Too Much on Her Plate

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Too Much On Our Plates: The Experiment

September 1st, 2009, No Comments »

Last week I blogged about plate sizes and research that shows that the size of your plate affects the size of the portions you serve yourself and ultimately, your weight.    Around the same time, my husband pointed out that our own plates and dishes (wedding gifts from the 1980s), were dwindling in number and not looking nearly as spiffy as they had when we watched the Huxtables eating from a similar set 20 years ago.

Browsing online, I decided to look for a ten-inch plate like I blogged about last week, and for the first time ever, paid attention to the actual size of dinnerware.  Wow.  Oversized is in, with advertisements literally bragging about how much their big dishes will hold.

And apparently, size is important to Americans. I ended up ordering a basic white set of restaurant dinnerware from Williams Sonoma.  It met my requirements—neutral, tough, and it has a 9 ¾ inch dinner plate.  Before I ordered, I skimmed the 91 reviews that customers have submitted.  Size matters, and was frequently mentioned among reviewers who couldn’t agree whether the plates were too small or just right. A few like me had actually been drawn to the dishes because of the smaller plate size.

I’m a little nervous.  I’m the only female in a house with three males who love to eat.  Our current plates are not only bigger, they have a lip around the edge that allows for “extra.”  Will I face a mutiny?  Brian Wansink’s team claimed the downsizing was painless.  I’ll report back.

Take good care,

Melissa

Size Matters

August 26th, 2009, No Comments »

When it comes to weight loss and overeating, it’s not only important to pay attention to what you put on your plate, it turns out that it’s also worth being careful about the plate you choose to use.

Want a fairly painless weight loss tip? This one comes from Brian Wansink and the researchers at the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University.  They’ve found that we tend to fill the real estate on our plates rather than actually making a conscious decision about how much food we need to fuel ourselves. And once the food is on the plate, we’re more likely to eat it.  According to Wansink, we tend to eat 92% of any food we serve ourselves.

Here’s the good news: Size matters—and it can matter significantly. On average, downsizing from a 12-inch to a 10-inch dinner plate would result in an average of 22% fewer calories being served. Even better, researchers find that this difference is not drastic enough to trigger a counteracting response (sometimes when we cut back we tend to compensate by eating more of something else—this is not the case here). If a typical dinner has 800 calories, a smaller plate would lead to a weight loss of around 18 lbs. per year for an average size adult.  Interested?

Wansink is the expert on Mindless Eating (and his book by the same name is one I’ve recommended before).

Here’s one more quick tip for you, courtesy of Wansink: fifty percent of the snack food bought in bulk (such as from your local warehouse club) is eaten within six days of purchase. Are those huge bags of chips still looking like such a good deal?

Take good care,

Melissa

Is Martyrdom Fueling Your Overeating?

August 24th, 2009, No Comments »

Do you overeat when you are stressed or tired or overwhelmed?

Do you flop down exhausted at the end of the day feeling like there is never enough time for you?

Despite your best intentions, do you never seem to get to that exercise plan, that journal that you want to write in, or that fun project you really want to start?

Do you ever feel like no one really understands how much is expected of you?

Are you feeling resentful that there is never enough time to get to you?

If you find yourself answering yes to any of these questions, it’s time to consider whether martyrdom is having a negative impact on your eating, your weight, your health, and your life.

What do I mean by martyrdom?  I’m talking about sacrificing yourself—literally—for whatever cause it is that you choose to be a martyr for.

Martyrdom is not the same as caring for others.  Healthy caring assumes that you are just as human and needy as everyone else.  When you distribute your care, you get an equal share (it’s like dividing up a pizza—everyone gets a piece).

The martyr approach doesn’t work that way.  The martyr assumes that caring for others takes priority or somehow cancels out her own needs. She assumes that in order to be “good” at caring for others (or other responsibilities), she must sacrifice her own agenda.  The martyr believes that “personal stuff” happens after you’ve taken care of everything else. The martyr often says, “I can’t (meditate, go to the gym, ever see my friends, fill-in-the-blank) because Junior’s soccer schedule is so busy or I’ve got that committee work to do or I have to make dinner.  Here’s the litmus test: if Junior has an unscheduled extra practice or the committee calls another meeting, the martyr will move mountains and give up on sleep to make that happen.  Her own needs—they just don’t get the same priority.

The tradeoff for choosing martyrdom is feeling exhausted and deprived and unfed, overlooked, and uncared for.  Resentment usually follows.  Let’s see a show of hands.  When you feel exhausted, deprived, unfed, overlooked and uncared for (with a hefty dash of resentment), who finds those chocolate chip cookies a lot harder to resist?

