Tag Archives: diet

Know What You’re Eating

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Read the ingredients.

Chobani Yogurt
This is my favorite yogurt these days. Just wish it wasn’t so damn expensive since I eat so much of it.

I was looking for yogurt in the supermarket the other day. I’ve been drinking a lot of smoothies lately and I wanted an inexpensive alternative to the Chobani greek yogurt I usually buy. Although I usually make my yogurt, I’ve been so busy with work around my home and cherry season chores that I figured I’d make things easy on myself and just buy a quart or two. I figured that if I could find an inexpensive brand, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble of making it myself anymore. At $5+/quart, the Chobani gets costly quickly when you go through a few quarts a week.

So I was in the dairy section of the supermarket, checking out brands I’d never really looked at before. I didn’t need Greek yogurt for my smoothies, but I did need it to be plain, fat-free yogurt — and nothing else.

Yogurt, in case you’re wondering, is milk with active yogurt cultures added. It involves heating the milk, cooling the milk partway, adding the cultures, and holding the temperature until curds form. One more step — draining off a good portion of the liquid whey — is what turns regular yogurt into thick Greek yogurt.

I looked at labels and was absolutely shocked by the additives I found in some. While it’s common for Greek yogurt makers to fake Greek yogurt by adding thickeners, I didn’t expect yogurt makers to add unnecessary ingredients to regular yogurt. Yet there they were in the ingredients list. Pectin was especially popular — nearly every yogurt contained it.

Organic Yogurt Ingredients
Good thing that locust bean gum is organic.

The ingredient list in one organic yogurt was so offensive that I took a picture of it.

Remember, yogurt = milk + active yogurt cultures. It doesn’t need pectin, corn starch, locust bean gum, or added vitamins.

You have to understand that many of my friends are organic food snobs. In their minds, if it’s not organic, it’s not healthy. These are the people who buy organic produce, sometimes paying three to ten times the price of non-organic produce. They think organic means no chemicals. (Certain chemicals are allowed in organic food production.) They think organic means healthier. (No scientifically conducted test has shown a difference in nutritional value between organic and non-organic food.) They think that the industrial farming methods that make it possible to feed millions of people cost effectively are unsafe or even evil. When faced with a choice between an organic yogurt and the Chobani I usually buy, they’d pick the organic, likely without even reading the label beyond the word “organic.” That word, which the manufacturer has paid a premium to the FDA to use, is shorthand, in their minds, for “healthy.”

Chobani Yogurt Label
It might not be certified “organic,” but at least it’s yogurt — and only yogurt.

I looked at every label for every non-fat and low-fat plain yogurt in the supermarket. In the end, I bought the Chobani. It was the only one that didn’t include additives that aren’t a part of real yogurt. I also bought a half gallon of skim milk and will be making two quarts of yogurt today, using the Chobani as a starter, for next week.

Those of you who are blindly buying products because the label proclaims they’re organic might be putting all kinds of weird ingredients into your bodies. You can keep them. I’ll stick with a product that contains exactly what it should — and only that.

Organic vs. Non-Organic Yogurt

How to Calculate Nutritional Information for a Recipe

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And why you might want to do it.

As the folks who know me well or follow my blog know, I’m dieting again.

Back in 2012, I lost 45 pounds in four months and regained both my health and my self-esteem. Although I’ve managed to keep most of the weight off since then, it’s been creeping up slowly. I want to nip that in the bud so I’ve gone back on the same diet that helped me lose so much weight so fast nearly three years ago. I expect that two months of serious dieting should be enough to get back down where I was in September 2012.

Nutritional Info Example
Calculating the nutritional info for an easy and yummy looking biscuit recipe a friend shared on Facebook makes it clear that this is something I need to avoid. (In case you’re wondering, this recipe’s ingredients are 4 cups Bisquick, 1 cup sour cream, 1 cup 7Up soda, and 1/2 cup butter.)

I know the reason I gained that weight back, which is important to prevent it from happening again:

  • Portion control. Although the diet I was on basically “shrunk my stomach” so I couldn’t eat those big portions, over time, I stretched it back out by eating more and more. What can I say? I like to eat. And when you put a big plate of food I really like in front of me, I want to eat as much as I can. This is something I need to control once I’m back down to my goal weight again.
  • Bad food choices. In general, I eat very well. Lots of fresh foods — not prepared foods — cooked simply. I grill or smoke most meats, I eat salads and fresh vegetables. But occasionally I make bad choices — usually at restaurants — that include fried or high-carb (or both!) foods. And every once in a while a friend will share a recipe online that looks too good to pass up and I’ll make it.

