The Green Revolution

I read an article yesterday about how chefs are moving away from big meat/protein portions and into vegetables more and more. The reasoning is very chef-y: big hunks of meat are boring. There really isn’t much you can do with meat but marinade it, and no matter what you do, it ends up filling before you want to be filled.

So they serve smaller portions, focus more on the sides, and turn their menus around. Instead of eating a filet mignon on a bed of spinach and mashed potatoes, you would be served farm-fresh spinach leaves making friends with a mash of Yukon potatoes, with an accompaniment of filet mignon.

An Eating Day at the Beach

Oh, Sun Diego, shall I count how many ways I love thee? Well, it’s really just one: I can go to the beach any time of the year. Really, I live and work close to the beach and frequently I’ll just head out for lunch, or in the late afternoon.

What if you wan to spend the whole day at the beach, though? What are the challenges of a day in the sun from a dietary perspective?

The Revenge of the Bland

American cuisine focuses on the bland. I don’t know what it is, but apple pie, turkey, mashed potatoes, hamburgers, steak, casseroles, and what you have tend to be light on the spice, measured in the flavor, balanced. No Poblano peppers, no extravagant ginger, sensuous garlic, taste-explosive mole. American cuisine, at least the fast food version, has conquered the world because it’s not offensive to anyone.

The downside: you can’t control how much you eat. Popcorn is bland – so bland that you can just stuff it down your mouth until well after feeling sick, because why not? Milk chocolate is bland – and have you tried putting down that bag of M&Ms? French fries are all crunch, salt, carbs, and fat – bland and unstoppable. Let’s not even talk about cereals, mac&cheese, or marshmallows.

Healthy Living - Savvy Supermarket Buys

One of the things I like doing when visiting a new country or culture: go to the nearest supermarket and see what people buy for food. You learn the most amazing things when you do that. For instance:

Italian supermarkets are full of pasta ingredients. There is typically one full aisle for the pasta itself, then another aisle for tomato products, an aisle full of olive oils. The meats and produce are out of this world, even in your typical grocery store, and they seem never to sell generic produce, only seasonal types.

Heart Rate and Calories Burnt - How Do They Relate?

You’ve heard me chat about calorie counting, and you’ve heard that I use a heart rate monitor to figure out how many calories I burn on my workouts. You’ve heard my surprise at finding out that “starvation mode” is measurable in the heart rate – reducing caloric output during the day, forcing lower calorie consumption and the usual “plateau” effect in many starvation diets.

But why is there such a strong correlation between the heart rate and the calories consumed? I mean, sure: if your heart beats faster, it must mean that more energy is spent. But why is that the only variable that matters? Why doesn’t body temperature figure into this equation? Why not the air temperature, or the types of food you eat, or the kind of exercise?

Healthy Yummy Breakfast Recipe

I am realizing now that I’ve been concocting this recipe for years, improving the ingredients over time, and I finally have something I absurdly like and that is actually pretty good for me – and I have never shared. Here’s the deal – it’s so good that I sometimes fancy it up and serve it as a dessert for dinner guests (hint at the end).

It all starts with what I like for breakfast: something crunchy, sweet, plentiful, but not weighing down; something with good balance of nutrients, with lots of proteins, healthy carbohydrates, fiber, and a good amount of water; and of course something that can be made quickly and without fuss. Here is the recipe:

Enters Starvation Mode

One of the things calorie counters like to say is that if you don’t eat enough, then your body enters “starvation mode.” I held that to be a bit of hyperbole, akin to the notion of ketosis in Atkins Diets, but I could finally watch that happen in real time.

For that, I have to thank a combination of habits I’ve developed:

• I wear my heart rate monitor at every workout
• I perform some workout every day
• I started calorie counting after my accident and the resulting loss of exercise and gain in weight

What happened? Lately, the weather turned really nice in San Diego. I mean, summer in March kind of nice. And when the weather turns for the better, I lose (temporarily) all interest in food. So I would get to the end of the day with sometimes 1,000 calories to spare – almost half my daily intake. I wasn’t trying, I wasn’t going for it, it just happened.

Tracking Calories by Bar Code

It’s been a while now that, whenever I need to lose weight, I start calorie counting. Most recently that happened in February, when I gained 15 pounds after a bad snowboarding accident. I was incapacitated for weeks, barely able to get out of the house, and the only place close enough to walk to was the grocery store. A fancy grocery store (I live near La Jolla, after all) with the best junk groceries you could imagine.

Rain and No Workout - the Lethal Combination

This has been a horrible winter for all of us in San Diego. The usually fairly dry city has been beset by a series of winter storms, the latest passing over my head right now. It’s an El Niño year, which always means more rain for us, and this one is particularly nasty (nothing like the 1998 season, though).

Unable to get to my workout (and too lazy to replace it with something else), I decided to just eat less. Sometimes I just let myself go on days like this, but this time it was too important to me: I still have to lose 10 of the 15 pounds I gained after my motorcycle accident, and stopping right now would have been terrible for my motivation (especially since the weather is going to be nice tomorrow).

Change Your Brain - Change Your Body

I just happened to channel surf last night and stumbled across a weight loss information segment on PBS. Daniel Amen, a psychiatrist telling his audience how he used brain scans to determine pattern and causes of overeating. All in all, an engaging two hours, and I would advise buying the DVD from the PBS site.

Aside from he shock and awe-inducing pictures of brain scans of old people, football players, and alcoholics, and from the constant references to chemical imbalances that cause overeating, the focus of attention was on the notion there are different kinds of personality profiles that tend to overeat.