arlenesway.com.au Loose weight with Arlene Normand

Oops how did that get into my mouth? Why do we eat subconsciously, and how we can unlearn this habit?

Have you ever found yourself at the bottom of a bag of chips with no recollection of how it happened? The same feeling as when you have driven home from work without the slightest idea of how you got there.

We live a surprising amount of our lives on auto-pilot. We don’t have to think about breathing and walking, and many of us can type, drive, ride a bike and apply lip gloss without calling on our conscious mind for guidance. This type of auto-pilot comes about when we become highly practised at something by doing it repeatedly.

Mostly our subconscious patterns serve us well. However, our subconscious habits make excellent slaves but very poor masters. Take eating, for example. Like any other habit, it can be done without thinking and can be either self-serving or self-sabotaging. Incidental eating is something we do on auto-pilot, when our conscious mind and all its comments on what we should be doing turns off, and our subconscious – with all its easy-going, hedonistic tendencies – turns on.

In the days when we had to think about food, select and prepare it, we were very conscious of what we ate. Now, with lifestyle changes and access to foods that do all the thinking and preparation for us, we think and know a lot less about what we eat. With bars and bite-sized foods at our fingertips, we barely even need to chew! Much of our eating is now incidental to actual meals. You may recognise these two forms of incidental eating:

1. Picking and grazing all day without actually planning, preparing or sitting to eat a meal. You may find yourself saying “I have hardly eaten all day”, but in fact you will have incidentally eaten a number of times. (Mothers take note!)

2. Mindlessly Eating foods even if you are not aware of whether or not you are enjoying them or finding them satisfying. (People who like crackers, nuts and confectionary beware!

So how do we know when our subconscious eating patterns are serving us poorly? Most of us, when we are in subconscious mode tend to go from the enjoyment of the first mouthful to “oh my god, I need to lie flat” and the ensuing guilty aftermath. Some of the more enlightened people I know have a “one-mouthful” rule when it comes to treats and food we are eating purely for enjoyment. Most of these people have a healthy BMI and seldom agonise about what they eat. So I believe they might be on to something.

The rules come down to self-awareness, portion control and planning:

1. Eat what you enjoy and do not deprive yourself when you know you are going to love it. Be hones about how much you will love it and don’t temp yourself with sub-standard treats.
2. Never buy things you don’t actually want to end up eating. If it is in arm’s reach it is ripe for the incidental picking.
3. Never upsize anything and always opt for the smaller versions of everything. Say goodbye to the jumbo pack and the mega bar. Family packs are for huge families, not for individuals. Don’t kid yourself; you will not save some for later. Do not say, once it is gone, it’s gone. Once it’s gone, it’s gone to your hips.
4. If the portion is too big then cut it down to size before you begin, and push the excess away on another plate. Do not under any circumstances stand near a buffet table at a party.
5. If you have a treat, have one mouthful – this allows you to taste and enjoy it without any guilt. It might be a good idea to ask yourself occasionally whether you really feel like that cheesecake or the handful of chips. The body – for all its other marvels – is unsophisticated in this respect. It treats all calories the same and gives us no special temporary-insanity exclusion clause when eating.

It is just like our mums used to say: It pays to engage your brain before you put your mouth into gear!

1. Start Smart Begin lunch and dinner with a veggie-rich salad or broth-based soup. This lets you fill up first on a big volume of low calorie food and ends up displacing some of the foods you will eat next – the choices are usually higher in calories.

2. Try the 3-hour rule The secret to losing weight comes down to keeping your metabolism alive and active. How do you do that? By eating every 3 hours, give or take 10-20 minutes, which translates to 3 moderate meals with 3 snacks between meals. Though other experts say there is nothing magic about 3-hour intervals, eating small, frequent, portion-controlled meals and snacks can keep your blood sugar level steady, your energy up, and keep you from overindulging.

3. Have liquid assets If you are going to drink anything with calories (fruit juice, alcohol, sweetened tea or coffee, cold drinks) you need to consciously adjust your diet to accommodate those extra calories. Research shows that people consciously make adjustments to eat fewer calories over the course of a day after eating a solid food like jelly beans, but not after drinking the same amount of calories in a glass of juice. The best thirst quencher is still plain water.

4. Reduce processed food Skip the munchies made with white flour and sugar like biscuits, cakes, breakfast bars. They have no fibre, very little nutrients, and signal the body to produce more insulin and set the stage for turning calories to fat, fat, and more fat.

