Food, famly, friends

My little brother is back in Ontario visiting for the week. To celebrate, my parents hosted an 'open house' where neighbors, friends and family got together and we all had a chance to catch up.

We also ate.

Actually, given the way I was eating, I'm not sure if anyone else even had the chance to eat.

I was a glutton. I'm not sure why, but I think I subconsciously decided to either start training to be a professional eater, or was just trying to see if I could make my stomach explode.

It was THAT bad.

Personally, between you and me, I blame my sister-in-law-to-be's Xmas cookies. They are amazing, and they are what caused me to "break the seal".

To use lingo from my alma mater (the University of Guelph) - I crushed it.

Xmas cookies, walker's chocolates, muffins, some AMAZING meat balls (thanks Mom!), more muffins, more Xmas cookies, pastry, even more cookies....and a stick of celery ;)

It wasn't until my stomach actually started to hurt and BEGGED ME TO STOP that I realized I had gone WAAAAY overboard.

But this is what happens when you hit the holiday season. You over eat and when you do, there is a chance you overeat BIG TIME.

But here's some interesting info for you: At the height of my stomach busting gluttony, about 1 hour after my eating frenzy, I tested by blood sugar.

5.5 mmol/L (about 100 mg/dL)

Average.

Not even postprandial (the amount you would expect from an average person after an average meal).

Thank you 2 years of fasting and weight training.

I ate sugary cookies and pastries until I could barely keep my eyes open and still had a normal blood sugar reading.

Here is another great thing I want to share with you. On the drive home, I obviously knew I had overate, but I also knew it wasn't a big deal.

I knew I wasn't going to wake up 5 pounds heavier on Monday (I checked this morning..just to make sure)

And since I knew I could fast twice this week I still had everything under control.

So here's my point - We all mess up. And chances are if it's gonna happen, it's going to happen during the holidays. Yes I could have been a little better, but (AND HERE IS THE IMPORTANT PART) there is no need to stress out.

Devoting your entire life to losing fat and not taking time off to enjoy the cookies every once in while is a recipe for a very boring life.

Don't let your quest for weight loss get in the way of what truly counts.

Food, family and friends.

BP

PS - Freedom comes from knowing that you CAN eat less. That your metabolism won't slow down and you won't lose muscle just because you decided not to eat for 24 hours.

Just as you can overeat every once in a while and not need to stress out

you can also under-eat without stressing out.

Eat Stop Eat – Experience freedom now.

Childhood Obesity

Here is an absolutely astonishing fact from research conducted at the University of Guelph:

"In a typical high school with more than 1,000 students, the cafeteria would sell only three to five pieces of fruit in total per day, which is extraordinarily low, and virtually no one is buying plain milk.”

If Dr. Wilson's research is correct, than the obesity epidemic is only going to get worse in the next couple years.

Combine these stats with the lack of physical activity in children and we are in a whole lot of trouble.

And, don't think an hour in the gym is going to fix this problem. While exercise is highly effective, its calorie burning ability is greatly exaggerated.

In a recent research study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, men who were asked to walk briskly for 15 minutes 14 times in a one day period (that's 3.5 hours of walking) only increased the calorie burning by 500 Calories. This is roughly the same amount of calories in one slice of Starbucks Banana loaf.

Exercise helps. Eating less works. Eating less and exercising is the magic combination to promote and maintain weight loss.

BP

PS- In another research study published this month it was suggested that lifestyle modification works better than traditional dieting. I couldn't agree more. I beleive on of the main reasons so many people are having long-term success with Eat Stop Eat is that it teaches you to change the way you think about eating. Learn more about Eat Stop Eat by visiting HERE.

Is There a Conspiracy to Make Us Fat?

Thanks to some very frustrating airport delays yesterday, I managed to finish off "Mindless Eating" by Brian Wansink.


This book did not disappoint me. Almost every page had great facts about the way food is marketed and the factors that make us decide to eat. This book is definitely in my list of top-ten must-read nutrition books.


I've been racking my brains trying to figure out the top lesson I learnt from this book so that I could share it with you, and I think I have it.


You know how everybody these days seems to be blaming the food companies for our obesity problem? - As if it's some giant conspiracy?


Well the number one thing I learnt from "Mindless Eating" is that there is no "fat conspiracy".
Food companies do not care if you EAT their foods. They only care if you BUY their foods and continue to BUY their foods.


The people at McDonalds don't care if you buy a happy meal, turn around and throw it in the garbage, just as long as you buy the happy meal.


Also, food isn't designed to be "fattening" (Whatever that means). Food is designed to be inexpensive for the companies to make and desirable enough for you to repeatedly purchase.


This is the great conspiracy. Yes food companies, restaurants and shopping centers go to great lengths to figure out how to make us BUY there food, but we are the ones making the decision to EAT the food.


And this is where some of the great ideas from "Mindless Eating" come into play.
Do you remember the picture of the four glasss I posted on my blog on Monday (look below)? Every glass in the picture contains 1 and a half cups of fluid, except for the small squat one, it has 2 cups.


This is reffered to as the "horizontal-vertical illusion". If you picture an upside-down capital "T" where both the horizontal line and the vertical line are the same length, we will always see the vertical line as being longer.






So if you were to fill the small cup to almost the top, like most of us do, it would contain a little over 2 and a half cups of fluid.


So a morning cup of orange juice could actually be a morning 2-and-a-half cups of orange juice. This could account for an extra 33 grams of sugar and 165 Calories!


This is just one great example of how our assumptions combined with some excellent marketing get us to buy more and consume more. If we can become more aware of these "overeating ques" that are around us every day, then we can be more aware of ways to avoid them.


BP

Fasting Diet, Circuit Training