It’s the start of the summer barbecue season and the accompanying temptation of a table loaded with delicious food. 

Here’s three easy tips to help avoid overeating:

1.  If you’re full, stop eating and clear your plate right away.  If a plate with food on it sticks around in front of you, you’ll keep picking at what’s on it until there’s nothing left. An exception – a study has found that looking at the “carnage” – the leftover bones from barbecued ribs or even the number of empty beer bottles – can serve as an “environmental cue” to stop eating.

2.  Do you 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. Don’t sit or stand where you can see the food that’s calling your name. Keep your back to it if you can’t keep distant. There’s just so much control you can exercise before “see it = eat it.”  If staying near 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 in your mouth when you’re busy talking.

3.  Before you grab some tasty ribs, dogs, burgers or pie — ask yourself if you really want it.  Are you hungry?  Is it worth the calories?  Odds are, the tempting display of food in front of you is visually seductive – and may smell great, too — but you’re reaching out to eat what’s in front of you for reasons not dictated by your stomach but by your eyes. Have you decided that you want to splurge on something specific? Try picking it ahead of time and commit to your choice so you don’t find yourself wavering in the face of temptation.

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A lot of us actually plan to overeat during the holidays – although we may not admit it:  think about it — do you know that you’re going to overeat?  Do you think it wouldn’t be normal or celebratory if you didn’t overindulge and eat three desserts at Christmas or double helpings of stuffing and sweet potato casserole on Thanksgiving?

It’s all too easy to do that.  Food is absolutely everywhere.  It’s there for the taking — and most of the time, holiday food is free (and in your face) at parties, on receptionist’s desks, as sample tastes while you shop.  How can you pass it up?

On top of it all, it’s sugary, fatty, and pretty.  How can you not try it?  Of course, sugary and fatty (salty, too) means you just crave more and more.   Do you really need it?  Do you even really want it?  If you eat it, will you feel awful later on?

Are you eating because of tradition – because you’ve been eating the same food during the holiday season since you were a kid?  Maybe you don’t even like the food anymore or it disagrees with you.  So why are you eating it?  Who’s forcing you to?

Do you think you won’t have a good time or you’ll be labeled Scrooge, Grinch, a party pooper, or offend your mother-in-law if you don’t eat everything in sight?  Really?

You can still love the holidays and you can still love the food. In the grand scheme of things overeating on one day isn’t such a big deal.  Overeating for multiple days that turn into weeks and then months can be become a bit and weighty deal.

The question is:  do you really want to overeat?  If you do, fine.  Enjoy every morsel and then take a nap.  Tomorrow is another day.  Just know that you don’t have to.  You make the decisions about what goes into your mouth.  Make thoughtful choices and enjoy them along with everything else the holiday represents.

What To Do

• Have a plan. Think about how you want to handle yourself in the face of food, family, eggnog, and pecan pie.  Nothing is engraved in stone but if you have an idea about what you want to do and how to do it you’ll be far less likely to nibble and nosh all day and night. You’re the one in charge of what goes into your mouth.

• Visualize the situation that you might find yourself in. What do you want the outcome to be? Rehearse, in your mind, how you’ll respond or behave to successfully navigate the eating challenges. Sports coaches use this technique to prepare their athletes to anticipate what might happen and to practice how to respond. Sports performance improves with visualization exercises—so can eating behavior.

• Make sure your plan is workable and realistic for what you’re aiming to achieve over the season.  The plan doesn’t have to be complex – just decide what you want to do and what steps you need to get there.

• Write it down –even if it’s on a napkin.  It will both reinforce your intentions and act as a measure of accountability.

• Consider what your surroundings will be.  Will your plan work for you – it may sound great, but is it doable for the situations you might find yourself in?  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? What will you do in these situations?

• 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 in charge of what food and how much of it will go into your mouth.

Do you have an ipad or an iphone?  Maybe both?  Check out Eat Out Eat Well Magazine coming soon to the Apple Newsstand.

