Waiting Until We Are Hungry Before We Eat

We can (as Diogenes observed) greatly enhance our appreciation of any meal by waiting until we are hungry before we eat it and greatly enhance our appreciation of any beverage by waiting until we are thirsty before we drink it.
--William B. Irvine, from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

In the modern world, nearly all of us can eat and drink whatever we want, whenever we want.

But wait: isn't food all the more delicious when we wait a little while for it? Even a simple glass of cold water becomes delicious when we're deeply thirsty.

Voluntary Discomfort
In his exceptional book A Guide To the Good Life, William Irvine explains how the Stoic philosophers sought different forms of voluntary discomfort as exercises of discipline, gratitude and pleasure. Yes, you read that right: pleasure. There are many modern misconceptions the Stoics, and one of the biggest is the inaccurate belief that the Stoics were "stoic" in the modern sense of the word, meaning unemotional or Spock-like. On the contrary, they knew how to enjoy the good things in life, and they frequently sought them out.

But the Stoics weren't hedonists. Yes, they sought enjoyment, but they also sought the understanding and acceptance that the things that bring us pleasure can also be lost. And they practiced voluntary discomfort by "going without" from time to time in order to better understand this concept. After all, knowing you can lose something--or worse, that it can be taken from you--helps you appreciate that thing even more.

Of course, eating and drinking is something we often taken entirely for granted. We do it every day, repeatedly, often with little enjoyment and sometimes without any thought at all. Which, if you think about it, is not only unhealthy but a little depressing too.

So, why not, periodically, wait a little bit to eat? Why not experience an hour or two (or more?) of hunger from time to time, and therefore turn that meal you waited for into a significantly more satisfying experience?

Stoic Kurtosis
Interestingly, this plays right along with some of Arthur De Vany's ideas about kurtosis: the concept of introducing variability, randomness and even occasional meal-skipping into your eating and exercise schedule. Our bodies were built for varying meals and varying caloric intake. Despite all our modern cultural programming, we were not built to eat three predictably-timed square meals a day.

Of course, just the mere act of waiting until we're hungry to eat is practically unknown for many modern people. Just look around. Judging by our society's obesity rates, we eat mindlessly, all the time, and whether we're hungry or not.

Isn't this typically ungrateful First World behavior? Maybe we could take a page or two from the Stoics, and wait until we're hungry before we eat.

Readers, what's your take?


Read next: Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking




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Ending Overeating: An Interview With Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler

Readers, today we have an enormous treat: An interview with a true thought leader in food, and one of Casual Kitchen's biggest influences, Dr. David Kessler.

Long-time CK readers of course know Dr. Kessler as the author of the exceptional book The End of Overeating, which exposed many of the food and restaurant industry's most pernicious and manipulative food processing techniques. His book completely reshaped how I think about food (you can read my rabidly positive review here), and it galvanized many CK readers to reconsider the suspect value of most processed foods and restaurant meals.

What readers may not know is that Kessler's book is just the tip of the iceberg of his career: Kessler ran the entire US Federal Drug Administration from 1990 to 1997, and he was a rare example of a senior government official who was able to work successfully under both a Republican and a Democratic President (George Bush Sr., who appointed him, and Bill Clinton, who kept him on). During his tenure FDA Commissioner, he was best known for dramatically increasing regulations on cigarettes, instituting many of our current food labeling requirements, and for stiffening the regulatory framework surrounding our food industry. After leaving government service, he served as the Dean of Yale Medical School.

I asked Dr. Kessler to talk about The End of Overeating for one simple reason: If there's ever a time of year we should read his book, it's right now during the holidays when we're surrounded and most tempted by processed, hyperpalatable and unhealthy foods. I'm grateful that he took the time to share insights about his book, about the food industry, and about the current state of overeating today.

Here's what he had to say:

CK: What's changed in the two and a half years since the publication of The End of Overeating? Are things improving in our culture with regard to obesity and our eating habits?

