Eat Out Eat Well

weight management strategies

Can You Train And Tame Your Hunger?

By Leave a Comment

Physical – or real – hunger, the kind you feel when your stomach is growling, you’re irritable as all get-out, you’ve got zilch energy, and probably a throbbing headache, means you body needs food for fuel.

Info You Can Use About Hunger

  • Hunger is somewhat unpredictable.  Your actual hunger levels are not the same every day and can be affected by what your body needs and does — like activity, hormone levels, sickness, and other things.
  • Hunger doesn’t necessarily follow a time schedule.  You can adjust the types and amounts of your meals and snacks to influence the next time you will be hungry.  Eating just because the hands of the clock are at noon or 6PM – even though you’re not hungry – can lead to weight gain and unhealthy eating habits.
  • What you eat affects your hunger level.  Carbs, fat, and protein are digested at different rates.  Simple, refined carbs like soda and candy are digested rapidly. They give you quick energy from a surge in your blood sugar – which is followed by a rapid drop in your energy.  Protein foods give you the most sustained blood sugar levels and satiety without the blood sugar spikes.  Eating food that has a balance of nutrients is probably the best way to satisfy your hunger, keep you feeling fuller longer, and give your body the fuel it needs.
  • How much you ate at your last meal affects you hunger levels since larger meals take longer to digest.  Haven’t you ever eaten so much for dinner that you’re not hungry until lunch the next day?
  • You can put off eating for a while –occasionally ignoring your hunger won’t cause a long-term or significant drop in your metabolism. If you do postpone your hunger the urge to eat will come back and may be stronger when it does return.
  • Your stomach is about the size of your fist and can be filled by a palm full of food.  Of course, since your stomach is a muscle, it can also stretch.  When you stretch it out by putting in too much food you probably don’t feel so great (like overly stuffed at Thanksgiving).  When you eat small meals you’ll get hungry more often and perhaps fuel your body more efficiently.  This is the rationale for 5 or 6 small meals a day rather than two or three larger ones.
  • Your body is smart.  Have you noticed that sometimes you are hungry for a specific food?  It might be your body’s way of letting you know that it needs a particular nutrient.  Careful:  sometimes that hunger is head or emotional hunger that popped up because you just passed a bakery and the smell of just-baked chocolate chip cookies is acting like a trigger!
  • All kinds of foods can play a role in satisfying your hunger. Labeling food good or bad puts the food in charge. Depriving yourself of a particular food or attaching special meaning to it can set you up for cravings and overeating.  It gives the food power over you rather than vice versa. Allowing yourself to make good choices from all foods; eating when you’re hungry; and eating portions that satisfy and not stuff you, put you, not the food, in charge.

Next post

When Should I Eat:  a numbered scale to help you figure out how hungry you are and when to eat.

Want To Save 100 Calories?

By Leave a Comment

Skip The Bacon

Want to save around 100 calories? That’s what’s in two medium slices of bacon.

Nix two slices of bacon on your bacon cheeseburger or two slices on your club sandwich or breakfast sandwich.

If you eat bacon five times a week that’s a pound lost in seven weeks and five pounds lost in 35 weeks just by subtracting those slices from what you normally eat.   Of course, that’s assuming you don’t add an extra slice of cheese or a heaping spoonful of mayo!

A Tasty Way To Lighten Up Your Burger

By Leave a Comment

In my neck of the woods, barbecue season is right around the corner.

I happen to love hamburgers, but, needless to say, I don’t love the calories and saturated fat in most of them.

Some Hamburger Stats

Most (not all) hamburgers are made with either ground round or ground chuck and are usually six or more ounces.

A broiled burger made with ground round (85% lean meat) has 70 calories in each ounce with 4 grams of fat (2 grams saturated fat).

A broiled burger made with ground chuck (80% lean meat) has 76 calories in each ounce with 5 grams of fat (2 grams saturated).

How about substituting chopped vegetables for some of the meat?  Onions, garlic, peppers, and mushrooms are some possibilities. An ounce of onions is 11 calories with no fat; an ounce of white mushrooms has 6 calories and no fat.

Switching out an ounce or two of meat for veggies can save you 60 to 150 or so calories and 4 to 10 grams of fat and add a whole bunch of flavor.

Try it – you might like it!

 

Head Hunger

By Leave a Comment

Have you ever followed an argument with a friend – or maybe with your Mom – with a trip to the bakery or the closest candy store?

You could already be stuffed to the gills. But, all you can think about is getting that cookie, or candy bar, or bag of pretzels and chowing down – even though you’re not hungry and may or may not actually enjoy what you’re eating.

There’s Real Hunger And There’s Head Hunger

Real hunger or physiological hunger is your body’s way of telling you that it’s time to eat food for nourishment.  It’s when you have that empty, rumbling feeling in your stomach, a headache, maybe some lightheadedness.  It usually occurs two to four hours after your last meal.

