Category: diets

Book Reviews · diets

Two books about what celebrities eat and why

Sam B4 Comments

1. Rebecca Harrington, I’ll Have What She’s Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting

You can read about it here: http://flavorwire.com/497767/ill-have-what-shes-having-author-rebecca-harrington-on-our-fascination-with-what-celebrities-eat

Listen to her read from the book here.

 

 

2. Timothy Caulfield, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash

You can read about it here: http://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2015/01/08/timothy_caulfield_debunks_celebrity_health_trends_from_glutenfree_diets_to_colon_cleanses.html

Listen to Caulfield interviewed on the CBC here.

And we reviewed Caulfield’s previous book here.

 

diets · eating · Uncategorized

Planning another New Year’s Diet? Three Alternative Approaches that May Spare You the Grief

Tracy I11 Comments

Far more tempting than the sugar cookies and shortbread, the spinach dips and puff pastries, the stuffing and the gravy…more tempting than any of these is the allure of that January 1st diet.

There are few women’s magazines and no fitness magazines on the stands right now that don’t have a feature about weight loss and dieting: a new plan for a new you!

Diets that begin on January 1st don’t typically work any better than diets that begin on any other day.  We’ve talked before about the sad news about losing weight and keeping it off.  See for example here and here and here and here.

I too ate more than I needed to over the holidays and my jeans are a bit tighter than they were a month ago.  So I get the temptation.  But I also know enough that dieting isn’t the answer.  By dieting, I mean following a very restrictive food plan and a drastic reduction in calories. It’s temporary and designed to make us lose weight.

The thing is, the body goes into a famine response — the metabolism slows and what food we do take in, our body hangs onto.  What’s worse, restrictive diets don’t really give us what we need to lead physically active lives. And they do nothing for our metabolic health. See “Metabolic Health Is a Feminist Issue.”

I’m here to tell you that there is still hope. I don’t mean there is a diet that is the last diet you will ever need. No.  I mean there are things you can do instead of dieting that have a good chance of improving your relationship with food.

What the three approaches I’m going to talk about have in common is that they require us to give up the diet mentality and focus more on what’s going on with us internally.  The three approaches are: (1) mindful eating; (2) intuitive eating; and (3) the EAT Q method that applies the idea of emotional intelligence to eating.

savorMindful Eating

The book Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life is a collaborative effort between a Buddhist monk and a nutritionist. Amazon quotes Donna Seaman from Booklist, describing what the book has to offer:

So essential to healthy eating is a healthy perspective that Zen Buddhist master and prolific author Nhat Hanh joins forces with nutritionist Cheung for a truly holistic approach. The duo pairs the latest nutritional information with the age-old Buddhist practice of mindfulness—that is, of being fully aware of all that is going on within ourselves and all that is happening around us—to draw attention to what and how we eat. Guidance is offered for recognizing what barriers—physical, psychological, cultural, and environmental—prevent us from controlling our weight, and readers are encouraged to savor food in order to fully nourish both the body and the mind. To that end, Nhat Hanh provides guided meditations on everything from eating an apple to coping with stressful situations, along with advice on selecting and preparing food, staying active, and avoiding self-criticism. Complete with a discussion of why healthy eating is also good for the environment, this is a uniquely insightful and positive program for wellness: a book of tested wisdom; practical action; and intellectual, emotional, and spiritual nutriments.

The idea is not to fixate on weight. Rather, it encourages us to bring our awareness to ourselves, our relationship with food, and the experience of eating.

You can find out more about the book and the approach on the Savor website.

Eating mindfully, free of distraction, is a challenging undertaking. When I took a mindfulness meditation course, one of the first things we had to do was to eat a raisin mindfully. That meant feeling it, smelling it, looking at it, rolling it between our fingers — all this before we even put it in our mouths.  From start to finish, it took about five minutes to eat — to savor — that raisin.

I’ve scarfed down whole meals in about the same amount of time, not even tasting them, on auto-pilot, or distracted by a magazine, the television, or that thought of dessert (!).