5. Choose your pals and what you do with them Studies show that most of us base how much we eat on what others around us eat. So steer clear of big eaters in your social circle, at least when food is around. Don’t hover around the buffet table. Remember to march to your own calorie drummer which requires some independent thought and discipline. Learn to watch other people eat – you talk or listen!

6. Pare portions Everything from beverages to bagels is two to five times bigger today than in the 1970’s. So if you grab a sandwich or eat out, chances are you will be served double what you need. Start leaving food on your plate. Use your hand and fist as a portion size.

7. Be an early bird Eat the most food earlier in the day. Many “dieters” try to trim calories from their breakfast and lunch and then get hungry. Research shows the calories you eat earlier in the day help you eat less at night – a good idea since you probably won’t be active after an evening meal.

8. Step it up Get a pedometer and start walking. To keep the weight off forever, the goal is to take 11000 to 12000 steps (around 90 minutes) a day. You don’t need to do it all at once.

9. Think thin Seeing is believing. You have to picture yourself slim. Start wearing clothes you like and want to wear. Throw out your old clothes.

10. Fill up on fibre Crowd out calorie dense foods (chocolates, cakes, biscuits) by ratcheting up on fruits and veggies. Hitting that mid afternoon slump, reach for carrots or a fruit, the carbohydrate will give you a lift. Not only does munching on natures bounty become a habit, but it will help you tap into dozens of disease fighting phytochemicals and vitamins.

11. Brush your teeth To stop being a compulsive snacker in the evening, brush your teeth. No-one likes messing up freshly brushed teeth.

If you’re a well-informed, health-conscious New Yorker who has put on
some unwanted pounds in the past year, it might not be entirely your
fault. Here’s a possible alibi: The health halo made you do it.

I offer this alibi after an experiment on New Yorkers that I conducted
with Pierre Chandon, a Frenchman who has been studying what researchers
call the American obesity paradox. Why, as Americans have paid more and
more attention to eating healthily, have we kept getting fatter and
fatter?

Dr. Chandon’s answer, derived from laboratory experiments as well as
field work at Subway and McDonald’s restaurants, is that Americans have
been seduced into overeating by the so-called health halo associated
with certain foods and restaurants. His research made me wonder if New
Yorkers were particularly vulnerable to this problem, and I asked him to
help me investigate.

Our collaboration began in a nutritionally correct neighbourhood,
Brooklyn’s Park Slope, whose celebrated food co-op has a mission
statement to sell “organic, minimally processed and healthful foods.” I
hit the streets with two questionnaires designed by Dr. Chandon, a
professor of marketing at the Insead business school in Fontainebleau,
France, and Alexander Chernev, a professor of marketing at Northwestern
University. Half of the 40 people surveyed were shown pictures of a meal
consisting of an Applebee’s Oriental Chicken Salad and a 20-ounce cup of
regular Pepsi. (You can see it for yourself at TierneyLab.) On average,
they estimated that the meal contained 1,011 calories, which was a
little high. The meal actually contained 934 calories – 714 from the
salad and 220 from the drink.

The other half of the Park Slopers were shown the same salad and drink
plus two Fortt’s crackers prominently labeled “Trans Fat Free.” The
crackers added 100 calories to the meal, bringing it to 1,034 calories,
but their presence skewed people’s estimates in the opposite direction.
The average estimate for the whole meal was only 835 calories – 199
calories less than the actual calorie count, and 176 calories less than
the average estimate by the other group for the same meal without
crackers.

Just as Dr. Chandon had predicted, the trans-fat-free label on the
crackers seemed to imbue them with a health halo that magically
subtracted calories from the rest of the meal. And we got an idea of the
source of this halo after I tried the same experiment with tourists in
Times Square.

These tourists, many of them foreigners (they kept apologizing for not
knowing what Applebee’s was), correctly estimated that the meal with
crackers had more calories than the meal without crackers. They didn’t
see the crackers’ health halo, Dr. Chandon said, presumably because they
hadn’t been exposed to the public debate that accompanied New York
City’s decision last year to ban trans fat from restaurants.

“It makes sense that New Yorkers would be more biased because of all the
fuss in the city about trans fat,” Dr. Chandon told me. “It hasn’t been
a big issue in most other places. Here in Europe there’s been virtually
no discussion of banning trans fats.”

