Blast from the Past - American Cookery

I love finding old magazines, pamphlets and books with advertising from long ago, especially food and diet ads. I scour used book stores, and antique shops to find them, and sometimes come up with a gem or two. Today I found one called American Cookery, (c) 1927. Every page has printed at the bottom: "Buy advertised Goods -- Do not accept substitutes" They didn't beat around the bush in those days.

Today's "Blast from the Past" is a recipe for Melon Balls:

Melon Balls - With a potato ball cutter cut balls from both watermelon and cantaloupe. Serve, chilled, with other fruit or by themselves in cocktail glasses.

Wow! I'm glad they explained that. Now what I'd really like to know is what is a potato ball cutter and why would anyone want one?

Drugs for Weight Loss - Miracle or Nightmare

A recent article in the New York Times, "Quest for Weight-Loss Drug Takes an Unusual Turn," was missing a big red "X" over the graphic of the pill bottle and pills. Doctors interviewed for the article were quoted as saying they joke about the drug Topamax causing people to become, "skinny and stupid," in reference to the reported side effect of diminished mental capacity.

Other fairly commonly reported side effect include kidney stones (between 1-2%), a change in taste, particularly with carbonated drinks, and tingling in the extremities. A change in taste could dramatically affect how much you eat or drink, so that alone could explain the weight loss.

This article frightens me because it seems to promote the use of a powerful anti-epileptic drug for weight loss, simply because that is a noted side effect.

The article goes on to state that "prescription weight-loss drugs are not powerful, have side effects, and work best when used along with a low-calorie diet." Here's some free advice: Skip the pills. The low-calorie diet works by itself. I've heard reports that prescription weight loss drugs do nothing more than help one lose 5
pounds over an entire year! That is surely not worth the cost, and associated side effects.

Don't risk your health on untested pharmaceuticals. These drugs are not approved for this use, but doctors are free to prescribe any drug for any purpose, once the drug has obtained FDA approval.

Website Spotter: Health - Weight Loss - Cooking

MasterFoods.com This site has it all! Cookbooks, including virtual books you can download to your own computer; glossary of cooking terms; herbs & spice usage guide.

Origins of Food Phrases

CORNY Meaning: Unsophisticated, old-fashioned, or excessively sentimental. Our story says this expression began in the 1890's. Companies selling seeds sent their catalogs to farmers. Jokes and riddles were added to the seed catalogs, but the jokes were obvious and trite. They became known as corn catalog jokes, then corn jokes, and eventually the adjective "corny" was born.
-- Eat Your Words, Charlotte Foltz Jones

History of a food nickname: My ex-husband first called me Sweet Heart, then Sweetie Pie, which morphed into Sweet Pie. For awhile he called me Dr. Pie (when I first became interested in health and nutrition), then to my horror and dismay he started exclaiming, "Holy cow, Pie!" whenever something amazed or delighted him. This prompted me to wail, "Don't call me a cow pie." From that point on I was just plain "Pie."

Common Sense Diet & Carbohydrate

The popular press is full of books and diet plans based on the theory that an increased insulin level, such as is experienced after eating high glycemic foods, causes weight gain. This is taking a complex bodily process (digestion) and reducing it to an overly simplistic idea, and it is dead wrong. With the confusing array of books, it's getting harder to know who or what to believe. No one seems to really know, and what makes sense today might be refuted tomorrow.

I've decided to adopt a common sense approach which also promotes a healthier eating style overall. It is simple. Repeat after me: Fresh is best.

Here are five main guidelines. If you make an effort to incorporate them into your life, you'll find yourself eating more food, enjoying meals more, and still indulging when the mood strikes.

1. Reduce saturated fat (primarily meat). How?

Eat more vegetables, fruits, grains, and beans. Beans are a great source of protein, so if you're into the Atkins type plan, just start adding a bean dish or two to your weekly menus.

2. Cut weekly fast food eating back by one-quarter. How?

Just estimate how often you eat at fast food restaurants, and pick a night or two where you'll eat at home instead. Once you achieve this, cut it down again, until you eventually think of fast foods as a treat, instead of a regular fare.