Learning to pay attention, not just to the food I’m eating but to the way I feel as I am eating it is a difficult challenge for me but it’s definitely something that I’ve been working on and I’m renewing my commitment to eat as mindfully as possible in 2015.

intuitive eatingIntuitive Eating

I’ve been a big fan of intuitive eating for quite some time now.  You can see my post “Intuitive Eating: What It Is and Why I Love It” from almost two years ago.

My main source of information about this approach comes from the book, Intuitive Eating, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.

The book outlines 10 principles of intuitive eating:

Intuitive Eating (IE) is based on ten principles, to each of which the authors devote a full chapter:

  1. reject the diet mentality
  2. honor your hunger
  3. make peace with food
  4. challenge the food police
  5. feel your fullness
  6. discover the satisfaction factor
  7. cope with your emotions without using food
  8. respect your body
  9. exercise: feel the difference
  10. honor your health with gentle nutrition

Much of it is in the same spirit as mindful eating, but there is a more explicit focus on rejecting the diet mentality and learning to approach food differently. There is much more emphasis on getting in touch with your internal cues, feeling what it feels like to be hungry (and to respond to that hunger) and to feel full and satisfied.

I credit the intuitive eating approach with helping me learn to enjoy food again without feeling so bound by the rules and restrictions I’d internalized after years of dieting.

There’s an on-line community focused on intuitive eating. You can find it here.

eat qThe EAT Q Approach

Susan Albers’ book EAT Q is subtitled “Unlock the weight-loss power of emotional intelligence.”  Anything that talks about the weight loss power of anything automatically raises my hackles. But what I like about this book is that it devotes a whole chapter to undoing the diet mentality.

Dieting is a major barrier to the EAT Q approach. You can’t get anywhere with EAT Q if you’re stuck in the mindset associated with dieting.  Why?

Dieting distorts feelings around food and eating to the point that the feelings become secondary to the basic rules of deiting: restrict (food) and resist (desire).

There are other obstacles to EAT Q (i.e. pleasure seeking, social eating, stress, and trauma) but dieting is the first one on the list.

Lots of people who have difficulties with food engage in emotional eating.  Eat Q is “a concept that helps you align your intellectual knowledge about food and nutrition with your emotions…Eat Q improves the quality of your food decisions no matter how you’re feeling.”

It combines emotional intelligence and mindfulness to address emotional eating.  Emotional intelligence is “a set of skills that, collectively, helps you be aware of and understand your emotions and the emotions of others.”

Emotional eating is “defined by experts as eating in response to emotions–whether positive or negative–in order to change those emotions.”

And mindfulness, as mentioned before, is rooted in Buddhism and is about being “fully present in the moment, in a nonjudgmental way.”

When we employ the Eat Q method, it “helps us navigate our relationship with food–our overall ability to manage the relationship between what we feel and how we eat.”

The book outlines what it is, spends quite a bit of time talking about barriers to practicing it, and finally provides a few “tools for success.”

You can find out more about Eat Q here.

A New Year, a New You — Doing Things Differently in 2015

Each of the books I’ve talked about here outlines an alternative to the trap of dieting.  They’re challenging in their own ways. Unlike diets, these are not just temporary solutions. Rather, they are lifelong undertakings that can bring peace to our relationship with food and with our bodies.

One qualification worth mentioning: if you are very physically active, perhaps an athlete who trains intensely, you may find that simply paying attention to your physical hunger signals may not be good enough for you to get the food you need to support your training.  When I’m doing a difficult bike class on the trainer or out for a long run (over 12K), I need to eat regardless of whether I’m hungry. In fact, if I wait until I’m hungry, I’ve waited too long.

Nevertheless, except in the middle of a difficult training session, my internal cues are fairly good guides. And I consider it a huge achievement that I can recognize them. Back in the day when dieting was a way of life for me, I didn’t even know when I was actually hungry or when I’d had enough.

One final point. An important practice related to all of these approaches is the practice of eating slowly. Just learning to slow down is a major step for many chronic dieters.  For more about eating slowly, see Zen Habits’ post about Slow Eating.

