BITS-O-WISDOM: "The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness that the discovery of a new star." -- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Daily Bites: A Tasty Bit of Advice from One's Who's Been There

The Daily Bites are my recipes for tips, tricks and techniques to help you lose weight, gain self esteem or eliminate some of the daily stresses of modern living.

They're short e-mail messages, just the right size to give you a nudge - maybe just the thing you need to hear to lift your spirits and let you know you're not alone. If you like the Daily Bites, get on the list to receive the OBM Daily Bites in your e-mail. (Be sure to add OneMoreBite.com and OneMoreBite-Weightloss.com to your address book to ensure delivery).

Example OMB Daily Bites:
Holidays Around the Corner: That Time of Year
Overcoming Obstacles

Last Minute Gift Ideas

Think fitness for yourself and others. Get to your local sporting goods store and poke around. There are lots of great last minute, inexpensive gift ideas:

• Small dumbbells (I started over 20 years ago on the path to health and fitness when a set of "Smart Bells" were given to me.)
• Jump ropes (remember these? excellent workout)
• Exercise balls (large are used for stabilizing exercises - great for working the core muscles)
• Exercise Videos or DVDs
• Gym memberships (for yourself maybe?)
• Heart monitors (good for exercise intensity)
• Body fat calipers (better to track fat loss than than lost weight only)
• Nutritional Software (OMB's Weight Loss Tools has some suggestions)

If you have a bit more to spend:

• Body fat scales (better to track than your weight alone)
• Digital kitchen scales (figure out how much you really are eating)
• Pressure cooker (save tons of time cooking)
• Food processors (save tons of time cooking)

Next year, plan ahead and shop online. (No one says you can't get yourself a gift.)

New Weight Loss/Diet Articles

How Many Calories Can I Eat and Still Lose Weight:
Everyone's asking, how many calories should I eat, and the answer is always, "It depends." If you're frustrated by this question, read this article.

Addicted to Restaurants - Action Plan for 2004
If you eat out regularly (more than five days a week), it could be what's keeping you heavier than you want, even though you may think you're not eating "that much." If this sounds like you, read the article.

Weight Loss Articles Archive

New in Food News

Food marketers are rolling out their "new, improved, and healthier" food products, so keep your eyes and ears open; there ought to be at least one or two winners in the bunch.

Clever Packaging: Campbell's soup now available in a handy, drink-and-drive container. The container itself is a good idea, but I want someone to design one I can reuse, instead of paying such a hefty price for the throw-away version.

Splenda: We'll be hearing a lot about Splenda as many foods are substituting it for sugar in an effort to reduce the carbohydrate count in foods. I personally think it's best not to get too enchanted with artificial foods or additives as it's usually only a matter of time before the real effects of these manmade ingestibles start popping up. I'd rather have the real thing, less often, but you make your own decision in that regard. If you cannot have ordinary sugar, you may find Splenda an excellent substitute.

New Food: When is a "Joy Stick" not for your computer or electronic game? When it's a new pork product! The company is saying the Joy Stick is, "A natural, high protein pork stick." -- Nuf said.

FDA's New Food Labeling - Get Out Your Calculators

I always thought it wasn't that difficult to figure out calories, fat, etc. from a food label: Check the label, see how many servings it lists for the whole container, estimate how much of the container I'll eat (usually the whole thing), multiply by number of servings stated on the label, etc. It wasn't that difficult to double it for instance when the box said two servings.

Now the FDA wants to make this all easier for us, so they've gotten together and decided the quantity of a typical serving of various food groupings (pasta for instance is 1 cup, soft drinks are 8- ounces, etc.). The FDA thinks it will be less confusing (?), stating it will be easier for an individual to decide between two competing products, such as two soft drinks. They've obviously forgotten that every manufacturer decides how much to put in one package so a drink that is 8-oz, side-by-side with one that is 10-oz. is going to be more confusing than ever.

The fact is, people believe what the packaging says, and in many cases the packaging is deceitful.

Take for instance the Boboli Personal Size Crusts. The package contains two crusts, yet each serves two, so the entire package serves four. Meaning you personally don't get to eat one whole crust (they aren't particularly large either), despite the obvious implication that each serves one. This is just plain wrong. Read the label - it's all right there, just like the FDA ordered. Hope that makes sense.