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2.  Do you 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. Don’t sit or stand where you can see the food that’s calling your name. Keep your back to it if you can’t keep distant. There’s just so much control you can exercise before “see it = eat it.”  If staying near 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 in your mouth when you’re busy talking.

3.  Before you grab some tasty ribs, dogs, burgers or pie — ask yourself if you really want it.  Are you hungry?  Is it worth the calories?  Odds are, the tempting display of food in front of you is visually seductive – and may smell great, too — but you’re reaching out to eat what’s in front of you for reasons not dictated by your stomach but by your eyes. Have you decided that you want to splurge on something specific? Try picking it ahead of time and commit to your choice so you don’t find yourself wavering in the face of temptation.

The post 3 Easy Barbecue and Picnic Tips To Avoid Overeating appeared first on Eat Out Eat Well.

It’s summertime.  School’s out.  You’re on vacation.  Maybe you have a beach or lake  house or maybe you’re just home – but so are the kids – all day long. Vacation and kids:  most likely you’ve let down your eating guard.

There’s food in the house that might not usually be there. It’s singing a siren song.  It’s almost preordained that you’ll find yourself  in your kitchen opening and closing cabinet doors or with cold air from the open fridge door in your face as you shove around containers full of ice cream, sugared cereal, chips, yesterday’s cake, and slices of cold pizza.

Once you’ve opened the first door – whether it’s the fridge or a cabinet, chances are you’re a goner unless someone interrupts you midstream (even that might not stop the rolling freight train).  The notion of (sweet/salty/fatty/caloric food has embedded itself in your brain and has firmly taken root.

Calorie Savers:

• The easiest thing to do is to not bring the food into the house.  Most of us follow, whether we like it or not, a See It = Eat It pattern.  If the food is right in front of your nose whether it’s on the counter or on the shelf in the fridge or in a cabinet, you will eat the food.  If it’s sugary, salty, fatty food you will want more.

• If you’re going to eat, use a plate and utensils. Always put your food on a plate or in a bowl — the smaller the better. The size of the plate – or bowl – or container can often determine how much you ultimately eat.  Make it a smaller dessert bowl or plate, not a monster size cereal bowl or dinner plate.  If you stand there with fork or spoon in hand and just attack the container, in the blink of an eye it’s possible to polish off an entire pint of ice cream, a double piece of cake or half (or maybe a whole) bag of cookies.

• Eat with a teaspoon or small fork not with a tablespoon or a large fork or with your fingers.  Large amounts of food disappear much more quickly with fingers or large utensils as shovels. The food disappears down the hatch so quickly that your brain doesn’t have time to register that you’ve eaten something – until you’ve probably overeaten way too much food and way too many calories.

• Don’t bring home leftovers. Don’t let them invade your space.  Don’t bring back the leftover pizza or the leftover cake from the picnic.

•  If you just can’t bring yourself to leave your leftovers in the hands of the restaurant: hide the stuff that tempts you.  Out of sight, out of mind is really true. We all tend to eat more when it’s right in front of us.  Food we like – especially higher calorie sugary, fatty, and salty foods — trigger cravings and eating.

The post It’s Summertime: Are You Raiding The Cabinets And Fridge More Than Usual? appeared first on Eat Out Eat Well.

What happens?  You eat the skimpy portion – decide you’re still hungry – and then go back, maybe two or three times, for more.

And if you keep the serving dishes on the table right in front of you, it’s way too easy to keep refilling your plate – or just stick your fork out and eat from the platter.

Get Those Serving Dishes Off The Table

If you want to make it a little easier for yourself to save on calories, one thing you can do is to get those serving dishes off of the table.  When serving dishes are left on the table men eat 29% more and women 10% more than when those serving dishes stay on the counter.

Why?

It’s harder to grab seconds if you have to get up to get them. Sticking out your fork and shoveling more onto your plate while your butt remains firmly planted in your chair makes it far too easy to refill your plate without much thought about the quantity of food that’s going into your mouth.

