DIET MISTAKES THAT WILL
               KEEP YOU FAT               

Unrestrained, unhealthy eating and uncontrolled weight gain are not good for our bodies.  Lets face it, the chances of you or someone you know wanting to get diabetes, high blood pressure, a heart attack or any of the other diseases and maladies that may be the consequences of being overweight are slim.  We all know, well most of us, the importance of maintaining a healthy diet and weight, but sometimes we need to be reminded.

I'll tell you right now that these 7 diet mistakes were part of my daily eating routine (there were actually a lot more), in fact I still find myself struggling with a few.

We all need to stop expecting perfection from ourselves and others; we are all perfectly imperfect after all.  We will make mistakes; what we have to work toward is minimizing them as much as possible.  So here are seven of the most self-destructive errors that contribute to a flabby middle.

#1  Too many liquid calories

If you subscribe to the notion that "liquids don't count, they go in and then out", you might be surprised to learn that Americans get 21% of their calories from beverages.

Specialty coffee drinks, fruit and energy drinks and alcohol are some of the biggest calorie offenders.  Alcohol may be the worst because drinking relaxes our willpower.  After a couple of drinks, eating half a pizza may not seem like such a bad idea.

#2 Skipping meals to cut out calories

Not eating regularly throughout the day slows down your metabolism, making it harder to lose and easier to gain.  

#3  Not drinking enough water.

Water is essential for burning calories and plays an integral role in nearly every biological process in the body. 

When we're not well - hydrated our metabolism drags.

#4 Waiting for the Diet Fairy to swoop down, twang you with her magic wand and "poof" your extra pounds away.


Umm, what are you smoking?                                      

#5  Eating too little

Mistake #2 talked about intentionally skipping meals to cut calories; here we are talking about not eating enough or often enough.


Our bodies are built to help prevent starving when there's not enough food to go around.  Your body perceives any drastic reduction of calories as a threat of possible starvation and rapidly adjusts (slows) its metabolism.


#6  Mindless eating - if it's not on a plate it doesn't count


Unless you're keeping a food journal you probably don't have a clue as to how much you really eat.  Unknowingly putting hand to mouth or "eating amnesia" accounts for the large consumption of calories that have little to no nutritional value.


#7  If you exercise, you can eat anything


Just because you exercise regularly doesn't mean you can feast on garbage food all the time without worrying. Exercise won't benefit you much if you stuff your body with crap.


Exercise alone is not enough, you also need to maintain a healthy, balanced diet.

Don't believe #4.   There really is a Diet Fairy.  Anybody who doesn't believe in the Diet Fairy probably doesn't believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa.  Geesh.                 

NANO WHAT?

     The wonders of modern science are truly mind-boggling.  First we had GMO, then we had BPA and now -tada!- the purveyors of our foodstuffs proudly present - NANO!

     As you know, in our blog we have beaten the heck out of GMO and stated our aversion to all things Monsanto, and then we jumped all over plastics and can linings and BPA.  Bloody but unbowed, science has now snuck in the back door with a science fiction staple - nanoparticles.

     Nanotechnology, that geeky mad scientist vision of the future, has now invaded the food industry.  While we may not thrill to the idea of tiny robots scurrying about our bodies, poking their teensy noses into every cell and molecule, we can at least see the possibilities of their being useful in a medical sense.  In our food - not so much.

     Few, if any, studies demonstrate the safety of nanoparticles in food, yet nanomaterials are making their way into our food supplies.  Currently the United States has no labeling requirement for products or packaging containing nanomaterials.  The FDA has stated that nanomaterials cannot generally be regarded as safe.  Ingredients that are GRAS (generally recognized as safe) at the macro level may not be safe at the nanoscale.

     Their small size allows nanoparticles to go places in the body that larger particles cannot.  Whether you inhale 'em, eat 'em or rub 'em on your skin, once they get in you they can penetrate cell walls and pass into the lymph and blood system.  From there it's a hop, skip and jump to bone marrow, lymph nodes, spleen, liver, heart and they're even small enough to cross the blood brain barrier.  

     A laboratory study showed titanium dioxide nanoparticles in the white powdered sugar that coats Dunkin' Donuts Powdered Cake Donuts and Hostess Donettes. (See Slipping Through the Cracks: An Issue Brief on Nanomaterials in Food http://asyousow.org/health_safety/nanoissuebrief.shtml.)

     Back in 1966 a classic sci-fi movie was released called Fantastic Voyage.  To save the life of a diplomat, a group of doctors and scientists in a submarine were were shrunk down to the size of a bacterium and injected into the diplomat to "make repairs internally".  This is actually the cutting edge of medicine today (not tiny scientists - nanobots).  Amazing - and no prob.  Years of research and countless studies enabled such breakthroughs.  Unfortunately, when it comes to what goes into our foodstuffs, the attitude seems to be "Oh, wow.  A whole country full of lab rats.  Let's throw this out and see if anybody develops anything interesting."

      If you needed still another reason to avoid processed foods, think about this one.  Pleasant dreams.

     

     

JUST A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR

It's difficult to turn on the TV lately without seeing the BREAKING NEWS that too much sugar is bad for you.  Duh.  Newscasters are delightedly reporting that studies have shown that the average American consumes 130 pounds of sugar per year (some studies have indicated that we eat 140 pounds a year, but what's a few pounds among friends?).

Let's do the math:

        one pound of sugar = two cups x 130 = 260 cups per year

        260 cups divided by 365 days (we won't do leap years) = .71 cups per day

That's very close to 3/4 cup each day.  Now I know you're thinking that you certainly do not consume that much sugar in a day.  If all you're considering is the spoonful or two that you put in your coffee, remember that virtually ALL processed foods contain either some form of sugar or an artificial sweetener.

Do you eat flavored yogurt?  Sugar
Do you drink milk?  Sugar    Chocolate milk?  Sugar, sugar, sugar.
Soda?  Sugar or Splenda or aspartame, etc.  
Bread or other baked goods?   Sugar
Cottage cheese?  Sugar
Energy or breakfast bars?  Sugar
Fruit juice?  Sugar

Just check out the ingredients in the packaged food you buy.  Better yet, stop at your local MacDonald's and ask to see the ingredient list of any of their 'food'.  Lots of luck with that.

If you really want to get scared, figure out the calories.

           one cup of sugar is 768 calories
           .71 cup is 545 calories PER DAY
           545 calories x 7 = 3815 calories per week
           Every extra 3500 calories you consume = one pound of weight

Presumably you don't lounge all day in a pile of pillows with servants bringing you goodies and peeling you grapes.  If that were the case, math tells us you would gain in excess of one pound per week.  Since most of us have places to go and things to do we will work off some of those calories, but they are always there, lurking, waiting for us to take a few days off.

I'm sure our readers are much more savvy than average and probably are careful about what they eat, but it's easy to fall into the trap of a Starbuck's latte with soy milk (21 g. of sugar), or a 6" sweet onion chicken teriyaki at Subway (19 g. of sugar).  Don't forget the office donuts or Aunt Tillie's double chocolate brownies.  It would be rude to decline.

The point is that we are surrounded on all sides by the beguiling allure of sweetness.  If sweetness is what you want, make it a piece of fresh fruit.  Sure it has fructose, but it also has fiber and all those macro-and micro-nutrients that make it a whole food.  Save the indulgences for special occasions and you may find that you have lost the taste for them.