diets

8 Tips for Cooking Meals for People With Different Food Preferences, Intolerances or Allergies [Plus: the best of the worst vintage Weight Watchers recipes!]

April 30, 2013

Nothing says SPECTACULAR! like a volcano of processed pork products!  Picture a cozy scene, with mom and dad bracketing smiling children all seated neatly around the table, talking about our day and eating broccoli casserole with nary a complaint. Now smash that Rockwellian fantasy to bits because that is definitely not what happened at my house tonight. (Or really any other night). Tonight: My husband was out of town, two of my boys were seated on the floor in separate corners after brawling over an olive (“You’re going to act like animals? Then you can eat like animals.”), the third [...]

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Everything You (Never) Wanted to Know About Emotional Eating: What, How and Why You Should

April 23, 2013
watermelon

Watermelon is my favorite food. I love it like a love song, baby. Several years ago a doctor friend asked me an interesting question. “What is emotional eating?” I raised an eyebrow and wondered what kind of cyborg has to ask that question. I mean, who hasn’t tasted the sweet, sweet love of a warm cinnamon bun with cream cheese frosting and toasted walnuts and felt the same thrill as the first time a boy ran his thumb over the back of your hand? (Just me?? Awkward.) But before I bit his head off it occurred to me that I [...]

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Brace Yourselves Ladies: The Girdle is Making a Comeback… Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

March 31, 2013
50sdresspattern

Eating, sitting and pooping are generally considered life skills and yet I spent a portion of today – Easter Sunday, one of the High Food Holidays, no less – unable to do any of the above. The problem started, as it often does with me, with a mystery package dropped on my doorstep by the invisible fairy-men from the land of Fed-Ex. (Seriously I never see those guys/girls – they ring my doorbell and run so fast it’s like my packages appear by magic. Maybe they heard of the day I had to chase two of my kids all the [...]

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The 20 Best (Worst) Vintage Diet Ads [Part 2 - Because I just love these things SO much]

March 27, 2013
dietad3

  GROSS. So many questions: Why is this pig so happy to be slicing and dicing himself? Why is he made of sausage? How can he hold a knife with no opposable thumbs? And WHAT are the purple bits?! I’m so disturbed. My hobbies: Fitness, baking failures and flushing toilets (at least you’d assume so based  on the number of times per day I have to do it. Boys.) Actually one of my fave things to do is to collect vintage dresses. But it’s less well known that I also love vintage diet ads. They’re hilarious! And misogynistic  And gross (see [...]

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Harley Pasternak Introduces New Cleanse, Calls New Christina Aguilera “Uncomfortable” and Highlights Absurdity of Hollywood in General [Is there a right way to cleanse?]

March 4, 2013
cleanse

Top Hollywood trainer plays the Hot or Not? game with top Hollywood starlets: It’s the type of juicy tabloid fodder that we all hope we’re too mature to care about and yet somehow finds its way into our brains. (Clearly I read it since I’m blogging it, ha!) Harley Pasternak, founder of the famous Five Factor Diet and personal trainer to a list of celebs so long that his website can’t even contain them all (Katy Perry! Jessica Simpson! Miley Cyrus!), recently came out with a new cleanse called the Body Reset Diet, a 15-day “smoothie-based” diet optimized for fast [...]

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Leaky Gut Syndrome: Legit Problem or Imaginary Illness? [Either way it wins the Oscar for best disease name ever]

February 25, 2013
crotcheskill

See, your gut may betray you but at least it’s not a KILLER CROTCH. Dun, dun, dun!! (Seriously though is this not the best anti texting while driving advert you have ever seen?! Canada, you win again!) For as long as there has been cheese and chocolate, a certain group of people has skulked around the outside of buffet tables, orbited appetizer platters and played the Hokey Pokey with hors d’oeuvres trays. You’ve probably noticed them since they have to ask every waiter “Does this have dairy in it?” before they order and then drool over your ice cream sundae [...]

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Do You Speak Diet? How Did “Eating Healthy” Become How Women Bond? [The first reader e-mail I couldn't answer.]

February 10, 2013
diet

E-mail is one of the central fixtures of my day. This is partly because I’m a child of the 90′s and I still can’t get over how freaking amazing this whole Internet thing is. (For those of you who’ve never known a world without it you can’t imagine how bleak things were – I actually attended my very first official concert, New Kids on the Block, without being able to memorialize it with a video on YouTube or pics on Facebook! Okay, considering my most salient memory of that evening was my best friend getting her first period at the [...]

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The Link Between Mood Disorders and Diet [Is going gluten-free the key to curing my anxiety?]

July 30, 2012
redpanda

I think it’s safe to say this little guy is having a very strong reaction to…bark. At the time it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I don’t talk about it much these days since so many worse things happened in the interim (ah, life). But back in 2000 – 2001, I had a nightmarish year consumed by anxiety. Granted, I had a lot going on. I’d just gotten married, I was in my last semester of grad school, teaching full time, interviewing for jobs all over the country, and getting ready to move. Oh and I [...]

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How Do You Help Your Child Lose Weight? One Vogue Writers Shows How Not To Do It

March 26, 2012

Dieting has become the great American pastime. Ladies Who Lunch have been replaced by Ladies Who Do Pilates. And it’s nearly impossible to run into another woman and not hear some permutation of “You look great! Have you lost weight?” So I wasn’t surprised to see Dara-Lynn Weiss’ essay in Vogue this month (text not online) about how she put her “obese” 7-year-old daughter Bea on a strict diet. Just when you thought the mother-daughter dynamic couldn’t get more complicated now we have mommy-and-me (or in this case, just “me”) dieting. Weight Watchers, in this case, was the precursor to the age-old [...]

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How Smell Influences Taste (And how to use that to your advantage)

January 22, 2012

Fact: 70-75% of how you experience flavor is due to your sense of smell. Anecdote: A friend told me about a friend (isn’t this how all good anecdotes start?) who had lost his sense of smell in an accident and consequently lost 20 pounds easy-peasey because, in my friend’s words, “Everything pretty much tasted the same. Brownies tasted like whole wheat bread so why not just eat the bread then?” At the time my eating disorder – one of several, is there such a thing as multiple personality disorder for EDs? – was in full swing and I fantasized about [...]

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