Calorie Posting Laws

I just read an article, found here, about laws that require restaurants to post calories on menus and menu boards. According to the article, Heaping Helpings by Peter Rowe, all restaurants will be required to post this information by January 2011, with the passing of LEAN (Labeling Education and Nutrition Act). But the question is, is this going to help Americans make wiser food choices when eating out?

“Clearly,” said Dr. Eric Braverman, an assistant professor at New York's Cornell
Weill Medical College and author of “The Younger (Thinner) You Diet,” “smoking
education has worked. There is no reason to believe that sugar, salt and fat
education won't work.”

I have a hard time believing that people consuming fast food and huge entrees at restaurants are simply uneducated about just how bad that food is for them. I don't think calorie posting laws are going to affect the obesity rate in our country. People know what they are eating at restaurants is unhealthy, and they are doing it anyway. Seeing a number on the menu may make them feel guilty, but it's not going to stop them.

Healthy Twitters

Below are the twitters that I follow that deal with healthy eating and fitness. If you're on twitter and interested in healthy eating and fitness, I suggest following them. Normally they just provide a short description of an article and then link to it, so it's a quick way to sort through the new material that the websites feature.

1. HealthyEats
2. Shape_Magazine
3. FitnessMagazine

Enjoy!

Food Diaries

In my last entry, I mentioned something about food diaries. Keeping a record of everything I eat is something that I've attempted to do in the past but never quite got the hang of doing consistently. For one thing, it was easy to write in the food diary on days that I was eating healthy. I could painlessly record my fruit and cottage cheese, salad and tuna, and salmon and broccoli days. It was usually around the 5 pieces of pizza days that I gave up.



Jacqueline D. Stanley writes about the top ten benefits of recording what you eat in a food diary on WeightLossMoms.com:

1. Allows you to monitor your caloric intake. – Losing weight is a simple
equation – take in fewer calories than you expend. Monitoring your caloric
intake is the first step in lowering it.
2. Encourages you to focus on your
food choices. – More often than not we overeat because we are focusing on
something other than what we are eating. Writing down what you eat in a food
diary forces you to focus on what you are doing.
3. Provides a record you can
share with your health care provider. -- Your health care provider can look at
your food diary and provide insight and information on what you can do to eat
healthier. Also, what you are eating may be impacting your health in other
ways.
4. Helps you control the urge to binge. – Knowing you are going to have
to write down what you eat can stop you from reaching for the second helping of
potato chips.
5. Allows you to track your progress. – A food diary can serve
as evidence of how far you have come in this journey. It also feels great to
look back and see you are eating better today than you did days, weeks or years
ago.
6. Encourages mindful eating. – Writing down what you eat encourages you
to think about what you are eating. The more you think, the less and better you
eat.
7. Creates a means of evaluating the connection between what you eat and
how you feel. – You can use a food diary to examine the circumstances and
feelings which trigger overeating. Once you identify the causes you can begin
doing something about them.
8. Helps you be sure you are getting enough of
each food group. -- It is important to eat a balanced diet. A food diary can
provide clues as to what foods you have been neglecting and need to add to your
diet.
9. Assists you in acknowledging the reality of how much you eat. –
Keeping a food diary will help you confront the truth about how much you eat.
Once you stop kidding yourself about how much you eat, you can begin making the
necessary changes.
10. Reinforces your commitment to achieving and
maintaining a healthy weight. – Each time you make an entry in your food diary
you are expressing your intention and desire to do what needs to be done in
order to live well.

Needless to say, I feel the need to give keeping a food diary another try. As some added inspiration, I spent $15 on a fancy workout journal where I record my daily meals, snacks, AND workouts. In addition, it also features a progress chart where you track your weight and also body measurements, blood pressure, fitness level, etc. Below is a picture of the workout journal that I purchased. The title is really lame, but it's very thorough, and even includes little "I did it!" stickers for days when you eat healthy and exercise. Still lame, but oh well.

The Biggest Loser

Last Tuesday I watched the second episode of the new season of The Biggest Loser.  I find the show to be very inspiration, as well as a learning experience.  The show has really obvious product placement, although I must be a sucker because whatever they tell me to buy, I buy.  Multigrain Cheerios, Extra Sugar Free Gum... Basically if Jillian Michaels or Bob Harper endorse it, I feel the need to have it. 

So I was browsing the NBC Biggest Loser website and came across the blog of one of the Biggest Loser nutritionist's, Cheryl Forberg.  Her blog includes healthy recipes, cooking tips, and even posts of the food diaries that past BL contestants have kept. You can also sign up for an e-mail newsletter from her blog that contains tips on nutrition, weight loss, and healthy living.

Meatless Monday

I signed up for an e-mail newsletter a while back for Food Network's Healthy Eats Site. To sign up for the newsletter yourself, you can follow this link. Anyway the newsletter gave me the idea to do Meatless Mondays.

According to MeatlessMonday.com,

Going meatless once a week may reduce your risk of chronic preventable
conditions like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. It can
also help reduce your carbon footprint and save precious resources like fresh
water and fossil fuel.

When thinking about going meatless, even for just one day a week, it's important to get your protein in other forms. I usually do this through egg whites, almonds, and greek yogurt. Beens, legumes, other nuts, and seeds also are alternative forms of protein.

Healthy Eating Includes Healthy Drinking

One of the easiest mistakes to make when practicing healthy eating is forgetting that what you drink is just as important. Back when I was heavier, I never gave what I drank any thought. I probably consumed an extra 1,000 calories a day (not to mention extra sugar) just because I neglected the caloric price of what I was drinking. And now, its hard for me to watch other people drink bottles of pop (soda for you now western PA people) knowing that they're consuming 300-400 calories and over 50 grams of sugar.

Ideally, most of your daily calories should be coming from food, not drinks, with the exception of milk. Drinks are not going to fill you up. They are basically empty calories.

The Calorie King

One of my favorite tools for eating healthy is CalorieKing.com.

Weight loss is simple math. You have to burn more calories than you consume. Part of this is knowing how many calories you are consuming. But not everything has a label. So CalorieKing.com can tell you that, and so much more.

Let's do an example. McDonald's french fries. A small 2.5 oz serving of McDonald's french fries has 231 calories, 11.5 g fat, 1.6 g sat. fat, 161 mg sodium, 29 g carbs, 2.8 g fiber, 2.8 g protein, and 9.2mg calcium. CalorieKing.com also does a calorie breakdown, which tells you what percentage of calories come from what. For McDonald's french fries, 50% of the calories come from carbs, 4% from protein, and 44% from fat. CalorieKing.com also tells you what you could do to burn off those calories. To burn off a small, 2.5 oz serving of McDonald's french fries, you could do 64 minutes of walking, 26 minutes of jogging, 19 minutes of swimming, or 35 minutes of cycling.

One thing that I like to do before I go to any restaurant is type the name of the restaurant into CalorieKing.com. A list of food from the restaurant will show up, with a certain number of stars beside the name of the food. The more the stars, the healthier the food. This way I can pick the healthiest option the restaurant has to offer before I go there.

Statement of Purpose

Ever since high school, both healthy eating and fitness have been a major interest in my life. After having major reconstructive foot surgery in middle school, I gained around 4o pounds from being non-weight bearing on each foot for almost a half a year at a time. I worked hard to lose that weight in high school, and I continue to research ways of staying healthy. I plan on chronicling my healthy eating and fitness journey in this blog. I will post tips, ideas, and suggestions relating to this topic that I have accumulated over the years and those that I continue to discover. I look forward to sharing my successes and failures I have or have had with healthy eating and fitness.

--Lexie