I’m not going to promise that any of these approaches will guarantee weight loss. You might lose weight and you might not — but you will enjoy your food more and be less likely to eat more than you need.

Does anyone want to join me in my 2015 commitment not to diet and instead to eat slowly and mindfully?

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diets · eating · holidays

Eat! Don’t Eat! Holiday Magazine Mixed Messages

Tracy I7 Comments

xmas-dessertFor over a month now Canadian magazines like Canadian Living and Chatelaine, similar to Women’s Day in the US, have featured holiday recipes–from baking to appetizers to Christmas dinner and Boxing Day brunch (that’s the day after Christmas, for those who live south of the Canada-US border)–these recipes don’t skimp on sugar, fat, chocolate.  See Chatelaine’s “Nine candy recipes to sweeten up the holidays” and Canadian Living’s “Seven easy and impressive trifle recipes.”

And then there are the magazines, sometimes the very same magazines, that tell us how to navigate the holiday parties and buffet tables, the lunches and the dinners and the cocktail hours and the potlucks, the special treats left out at the office, free for all takers.

These articles prime us to deal with the excessive amounts of food available through the holidays. And they’re usually put in terms of survival, like “Survive the Holidays without Gaining Weight” and, on the Chatelaine website, “The Twelve Days of Fitness.”

“The Twelve Days of Fitness” is a program designed to help us “beat the bulge” through the holidays:

Get ready to beat the holiday bulge! Together with celebrity trainer Ramona Braganza, we’ve designed a 12-day pre-holiday workout challenge to get you through the indulgent festive season and kick-start your fitness routine for the New Year. With Ramona’s 3-2-1 Method, you’ll get a full-body workout that combines three minutes of cardio, six minutes of circuit exercises and a one minute core exercise — for a total of just 10 minutes a day. Plus, every day Ramona will share a fitness or nutrition tip in an exclusive video (the same tips she gives to her star clients Jessica Alba, Halle Berry, Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johansson). Get ready to follow along with our handy workout chart, below, and feel your best for the holidays.

Anyway, I don’t know about you, but to me these mixed messages — about indulgence on the one hand and keeping things in check on the other hand — are just annoying.

First of all, the whole idea of decadence and indulgence is irritating. As I’ve said before in my post on “Why Food Is Beyond Good and Evil,” if we don’t demonize certain foods they’re not as attractive.  But these foods are always set up as temptations that must be resisted.

I’m a big fan of intuitive eating, which encourages people to be mindful and pay attention to their hunger when eating. I find that if I am able to pay attention, I can pretty much eat what I want at holiday parties. The only thing I need to be aware of is the quantity.

For me, one of the worst feelings I can have is the feeling of having eaten too much. I’m not talking about the regret of it all. No, I mean literally the physical feeling of having put more food into my tummy than it can comfortably accommodate.

The idea that you can counterbalance day after day of mindless eating beyond comfort by doing a few workouts is also misleading. It just doesn’t work that way.  You can work out all you like, but eating more than feels comfortable is still bound to cause…well…discomfort.

My own approach to holiday eating is still a bit haphazard. As I said before, if I pay attention, then I can eat what I like and stop when I’ve had enough.  If I don’t pay attention, that’s less likely to happen.  I’m probably going to switch to auto-pilot and go beyond my comfort zone.

But I certainly don’t approach particular foods with the “I shouldn’t” attitude. And I like to think of the holidays as another one of those occasions, like vacations or illness or travel or being too busy at work, that can throw me off of my routine.

Rather than clinging to a workout schedule in order to “undo” what I did at a party or a dinner the day before, I like to stick as closely to my regular schedule of swimming, biking, and running as possible because it grounds me and makes me feel good. Sometimes, it’s the only part of my routine that I can keep in place.

The more grounded I feel, the more likely I am to take care of myself at all of the different events.  Stopping eating before I need to undo my belt is one way of taking care of myself.

But back to the mixed messages we see in the media at this time of year.  I think it’s worse for women. “Eat!” and  “Don’t Eat!” are just another version of the double bind that feminists have called our attention to for decades.