Martyrdom breeds overeating—of many different types.  When there is never enough time, food becomes an easy-to-turn-to fix for all the unfilled places in your life. If martyrdom is ruling the day, then no matter what great strategies you learn to take control of your emotional eating, you’ll rarely feel entitled to implement them.

How to leave martyrdom behind?  The first simple, big, bold step has to take place in your head.  It comes when you can really truly see the cost of this kind of behavior and let go of the myth that martyrdom is a desirable quality.  It means challenging beliefs you may have that taking time for yourself is selfish.  Care is NOT an either/or proposition.  You don’t have to choose—“Do I care for them or do I care for me?”  The truth is, in order to really be able to provide your best care for anyone else, you have to be in good running order. In a healthy life, self-care and the care of other people and things go together. While you get comfortable with this notion, consider whether you have a support system that can help you settle in to this new way of thinking.  It’s much easier to leave martyrdom behind when you have the support and encouragement of others who believe in what you are doing and will remind you of your priorities along the way.

One more thing—letting go of martyrdom also means accepting the concept of time.  You are not responsible for the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day and that sometimes 24 hours isn’t enough time for everything.  It isn’t your job to take your life off the menu so that others can pretend that they are entitled to a bigger slice of life.  It’s not your job, it’s not fair, and it doesn’t work.<

Am I striking a nerve? Preaching to the choir? I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.

Savoring “Julie and Julia”

August 24th, 2009, 1 Comment »

Sunday afternoon, my husband and I saw Julie and Julia.  To say that I loved it would be an understatement.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you should.  Meryl Streep is brilliant, funny, and just-plain-great to watch.  The movie made me want to go to Paris.  It made me want to cook complex food (and maybe even try de-boning a duck).  It made me want to really appreciate the food and the ingredients that I eat.  It made me want to savor.

I don’t know about the real Julia Child, but Meryl-as-Julia savors everything.  She savors her experiences, she savors her marriage, and above all, she savors food.  Watching her enjoy herself, whether she is shopping for ingredients, sitting down to an incredible meal, or creating a culinary concoction in her kitchen, is to truly see someone who is fully in the moment and who is fully sensing and experiencing what she is seeing, smelling, feeling, and tasting.  Julia eats mindfully and she embraces life with the same spirit. Julia Child is now definitely on that list I have of famous people I would have loved to have had dinner with.

Both Julie and Julia are so engaging to watch because they follow their passion.  For Julie, finding a way to use the best parts of herself (her strengths) more and to do something that she loved and was passionate about, transformed her life.  What an incredible example of how we can make things a lot better without doing a major life overhaul.  She still went to work at a very hard job every day.  She still didn’t like where she lived.  She still fought with her husband, but when she set a goal that engaged her with her passion—and she kept taking consistent steps towards that goal, her life flowed differently.

Before I saw the movie, someone said—don’t go hungry. Well, I actually was pretty full of popcorn before the previews were over.  But the one thing that I didn’t walk away from Julie and Julia with was an urge to overeat.  It left me inspired to do a little more of what I love, to be myself, and to live the life I crave–not eat it. Oh–and it made me laugh–a lot.

Take good care,

Melissa

Could Yoga Curb Your Emotional Overeating?

August 12th, 2009, 2 Comments »

Mindful eating is an important tool for taking control of overeating and emotional eating. When we are mindful, we can tune in to the things we need and crave that we might be trying to replace with food.  Mindfulness encourages us to notice and attend to signals of fullness and to not eat if we aren’t really hungry.  Mindfulness is not always so easy to come by—especially in the midst of a hectic or chaotic life.  New research now suggests that yoga can help.

Regular yoga practice is associated with mindful eating and people who eat mindfully are less likely to be obese according to a study conducted by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA. The study was published in the August, 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

In an earlier study, these researchers found that middle-age people who practice yoga for as little as 30 minutes a week gained less weight over a 10-year period than those who did not. This finding was independent of physical activity and dietary patterns. The current study supports the researchers’ initial theory that mindfulness is learned either directly or indirectly through yoga practice and that mindfulness affects eating behavior.

In the most recent study, Researchers administered a specially designed Mindful Eating Questionnaire to more than 300 people. Eighty percent were women and the average age was 42. Participants also provided information on a number of variables including exercise, weight and height.

The researchers found a strong association between yoga practice and mindful eating but found no association between other types of physical activity, such as walking or running, and mindful eating. Participants who ate mindfully – those who were aware of why they ate and stopped eating when full – weighed less than those who ate mindlessly, who ate when not hungry or in response to anxiety or depression.