I believe that if you’re at a good, healthy weight and keep relatively active, short forays into the realm of bad food choices should be okay. Sure — enjoy a piece of pie or a flaky biscuit or a plate of pasta once in a while. But remember that portion control! And don’t do it every day.

That’s what I’ve learned over the past two years. Now if only I could remember that when you place my favorite food in front of me!

But how do you determine what’s a good food choice and what’s a bad food choice when it comes to preparing recipes? That’s where nutritional calculators come in handy. The one I use is on a site called SparkRecipes, but there are plenty of others. You enter the ingredients for the recipe along with the quantity of each item, indicate how many servings it creates, and click a Calculate Info button. The result is a display like you see here, which I calculated this morning for a four-ingredient biscuit recipe a friend shared. The numbers make it clear just how healthy — or unhealthy — a food choice the recipe can be.

I began doing these calculations for all the recipes I share on my blog. I recently learned that by omitting part of a recipe — for example, the dumplings in the chicken and dumplings recipe I recently shared — or substituting one healthier ingredient for another, you can make a recipe healthier without sacrificing flavor. This can help you cook healthier meals for yourself and your family — something that’s especially important when weight-related health problems such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or diabetes is an issue.

Is calculating nutritional information like this worth the effort? What do you think? Isn’t your health worth a few minutes of time in front of a computer so you can make an informed decision?

Monitoring Resolution Progress

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Maintaining a checklist may seem a bit over-the-top, but it does help.

Yes, I’m a geek. And yes, I’m somewhat compulsive about some things. But I really think it helps to stay on track with goals and objectives. Here’s what I mean.

The Weight Tracking Table

Back in 2012, when I finally got serious about losing weight and lost 45 pounds in four months, one of the things I did that I believe helped me to succeed was to create a weight monitoring chart. It was a simple list of dates with spaces to record a daily weight reading and body measurements.

Weight Loss ChartHere’s the first three months of my chart. I stopped tracking my weight on paper when I moved home to Arizona, but got all the way down to 149 pounds (from 196) by the middle of October.

Although most diet plans tell you not to weigh yourself daily, I did. And as the weight ticked down day after day, with minor upticks along the way, my success — clearly indicated on the chart I kept on the back of my medicine cabinet door — positively reinforced my efforts. Not only that, but I when I fed those numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, I wound up with a cool chart that showed my progress. (I told you I was a geek.)

I didn’t take body measurements daily. It was a pain in the ass to do. But the few measurements I did record show my progress and also helped reinforce my efforts.

My point is this: when you set a measurable goal, it might be a good idea to track it on paper (or in some other recording tool). This gives you evidence that you’re on target. And as you get closer to achieving your goal, you can feel good about it, not just when you reach that goal but at various points along the way.

Note that my weight chart shows upticks. Whenever a weigh-in showed me to weigh more than the previous day, that made me think about what I’d done that might have given me this setback. It made me work harder to stay on track. After all, with a goal like losing weight, the longer it takes, the longer you have to make sacrifices to reach your goal. It’s in your best interest to stick with it so you can minimize the time you’re making that big change in your life.

(And please don’t think that once you’ve reached a weight goal you can go back to your old ways. You can’t. Those old ways got you where you were. Just keep in mind that it’s harder to lose weight than to maintain a healthy weight once you’ve taken off the extra pounds. The main sacrifices come in the losing weight stage. After that, the “sacrifices” are fewer and must become part of your lifestyle. With me, that meant portion control. It wasn’t until I went back to my huge portions that my weight began creeping up again. I’m nipping that in the bud now.)

This Year’s Chart

Because I have five New Year’s resolutions this year, my chart is a bit more complex. It has multiple columns since some of my resolutions have multiple parts. Some columns get simple check marks. Others get numbers.

I created the chart in Excel, since it’s a grid, but I don’t expect to record the data in an actual spreadsheet. (I’m not quite that much of a geek.) Instead, I printed it out and put it on my bulletin board. Each morning, after writing in my journal about the previous day, I record the previous day’s results. As I look at the chart I have a concrete, in print record of how I’m doing.

Resolution Progress Chart
My New Year’s Resolution Progress Chart. I suspect that this will keep me on track — at least as long as I keep printing new charts and recording my progress on them.

Over-the-Top?

Is this approach over-the-top? Super anal-retentive? Evidence of an obsessive compulsive personality disorder?

Maybe.

But I think the reason many people don’t succeed with New Year’s Resolution goals — or any other goals, for that matter — is because they don’t have a daily reminder of what that goal is. It’s not in their face. There’s no one looking over their shoulder to make sure they stay on track.

This is my solution. The chart is in my face and I’m looking over my own shoulder, making sure I stay on track.

And, as always, I’m the only one that can ensure my own success.