No different from “be sexy but not too sexy” and “be assertive but not aggressive” and “be career-oriented but not at the expense of your children,” the magazines encourage us to cook elaborate, high calorie foods, mostly for other people. We are either not to eat them, or, if we do, we are supposed to “reverse the damage” through exercise.

I understand that all of the festivities can be stressful and that tables full of food can overwhelm people. Of course, there’s a very good chance that mindfulness will elude us at times. But it’s a much more self-nuturing to approach the season with confidence that we can look after ourselves and slow down enough to make conscious choices about how best to do that.

Instead of getting caught up in the whole “eat” and “don’t eat” narratives, why not try instead just to “pay attention”?

pay-attention

 

 

body image · diets · eating · Uncategorized

Keep your eyes on your own plate

Sam B2 Comments

Here’s a useful thought for the holidays as we get together with friends and family over food and drinks: other peoples’ food choices aren’t your business. Unless people ask your advice, keep your food judgements to yourself. I mean best yet, don’t make them, but if you make them, no need to share.

You just can’t assume you know what choices people are making or why they’re making them. It’s wrong to assume everyone is trying to “be good” over the holidays.

A parent I’m friends with on Facebook talked about teaching her children the “keep your eyes on your own plate” rule. That’s an important lesson for adults too.

Ragen Chastain has a broader principle, not just about food, but about other people’s life choices generally. She dubs it the “underpants rule.” You’re the boss of your own underpants and that includes what goes on your plate.

Here Pesky Chloe on Facebook illustrates the rule:

 

 

diets · eating · food · Uncategorized · weight loss

Vegan for Weight Loss? Not Necessarily but Don’t Let That Discourage You!

Tracy I5 Comments
Everyday Pad Thai. Photo credit: Vanessa Reese. http://www.theppk.com/2013/09/everyday-pad-thai/
Everyday Pad Thai. Photo credit: Vanessa Reese. http://www.theppk.com/2013/09/everyday-pad-thai/

It’s making the rounds again–the idea that a vegan or at least vegetarian diet is the best way to lose weight.  According to this article:

Overweight and obese adults who wanted to lose weight were randomly assigned to one of five low-fat and low-glycemic index diets: vegan (no animal products), vegetarian (dairy products included), pesco-vegetarian (dairy products and seafood included), semi-vegetarian (all food included, but red meat no more than once a week and poultry no more than five times a week), or omnivorous (no restrictions on food type and frequency).

Participants were told they could eat small amounts of nuts and nut butters, avocados, seeds, and olives in their diets but were encouraged to focus on lower-fat food options. The dieters were not given goals for limiting the number of calories they ate. As the researchers put it, “participants were free to eat until they were satisfied.”

After six months, those in the vegan group had lost the most weight, an average of 7.5 pounds. The vegetarian group was not far behind, with an average loss of 6.3 pounds. Those in the other groups lost only half as much weight (an average of 3.2 pounds for the pesco-vegetarian and semi-vegetarian groups and 3.1 pounds for the omnivores). There was no significant difference in reported activity level among the five groups.

I’ve blogged before about why this kind of thing bugs me.  First of all, any diet that restricts whole food groups for the purposes of losing weight is really just a fad diet that’s not likely to stick.

Not only that, and probably related, dieting to lose weight is for the vast majority of those who do it, doomed from the outset. It’s really hard to keep off all the lost weight.  We’ve had lots to say about that on this blog and are basically anti-diet in our approach.  See here and here and here and here for example.

Don’t get me wrong. There are all sorts of good reasons to be vegan or follow a plant-based diet.  Lots of athletes do well on a diet that’s free of animal products.  Like Rich Roll, an ultra-triathlete, and Scott Jurek, an ultra-runner.

I’m vegan, but I can’t say it helped me lose weight or perform better athletically. I continue with my vegan lifestyle (which goes beyond the diet) anyway because my motivation is ethical not based on health or weight loss or performance.

I don’t mind if people are convinced by articles like the one I quoted above to try this approach to eating. But I hate to make its virtues dependent on losing weight or improving athletic performance.