Men chow down on more servings than women because they tend to eat fast  – impatiently gobbling food while they wait for everyone else in the family to finish. As a result, they end up eating seconds and thirds while other people are still on firsts.  Women usually eat more slowly so they’re not as likely to get to the seconds and thirds.

To help avoid the temptation of going back for seconds:

• Let this be your mantra:  no seconds.  Figure out a reasonable portion of food that is within reason but not so skimpy that you’re nowhere near satisfied when you’re finished.
• Keep the serving dishes off of the table.
• Choose your food, fill your plate from the stove or from the serving dishes on the counter, and that’s it.  No seconds.

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The point of the holidays – any holiday – is not exclusively food.  Nonetheless, we wrap our holiday thoughts around food – after all, Thanksgiving originally was a harvest celebration and many cultures and religions have special foods to signify a special holiday.

Food Has Meaning

Food does have meaning–which may have different interpretations by people of varying religions, ethnicities, and cultures. Food acts like a cloak of comfort – something many of us look for and welcome around the holidays.

Nowhere is it written that food has to be eaten in tremendous quantity – or that a meal has to include stuffing, two types of potatoes, five desserts, or six types of candy.  That idea is self-imposed.

So is the opposite self-imposed idea: trying to diet during the holidays.  Restriction and overeating are both difficult – and often equally counterproductive. Winter holiday eating  comes during the cold and dark seasons in many parts of the world.  Warm comfort food just seems all the more appealing — whether you’re dieting or not — when it’s somewhat inhospitable outside.

Is Overeating Part Of Your Holiday Meal Plan?

Unconsciously, or perhaps habitually, a lot of us actually plan to overeat during the holidays.  Be honest:  do you know that you’re going to overeat?  Do you think it wouldn’t be normal or non-celebratory to overindulge and eat three desserts at Christmas or raid your kid’s Trick or Treat bag?

It’s all too easy to do that.  Food is absolutely everywhere.  It’s there for the taking — and most of the time, holiday food is free (and in your face) at parties, on receptionist’s desks, as sample tastes while you shop.  How can you pass it up?

On top of it all, it’s sugary, fatty, and pretty.  How can you not try it?  Of course, sugary and fatty (salty, too) means you just crave more and more.   Do you really need it?  Do you even really want it?  If you eat it, will you feel awful later on?

Eating And Tradition

Are you eating because of tradition – because you’ve been eating the same food at Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa since you were a kid?  Maybe you don’t even like the food anymore.  Maybe it disagrees with you or gives you acid reflux.  So why are you eating it?  Who’s forcing you to?

Do you think you won’t have a good time or you’ll be labeled Scrooge, Grinch, a party pooper, or offend your mother-in-law if you don’t eat everything in sight?  Get over it.  Do you really think you’re Scrooge?

You can still love the holidays and you can still love the food.  No problem.  In the grand scheme of things overeating on one day isn’t such a big deal.  Overeating for multiple days that turn into weeks and then months, is.

Do You Really Want To Overeat?

The question is:  do you really want to overeat?  If you do, fine.  Enjoy every morsel and then take a nap.  Tomorrow is another day.  Just know that you don’t have to.  You control the purse strings – and the decisions about what goes into your mouth.  Make thoughtful choices, the best choices for you, and enjoy them along with everything else the holiday represents.

The post Is Food The Main Focus Of Your Holiday? appeared first on Eat Out Eat Well.

Eating when you’re not hungry, or when you’re bored, angry, tired, procrastinating, or celebrating can push your calorie intake way up.  The biggest problem is that we often don’t realize that we’re shoving food into our mouths – either because we’re distracted, we don’t want to know, or we just plain old don’t care.

