What Each Choice Can Mean

In case you don’t already know, each of us makes about 200 food and beverage choices every day.  That’s a lot of choices—and an opportunity—to make those choices count. And, they will count. Dr. Steven Lamm, Internist with NYU School of Medicine and Contributing Editor of the Best Life Magazine, points out that the foods we choose to eat on a daily basis contribute 80 percent to whether we will develop diabetes, heart disease, or cancer.

Whether you’re shopping for food, eating at home or eating out, what you choose to eat has the potential to lower healthcare costs. Fresh, home-cooked meals with plenty of natural ingredients, vegetables and fruits tells your family their health is important.

The next time you go to the grocery store, notice the aisles of chips, cookies, candy and soft drinks (including sports drinks loaded with sugar).  The frozen cases are filled with cakes, pies, cookie dough, ice cream, and more. Then there’s the check out with still more candy—right there within arm’s reach. It’s all there, spread throughout the store so you can’t miss it even if you try. 

Now, look at the aisles of packaged, processed, boxed, pre-prepared and ready-to-eat meals, with ingredients not many of us can pronounce. Too much sodium, too little nutrition.  Believe it, every choice you make, every dollar you spend sends a message about what is important to you. 

This might be a good time to give some real food for thought to making better  nutritional choices. Your own and your family’s health depends on each bite. Since they all add up anyway, why not make them count?

Beyond the Scale

First, I’m not saying the scale isn’t important, but it’s only one measure of several. Yes it’s The Scale, it’s numbers, yet it’s only one indicator of progress. Your wellness journey is much more than numbers on The Scale.

We’re talking about wellness, and in this, we’re talking about health, and so we’re really talking about thriving. The decision to make positive lifestyle behavior choices, and becoming mindful of those choices isn’t something reflected in your scale’s vocabulary. And while the magic number is important, moving beyond that number to the what, how and why significantly increases your chances of success.

When you only look at the number on the scale to gauge your progress, what happens when you build muscle (which we know weighs more than fat)? What happens if you retain water? What about when you hit that plateau? What about vacation, or special occasions, and sometimes just plain life? These are all very human realities, and they’re all good reasons why The Scale isn’t the only indicator of success.

If you’re making positive lifestyle choices and are becoming more physically active, The Scale might actually report a gain—yet you’ve lost inches and maybe a size. You look better, you feel better, you have more energy, and you feel good about what you are accomplishing. Rest assured, keep going and The Scale will follow your lead.

As an alternative to becoming a slave to The Scale, I suggest you focus on those personal victories that take you toward your goal to lead a healthier lifestyle. Playing with your children, setting a good wellness example for your family, giving away pounds of clothes that no longer fit, dancing into the night, actually chasing the dog, going out to eat and taking half home, discovering a taste for vegetables . . . and the list goes on, and is personal because your list reflects your accomplishments.

So, what are you after that goes even beyond the numbers on The Scale? And, what are you ready to do to get there?

The Information Diet

There’s a new book out, “The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption.”  While it focuses on our information overload, I had to think, “WOW,” look at the parallels. The book talks about conscious consumption. Well . . .

If we stop to think about it, it becomes pretty obvious that healthy information consumption habits are about a lot more than just productivity and efficiency. It turns out even information consumption impacts our personal health, as well as the health of society. And, in the same way too much junk food can lead to obesity, junk information can actually lead to new forms of ignorance—call it cluelessness. 

The Information Diet provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. Hmmm . . . this sounds familiar. We can say the exact same thing about making healthy nutritional choices. After all, we know we are, at least in part, products of the food we eat. We are also products of the information we consume. This leads to the question of fault.

Is it the food’s fault that we eat too much? Is it the information’s fault that we have information overload? Maybe what we’re really suffering from is information malnutrition or information overconsumption. And,  it has all kinds of physiological and psychological effects on us. Hmmm . . . just like our nutritional choices. We may be eating too many empty calories, as well as too many empty mental calories. 