Not everyone is going to respond the same way to every approach to eating. For some people, there may be dramatic weight loss on this kind of diet. But for others, there may be none, or even weight gain.  Especially after they learn how to cook and realize that for every amazing non-vegan food out there that tempts us, there is an equally delicious vegan alternative!

So yes, try eating a plant-based diet.  It’s a perfectly legitimate and morally worthwhile way to satisfy your nutritional needs and keep your palate happy at the same time.  But it’s not a miracle diet.

Here’s a link to a recipe for “Everyday Pad Thai” from one of my favourite vegan blogs, Post Punk Kitchen by Isa Chandra Moskowitz.

diets · weight loss

Weight loss and the one question I want answered!

Sam B7 Comments

image

A weight loss study is making the news today. See Gradual weightloss no better than crash diets in the long term.

That’s a link to the Guardian but it’s in every major newspaper.

It’s being headlined as a triumph for speedy weight loss though that is clearly a misnomer. The study follows a group of obese people who lose weight on two different plans, roughly long and slow, and short and speedy.

We all know that people who lose weight quickly gain it and more back within five years. That’s not news.

But what we tend to want to say is that’s not the right way to lose weight. What about people who do it the right way?

There are different versions of this mysterious right way but most have in common slow, gradual weight loss.

Except in this study both groups, fast and slow, regained the weight.

Oddly, this is being called a victory for speedy weight loss rather than another nail in the coffin of the impossible dream of losing weight and keeping it off.

From the Guardian story, linked above:

Susan Jebb, professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford, was also enthusiastic. Doctors should, on the basis of the study, feel they can suggest a very low calorie diet to an obese patient, if they feel that would suit them. She was not dismayed by the numbers who put weight back on. “After two years the mean weight in both groups was still 5% lower than baseline,” she pointed out. Even if they put it all back on, they will have been at a healthier weight for some of the time, which can only be good. Jebb, in fact, told me earlier this year that some people probably need to resign themselves to going on a diet every five years for the sake of their health.

Yoni Freedhoff on his blog Weighty Matters raises some excellent questions about the study. He notes, for example, that neither group received post weight loss counseling. We all know that it’s harder to keep weight off than it is to lose it but they were left to fail on their own.

The fact that weight lost comes back when the intervention you undertook to lose the weight is stopped is anything but surprising, and yet that is precisely what was done with both the rapid losers and the slow losers. That there was no difference in their rate of regain speaks more to the authors’ failure of recognizing obesity as a chronic condition, which like any chronic condition, returns once treatment is stopped, than it does to the speed participants lost weight using weight loss interventions that they were explicitly instructed to stop once their weight was lost.

In a discussion of this study on our Facebook page, a reader asks a question I’ve posed before and to which I’ve found no answer.

Suppose weight regain is inevitable. Barring some weight loss unicorns, that is what study after study shows.

If that’s true, should you try to lose weight? I posed that question as one of a few questions I have about weight loss here.

If you eventually regain the weight is it better health wise to have been at the lower weight for awhile, or better never to have lost it?

I suspect the answer is complicated by individual health factors and by variables such as the amount of weight.

I just saw an endocrinologist about my weight issues recently and was told that given my metabolic health markers, excellent all around, I have no health reasons to lose weight. But if I want to lose weight for other reasons (for example, hills) I’m not going to hurt myself either. I’m going to blog later about my status as a “healthy fattie” and why that’s a complicated crown to wear.

In the meantime, if you turn up any good answers to the question I’ve posed here, let me know!

body image · Dancing · diets · eating · family · Guest Post

Inner conflicts in the life of a feminist dancing mother (Guest post)

natadicorsa8 Comments

I have danced all my life. I started ballet when I was an eight-year-old skinny child who never seemed interested in food. But when puberty hit, I developed a ferocious appetite, which made my mother elated, and my ballet teacher, who weighed us every first of the month, horrified: I put on 3 kilos all at once!