Here are a dozen reasons and triggers for “mindless” eating:

1. “Cheap” calories – the kind you find at all you can eat restaurants, those freebie tastes in markets, “value meals,” and three courses for the price of two.
2. Bread and extras like butter, olive oil, and olives on the table or peanuts or pretzels at a bar.  Way too tempting to pass up – especially if you’re hungry or you’ve walked in with the attitude that you “deserve” it because you’ve had a rotten day.
3. Opening your cabinet or refrigerator door and having your favorite snacks staring you in the face.
4. Procrastinating or avoiding doing what you have to do by having a snack.
5. Family gatherings that serve traditional and/or highly caloric foods that you wouldn’t normally eat – and a whole bunch of angst that causes you to eat.
6. Watching TV with a bag of chips or a bowl of candy on your lap.
7. Parties and events — especially when you drink — causing you to lose count and control of what you’re grabbing to eat.
8. Sitting near a vending machine or the snack room at work – and the candy bowls on a lot of desks.
9. Buffets – anywhere and everywhere .  Oh, the heaps and piles of good looking food. Enough said.
10. Feeling tired, bored, angry, or “out-of-sorts” and looking for food as a “pick-me-up.”
11. Having a stressful – or boring –meeting especially when there’s a table full of food nearby.
12. Getting home, having no plan for dinner, and just picking and nibbling a ton of calories all evening.

What are your reasons?

The post A Dozen Reasons We Eat When We’re Not Hungry appeared first on Eat Out Eat Well.

It’s the week leading up to Labor Day weekend.  Not technically the end of summer, but it sure feels that way.

I don’t know about you, but for me the thought process seems to be:  “Oh heck, it’s the last week of summer, the holiday weekend is coming up, all of my family is going to be home, a lot of burgers, ice cream, picnic food – and then it’s nose to the grindstone” (even if it has been nose to the grindstone, as it has been for me, most of the summer).

Holidays And Vacations Often Mean Overeating

It’s the kind of holiday season mentality that starts around Thanksgiving and continues right through New Year’s Day when you swear you’ll never eat another carb again!

Or, it’s the “vacation” mentality, when all of your healthy eating promises become submerged in the deepest recesses of your brain.

Or, it’s the mentality that adds the “freshman 15 . . . or 5 . . . or 10,”  the freedom at last, away from home mentality where no food is off limits.

Four Weeks Of Overeating:  Changes That Last For Years

Some new research may make you think twice.  Amazingly, overeating for just four weeks can cause changes in body fat and weight that last for years. For four weeks people in a study limited their activity to 5,000 steps a day or less (considered a sedentary lifestyle) and increased their caloric intake by 70% (5000+ calories a day). For two years researchers periodically monitored body weight and composition in this group and compared it to another group that did not change its diet or physical activity.

How Much Weight Gain?

The overeater/under-exerciser group gained, on average, 14 pounds. Six months after they were allowed to go back to eating and exercising normally they lost, on average, 71 percent of the gained weight but only one-third of the group members had returned to within one pound of their initial weight.

After one year the overeaters were, on average,  3.3 pounds heavier than before their four week food fest. The normal eaters had no change in body weight.

The overeaters had more body fat and higher LDL (lousy) cholesterol levels one year after their four week binge.  After two and a half years, the overeaters averaged a gain of 6.8 pounds from when the study first started, but the normal eaters didn’t show any significant weight gain.

SocialDieter Tip:

Boy oh boy, the effects of gluttony are really hard to get rid of – even when those overeating habits are ditched for a healthy lifestyle.  Even short periods of overeating and under-exercising can have lasting effects and make it more difficult to lose weight and keep it off.  Keep that in mind around holiday time, vacations, and “let-down-your-hair” times leading up to holidays and vacations.  It’ll serve you well for years to come.

The post Eater Alert: Beware End Of Summer Gluttony appeared first on Eat Out Eat Well.

“No, no, no, I’m not hungry,” you say to yourself – and, five minutes later you have a lap full of crumbs and a powdered sugar mustache.

Sound familiar?  Why, oh why, does this happen?  What’s with the loss of control over eating?

According to David Kessler, MD (The End of Overeating), 50% of obese people, 30% of overweight people, and 20% of healthy weight people say they have a loss of control over eating.

Eating Triggers:  Starting a course of events

A trigger is something that sets a course of events in motion, like overeating.

Eating triggers generally fall into three separate categories: food, feelings, and the environment.

