Restaurant Redo: Defensive Eating Workshop

Cooking at home more consistently is the best way to improve your health. You’ll simply have more control over your food. But, eating out at your favorite restaurant doesn’t have to spell dietary disaster. You can leave your next restaurant experience both satisfied and healthy.

Eating out is taking a toll on our health. It’s well established that diets high in sodium are responsible for more deaths than any cause other than tobacco or alcohol. According to the Center For Science in the Public Interest, cutting sodium in half would save as many as 100,000 lives annually. Taking a more defensive approach to eating out in restaurants would certainly be a strong first step to hitting this goal.

If you eat out more than 3 times a week, the upcoming Restaurant Redo workshop is designed for you. From high end restaurants to grab & go spots, this interactive discussion will prepare you to gain more control over your food choices and protect your health.

Join me in January for Restaurant Redo if you’re in NYC! For details and tickets, click here.

People, not Patients

The medical profession has a tough task in trying to combat obesity. It’s not simple. It’s costly and it’s frustrating.

As a nutritionist, I’m personally frustrated. We need to be more creative in our approach. We need to champion smart people and organizations to work with people (not patients) to move in the right direction. We need to listen more. Talk less. We also need to work as teams. Straightforward communication is key.

Recently a client shared a handout of directions from his new doctor about what he NEEDED TO DO to lose weight. It was a list of high calorie foods to be avoided at all costs. Or he’d fail.

The list was a slash and burn of foods, many of them nutrient-dense and real foods that any trained nutrition professional would include in daily in a sound weight loss plan. It also included one line about how it was ok to have artificial sweeteners (really?, that’s not even food, but go ahead, have all you want).

It was a typed list, New Times Roman font, totally uninspiring and didactic, like the kind of handout you get for a colonoscopy prep. Everyone gets the same one. You either succeed or fail. Follow the list. FOLLOW THE LIST. See you in six months.

Here’s the thing that really gets me. This client has been doing incredibly well with his weight loss and lifestyle goals. We’ve been working together weekly through video sessions. We check in about what’s going well and what’s not. We set goals, together, but mostly he does the goal setting and I give him advice to balance it all out. We talk about a new food to try each week. Real food. Real cooking. Recipes. Walking. Shooting a few hoops. Doing things he enjoys. Things he’s never done before. Things he never thought he could do before.

Did the doctor ask him about that? Did he ask him about his success? How he felt? No, just treated him as another number and handed him the paper of what he must do.

This simple piece of paper just reduced 11 months of our hard work to a second guess. So, yeah, I’m frustrated.

We can do better. We must do better. Let’s get back to listening more and fostering real relationships, inspiring ones. That’s how we’ll make changes that last a lifetime.

“I Know What To Do, I Just Don’t Do It”

We talk about prevention and lifestyle change, but what does it actually entail?

Prevention means eating healthfully, exercising, getting quality sleep, decreasing stress, enjoying meaningful relationships and managing finances. These all deserve a slice of the wellness pie and are known to be cost-effective strategies for reducing our chances of getting chronic disease or the progression of these burdensome conditions. We know this much.

Our healthcare system can’t support the sickcare model any longer. It’s time to stop talking about prevention. We need to do something. Something large scale, innovative and sustainable. And, we need to do it right now. (more…)

10 Holiday Eating Tips

1. Enjoy! The holidays are a great time to gather with family and friends and eat incredible foods. Don’t miss out!

2. Balance. Most people do eat more calories during the holiday stretch. Think about ways to increase your activity to balance out the excess calories. Walk more during your workday. Extend your walk or run by 5-10 minutes. Take the train or bus and get off a stop earlier.Take the stairs during your workday. Small increases in activity can make a big difference.

3. Think Mediterranean. Go for savory vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, whole grains, yogurt and olive oil whenever possible and use spices to help enhance flavor rather than an extra pat of butter or salt.