So I started weighing myself before and after every meal—or, as my mother teasingly put it, before and after every feed, like mothers used to do with babies, and I declined dinner preferring a meager yogurt instead. Fortunately, I got bored with this regimen, and I liked eating too much to develop an eating disorder as my mother feared. Aside from that one time, I never seriously dieted, mostly because I didn’t need to, but I have struggled with body acceptance since. What boys thought about my body started becoming important soon after, and I routinely found a body part to obsess about: my nose (too big!), my calves (also too big!), my breasts (not big enough!).
My recent favorite: wrinkly knees. I am seriously considering injecting something in them. (I would have to do some research on this!)

My partner has now taken my mother’s place in teasing me. Now, this is interesting because both bear at least some responsibility for my insecurities over my body. My mother, like—I suspect—many other mothers, may have been reassuring about weight, but not about my appearance in general: she rarely praised my looks and often made disparaging comments about them. She also has been on a diet since I can remember. More precisely, she has been “starting a diet” since I can remember. She is the reason why, as a mother myself, I really want to change the way I think and talk about my body. I don’t want my daughter to inherit this self-loathing obsession with looks that is passed down to so many of us, for generations.

I have to acknowledge that my partner has been a lot better than my mother in many respects. As a feminist, he is very aware of the importance of fighting back against stereotypes of femininity. As a lover, he has made me feel beautiful and sexy. However, he has his own preferences about the female body. In fact, his preferences happen to be fairly conventional (although maybe conventional for a man 20 years his senior): he likes curviness. He finds cellulite cute, and muscles unattractive. On the one hand, this is good news: unlike some women I know, I don’t have to deal with men who complain about me getting too fat. On the other, I have to deal with a man who excitedly compliments parts of my body that I do not want to hear praised as “jiggly” and who seems to find never-ending amusement in poking and squeezing stuff that an entire industry has been created to eliminate—or at least photoshop away.

Finally, add to this picture my pregnancy, during which I juggled the worry to stay fit and gain just the minimum amount of weight with the worry of not worrying too much about it, and accept with serenity the unavoidable decline. After I gave birth, I juggled the admiration for feminist, supposedly empowering projects like the  4th Trimester Bodies Project with the shame of feeling relief for not looking much like the women portrayed.

I know that my current concerns with being fit and thin have a functional nature: I can be a better dancer if I am back to my pre-pregnancy weight and shape. But now that I am close to that target, I know that it’s not just that: my not-as-toned-as-before belly does not prevent me from dancing well, but it does make me extremely, and irrationally, sad.

So… the jury is out.

As a mother, I want to be relaxed about my body, and transmit to my daughter the idea that it really shouldn’t matter what she looks like, and that she should instead aim for a healthy, functional body (I am hesitant to say “strong” because of possible ableist biases that shape the normative ideal of physical strength: I think being functional can be declined in ways that involve fewer such biases.)

As a romantic partner, I want to please my significant other, but without sacrificing my preferences. As a feminist, I do not want to succumb to objectifying and disempowering aesthetic ideals. (Don’t get me started on padded bras and waxing practices.)

As a woman, I want to be pretty, even with the understanding that my aesthetic standards are the product of my history and the era I live in.

I hope by the time I am old enough to have a granddaughter I will have figured it all out. In the mean time, I’ll enjoy my chocolate tonight, and my ballet class tomorrow.

Sara Protasi is a PhD student in Philosophy at Yale. She is currently working on her dissertation, tentatively titled “Envy: Varieties, Evils, Remedies, and Paradoxes”, which is at the intersection of moral psychology, normative ethics, and ancient and modern philosophy. Her other teaching interests include feminism and bioethics. Dance is her main hobby and passion outside of philosophy. She is an alumna of Yale Dance Theater and A Different Drum Dance Company at Yale.

diets · eating · health · weight loss

Non-Dairy Ice Cream Cleanse. Really?

Tracy I4 Comments

coconutThe article asks: “Would you go on an ice-cream diet to lose weight? New cleanse prescibes FIVE PINTS a day for four days straight.”

Let’s start with my answer to the question: No.

I don’t care if it’s dairy-free. Even if it were completely vegan (it’s got honey in it, so I’m kind of surprised that they’re claiming to be a vegan ice cream shop). I would not go on an ice cream cleanse to lose weight or to “detox.”  And I especially wouldn’t pay $240 for it!

