  • If I eat this, how am I going to feel half an hour or an hour from now? Ever eat a big bowl of pasta at lunch, start to nod off and reach for a monster cup of coffee?  Ever stop at a gas station on a long road trip to grab a candy bar – only to find yourself nodding off a while later?  Dangerous.  I once had pasta for dinner before a movie and promptly fell asleep during the trailer only to wake up when the movie credits were rolling.  Pasta makes me sleepy, so does candy.  What about you?
  • Food affects your mental clarity. Learn to identify the relationship between certain foods and how your body physically and emotionally reacts to them.  Some make you sleepy, some make you crabby, some make you alert, and some give you energy.  Which foods do what for you?
  • Is this the right portion size for me? Portion control is essential for weight management.  Learn to eyeball portion sizes and commit to a personal “no seconds” policy.
  • Do I really want to eat this or am I doing it just because . . . (you supply the answer – some typical ones are: everyone else is eating it, or my kids love it, or Grandma made it, or it’s the specialty of the restaurant, or “I had a tough day, I deserve it”).

Some Questions To Ask Yourself

Create a habit of asking yourself these questions when you’re faced with food choices:

  • How will I feel when I eat this food?
  • Am I really hungry?
  • Is it delicious?
  • Is it good for me?
  • Is it healthy?
  • If I eat this, how am I going to feel half an hour to an hour from now?
  • Is this the right portion size for me?
  • Do I really want to eat this or am I doing it just because . . .?

What are some of the questions you can ask yourself before eating?

Jelly Beans: What Kind Is Your Favorite?

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Don’t you love those little nuggets of jelly bean sweetness that come in multitudes of colors and flavors and get stuck in your teeth?

Their gummy insides probably stretch back centuries ago from the treat, Turkish Delight.  Their outsides are just like the colored hard candy coating, developed in the late 17th century, for the Jordan almond.

The modern jelly bean became popular during the American Civil War when Boston’s William Schraft encouraged sending candy to Union soldiers.  Jellybeans were the first bulk candy and they became one of the staples of penny candy that was sold by weight in the early 1900s. Because of their egg shape, which can be taken as representing fertility and birth, they became popular as Easter candy around 1930.

Standard jelly beans come in fruit flavors but there are now a huge number of flavors — some goofy, some sophisticated — like spiced, mint, gourmet, tropical, popcorn, bubble gum, pepper, and cola.  They also come in a sugar free version (seems weird, but true – don’t you wonder how many chemicals are in those). Whatever your flavor preference, Americans eat a whole lot of them – around 16 billion at Easter enough to circle the globe nearly three times if all of the Easter jellybeans were lined up end to end.

How Do You Eat Them And What’s Your Flavor?

My preference (and my downfall) is to gobble up small handfuls (mostly reds and pinks) at a time — one reason I can’t have them in the house. How do stack up against these stats?

  • 70% of kids aged 6–11 say they prefer to eat Easter jellybeans one at a time
  • 23% say they eat several at once
  • Boys (29%) are more likely to eat a handful than girls (18%)
  • Kids say their favorite Easter jellybean flavors are cherry (20%), strawberry (12%), grape (10%), lime (7%), and blueberry (6%).

What’s In Jelly Beans?

They’re primarily made of sugar and also usually contain gelatin, corn syrup, modified food starch, and less than 0.5% of citric acid, sodium citrate, artificial flavors, confectioners glaze, pectin, carnauba wax, white mineral oil, magnesium hydroxide, and artificial colors (takes some of the fun out of them, doesn’t it).

Even though they may give you Technicolor insides, they are fat free.  On average:

  • 10 small jelly beans (11g) have 41 calories, no fat, no cholesterol, no protein, and 10.3 grams of carbs
  • 10 large jelly beans (1 oz or 28g) have 105 calories, no fat, no cholesterol, no protein, and 26.2g carbs
  • 10 Jelly Bellies have 40 calories, no fat, no protein, and 10g carbs

Some Jelly Belly Jelly Bean Trivia

  • Jelly Bellys were invented in 1976. They were the first jelly beans to be sold in single flavors and to come with a menu of flavor choices.
  • It takes 7 to 21 days to make a single Jelly Belly jelly bean.
  • Very Cherry was the most popular Jelly Belly flavor for two decades until 1998, when Buttered Popcorn took over. Very Cherry moved back into the top spot by only 8 million beans in 2003.
  • Jelly Bellies were the first jelly beans in outer space – they were sent on the 1983 flight of the space shuttle Challenger by President Reagan.