4. Focus on colorful vegetables. Most holiday meals are rich in vegetables such as squash, sweet potatoes, green beans, spinach, turnips and Brussels sprouts. These foods are an excellent way to include a good dose of protective antioxidants. Make your vegetable portions bigger than you normally do at holiday time. Fill your plate with color. (more…)

Butter Me Up?

I keep getting asked about saturated fat after several flashy media reports about sat fat not being the cause of heart disease. The answer isn’t so simple. To me, it begs for a heavy dose of simple common sense.

Here’s an email response to a friend about this topic over the summer. It summarizes my thoughts without getting into the nitty gritty of nutrition epidemiology. I thought it would be worth sharing. Here it is:

Introducing Walking Wednesdays at Lown Cardiovascular Center

I’m always encouraging (ok, begging) my clients and patients to “keep it moving.” It’s no surprise that a commitment to regular exercise has many benefits, for both body and mind. What’s more, it’s fun with the support of others.

I’m now offering my follow-up office nutrition visits as outside walking visits. I also just started an evening walking wellness group at the Lown Cardiovascular Center in Brookline.

The “Walking Wednesdays” group meets from 5 – 6 pm every Wednesday. The walks will start and finish at Lown, 21 Longwood Avenue, Brookline MA. The walks are rain or shine.

The group is FREE. Participation is open to anyone wanting to exercise with the motivation of others. All levels of fitness are welcome. The walks can be adapted to your fitness level. Parking is available on a first come, first serve basis from 5-6 pm at Lown. Public transportation is only a block away with the MBTA Green Line C Train, Coolidge Corner stop. There is also a Hubway bike share stop in the Coolidge Corner area. (more…)

Fed Up: A Few Thoughts

A few weeks ago, I was invited to a special preview screening of Fed Up, the new food documentary at the Harvard School of Public Health. The screening was followed by a short panel Q&A with film producer Laurie David, ChopChop Magazine  founder Sally Sampson and Dr. Eric Rimm, nutrition epidemiologist at HSPH.

The film intends to piss people off about the state of food marketing and the inability of the government to make changes to protect our collective health, especially that of American children. (more…)

10 Healthy Holiday Eating Tips

1. Enjoy. The holidays are a great time to gather with family and friends and eat incredible foods. Don’t miss out!

2. Balance. Most people do eat more calories during the holiday stretch. Think about ways to increase your activity to balance out the excess calories. Walk more during your workday. Extend your walk or run by 5-10 minutes. Take the T or bus and get off a stop or two earlier. Small increases in activity can make a big difference.

3. Think Mediterranean. Go for savory vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, whole grains, yogurt and olive oil whenever possible and use spices to help enhance flavor rather than an extra pat of butter.

(more…)

Eating Numbers, Not Food

I urged my friend Elias to share his thoughts on some recent frustrations about eating healthfully. We had a gritty discussion about eating FOOD again.

Here’s his take:

My Feelings on Food Statistics

I have always considered myself to be generally health conscious. I have some bad habits, but my good ones balance them out. Luckily, my body tends to agree with me. This system of checks and balances with a dash of chance has gotten me through life without any serious issues that can be traced back to my lifestyle choices. However, I am turning 29 in a couple weeks and I feel my luck is running out. My father had trouble staying fit around my age. He has only recently gotten back on track by making significant changes to his diet and activity levels. I want to start now.

This week, I began tracking my food consumption and activity level with an app that my father and sister use to assist them in their pursuit of a sustained healthy lifestyle. I have been surprised about how quickly I have adopted it and look forward to the challenge of making it a part of my daily life. I am usually quite a skeptical fellow when it comes to changing my lifestyle. Naturally in the process of eating it all up, I found a few bones I have to pick with all of this “healthy” stuff. I will start with my Number 1 problem: Numbers.

I know it will get better. I have taken the first step by becoming aware of the numbers. I know I will eventually start to see the patterns. Even though I see them on every package I peel back to eat something, I have never really needed to know anything about these poly-mono-saturated-globulites before I started tracking my food consumption. Suddenly, I feel as if I am sitting in a high schooler’s desk failing a biology midterm, when I was just trying to make my life better. Yesterday while rushing to work, I caught myself in the precarious setting of a pizza shop trying to translate menu items into nutrition facts. My app was right there to tell me that it was the worst meal I have had since I started tracking. I know there is a big step missing there.