Head hunger or psychological hunger doesn’t have physical symptoms and can happen at any time. It can be triggered by emotional situations, habits — like watching TV, working on the computer or driving in the car — or by food cravings or as a form of procrastination.   Whatever triggers your head hunger can make you think you’re hungry when you’re really not.

Emotions:  Common Triggers For Eating

Emotions are common triggers for eating. Head hunger is emotional eating usually in response to gremlins like stress, sadness, loneliness, anger, fear, or boredom.

Head hunger also serves as a distraction – the eating it provokes can be a way to distract yourself from difficult situations, projects, and encounters.

The thing is, these feelings and situations are a part of life and eating won’t make them go away.  Eating in response to head hunger often keeps you from figuring out what’s causing the feeling in the first place.

“I want chocolate” might really mean “I need comfort” or “I worked my tail off and I really need to be recognized for it.” Those trips back and forth to the fridge or the vending machine might be the ultimate form of procrastination – is there a project that needs to get done that you’re struggling with?

What To Do

Wouldn’t it be great if it was as simple as figuring out what’s causing your head hunger and dealing with it.  The fact is, that’s the answer. Eating can’t really satisfy your emotional needs, and left unmet, those needs will trigger your head hunger over and over.  So, you overeat, you mentally beat yourself up, you feel awful, and the whole process is triggered once again.

To break the pattern, first stop beating yourself up when you eat in response to head hunger — as opposed to eating because you’re starving and your stomach is growling like crazy. Devise a plan to figure out what caused you to eat in the first place. Try keeping a written record of what happened and how you felt before your head hunger took charge. Looking back at a series of entries might give you a clue.  Once you get a handle on your triggers, come up with a plan to deal with them and make a “go-to” list of ways to reward, calm, comfort, and/or distract yourself without eating.

 

A Primer On Reduced, Low, Light, And Free!

By Leave a Comment

Do you have a clue what the difference is between reduced fat, low fat, light, and fat free.  You practically have to walk around with a cheat sheet — or an app — to figure out if something actually lives up to the promise on the product’s label.

The same thing is true on menus, in deli cases, and the little labels perched next to the choices in salad bars.  Are the calories in the low calorie tuna salad less than the calories in the reduced calorie?  Can you even believe those calligraphied labels behind the glass cases?

 

Checking The List Of Ingredients May Or May Not Help

Packaged food labels list ingredients in descending order by weight, not amount. The first ingredient listed has the greatest amount by weight, the last ingredient is the one with the least amount by weight. That’s why preservatives are usually at the end of the ingredients list.  A ton of chemicals are not necessary to increase shelf life — a little bit will do it.  However, fat, sugar, and grains have more heft and usually are closer to the beginning of the ingredients list.

 

Fatty Labels

Labels have to include the total amount of fat, saturated fat and unsaturated fat.  This carves the way for the low, reduced, and fat free categories.

  • Low fat means 3 grams of fat or less per serving (or per 100 grams of food)
  • Reduced fat means the food product contains 50% (or less) of the fat found in the regular version
  • Less fat means 25% or less fat than the comparison food
  • Fat free means the product has less than 0.5 grams of fat per serving, with no added fat or oil

Salty Labels

  • Reduced sodium means at least 75% less sodium
  • Low sodium means 140 milligrams of sodium or less per serving
  • Very low sodium means 35 milligrams of sodium or less per serving
  • Sodium free (salt free) means there is less than 5 milligrams of sodium per serving

Sweet Labels

  • Sugar free means there is less than 0.5 gram of sugar per serving
  • No sugar added means there’s no table sugar added but there may be other forms of sugar like dextrose, fructose, glucose, sucrose, maltose, or corn syrup

The Low down On Low, Light (Lite), Lean, and Reduced

  • Reduced calorie on the label means there’s at least 25% fewer calories per serving than in the regular (full calorie) version of the product
  • Low calorie means 40 calories or less per serving and less than 0.4 calories per gram of food
  • Light (fat) means 50% or less of the fat than in the regular, full calorie, version
  • Light (calories) means 1/3 fewer calories than the regular, full calorie, version
  • Lean (meat, poultry or seafood) means less than 10 grams of fat, 4.5 grams of saturated fat, and 95 mg of cholesterol in a 100 gram serving
  • Extra lean (meat, poultry or seafood) means less than 5 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat, and 95 mg of cholesterol in a 100 gram serving

Confused???

Confused by the ins and outs of labeling?  You’re not alone.  Try to be as savvy as possible and do a little investigating. A product sporting a reduced fat label  just means that it contains at least 25% less fat than the original version. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it ends up being a low fat product. Take a reduced fat muffin. If the fat content in the original full fat muffin is 30g and the fat has been reduced to 15g — a 50% reduction which allows it to say it is reduced fat — the reduced fat muffin still has a fat content five times higher than the 3g of fat per serving that officially qualifies as low fat.  Check the calorie count and fat breakdown on the nutrition label for more complete info.