Popular nutrition site confirms: breakfast cereal makes you fat

Just for giggles, I used NutritionData (http://nutritiondata.self.com) to query on things that are better choices than mayonnaise for weight gain.

I figured like, so many other so-called authorities in nutrition, ND was going to tell me that, if you want to gain weight, there is NOTHING better than mayonnaise.  Readers of this blog know that this is just not true – but what would the gurus at ND say?

What a delightful surprise, then, to see that most of the top 50 ideal foods for weight gain were highly processed breakfast cereals, among them such supposedly healthy choices as Whole Grain Total and Cheerios, as well as a couple of the Kashi cereals and one of the Quaker instant oats products.  (I was hoping for the ultimate irony that Special K would be in the top 50, but it’s not.  There is a variety of Special K at #74.)

(Butt-saving disclaimer:  Query performed Friday, April 8, 2011 at approximately 3:40 pm EDT.  Your results may vary.  And, note to corporate America:  if you want to give anyone grief about this, please contact the good folks at NutritionData.  It’s their analysis, not mine.)

If you want to get fat AND go broke, America, keep on shelling out the benjamins for those healthy breakfast cereals.

Weigh In, Week 2

Weight on 3/23/11: 153 lbs.
Weight on 4/6/11:  148 lbs.

::fist pump::

Wait, you might be thinking.  Didn’t you post on February 24 saying you were getting on the low-carb wagon again?  That was more than 2 weeks ago.

Yeah, well.  A little over two weeks ago I realized that the Protein Power style of low-carbing, where a) you start out with 30 grams of carb rather than 20, and b) you can eat anything you want as long as your daily total is under 3o grams of carb, was Just. Not. Working.  I am still a fan of the Eadeses, and there are many fine things about their books, but I just can’t get started if someone tells me it’s OK to have a portion of rice with 10 grams of carbs.  As always, YMMV.

So I decided that I had to go back to my good friend Dr. Atkins and do Induction.  Voilà!  Five pounds down.

I am still trying to decide on a goal weight.  My pre-pregnancy weight was 139, and I had been hoping to lose a bit more.  Maybe 130?  Maybe 125?  This leaves me 18 to 23 pounds to go.

For the first time in my life, though, I found myself a little bored with the food options, so I have opted to go up to 25 grams for at least couple of weeks so I can at least have some nuts.

In retrospect, the biggest mistake I made low-carbing was not trying to determine my own individual carb tolerance.  It’s a pain in the neck to keep track of carbs, and so much easier to wing it and eat a big salad and a bunch of protein and fat every day.  But by not determining what Dr. Atkins called my CCLL and CCLM, I totally screwed myself over in pregnancy and nursing.  Since you can only do Lifetime Maintenance at those times, and since I had no idea what Lifetime Maintenance looked like for me, I had to guess … and with disastrous results.  I had such terrible carb cravings and ate so many bagels when I was pregnant I’m surprised that my daughter wasn’t born with a whole in her head.

This time around, I’m going to do it right.

Overheard at the Playground …

… a conversation between a mom and a young woman walking her dog.

They knew each other from the local women’s-only gym.  It transpired that the young woman had lost 68 pounds.  My ears always prick up with tales of large amounts of weight lost, so I listened a bit more closely.

She mentioned that she’d done it on a very low-carb diet.  She described the details: high fat, moderate protein, very low carbs.

“Low-carbs?  Can you eat whole grains?” asked the mom.

The young woman said something to the effect that if she ate grains, they would be whole grains, but only in very small quantities.  Yeah, right, I thought.

Then the mom asked if it was the Atkins diet.  The young woman said, “No, not Atkins.  It’s a special diet called the ketogenic diet.”

Atkins is a ketogenic diet, I thought.

But the young woman clearly knew quite a lot about what she was talking about.  She mentioned how her bloodwork was always excellent and she was no longer pre-diabetic.  She described how ketogenic diets are prescribed for epileptic children with no apparent ill effects on their arteries.