Dr. Kessler: It's been gratifying that new science continues to support the findings in The End of Overeating. I purposefully did not use the word "addiction" in the book, feeling it was a distraction, but scientists increasingly are using addiction science to look at the world of overeating and weight gain. The past two and a half years have seen an explosion in attention to this topic. Awareness and knowledge can only help us make informed decisions about what we eat.

What's the most important piece of advice you'd share with the average person who's up against the modern food industry?

It is most important to understand how huge portions of foods loaded and layered with sugar, fat, and salt can hijack the mechanisms of our brains. It's not always obvious what those foods are, so try to know what's in that chicken breast, as well as what's on that hamburger.

What's been the harshest, most unusual or most unsound criticism that you've received about The End of Overeating? And what reader responses to your book have most inspired you?

One criticism [I've received] is that I place the blame for the obesity epidemic on food companies, who are merely selling what the public wants, and not on individuals. I believe that corporations have a responsibility not to manipulate the brains of consumers. I believe individuals have the responsibility to understand they are being manipulated. I think that is clear to readers of The End of Overeating.

I am most inspired by readers who approach me after I have given a talk on the topics in the book and tell me that they felt for the first time as if someone knew what they were going through, that the science of that was a revelation, and their eating habits and lives had been changed forever. Heady stuff!

Some of the central ideas of your book--if taken to an extreme--can put us on uncomfortable ground. An example: if hyperpalatable food is truly bad, does this mean that the food industry should instead sell us "not-very-good-tasting food" so we won't eat so much? Is it really Big Food's fault that it merely sells the very food that we consumers consent to buy?

We've been conditioned to consume those loaded and layered foods. Believe it or not, once you know what's in those products, they can become "not-very-good-tasting food." Foods that are not highly processed, real foods, can taste good once we break the cycle of eating hyperpalatable foods. Food companies have long known what sells. Now they know the science of why. What is their responsibility once they have that knowledge?

You were appointed to run the FDA in 1990 under bipartisan support. You've successfully served under presidents of both the right and the left. If President Obama took you aside and asked you for your top policy suggestions on the subject of heath, diet and the business of food, what would you tell him?

What I tell all policy-makers is what I've said in my answers to your questions. Policies about truth in food marketing, food labeling, farm subsidies, etc., should be informed, as all good public health policy is, by the science.

Readers, share your thoughts and opinions!





Related Posts:
Four Steps to Put an End to Overeating
The Pros and Cons of Restaurant Calorie Labeling Laws
Obesity and the Obama Administration: A Blogger Roundtable Discussion
Who's Watching the Watchdogs? Ethical Problems in the "Ten Riskiest Foods" Report By the CSPI


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Mindful Chewing: How To Cut Your Calorie Intake in Half--Without Feeling Hungry

Everyone knows that there are enormous health and dietary benefits to eating more slowly. In this post, I'll talk about a laughably easy technique you can use to help you cut your eating speed and caloric intake in half--perhaps more. Best of all, you won't feel the least bit hungry or deprived.

How? By chewing.

Chewing is the one thing everyone does, but nobody thinks about. But this overlooked and underappreciated first step in digestion is one of the easiest ways to slow down at a meal and achieve satiety on considerably less food.

When you mindlessly rush through meals and swallow large chunks of insufficiently chewed food, it's not only far easier to overeat (we'll discuss why shortly), but you risk incurring digestive problems like indigestion, bloating and even intestinal blockages.

In contrast, when you properly chew your food, your entire digestive tract works more smoothly. Careful chewing also helps you appreciate and enjoy all of the complex and subtle taste sensations of a food.

Taste is the doorway. You must appreciate taste... It is not just about being thankful, it is to make eating a holy experience, so the energy from the food can enter your body.
--from The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

Is there a magic number for how many times you should chew your food? Not really. It depends on the crunchiness and the caloric density of what you're eating. For example, a homemade tortilla chip might require more chewing than a bite of chocolate mousse, but because chocolate mousse may contain far more calories per bite, you might want to "chew" the mousse much more than necessary to slow down and prevent yourself from eating too much.