This morning, I, wanting to make up for my horrible consumption yesterday, concocted another joyful mixture of fruits and veggies in my wonderful and new tradition of My Morning Smoothie. My smoothie is very important to me because it was the first thing I saw as a portal to good health. I can pack in fruits, nutrients, and a even few veggies into one quick and easy, just-about-to-run-out-the-door meal. I have gotten very good at making a wide variety of smoothies over the past seven months. My bowels sing the praises of the increase in fiber and starting my day with a liquid meal kickstarted my day’s hydration. As you can deduce from what I have said so far, I haven’t had one all week and I was very excited to receive all the praise bound to be coming at me from my app once I logged all of the ingredients.

Halfway through humming through my purple solution, just as the level was getting well below the picture on my glass of Spock saying “Live Long and Prosper” (yes, I have gone that far with my love for my smoothie); my app shows me that I am already creeping over my limit for sugar today. What’s worse is that I could stop now, waste the smoothie, and not make that red number get bigger. There is not a lot that I have learned so far by using this app, but one thing is abundantly clear: I eat too much sugar. I thought that abstaining from soda would get me off the hook. It appears that story was too sweet to be true.

Nearly in tears over the betrayal coming from that slosh in Spock’s vessel, I texted Tara with a screenshot of the ingredients and nutrition facts. She identified the 2 cups of pulp-packed orange juice as the main culprit. I have added the extra pulp OJ to reach that perfect fluffy smoothie texture you usually only get with ice cream smoothies (the pulp teams up with the nearly green and frozen banana I put in there). Once the dust settled and I stopped thinking this was another earthy-crunchy conspiracy to drain all the joy from food, something became very clear. We discovered that I had begun eating numbers and stopped eating food.

Despite my stress-fully revealing experience this morning, I look forward to the makeup blending that will be happening tomorrow morning. By Tara’s recommendation, I am going back to using coconut milk as the primary liquid ingredient. After we talked about how the orange in the juice is not the problem (the problem is the sugar manufacturers add to make it marketable to Americans), I had the idea of adding a fresh orange to the smoothie. I am also going to go for a bike ride to make up for my sugary transgressions. Most importantly, I am going to be looking out for moments when the numbers about my food count more than the infinite rewards I will reap from a healthy lifestyle.

By Elias Bouquillon, guest blogger and Tara’s friend that will eat fruit & not drink it from now on.

Thoughts on The Heavy: A Mother, A Daughter, A Diet by Dara-Lynn Weiss

Dara-Lynn Weiss is a NYC mother who writes of her experience raising a young daughter with obesity. This intense memoir is a front seat personal navigation of the challenges that face anybody trying to lose weight. The added controversy of childhood obesity is perhaps captured best here:

I knew how universal this quagmire was, how uniquely helpless parents feel when they see themselves as having to choose between denying a child the joys of childhood or letting them barrel toward bad health.  

Read this book. At times you’ll be downright angry at what appears to be an uptight, overbearing control freak of a woman with a history of eating issues of her own. I was. But, perhaps she’s really on to something as she portrays a brutally honest view of the tenacity that must be consistently employed when making lifestyle changes necessary for ongoing weight loss and maintenance.

Losing weight is easy. Keeping it off is next to impossible unless you make defensive & mindful eating a priority. Actually, it has to be the #1 priority for many. In the end, I applaud Ms. Weiss. She did everything (sometimes too much) to protect her child from a statistically bleak health future. She put her foot down.

As with other tricky areas of parenting, there isn’t one right way for a parent to guide an overweight child. Support, knowledge, resources and education are all essential components but it seems to me that consistency is the key ingredient.

Childhood obesity is anything but cookie cutter.

Your thoughts?

By Tara