Sun salutation anyone?

The Secret to Implementing All Those “Best Life” Tips

August 11th, 2009, 1 Comment »

There are so many good tips and tools and strategies that can help us live a fuller,  more authentic and meaningful life. Tips that can lower our stress, help us lose weight, prevent overwhelm and improve our relationships. But learning about these tools and ideas and strategies just isn’t enough.  These gems are only helpful to us if we are able to figure out how to implement them and allow them to be useful in our lives.

There is an ingredient that is essential for metabolizing good information.  It’s necessary for creating a plan for implementation.  It’s a crucial factor in reducing stress and overwhelm.  And, it is in very short supply in many of our lives. I’m speaking about good, quality, quiet time.

What I see in my own life and in the lives of the women I work with, is that many of the things we can do to increase our happiness, productivity, success with weight or health, or whatever it is that we want to do, only really happen if we allow ourselves enough quiet time to listen to ourselves and discover the how and when and why of implementing.  When we have quiet time we can hear what we need.  We can think about how to address the need, and we can plan and schedule the actions we are going to take.

Do you get enough quiet time?  When you have an opportunity for quiet time, do you allow yourself to take it?

It’s interesting about quiet time.  Many of us—especially women with a lot going on—have a tendency to avoid quiet time—to fritter it away or to distract ourselves from it—to  fill it with things like the internet or TV we don’t really care about.  Or to fill it with food and nibbling or overeating.

It sounds so simple, but truthfully, taking more quiet time isn’t always an easy thing. For someone perpetually on the go, the beginning stages of quiet time can be uncomfortable.  Listening to ourselves or discovering what we need can be difficult.  And sometimes we don’t like discovering that we have questions or needs that we don’t know how to answer or address.  But here’s the real truth.  If we don’t take the time to listen and hear what we feel or need or want, we won’t be able to match those things up with the tips and tools and strategies we know about or are capable of acquiring.

Do you get enough quiet time?  What does ideal quiet time look like for you? I encourage you to choose a regular “quiet” activity—walking, writing or journaling, quiet contemplative or meditative time—maybe a gentle yoga workout.  Consider how you could add some quiet time to your week and make a commitment to stick with it for at least a week.  It’s the kind of action that really pays off.

Do You Read or Watch TV When You Eat? The Problem With Multitasking

July 23rd, 2009, 1 Comment »

Many of us do it. We’re busy, so we work through lunch while we nibble at our desks, we prop up a book or surf the internet while we eat our dinner and we snack in front of the TV. Many of my clients, struggling with overeating and emotional eating tell me they almost never simply eat without also doing something else at the same time.

Here’s the problem. Our brain isn’t capable of paying focused attention to more than one thing at a time. If we are focused on one activity, we’re not able to be fully present and attentive to the other. If I am busy reviewing my to-do list while finishing last night’s leftovers, guess where my brain is going to be focused? Hint—it’s probably not on the food.  One of the biggest culprits behind weight gain, overeating and weight regain is mindless eating—eating that happens on “auto-pilot.”

When we eat mindlessly, we tend to ignore hunger and fullness cues, we aren’t savoring our food so our ability to be really satisfied with what we are eating is diminished. When we eat mindlessly, we really aren’t making a conscious choice about what we put in our mouths. Sometimes we aren’t aware at all of how much we are eating.

I recommend to all my clients that they spend some time experimenting with mindful, focused eating and many of them are amazed at what they discover.

Although he’s not talking about multi-tasking while eating, Mark McGuinness wrote an excellent blog post about the reasons multitasking doesn’t work. It’s a great reminder I can apply in multiple areas of my life. I recommend you check it out.

Do you multi-task? Do you mindfully eat? What do you notice when you eat while doing versus when you focus solely on eating? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Take good care,

Melissa

Mindful Emotional Eating: Food For Thought

April 29th, 2009, 1 Comment »

Pavel Somov, PhD has a powerful idea about emotional eating: “You have two options in regard to emotional eating: you can try to eliminate it altogether or you can try to make better use of it by making emotional eating more conscious.”

Somov, a psychologist and the author of Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time, recently blogged about his approach, which he calls Mindful Emotional Eating, for the Huffington Post. Mindful emotional eating, which may at first seem counter-intuitive, overlaps with many of the concepts and ideas that I blog about at Peace With Cake. I find Somov’s ideas and his three principles of mindful emotional eating intriguing and potentially very helpful. Somov also suggests that emotional eating doesn’t have to be a negative act and that if it is something that we engage in consciously and deliberately–if we are in control of the choice and the act–it can actually be something that meets our needs. I’m looking forward to reading his book and will share my thoughts about it here.

