Starbucks is catching on to portion control

Getting caught up in the good food bad food argument is a futile pursuit and will get you nowhere. Every food that gets labeled ‘good’ can also have an unhealthy or ‘bad’ dose, likely every food that is labeled ‘bad’ can have a perfectly acceptable dose that will do no harm to either your health or your body weight (if your goal is to maintain or lose weight)

The devil is always in the dose.

I was recently at starbucks and noticed they have a new offering in their baked good section: mini scones and mini donuts.This is a great idea.

The regular scones are close to 500 calories each whereas the mini scones are around 100 or less, the mini donut is about 150 calories (about half of a regular donut)

These mini offerings are perfect because they provide a few bites of something sweet that compliments the coffee but they don’t put you behind the 8-ball for your daily calorie consumption.

Anyone who is struggling with weight loss likely struggles with portion control and will typically eat whatever is served to them. It’s much easier to allow someone to serve you less, than order a larger item and try to save or throw away half of it (it’s also cheaper to order the smaller item)

Good for starbucks for creating these mini offerings.

John

Are these the right foods or the wrong foods?

For a growing number of people who are looking to lose weight or ‘get in shape’ food seems to be divisive topic. The path to a healthy body or to weight loss becomes something that gets wrapped up into an identity which food plays a major role.

Common incarnations of these food related identities include:

Raw Foodies

Vegetarianism and all of it’s incarnations

Low Carb

Paleo style

Locavorism

Macrobiotic

In most cases there is little scientific basis for any of these diet styles but rather there is an ideological basis, a belief system and most of all an identity. In these cases people become part of a group they can identify with based on a list of foods they will and won’t eat.

I’m fully aware that this just offended someone who has never considered their eating pattern as an identity and actually believes there is a scientific rationale for it…I’m sorry to break it to you, but there isn’t…if there were, then all of the other styles would be wrong and yours would be the only right one…sounds a lot like a religion doesn’t it!

Upon closer inspection and when put to the test many of these people are only fair weather followers of their chosen food identity. In other words they sorta follow it but not 100% (at which point I wonder what the point was of having the identity in the first place at all)

But that’s fine. In fact to me that is encouraged, the less radical you get with one of these beliefs the better chance you have of not becoming completely obsessive compulsive about it.

Most normal people don’t think twice about food or where it comes from, they just eat what tastes good to them, and what is wrong with that? These same people could easily lose weight and improve their health by just eating less of those same foods and going to the gym or for a walk. Any food can be part of a healthy lifestyle as long as it doesn’t become the only food you eat. This seems like the healthiest way to eat to me, both from a physiological, psychological and social standpoint.

John

What Would You Eat?

Simple mental exercise for you today.

What would you eat if you knew the food choices you made wouldn’t adversely affect your weight or your health?

I’ll start: I would eat just about everything I am currently eating.

John

A weird thing keeps happening to me and my friend (who also happens to pay attention to calories in vs out) at some of the local coffee shops that we frequent. I routinely get served MORE food than I order.

Love these things, about 60-80 calories each! Effin' awesome

As many of you know my only rule for weight loss is calories in vs calories out, and the way I lost all of my weight was to stick to this one rule (37 pounds lost so far).

Half of this rule requires me to have at least an educated guess at my calories in. So when I order a coffee with a milk and sugar I have a pretty good idea how many calories are in that coffee. And I like to have something sweet with coffee so I order 3-4 timbits to go with it (which are about 60-80 calories each). And this is where it gets weird.

Even though I’ll only order 3-4 timbits, the person at the counter will give me 4-5 and sometimes even 6. This doesn’t sound like a big deal and they probably think they’re doing me a favor, but in reality their effing up my weight loss progress (because I can’t resist eating them all…which is why I only order 3-4 in the first place)

Each one of these little balls of heaven are between 60-80 calories so I pay close attention to how many I have with a morning coffee so I know how many more calories I can consume at lunch/dinner or whenever I eat again.

Every time the server gives me an extra 2-3 timbits I end up eating an extra 100-150 calories I wasn’t planning on.

This brings up an interesting thought experiment about what is socially acceptable when it comes to eating and food.

So far you and I and most people would agree that it’s perfectly fine to serve someone MORE food than they’ve ordered or paid for (getting stuff for free is almost never a bad thing)…But imagine if someone did the reverse.

Picture this:

You walk up to the counter and place the following order: “I’ll have a large coffee with 2 creams and 2 sugars, and 5 timbits”

and the server looks at you and says: “how bout I give you a small coffee with no cream and a sweetener and 1 timbit”

This obviously would be completely unacceptable (even tho it might actually help you lose weight)

Ironically we live in a society where it is perfectly acceptable to help overfeed people who are overweight or trying to lose weight (and thus make their weight gain worse and crippling their chance to ever lose weight), but it would be completely unacceptable to deny serving food to people who clearly could afford to drop a few pounds.

Messed up.

John

Today is one of the biggest eating days in north america. It’s the super bowl celebration Eat-a-Thon.

I’m going to one our favorite local sports bars with some buddies where we will indulge on all you can eat chicken wings, pizza, nacho’s, beer, and all other forms of sports bar/pub food.

Tomorrow and Tuesday will be a lower calorie days to keep me right where I need to be.

Nothing special, just accounting for today’s overage with a couple days of lower calorie eating.

The key thing is to pay attention to the degree which we can all overeat in one day vs undereat.

Obviously the lowest amount of calories I can eat in one day is zero. Since my 24hr BMR is about 1900 calories, that means it will take me a full day of fasting to compensate for overeating by 1900 calories.

I’m guessing I’ll eat about 3500 calories today, so that’ll put me about 1600 above what I needed for the day. So tomorrow and Tuesday I’ll shoot for an 800 calorie deficit both days and by Wednesday I’ll be back to even.

John