It was very perplexing – she had all her facts straight, but she admitted to eating whole grains – which I will be you ten bucks she doesn’t – and she would not identify the diet as Atkins.

I suppose that this could be interpreted in many ways, but here’s my take.  Most people haven’t got a clue what the Atkins diet is.  If you admit to being on the Atkins diet, you will hear things like, “Who wants to eat all that meat?” or “All that fat is going to kill you!” or the Double Myth That Won’t Die: Atkins causes kidney disease and osteoporosis.

On the other hand, most people who have done Atkins properly – me included – want to share the news, and so they describe the diet more or less accurately and just omit the A word.  Because who wants to get into same boring argument with mere acquaintances over and over and over again?

I’m not sure if that was the case with the young woman at the playground, but it is certainly the case with me!

What I Had For Dinner

Oxtails!

I decarbed this quite a bit – I omitted the white sugar, used xanthan gum instead of flour for thickening, and replaced the ketchup with a tablespoon of tomato paste.  I made the butter beans optional (put a few in my husband’s bowl but not mine), and I did not serve rice at all.  Also, this easily makes 6 servings, not 4, as the article claims.  (Wow … I have a big appetite, but I cannot even imagine eating a quarter of this recipe plus beans plus rice.  I am stuffed right now.)

When I ran it through NutritionData with these adjustments, I got 13 net carbs.  But I’m not sure that we need to count all the carbs in the brown sugar, because, well, you burn the stuff.  (If you’re mystified by this, you didn’t read the recipe.)  Burning converts the sugar back to carbon and water, so surely the carb count is somewhat lower.  I’m gonna guess that reduces the carb count per serving to maybe 9 net carbs, but that’s just a guess.

Coconut Oil No Longer a Villain

I almost fainted when I read this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/dining/02Appe.html

Especially this:

‘“I think we in the nutrition field are beginning to say that saturated fats are not so bad, and the evidence that said they were is not so strong,” Dr. Brenna said.’

Do you think someday we’ll read an article in the New York Times that admits that canola oil tastes bad and isn’t any better for you than butter?

The Migraine Update

Oh, yeah, I’m supposedly the Migraineur.  So let’s have the migraine report.

I forgot to refill my Inderal prescription about 2 days before the pregnancy test, and so May 2008 was the last time I took the stuff.  My doctor, whom I have since fired – long story I may tell here some day – predicted I wouldn’t have any migraines during my pregnancy, and she was right, though I think her confidence was not justified, since many pregnant women DO have migraines.

In the two years since my daughter was born, I have had hardly any migraines.  Once I woke up with something that was so unmistakably a migraine that I was sure I’d just slept through the aura.  The other times, what I had was a persistent one-sided headache that was probably a migraine, but lacked two telltale symptoms: the aura, and the aftermath of an incredibly sore head when I bent over.  And even then, we’re talkng three or four times, max.

I am sorry, fellow migraine sufferers – I can’t tell you how this happened.  Combination of luck and hormones, I suppose.  I feel lucky.

Befriending Myself

Monday weigh-in, at 151 pounds.

Hard to believe, but I can’t remember what I weighed last Monday.  It was probably 155, but it might have been 157.

I have, lately, decided to have more compassion for myself and less tough love, mostly because “tough love” usually seems to be stingy with the love and generous with the tough.  And that doesn’t end up looking much like love to me.

What this doesn’t mean is giving myself permission to go eat anything I want, any time I want, in any amount I want.

What it does mean is asking myself questions like, “Is eating that cupcake really what I would do if I loved myself?”  Or like, “Is there some other treat I could have that will not make me feel bad later?” And especially, “Is it productive, or counterproductive, to beat myself up when I eat something unhealthy?”

It means reminding myself that there will always be cupcakes, so I don’t need to have one right now.

It means forgiving myself for small lapses, in the hope that this inspires me to do better next time.