Unusual & Exotic Food

Exotic Unusual Chinese Food: Chinese food for the culinary adventurer - "I can’t imagine eating anything that generates its own electrical defense system..." says Rhonda Parkinson. Read her funny and informative article about Chinese cuisine.

Speaking of other cultures, check out Bad Candy for some hilarious adventures of two fellows who want to spare others the trauma of eating what they consider to be bad candy! The folks who grew up with these candies like them just fine, thank you.

Fast Food Land

Health fads come and go and the current trio of low fat, high fat, and pyramid style eating is more confusing than ever. Fast food doesn't know whether to push the Atkins, South Beach diet fare with more meat, cheese and oil, or the low saturated fat diet considered the wisest by the nutritional industry.

Their first offerings are the new "healthy" salads. These salads are worse than the burgers and fries they're meant to replace. Salads could be a healthful choice except not when they are loaded with meat, cheese, and oily dressings. They also toss on sour cream, olives, and anything else they can think of to increase the calories. It's as if they made an effort to make them fattening.

Fast food has tried before with salad bars - they all disappeared because people stopped ordering from them. They had a baked potato's with toppings phase as well - that fizzled too. I think it's just too difficult to go into a McDonalds, smell the fries, and then order a plain salad with dressing on the side.

My longstanding advice still stands: Cut back on how often you eat out, and you can still enjoy the occasional double-deluxe cheeseburger or whatever you want when you do eat out. It's how often you indulge that counts.

Food & Recipe Sites

Vegetarian (you don't have to be vegetarian to enjoy these recipes)

• FatFree.com
• Excellent newsgroup for pressure cooking at VegSource.com!

Food Trivia

Carrageenin, a product extracted from seaweed, is used as a thickener in foods such as ice cream, peanut butter and salad dressings.

OneMoreBite's Short Guide for Keeping Your New Year's Resolutions

Are you gearing up again to make some resolutions for 2004? What about resolving to make some changes? Nothing radical, just changes that will impact your life and weight profoundly. The main idea I'm promoting in 2004 is cutting back on fast food and restaurant eating. That's the sum total of my diet advice. Do that and you'll lose from five to 85 pounds in one year (depending on how much you needed to lose to start with).

Supplement Report

Seasilver: Seasilver is a liquid multi-vitamin/mineral/amino acid dietary supplement that purports to contain, among other ingredients, aloe vera, phyto-silver (purportedly a plant-based silver), sea vegetables, the herb Pau D'Arco, and cranberry concentrate. In June 2003 the FDA seized the assets and charged the marketers of Seasilver with false and misleading claims.

Apparently they'd said Seasilver could be used to safely and effectively treat or cure 650 diseases, including AIDS and cancers, and would cause substantial and permanent weight loss. It turns out it's not true - who would have guessed? Unfortunately tens of thousands of people paid good money for these worthless products, and the people selling them get rich at our expense. They are able to do this simply because the buying public wants so badly to believe the claims.

Imagine how easy to achieve your dreams, if we'd only put as much faith in ourselves as we do in the latest miracle product.

Website Spotter

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence: In the Health and Safety category see topics such as aging, chronic conditions, death and dying, disease, mental/emotional health, and nutrition. Tell your student or their teacher about this excellent resource.

FDA Kid's: includes a Food Safety quiz, and Food & Drug word find.

Fraudulent Weight Loss Ads

The FDA has issued a report presenting guidelines for advertisers in the hopes they will refuse to run ads for bogus products (fat chance). They state any product which makes one or more of the following claims is fraudulent, simply because these claims cannot be substantiated. If you see any advertised product making these types of claims or promises, just say NO and keep your money in your wallet. It's easy to get caught up in the allure of easy weight loss, but it isn't likely any product making these promises can deliver.

• Causes weight loss of two pounds or more per week for a month (or more) without dieting or exercise.
• Causes substantial weight loss, no matter what or how much the consumer eats.
• Causes permanent weight loss even after the consumer stops using the product.
• Blocks the absorption of fat or calories.
• Causes substantial weight loss for all users.
• Causes substantial weight loss by wearing it on the body or rubbing it into the skin.

Don't be taken in by misleading advertising. No product exists that allows effortless weight loss - if one is ever developed you'll hear about it in the news - not by an advertisement.