So might New York’s pioneering ban on trans fats have done more harm
than good? Did it encourage people to eat more calories (and other fats
that some scientists argue are no less harmful)? Did people start eating
French fries – hey, they’re trans-fat free now! – and reward themselves
with dessert? I can’t pretend to know the answers after our little
experiment, which hardly constitutes peer-reviewed research. But the
results were statistically significant and certainly jibe with other
findings by Dr. Chandon and his frequent collaborator, Brian Wansink,
the director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.

They’ve found that all of us, even professional dieticians, make
systematic mistakes when estimating how many calories are on a plate.
Experiments showed that putting a “low fat” label on food caused
everyone, especially overweight people, to underestimate its calories,
to eat bigger helpings and to indulge in other foods.

The researchers found that customers at McDonald’s were more accurate at
estimating the calories in their meal than were customers at Subway,
apparently because of the health halo created by advertisements like one
showing that a Subway sandwich had a third the fat of a Big Mac. The
health halo from Subway also affected what else people chose to eat, Dr.
Chandon and Dr. Wansink reported last year after giving people a chance
to order either a Big Mac or a 12-inch Italian sandwich from Subway.
Even though the Subway sandwich had more calories than the Big Mac, the
people ordering it were more likely to add a large nondiet soda and
cookies to the order. So while they may have felt virtuous, they ended
up with meals averaging 56 percent more calories than the meals ordered
from McDonald’s.

“People who eat at McDonald’s know their sins,” Dr. Chandon said, “but
people at Subway think that a 1,000-calorie sandwich has only 500
calories.” His advice is not for people to avoid Subway or low-fat
snacks, but to take health halos into account.

“People need to look up calorie information, and this information needs
to be clearly available on the menu or on the front of packages,” Dr.
Chandon said. “If no information is available, people should say to
themselves: ‘This restaurant or this brand claims to be healthy in
general. Let’s see if I can come up with two reasons why this claim
would not apply to this particular food.’ When we asked people to follow
this ‘consider the opposite’ strategy, it completely eliminated health
halos.”

More generally, Dr. Chandon advises American consumers, food companies
and public officials to spend less time obsessing about “good” versus
“bad” food.

“Being French, I don’t have any problem with people enjoying lots of
foods,” he said. “Europeans obsess less about nutrition but know what a
reasonable portion size is and when they have had too much food, so
they’re not as biased by food and diet fads and are healthier. Too many
Americans believe that to lose weight, what you eat matters more than
how much you eat. It’s the country where people are the best informed
about food and enjoy it the least.”

Roasted tomato & parmesan salad

Cut 6 ripe tomatoes into quarters. Place on a wire rack over a tray lined with baking paper. Cook in an oven preheated to 150°C for 1 1/4-1 1/2 hours or until halved in size and shrivelled around the edges. Set aside to cool.

Place 100g baby rocket leaves (or mixed salad leaves) in a serving bowl. Top with roasted tomatoes, 50g shaved parmesan and 1/3 cup shredded fresh basil.

Drizzle salad with 1-2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar. Serve immediately.

Moroccan lamb salad

Ingredients (serves 6) 1 serve = 1 protein, 1 tsp oil

750g butternut pumpkin, cut into 2cm pieces Olive oil, to drizzle

300g natural yoghurt 1 garlic clove, crushed

1/3 cup fresh mint leaves, chopped 1 Lebanese cucumber, chopped

1 small fresh red chilli, deseeded, finely chopped 2 tbs water

55g (1/3 cup) pine nuts 2 tsp olive oil

2 tbs Moroccan seasoning 400g lamb eye of loin backstraps

100g baby spinach leaves 2 Lebanese cucumbers thinly sliced

180g feta, crumbled

Method

Preheat oven to 200°C. Place the pumpkin on a baking tray. Drizzle over a little oil and toss to coat. Roast for 20 minutes or until tender. (Alternatively, place pumpkin in a microwave-safe dish. Cook, covered, on High for 4-5 minutes or until tender).

Meanwhile, combine the yoghurt, garlic, mint, cucumber, chilli and water in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper.

Heat a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the pine nuts and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes or until toasted. Transfer to a heatproof bowl.

Heat the oil in the frying pan over medium-high heat. Sprinkle seasoning over the lamb. Add to the pan and cook for 4 minutes each side for medium or until cooked to your liking. Transfer to a plate and cover with foil. Set aside for 3 minutes to rest. Thickly slice across the grain.

Place the pumpkin, lamb, spinach, cucumber and pine nuts in a large bowl and gently toss until just combined. Divide among serving plates. Top with feta. Serve with the yoghurt mixture.