Here’s are the deets:

Kippy’s, a vegan ice-cream store in Venice, is offering a $240 cleanse in which dieters eat five pints of raw coconut-based ice-cream a day for four straight days.

The cleanse, which amounts to 1,000-1,200 calories and 70 grams of fat per day and boasts 20-25 grams of sugar per ice-cream pint, is designed to help people lose weight and achieve a clearer state of mind.

What you get is four days worth of ice cream and you eat it five times a day. They’ve got a “master cleanse” flavor and a “Superfoods” flavor, as well as dark chocolate with Himalayan fire salt, coconut yogurt (for breakfast), and orange creme.

There are lots of reasons I wouldn’t do this.

First, you can’t lose weight in four days and expect to keep any of it off.  The journalist who tried out the cleanse learned this first hand:

A reporter for Gizmodo, who reviewed the ice-cream cleanse with his girlfriend, revealed that despite their typical cleanse grovels (missing the feeling of chewing, salty foods, and solid foods in general), they both lost a similar amount of weight – approximately six pounds each.

But he admitted that ‘in the span of one long weekend, I managed to put all of that cleanse-weight back on (plus another pound or so).’

No surprises there.

Moving on:  all this talk of “cleanses” is just ridiculous. This article on the website “Science-Based Medicine” talks about the whole “detox”/”cleanse” trend as a scam ($240 for four days of ice cream, anyone?)  and gives suggestions about how to avoid it. According to the article, the premise that our bodies ingest and accumulate toxins that we need to cleanse ourselves of is just plain bad science:

Today’s version of autointoxication argues that some combination of food additives, gluten, salt, meat, fluoride, prescription drugs, smog, vaccine ingredients, GMOs, and perhaps last night’s bottle of wine are causing a buildup of “toxins” in the body. But what is the actual “toxin” causing harm? It’s nothing more than a meaningless term that sounds scientific enough to be plausible. A uniform feature of detox treatments is the failure to name the specific toxins that these rituals and kits will remove.

The colon remains ground zero for detox advocates. They argue that some sort of toxic sludge (sometimes called a mucoid plaque) is accumulating in the colon, making it a breeding ground for parasites, Candida (yeast) and other nastiness. Fortunately, science tells us otherwise: mucoid plaques and toxic sludge simply do not exist. It’s a made-up idea to sell detoxification treatments. Ask any gastroenterologist (who look inside colons for a living) if they’ve ever seen one. There isn’t a single case that’s been documented in the medical literature. Not one.

We see this vagueness about cleansing and what is to be cleansed in the claims made by Kippy’s coconut ice cream diet: “It helps us digest, repairs the gut, feeds the brain, boosts the metabolism and is a powerful agent of detoxification,” or so claim its developers and purveyors.

That the offending toxins are either unnamed or, if named, invented or falsely identified, leads to the debunking of the second assumption of cleanses: that the toxins are the root of illness.

And the final suspect claim is that these detox regimens and cleanses remove toxins.  According to the article, “there is no evidence to demonstrate that detox kits do anything at all.”

Yeah so what that says to me is that the very idea of a cleanse of any kind is just a waste of time and money.  My radar for that sort of thing is fairly sharp. I just have to hear the word “detox” or “cleanse” and my hackles go up.

And I think too that there’s a ton of slippage between the cleanse motive and the weight-loss motive.  If you challenge someone about a detox on the grounds that they’re not going to lose weight and keep it off, they will claim that what they’re really doing is detoxing.

Another thing worth pointing out is that there are medical applications of the term “detox.” It refers to a pretty horrible process of withdrawal that people addicted to substances like alcohol or narcotics go through when they are attempting to quit, or people who have ingested poison have to go through to literally clean out their systems. So it’s not a completely bogus idea, it’s just not the sort of thing that is covered in things like an ice cream diet or a cayenne and lemon juice drink or a “rapid cleanse” (which sounds just scary).