In the meantime, check out his post and then leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

Take good care,

Melissa

Overeating can cause . . . overeating

January 12th, 2009, Comments Off

The holidays are over, but has your body recovered?

It’s possible that holiday patterns of overindulgence can actually predispose the body to develop patterns of ongoing overeating. Overeating causes biological changes in the body that can lead to more food cravings, disrupt food and sleep cycles, and cause your stomach to send mixed signals about when it’s actually full.

Metabolic and hormonal processes go into overdrive when we overeat. The body attempts to cope with excessive food intake by producing extra insulin, triggering a cycle where blood sugar levels are negatively affected and cravings for high sugar, high carbohydrate foods result. For some, this vicious cycle can create a sense of “sugar addiction” or feeling out of control with food.

Overeating and high fat diets may also affect our internally regulated patterns of eating and sleep. Dr. Joe Bass, an endocrinologist and molecular biologist at Northwestern University, has studied the effects of eating patterns on the body clocks of mice. Mice who are overfed show changes in their body clocks, which regulate sleep and eating. In his research, mice who were fed a high fat diet actually began waking up during the night to eat. This extra food consumption led to weight gain. Bass hypothesizes that people who eat lower fat diets may sleep better and may be less predisposed to night time binge eating.

Finally, we know that overeating can affect the body’s ability to identify fullness or satiety. Consistent overeating triggers changes in the part of the stomach that sends signals to the brain indicating that the stomach is full. According to Dr. Sasha Stiles, a specialist in obesity at Tufts Medical Center, “When you overeat time and time again, this electrical conduit pathway gets tired and it doesn’t tell your brain that you’re full anymore. It may send abnormal signals and you may not even realize you’re full.”

What’s an over-indulger to do?

• First of all—don’t panic. Knowledge is power. Acknowledging that your body might be going a bit haywire after a few weeks (or more) of overindulgence is an important first step.
• Focusing on a lower fat, low sugar balanced diet will help. Be patient with yourself and know that overeating and sugary high fat food choices may actually have impacted your cravings. Over time, with changes in your diet, these cravings will change.
• This is a time to become a real listener to your body. Pay attention to what signals your body sends you about hunger. Notice what you eat and how your body responds. By paying attention to what you eat AND to how your body feels, you will grow more skilled and more confident at knowing how and when to feed yourself.

Take good care,

Melissa

Stay out of overwhelm and stay in control of your weight loss: learn to press “Pause”

December 8th, 2008, Comments Off

One of the most powerful things we can do to maximize our effectiveness, minimize our overwhelm, and be more successful is to know when it is to our benefit to actually do less. We truly can’t do it all and we will virtually never get it perfect.

Getting fixated on “fitting it all in” or not knowing when we’ve done enough(because we get stuck in that nonproductive place of trying to make it perfect) can be a trap that leads to overwhelm, stress, feeling like we can’t succeed, and often, resorting to food for some sort of comfort.

Multi-tasking has a way of making us feel super-efficient, but what it usually does is keep us from being truly focused on what it is we are doing. When we multi-task, we lose our ability to be mindful and we are less aware. This also contributes to stress, overload, and the bad habits we turn to to “cope.”

When we are busy; when we are jumping from one thing to another (or even doing three things at a time), we can become so used to that rhythm that we aren’t even aware of the stress or the overwhelm that is building. When we spend every waking moment chasing our day, just doing what “has to” be done, there isn’t any room to be proactive and there probably isn’t enough room for self-care.

Deliberately doing less, or purposefully working to reduce stress, requires creating enough time to pause and to become aware of all that is going on. It’s important to learn to take a step back in order to gain perspective and to even be able to realize when we are in overwhelm. The next step is creating a piece of quiet time where you can make a decision–a conscious choice–about how to move forward.

You may benefit from practicing this act of pausing. Challenge yourself to sit quietly for 3-5 minutes each day. Sit and do NOTHING. Close your eyes, stare at the ceiling, watch your fish in your aquarium. Move your mind gently away from the list of things to do or the grocery list. Practice pausing.

You may find that this act of completely stopping, even for such a short time, is incredibly difficult. You might even tell yourself that this is one of those activities you can benefit from by just imagining yourself doing it. Trust me–it’s not true. The more you resist it, the more you probably need the practice.

Take good care,

Melissa