 

Should You Eat Blue Food?

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I remember when my oldest son absolutely insisted he would only eat blue food.  His primary motivation was the blue ice cream – I don’t even recall the flavor or the name – that was Baskin Robbin’s new special fantastic flavor.  I do remember that it left my son’s mouth an incredible shade of turquoise.

Fortunately the blue food phase didn’t last very long – in part because finding true blue food is not an easy task, some say impossible — and because Mom didn’t give in.  Blue M&Ms and blue ice cream didn’t count, and still don’t, as true blue healthy food.

Why Should You Care About Blue?

Three plus centuries BC, Hippocrates, the Greek physician and a proponent of a plant-based diet said, “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food.” Predating Hippocrates, traditional Asian diets were plant based and the belief was that they played a significant role in disease prevention — wisdom now supported by modern research.

The vibrant colors of plants give us clues about their healthy components.  More color probably means more of the good stuff.  But why are vibrantly colored foods so healthy? The answer lies in the phytochemicals which are manufactured by the plants to protect themselves from animal or insect damage, photosynthesis, and radiation.

The phytochemicals we eat give us the same protection that they give plants. Phytochemicals aren’t technically classified as nutrients but they are associated with disease prevention and treatment. You know if a plant food is rich in phytochemicals because it’s vibrantly colored.

Those vibrant blue, purple and red foods are filled with anthocyanins, which are water-soluble phytochemicals, that typically have a red to blue color. Anthocyanins, the pigments that make blueberries blue, act as powerful antioxidants which help neutralize harmful byproducts called “free radicals” that can be the precursors of cancer and some age-related diseases.

In your body, the antioxidant process is similar to what stops an apple from browning. Once you cut an apple, it begins to brown, but if you squirt it with lemon or dip it in orange juice, both of which contain vitamin C, it stays white.

Is There Really Blue Food?

Good question. True blue food is rare in nature, some say non-existent.  But, wait a minute – what about blueberries, blue potatoes, blue lobster, blue corn, blue crab and that rare blue mushroom along with some other exotic foods?

There’s some thought that because blue doesn’t exist in significant quantity as a natural food color, we haven’t developed an automatic appetite response to blue food.  The primal nature of humans is to avoid food that is poisonous. Multiple millenia ago — when our ancestors foraged for food —  blue, purple and black were “color warning signs” for food that was potentially lethal.

Some believe that the foods we consider to be blue are actually purple – even though they may appear to be blue.  As for blue cheese – well the blue veining is indeed blue, but it doesn’t seem to count because the blue veins are not naturally occurring.  And, since blue lobster and crab turn red when they’re cooked – are they really blue foods?

It is an argument that could make for great dinner table conversation or excellent trivia questions.  The thing to remember is that food that is in the range of blue or purple or red is filled with those marvelous phytochemicals that are great for you.

Blueberry:  The Classic Blue All Star

The blueberry is a native American species. When the Pilgrims settled in Plymouth in the winter of 1620, their neighbors, the Wampanoag Indians, taught them survival skills: planting corn and using native plants, like blueberries, to supplement their food supply. The colonists learned to gather berries, dry them in the sun, and store them for winter. Blueberries eventually became a really important food that was preserved and canned.  A beverage made from blueberries was a staple for Civil War Soldiers.

Blueberries, both fresh and frozen, especially the tiny wild blueberries, are truly all stars.  One cup has about 80 calories and virtually no fat. They rank first in antioxidant activity when compared to forty other common fruits and vegetables. Concord grape juice ranks second with about two thirds of blueberries’ antioxidant activity followed by strawberries, kale, and spinach.

I frequently see “true-blue” blueberries  during the summer blueberry season. I suspect that true-blue blueberry growers refer to their blueberries as blue not purple. But whether blue foods are blue only in the eye of the beholder and technically purple to the color purists and food scientists, reaching for whole and natural foods that come from that gorgeous end of the blue/purple/red color spectrum is one giant component (among many) of a healthy diet.