diets

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 Ladies Who Lunch have been replaced by Ladies Who Do Pilates.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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From Oscar-Seeking Stars to Empathetic Personal Trainers: What happens when people try to gain weight?

November 21, 2011

When super-fit personal trainer Drew Manning decided to “get fat” for six months and then lose the weight, chronicling his journey on his website Fit2Fat2Fit, his story shot into the media limelight faster than a starlet’s nip slip. Everyone, it seems, wants to know why Manning would voluntarily shed his rock-hard body – one he’d used to model in the past – and trade in his thin privilege for something most Americans are doing their darndest to get rid of? He explains, “My goal is to inspire people to get fit, teach them how to do it and give them [...]

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Wheat: The Research That Currently Has Me Boggled

November 3, 2011

See? This is what happens with wheat! It makes you so crazy you start shucking clothes and the next thing you know you’re running through a scratchy field with nothing but your wheat-club to defend yourself with! Oh the horror – I must avert my eyes. (photo credit) Claim: Modern (a.k.a. monkeyed-with) wheat is bad for you. If you take all wheat products out of your diet then you’ll lose weight, look like a Greek God and have your pick of the Kardashian sisters (If I were you I’d avoid that Kim one, she seems just a wee bit flighty). [...]

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Dietary Dilemma: Science Says Why “Cheat Days” Don’t Work

August 31, 2011

“Holy Cat!” But my fave part: “Rich in dextrose for quick food energy”!! Yep, sugar is quick energy all right! Oh the cheat day! Back when I was doing such things (before Intuitive Eating), I used to dream about my cheat days. I’d plan out well in advance what restaurants I wanted to hit, what candy I wanted to inhale and, always, what little amount of time I had to do it in. Ostensibly the idea of a cheat day is supposed to be freeing – all the “bad” food you’d been avoiding for six days you could enjoy guilt-free [...]

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The #1 Health Tip Every Expert Agrees On [And 3 Easy Ways to Do It!]

August 28, 2011

Paleo or vegan, conventional nutritionist or holistic healer, USDA lab rat or NY Times columnist - when it comes to how to be healthiest, there is a lot of disagreement but the one thing every expert* will tell you to do? Eat more vegetables! (Oh and drink water. Fine, that’s two things.) And yet when researchers tally up what people say they eat and what they really eat, almost everyone falls short on their servings of greens. The reason for this is simple: Popeye has been usurped by Iron Man. Actually, it’s because veggies don’t taste like cake. You may have [...]

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What Experts Say Works Versus What Dieters Say Works [Surprising Research]

July 31, 2011

Yet another expert opinion… Today as I was reading through various conflicting research studies and opinion pieces – I like to torture myself this way pretending that I’m “learning” and not just further confusing myself – I came across an interesting, if unwitting, social study playing out in real time. A few weeks ago US News & World Report came out with a ranking of the top 20 “best overall diets.” To wit, “U.S. News evaluated and ranked the 20 diets below with input from a panel of health experts. To be top-rated, a diet had to be relatively easy [...]

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How Do You Talk To Someone About Their Weight? (Advice, please!)

July 24, 2011

Times sure have changed, huh? Awkward: “Wow, you’ve sure lost a lot of weight!” Worse: “You’ve gained a few – you know the freshman 15 doesn’t count after college, right?!” Worse-r: “You’re too skinny, eat a sandwich!” Worst: “You used to be so pretty; aren’t you worried about your health at all?” (The last one is the worst because it can be said for everything from morbid obesity to anorexia and every weight in between. For some reason “health” is the ultimate trump card in all weight conversations.) I hate talking about weight – mine, yours, anyone’s – because I [...]

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Fat Substitutes Make You Fat [Research to Make You Go Doh!]

June 21, 2011

“Wasabi Chips: Wakes you up with every bite!” Or turns you into a self-cannibalizing zombie. Whatevs. On some level your body just knows when something is artificial. It’s why we all have had such a negative gut reaction to Hugh Heffner marrying then not-marrying then replacing that random blond he was “engaged” to for publicity purposes. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the latest food research out this week has discovered that eating fake fats will actually make you fatter than if you’d just eaten the full-fat version in the first place. Researchers, having the best job ever, fed mice [...]

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Is The Furor Over This Yogurt Ad Justified?

June 15, 2011

Oh how I love Natalie Dee! Expensive little non-eco-friendly cups of skim dairy, artificial sweeteners and fruit of dubious origin – I have little love for conventional yogurt.  With all the great health benefits of full-fat plain yogurt that is not only super cheap but super easy to make at home in your crockpot, I don’t see any need to buy the processed stuff. But for all that it is not, is Yoplait a trigger for eating disorders? Watch this first (possible trigger warning for eating disordered thoughts): It’s an advertisement for Yoplait lite yogurt that features a woman looking [...]

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