3. Reduce refined sugar and hydrogenated oils. How?

This is a tough one because it means weaning yourself away from heavily processed foods. Every pre-made food contains a lot of added sugar, and most also contain hydrogenated oils, neither is doing your body any favors.

4. Reduce caffeine. How?

Cut back on soft drinks, diet or otherwise. If you're drinking three or more a day, that might be giving you much more caffeine than you realize. Count how many caffeine containing beverages you drink a day, and cut back. If you drink 10 and you cut back to nine, that's progress. Don't feel like a failure if you have to take baby steps.

5. Choose more complex carbs (foods closer to their natural state), and less refined carbs.

Overall eat more is the message. More vegetables, more fresh salads, more fruits, grains, nuts, beans, rice, etc. By doing so, you'll automatically eat less refined, expensive, overly processed foods. If you have certain dietary restrictions for health reasons, then do what is best for your body and your health. Some people cannot eat as much fruit, others have a difficult time with certain grains (allergies or intolerance) and some cannot digest milk (lactose intolerant).(See the note below regarding the Atkins diet).

Here are resources, if you do have wheat sensitivities

If you believe you dislike all the above ideas, then you need to take a look at that belief. Is it going to support your weight loss efforts to continue in that belief?

Instead of, "I hate vegetables," tell yourself, "Even though vegetables haven't been my favorite in the past, I'm going to keep an open mind, and start trying more fresh foods."

Watch that your own self talk isn't sabotaging your efforts to at least make some small dietary changes. What you do every day will dictate how you look and how you feel.

EFT for Weight Loss

Have you learned basic EFT? It is easy to learn, and even easier to use in your weight loss efforts. So many of the underlying, core beliefs we have interfere with healthy attitudes toward food, and how we nurture ourselves. As you chip away at those emotional blocks, you free the person inside.

Issues from your past including issues about your body image, and how you were treated by your family, friends, teachers, etc. may be something that needs attention. Using EFT, and NLP techniques you may be able to overcome and leave behind many of the limiting beliefs that hold you hostage in your own efforts to become who you were meant to be.

I include EFT suggestions and exercises in The Daily Bites, sent on a loose schedule during the week, usually at least three times. If you'd like to start using EFT for yourself, subscribe to The Daily Bites for frequent ideas on using EFT for weight loss (and other issues). The EFT for Weight Loss Worksheets and Written Instructions are free.

Carbohydrate Update

There are different sources of carbohydrates and those that should be reduced in your diet are those made from refined white flour, hydrogenated oils, chemicals to retard spoilage, additives, colors, and flavors.

With the Atkins diet being so popular I continually hear people say they are trying to reduce or even eliminate carbs from their diet. When Atkins originally wrote his first diet book (he didn't invent low carb dieting, he just popularized it), he meant to encourage people to cut back on processed food sources of carbohydrate. Soon everyone was confused, and Atkins evidentially decided it would be far simpler to simply promote all carbohydrates as the enemy, whether fruit, vegetable, whole grain, or otherwise. This way, people would reduce their use of refined carbs, he may have reasoned.

Now we have low carb wine, low carb bread, and entire stores built around selling low carb versions of basic carbohydrate foods. Think of the scam that is low-fat and reduced fat (added sugar they mean), and you'll see what's happening here. People are being duped into buying more expensive, altered versions of foods, instead of just eating the real thing, and paying attention to quantity.

Potato chips are not nutritionally equal to baked potatoes. Sorry, but they are not the same.

Whole food potatoes are grown, harvested and delivered to the table with a minimal amount of alteration or fuss.

Potato Chips are potatos that are grown, harvested, then stripped down until there is barely any of the original food left, pressing out all the moisture, drying what's left, adding chemicals to retard spoilage, kill bugs, minimize clumping, then pounding the result into a mash, reforming it into chips, deep fat frying them, adding salt or flavorings, and repackaging the high fat, high salt, poor quality snack food into boxes or bags. Now you have the modern miracle we call potato chips.

Common sense tells me a baked potato is a good food, as nature intended. It's far better nutritionally to just toss an ordinary potato into a 350 degree oven for an hour, and voilà, instant dinner. Okay, an hour isn't instant, use the microwave if you're in a big hurry.

Reduce visits to fast food chains, wean yourself off daily chips, cookies, and fat-free pastries. Start cooking more meals at home.