Here’s the conclusion of the article I’ve been referring to from the Science-Based Medicine website:

Any product or service with the words “detox” or “cleanse” in the name is only truly effective at cleansing your wallet of cash. Alternative medicine’s ideas of detoxification and cleansing have no basis in reality. There’s no published evidence to suggest that detox treatments, kits or rituals have any effect on our body’s ability to eliminate waste products effectively. They do have the ability to harm however – not only direct effects, like coffee enemas and purgatives, but the broader distraction away from the reality of how the body actually works and what we need to do to keep it healthy. “Detox” focuses attention on irrelevant issues, and gives consumers the impression that they can undo lifestyle decisions with quick fixes. Improved health isn’t found in a box of herbs, a bottle of homeopathy, or a bag of coffee pushed into your rectum. The lifestyle implications of a poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking, lack of sleep, and alcohol or drug use cannot simply be flushed or purged away. Our kidneys and liver don’t need a detox treatment. If anyone suggests a detox or cleanse to you, you’d do well to ignore the suggestion, and question any other health advice they may offer.

So I’m saving my money. I have nothing against coconut ice cream, by the way. I love it. But I’m not about to spend $240 for a four-day supply, eat it as my only meal for days in a row, and try to fool myself that I can use it to improve my health.

 

 

diets · eating

In defense of (some) white foods (some of the time)

Sam B3 Comments

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Photo of two things I love, baguettes and bikes, from the blog Lovely Objects.

I’ve been thinking about white bread this week in Spain. It’s a local staple. And as a vegetarian I’m relying on it more than I usually do for daily sustenance. Aside from wishing for more choice, it’s not all bad.

While there is nothing I like better (in the bread department) than thick dark bread, milled with nuts and seeds (maybe even some fruit too), I know that not everyone feels the same way. I’m a parent and so I know that most kids, mine included, prefer the white stuff. Sometimes I like it too.

I know for sure I did as I kid. I even wrote a piece about it for Philosophers on Holiday (back when they were a printed zine, mailed to your home or office ) called “Ode to Hotel Toast.”

When I was a kid I only encountered commercially prepared white bread in hotels, though I didn’t know that. I just thought hotels made exceptionally good toast. The piece talks about Wonder bread, and how someone I know from Newfoundland called it “fog bread.” All fluff, no substance. “But it makes a right good piece of toast.”

In recent years, those who aspire to healthy eating turned away from white bread as part of our anti carb, healthy lifestyles. Between the paleo people and the low carbers more generally, it can feel like you might as well just eat spoonfuls of sugar out of the jar as pick up a slice of white bread.

There are even no white food diets.

I’ve had my doubts. The French don’t get fat. (National stereotype, I know. They also don’t eat much and they smoke.) Look at those lovely crusty white baguettes and croissants they eat everyday. My kids loved to eat with the French family next door. “They don’t have to eat whole wheat bread,” they reported back.

These days I eat all kinds of bread but often I’ve felt guilty about the white stuff.

So I was happy to read this month that there are some health benefits to white bread

See White bread good for gut bacteria.

“When people try to eat healthier, they usually skip the white bread and go for whole grains. Yet it seems as if white bread may not be as bad for you as once thought. Scientists have found that white bread actually encourages the growth of beneficial gut bacteria, which could mean that choosing this type of bread isn’t completely unhealthy.”

That’s bread. But what about rice?

“Somewhere along the line, a terrible rumor began: White rice is bad, and brown rice is good. We’re not sure who started it, but Ryan Andrews, R.D., director of education for Precision Nutrition, is here to explain the confusion.”

See Is brown rice really the healthiest?

And then there’s the arsenic problem. See The New York Times, The Trouble with Rice. It turns out that there are high levels of arsenic in rice, ten times higher in brown rice than white.

Can’t we be white bread/white rice moderates? No food is evil, after all, not even white bread.

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diets · weight loss

Sam and Tracy Respond to the Near Impossibility of Weight Loss: Our Posts All In One Place

Sam B

I thought it would be helpful to have all of our posts that started as reactions to the near impossibility of maintaining weight loss piece on CBC all in one place.

Enjoy!

And since lots of it’s not happy news, here’s a beautiful flower to make feel better. Enjoy.