Trigger Food

• a specific food that sets off a course of overeating where you lose control and eat an excessive amount
• usually a combo of sugar and fat – like brownies or gooey cookies – or a combo of fat and salt – have you downed your popcorn in the movies, lately?
• Don’t confuse your food triggers with your favorite foods (the ones that you really like), your comfort foods (ones that you link to home and happiness), or food cravings (when you want a food you haven’t had in a while)
• a true food trigger is the actual food, not a feeling or place that triggers the out of control eating – think:  an open bag of chips – bet you can’t eat just one regardless of where you are eating or how you are feeling

Trigger Feeling

• an emotion, good or bad, that causes you to overeat
• anxiety and sadness are common triggers
• food triggers prompt overeating of a specific food;  general out of control overeating — the kind where food is often shoved in the mouth as quickly as possible in large quantities – can be precipitated by an emotional trigger

Trigger Environment

• a specific situation or place that starts a period of overeating
• common examples might be walking into a movie theater (popcorn), going to a buffet restaurant (one or two helpings of everything), attending a sporting event (how many hot dogs?) or visiting a relative (cookies, pie, and cake?)

Eating Triggers Are All Around You

Bottom Line – eating triggers are commonplace. When you bump up against some of yours, recognize them for what they are and have a strategies to deal with them. 

Often the triggers are linked – this happens often, sometimes by design.  Think about the sugar/fat and salt/fat triggers and fast food restaurants, desserts in fancy restaurants, your local bakery, the gas station convenience store.  What do they have in common?  Lots of food with sugar/fat and salt/fat combinations.   They stare you in the face wherever you turn and at whatever hour.  Stir in some feelings and emotions, a not infrequent occurrence, and you have the perfect set-up for overeating.

Ways To Outsmart Food Triggers

• Figure out which food makes you lose control.  Is it potato chips, chocolate chip cookies, ice cream, or mac and cheese?  We all have our particular triggers.

• What kinds of feelings make you run for the fridge?  Is it when you are sad, anxious, really happy, or just procrastinating?  Once you can identify the feeling, try to substitute a behavior other than eating – maybe a walk or a project.  Make a deal with yourself:  if I do X then I can eat Y.  But you have to do X first!

• Be savvy and know when you are in the emotional danger zone where you are on the brink of rapidly spiraling out of eating control.Educate yourself about which kinds of foods are hidden saboteurs – or maybe not so hidden.  Beware the sugar/fat, salt/fat, or sugar/fat/salt combos.

• Educate yourself about which kinds of foods are hidden saboteurs – or maybe not so hidden.  Beware the sugar/fat, salt/fat, or sugar/fat/salt combos.

• Know your environmental triggers.  If the gas station convenience store screams candy bar then pump your gas at a gas station with no store.  If you have a history of overeating at X restaurant then go to Y instead.  If you know that you always overeat at Aunt Mary’s (could be all three triggers:  food, feelings, and environment are operational at her house) then have a strategy or plan in place to handle the situation.  Or maybe invite her to your house.

• Keep the darn trigger foods out of your house.  Or, if they have to be there for other family members, or maybe for a party, make them difficult to get to.  Put them in the basement or the garage.  Make them inconvenient or really difficult to get to.  Not only is out of sight out of mind operational, we also tend to be lazy.  The more effort you have to exert to get to the food, the less likely you are to eat it.

• This is a tough one:  sometimes you have to avoid thinking, talking and reading about food. Brain imaging research suggests that the addictive response of the brain to food could by calmed by not thinking about food. Obviously, you can’t be abstinent from food – you need to eat – but long conversations about it, might be more than your brain can bear before you succumb to the bakery or vending machine.  Don’t linger in the grocery store and skip the gourmet shop that opened three blocks away.

• And, the time tested – wait at least 15 minutes then allow yourself to have the food – often works. Better yet, wait 15 minutes, try to create a diversion to get out of your trigger feeling, and change your environment – get out of the kitchen or away from the bakery aisle.

The post What Triggers Your Overeating? appeared first on Eat Out Eat Well.