I know, I know, you don't have the time to cook, but actually it takes far less time to just put together a salad than to spend worrying how you don't have time. There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over. Bring back meal time as an enjoyable part of your day, at least a few times a week.

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TV and Diabetes - It's in the News

Based on data from the large Nurses' Health Study, researchers found an increased risk of obesity and diabetes among participants who spent a great deal of time watching television each week. Television viewers exhibited a lower metabolic rate and a greater tendency to eat while watching than individuals participating in other sedentary activities. -- Nagourney E. Reality TV: Danger of diabetes. NY Times April 2003

If you enjoy a fair amount of TV, you can add some exercise while you watch. Use the time during commercials for either exercise, or household chores. I used to clean my whole house while watching TV as I'd just get up and work during commercials. Sweeping, vacuuming, dusting, bending, stretching, it all counts as daily exercise, so just get moving during the commercials. Keep some light weight dumbbells near the couch, and you can easily reach for them for three sets of arm exercises during breaks as well.

I'm working out while I'm writing this. I'm doing arm biceps curls, and now it's time to do another set ... okay, that's done. You see, it isn't required that you follow a strict format with exercise, no more than it is required you do so with your eating. You will get great results, if you are consistent. You can lose weight if you make small changes in your daily habits, and be consistent with them as well, in other words, a lapse now and then, a binge even, isn't the end of the world, it just means you had a lapse or a binge.

Every action stands alone, so if you overeat today, you don't make up for it tomorrow, you just eat as well as you are able each time you eat. One bite at a time.

Genetically Modified Foods Becoming Insect Growth Feed

An unexpected side effect of some genetically modified (GM) crops is that the insects are not only quickly developing a resistance to the toxins, they are using it as a food, becoming bigger and stronger.

Genes have been added to crops from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) which is a naturally occurring poison, widely used as a pesticide. These engineered crops have spread from four million acres planted in 1996 to over 100 million acres in 2000 with no end in sight.

Unfortunately, pests are rapidly developing a resistance to the Bt toxin, perhaps because they are eating it as a daily diet, rather than just occasionally being sprayed. Most troubling are the results of tests conducted by Imperial College London and the Universidad Simon Rodriguez in Caracas, Venezuela where they fed larvae of the Diamondback moth - a particularly bothersome pest - with regular cabbage leaves, and leaves treated with the BT toxin. The larvae eating the treated leaves had a 56% greater growth rate.

Researches concluded, "Bt transgenic crops could therefore have unanticipated nutritionally favourable effects, increasing the fitness of resistant populations," adding, "It destroys the industry's entire case that insect-resistant GM crops can have anything to do with sustainable farming."

Oops! Science marches forward, and sometimes takes two steps back.

+++ The Daily Bites are mini-lessons in how I use EFT to maintain my 80 pound weight loss. Twice weekly and free +++

Home Exercises - Stairway Calf Raises

If you have access to stairs use them for calf raises. Calf raises are simply putting your feel on the outer edge of one step, and slowly lowering your heels, then rising up on your toes as high as you can, lower and lift, lower and lift, for up to 20 repetitions each set.

Work up to doing three sets, twice a week.

My son and his friends invented a killer calf routine on a stairway at their school. They started at the bottom, and went one person at a time. First person does one set on the bottom step, jumps (both feet at once) to the next step, and does the next set, continuing all the way to the top of the stairs. After this fabulous routine my son could hardly walk for several days. I modified his approach on our stairs at home, skipping the jumping part (me? jump?), and only doing about six steps, but it really works well, and best of all, it's free!

Fun with Food - Sites of Interest

Gallery of Regrettable Food, by James Lileks

Many of the books featured in the Gallery of Regrettable Foods are on my shelf! Yes, cookbooks from the past had the most awful photos, frequently in black-and-white, that displayed the most ghastly looking slop - we'll see for yourself. I love this book and reread it when I'm in the mood for a good laugh.

This is a great gift book for your cookbook loving friends. Buy Gallery of Regrettable food from Amazon.

Wacky Packages - Satire of popular food labels.

Food I Fear

'Til next time, eat and enjoy life.
Stop waiting until you're thinner, taller, richer - Do it Now!

Kathryn Martyn, M.NLP