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Have you taken seminars, read books, bought gadgets, or tried countless weight loss programs, and you still can't quite make it work? The answer you seek isn't in finding more information but in devising a weight loss program you can call your own.

Working one-on-one with a professional weight loss coach may be the answer. Overcome your limitations, break through to the weight loss success you know you can achieve.

The 8 Week Workshop is ongoing. You may enroll at any time. Maybe the time is right for you to eliminate your obstacles to weight loss success?

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Website Spotter

Nutrition Action's Rate Your Restaurant Diet Quiz

This "quiz" won't reward you with a score when you take the time to carefully enter your answers. Rather it produces a list of questions with a scoring system for the responses with either plus (+) or minus (-) signs and their corresponding number assigned. The best answer nutritionally is the first answer (hope I didn't ruin it for you). The information is good though, so take a look, and read through, score yourself on a piece of paper and then compare your answers to those they provide.

You can see the answers by using the "Submit Your Answers" button at the bottom of the page, then print that page for a quick review of how to improve your odds when eating restaurant foods.

What's up with E-Diets.com?

They now offer 12 different diet plans - one for each month, which is apparently how long people stay on each one. None work for permanent weight loss. If you just want to lose weight temporarily, choose any single food and only eat that for three days. I guarantee you'll lose weight.

Temporary fixes just do not work. Stop the dieting/weight-gain cycle and lose weight permanently with a diet makeover. It is what you eat regularly that creates the body shape you wear. You see new "diets" all the time. Are they any better than the old diets? No. Do they work? Sure, they all work, temporarily.

Any diet works, as long as you stick to the plan, but that isn't how life is. We go off the plan, and get back to living.

A Better Idea - Use OneMoreBite's Approach

Learn, once and for all, to get past your "issues," the reasons you eat, or overeat. Address those. Why do you eat when you say you don't want to? Why do you do what you say you don't want to? Probably because you never really made a commitment to stopping, you don't really want to, or you aren't ready. You want to keep your present habits more than you want to lose some weight. Deep down, where it counts, you have more reasons for doing what you are, than for changing. If this sounds ridiculous, think about it for a moment. Even if you say you want to change, if you don't take some action, there is a reason you are not following through.

Once you address those reasons, then you can move forward with making the permanent body changes, and lose the weight you've been talking about for all these years. You may have five pounds to lose or you may have 50 or more, it doesn't matter. Once you get over whatever is blocking your path, then you can move forward and end the cycle of taking weight off only to put it back on for good.

Now is an excellent time to get serious - and get over whatever's been stopping you up until now. Holidays are a great time to get in touch with multiple issues, start now: Details about upcoming workshops and seminars or to register.

Website Spotter

Nutrition Info: Carl's Jr

Go to Carl's Jr's site and click on the Nutrition tab. Next, select the individual items (such as you would normally eat). Each time you make a selection, choose Add Item (it operates much like a shopping cart). Your list will build, until you have what you want, then hit "Submit for Calculations" and stand back to see your total calories and fat.

Remember, most people don't just eat one meal a day - so add this to whatever else you may have eaten that day, and it all adds up to an easy explanation as to why we keep getting bigger and bigger. Most people are averaging over 5,000 calories a day by eating at restaurants and fast food establishments on a regular basis.

You can lose 5 to 10 pounds in a month, simply be cutting your visits to these businesses in half. Take the challenge - simply reduce your visits by half (you don't have to give them up entirely). Weigh yourself when you start, and weigh yourself when you finish, four or more weeks later. You will have dropped some weight, almost without fail.

"Experience is a wonderful thing; it enables you to recognize a mistake every time you repeat it."

Weight Loss Surgery

WLS is suddenly making big headlines with celebrities having it done such as Carnie Wilson, Al Roker and Sharon Osbourne. You can hardly pick up a People Magazine without an article about someone who's had gastric bypass or one of the other popular types of WLS. At an estimated cost of $30,000, it's not something you can just pop in and have done like a little shot of Botox.

Insurers are already panicked at the thought of tens of thousands of overweight Americans suddenly clamoring for WLS so they've set up some stringent requirements. This surgery is lifesaving, but it is not an easy way out, nor an easy way to lose weight. It is meant for those who are dangerously overweight, and those for whom the risks of surgery outweigh the risks of continued obesity.