Here’s an interesting statistic. The average person spends more than 11 hours out of every 24 hours in a state of constant information consumption.  It seems that while we’ve grown obese on sugar, fat, sodas and junk food—at the same time we’ve become gluttons for tweets, texts, emails, instant messages, RSS feeds, downloads, YouTube videos, and FB status updates.

And it all comes back to the choices we make. It comes back to being mindful of those choices.

Guess what happens if we concentrate on cutting the low-quality information calories, as well as the low-quality nutritional calories?

Ordinary Choices

In the world of wellness there are always new, amazing (OK, maybe not amazing but at the least, surprising) findings, that really make one stop and ask . . . why? Why is it like this? Why do we do this? Why don’t we make better, or healthier choices?  These questions relate to the nutritional, or lack thereof, choices such a large percentage of our population continues to make—on a daily basis. Each of us makes an average of about 200 food and beverage choices a day. Well, according to the Chicago-based NPD Group, here’s what some of these choices come down to, choices about what we decide to eat—not what we say we eat (and that’s key). These are the choices that determine our actual culinary behavior.

For starters, there are some surprises here. On average, Americans frequent an upscale restaurant only about one out of every 100 visits. And, as for choice, we now have about 300 restaurant chains to choose from (with more than 2,000 locations). In fact, Applebee’s alone serves at least two million customers a day.

For the most part, our choices are sort of ordinary. Last year hamburgers topped the list of restaurant choices (we ate 13 billion of them—McDonald’s alone sells about 4.2 million each day in the U.S.). Next came french fries, pizza (about 23 pounds per person a year), Mexican food, and finally, chicken sandwiches. 

Convenience and cost have a lot to do with these choices—and this brings us to “takeout.” Takeout makes life a little easier. It lets you take food home to eat with your family, but you don’t have to prepare it. Yet, if you knew the average takeout meal averages close to 1,000 calories, not counting the excessive sodium, would you still eat it? Would you serve it to your family? How convenient are weight-related chronic illnesses? Where are the cost savings?

When we seriously look at serving size, portion size, calories, saturated and trans fats, sodium, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and other added ingredients, we have some serious choices to consider when making our daily nutritional selections.

So, with all these choices, where do we go from here? That’s the question. Do we make sound nutritional choices? Do we try to improve our dietary behavior? Do we really just eat for convenience or do we stop to ask, “Is this even good for me?” 

And, if we’re going to ask the question, maybe we ought to be brutally honest about the answer. Seems like a good place to start. Anyone agree?

Yes or No . . . Diet Soda? How About Those Artificial Sweeteners?

According to the American Dietetic Association, the average American consumes 22 teaspoons each day of added sugar. That's 16 calories per teaspoon, 352 calories per day and 2464 calories per week.

The source of much of that added sugar--soda. A 12-oz can of sweetened soda contains around 150 calories and 9 of those 22 teaspoons of sugar. The American Dietetic Association points out that substituting one diet drink each day for a sweetened soda can save 4500 calories per month, along with the potential of about one pound of weight loss per month. What they don't point out is . . .

• In that diet soda, you're ingesting the equivalent of five packets of artificial sweetener.
• You're also increasing your risk of osteoporosis, pancreatic cancer and diabetes.

 Research shows that diet sodas do not facilitate weight loss. Neither do sugar free foods, many of which are only slightly lower in calories than their regular counterparts. The reason, according to a Purdue University study, is that artificial sweeteners do not turn on satiety signals the way sugar, protein and fat do--meaning we don't feel full and continue eating. 

Armed with this information, consider this from the Center for Science in the Public Interest: Pepsi is being sued by a Madison County, Illinois man claiming to have found a mouse in his soft drink. That's bad enough. Pepsi's defense is worse--they say it's not possible the mouse was in the can when it was sealed, because it would have disintegrated from the acid in the soda.

This is what we are consuming. But do we really want to? Guess what happens when you drink a glass of water instead?