It means, above all, asking myself , “What would I say to a friend in my position?”  Would I say, “You’re a disgusting fat pig with no willpower”?  Or would I say, “So you ate a cupcake.  Everybody regrets something they eat once in a while.  But I know you have the power to go back to healthy eating immediately, with the very next thing you choose to put in your mouth.”  Notice that I said “immediately,” and not “tomorrow.”  How many times have I said to myself, “Tomorrow,” and then “Tomorrow,” and then “Tomorrow” until a year or more had passed?

On my recent post about things I’ll never say again, one thing I didn’t include was “Diet is not a moral issue.”  I still believe that to be true.  I still dislike hearing people say, “I was so good today – I skipped the treats and went to the gym,” or “I was so bad – I ate a whole box of donuts.”  What I’d like to hear is, “I’m proud of myself for doing what’s good for me,” or “I wish I hadn’t eaten that, but it is truly not the end of the world, and the next thing I eat will be good for me.”

Has the Migraineur become softer and less doctrinaire?  Maybe I’ve given up trying to prove anything to anyone but myself?  Nah.  But it occurs to me that I’d be happier if I did.

(For the record, no cupcakes were harmed in the research or writing of this post.)

Stats

My highest non-pregnant weight was 167 pounds.

When I got my PCOS diagnosis and went back on low-carb back (around August 2007), I was at 162 or 163.

When the little pregnancy test stick showed the plus sign, in May 2008, I weighed 139 pounds.

I can’t even tell you what I weighed at the end of my pregnancy. I don’t quite remember, and I’m not sure it’s an accurate number because I retained a LOT of water near the end. I remember something around 180 at week 39, but I was pretty swollen, cankles and all. In fact, I remember at weekly weigh-ins thinking, “If the baby is gaining hardly anything now, how come I am gaining 5 lbs a week?” Can we please be generous, not count edema as weight gain, and say that I didn’t gain THAT much more than the recommended maximum 35 pounds?

I don’t remember weighing myself very soon after the baby came. I think when she was tiny and exclusively breast-fed, I probably got below 150 for a few weeks. (Other people’s experience may vary, but I did not find breast-feeding to be such an effective weight loss strategy, maybe because for the first few months I ate around the clock. Get up, nurse, eat a granola bar, sleep, get up, nurse, eat a granola bar … repeat every two hours.)

But the number that sticks in my mind is 155. I’ve been pretty consistently 155 for a while, except for a month ago when I saw a rather alarming 157 appear on the scale.

I think I saw 153 this morning. I’ll take it.

Speaking of Michael Pollan …

… am I the only person who thinks maybe he has jumped the shark? Has he written anything lately that can compare to the originality of The Botany of Desire or The Ominvore’s Dilemma? I mean, I had fun submitting an entry to his “Rules for Food” contest. But if a writer actually has to ask his readers for not just ideas, but ideas for a new edition of a book he’s already written, doesn’t that perhaps suggest that he has run out of things to say?

Crunchy, Salty Things

I was skeptical about Giada de Laurentis’s recipe for vegetable chips, including kale, but I gotta tell you, if you miss crunchy, salty things, these are to die for.  I think these are tastier than potato chips – really – and one thing that every diet guru agrees on is that greens are good for you.  And truthfully, I think it’s easier to make these, provided you happen to have a bunch of kale on hand, than it is to go to the store to buy chips.  (Getting out of the house with a two-year-old is a process, not an event.)

Now, obviously, low carbers are going to skip the white and sweet potatoes and go straight for the kale.  And trust me, you’re going to want more than three leaves – I used two bunches for two grownups and a kid.  And don’t crowd – use two or three baking sheets if you have to.

The kale is pretty fragile once roasted, so the lemon mayo, while delicious, is too heavy for them.  I don’t mean aesthetically heavy, I mean physically heavy.  The chips disintegrate when dipped in.

Your toddler will have a great time making a huge mess with them, but when you sweep up the crumbs after dinner, you will realize that most of them made it into her rather than onto the floor.

Tonight I made them with mustard greens, and I was worried that the strong mustard flavor would be too much, but judging from the smell while they were roasting, the mustardy compound evaporates and you just get mild crunchy leafy goodness.