If you've gotten to the point that surgery is a consideration, I'm writing a booklet, "EFT Before During and After Weight Loss Surgery." It will provide examples of how EFT can help minimize pain, speed healing, and assist in your adjustment to a healthier eating style.

Once you've had the surgery you may have a reduced capacity for food but you'll still have the same emotional attachments to eating, you'll still long for food to fulfill something that is missing in
your life. In short, you are still going to be the same person you were before the surgery.

EFT and NLP techniques can help you transition into the person you want to be.

Surgery can be frightening, and EFT can help reduce the fears. Going into surgery with less stress and a positive outlook will help you achieve a quicker recovery. Also setting yourself up with the proper mindset for your new relationship with food after the surgery, will also help you achieve the success you want, and make you happier with the end result.

Use the simple methods I teach to overcome your fears, whether you want or need WLS.

Details about Using EFT for Weight Loss Surgery - Before and After will be announced in this newsletter. Get on the list to receive an advance copy by sending me a note saying you want to receive it via the contact form.

I'm seeking participants for a brief "study group" for possible inclusion in the book. The only cost to participate is a commitment to follow-through and provide me feedback.

KFC - Fried Chicken Part of Healthy Diet Laughed off TV

Okay, I made fun of their new commercials, but apparently so did thousands of people so KFC has admitted their food might not be so healthy after all, and has already pulling the ads claiming a bucket of chicken can be part of a healthy diet. Just in time, I'd say. Advising that pulling off the breading makes their food even healthier is like shooting themselves in the foot. Far better if they simply offer a choice at the counter - like a baked chicken perhaps? Some grocery chains already offer baked, are you listening KFC?

Study says Blame Your Mother

Idiot study alert - A recent long-term study tracked 7,000 people born in England, Scotland and Wales during one week in March 1958. The study subjects were checked at ages 7, 11, 16, 23 and 33. The amazing and ridiculous conclusion of the study is that children born to women of short stature (they don't specifically state what is short) have a higher risk of developing obesity. Study subjects also tended to be shorter. Since when does being short affect your propensity toward obesity?

Yes, I've always said the taller you are the more you get to eat but that's simply because you have more body mass to support. After more than 40 years the best this was the best conclusion they were able to derive? In other words, the study was a waste of time. They found nothing to report so they had to make something up and being short was the best choice. Stature is no more an influence on the
propensity toward obesity than is hair color. I'm amazed they even published these findings.

I could imagine that being short would be a detriment as we are all served the same amount of food in restaurants for instance, whether you're a 250 lb man or a 140 lb woman, and if you both eat it all, well the short woman is more likely to gain weight, isn't she? That's not because she's short, it's because she's being given more food than she needs. Next thing you know they'll have a drug for shortness - wait a minute! They already do.

That's another rant altogether. The pharmaceutical companies are producing new growth hormones for children (who haven't yet reached their full adult height) to ensure they won't be short. Egads, a short person, run for the hills! Suddenly being short is being treated like a disease. What next? The drug companies simply want to create and sell more drugs so they attempt to convince us we are flawed. We're too short, too fat, too ugly. Too tired, too angry, too stressed. It's too ridiculous for words.

Goofy Diet Products

Here are some of the more ridiculous diet aids I've come across
lately, and people are buying these products too.

1. Slimming Pants.

2. Weight Loss Shoes and Slimming Slippers.

3. Weight Loss earrings.

4. Weight Loss Supplements. Stuff yourself silly, then pop these little beauties. Before you know it, you'll be heaving up your guts, and no more naughty calories!

5. Zap the Fat! New gadget to simply melt your fat. Hopefully they won't melt the rest of you in the process. Stay tuned.

6. Weight Loss Belt - why not? Remember those gadgets that you'd strap on and they'd shake the fat off you? Real popular in the 1970's as I recall. I even belonged to a spa myself. (I'm going to the spa, we'd say).

7. Weight Loss Cream. Sure, slather this on and it'll magically melt fat away.

8. Weight Loss Shower Head- slimming water? Okay.

Others? Heard of any hilarious weight loss products? I'd love to compile a big list, so send any you know of to me.

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

Yours in good eating,
Kathryn Martyn, M.NLP