In short, there's no magic number here. But I've found in my own experience that I tend to enjoy my food more, and eat far more slowly, when I make a point of chewing at least 15 times per bite of food.

And yes, lately I've been literally counting in my head while I'm eating, because I'm actively trying to build mindful chewing into a consistent habit at the dinner table. So if you happen to be eating dinner with me and I get a strange faraway look on my face, you'll know why.

Finally, the most important benefit of slow, mindful chewing is the automatic delay factor that it builds into a meal. We've discussed elsewhere in this blog how your body doesn't figure out that it's full until after a lag of some 20-30 minutes. This 20-30 minute period is the most precious part of every meal, because it represents critical fulcrum time during which you can avoid dangerous overeating.

The key benefit of mindful and careful chewing is that it slows down the entire eating process, allowing your brain to catch up to your stomach and figure out that it's full long before you've eaten too much. Result? You'll enjoy your food more, eat far less, and you will push back from the dinner table without feeling hungry or deprived.

Readers, how do you approach chewing at the dinner table? What habits have you built upon to help you eat more slowly and mindfully?

Related Posts:
Review: The End of Overeating by David Kessler
My Raw Food Trial: Full Archive of Posts
Nobody's Colon Blew: Reader Q&A On My Raw Food Trial
How Food Companies Hide Sugar in Plain Sight
The 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen
The Pros and Cons of Restaurant Calorie Labeling Laws

Photo Credit: Bruce Tuten

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Resist Irresistible Food

Raise your hand if you've ever uttered these phrases:

1) I'm only going to eat a couple of bites.
2) I've been good all day, so I'll indulge myself just this once.
3) I deserve a treat every once in a while--I'm going to help myself.

Anyone who's familiar with the terms rationalization and justification knows that our so-called "higher brains" can be exceptionally good at making excuses and explaining away our behavior--especially when we're around tempting food.

Usually, the higher brain does its job of thinking ahead and planning quite well. But sometimes it falls down on the job. Badly.

For example, when your lower brain sees a delicious plate of chocolate chip cookies (and feels an understandable impulse to dig in), your higher brain often conspires with your lower brain, using one of those three statements above to justify unwanted eating behavior. Before we know it, we're doing our best imitation of the cookie monster.

Presto: we just did something we don't really want to do--without even thinking about it. And yet we think we thought about it. And as any second year Psych major can tell us, since we think we thought about it, our higher brain quickly engages in after-the-fact activity that helps excuse or even covers up our eating behavior. There are a number of studies that show, convincingly, that people dramatically underestimate the volume of foods they've recently consumed, and in some cases people don't remember at all what they've eaten.

In short, when we're in the presence of hyperpalatable food, our higher brains can be as useless as our lower brains.

So how do we stop our brains from rationalizing and justifying, and instead teach our brains to deter us from tempting, hyperpalatable foods?

It starts with re-framing how we think about hyperpalatable foods in the first place.

First of all, don't blame yourself for being tempted by tempting food. It's natural, and it happens to all beings at every level of brain complexity. And let's face it, if humans weren't tempted to eat in the presence of palatable food we'd have never made it to the present era.

However, remember that humans have a capability that animals don't have. We can think in the abstract about what will happen in the future if we take an action now. Most importantly, we have the ability to notice, observe and reroute our autonomic impulses.

Let me borrow a quote from David Kessler, from his book The End of Overeating, as he explains how he retrained himself to think about large portions:

For me, it was about altering my perceptions of large portions. Once, I thought a big plate of food was what I wanted and needed to feel better. Now I see that plate for what it is--layers of fat on fat on sugar on fat that will never provide lasting satisfaction and only keep me coming back for more. With that critical perceptual shift, large portions look very different to me [emphasis mine].

We aren't going to be able to change the fact that our lower brains will experience temptation in the presence of hyperpalatable food. But our higher brains don't have to automatically follow along. Instead, we can use the higher brain to subvert the stimulus/response reaction of our lower brains. How? By engaging our higher order brain functions to notice, and disrupt those patterns.

Try this the next time you are in the presence of tempting food: Openly notice and acknowledge that you are experiencing feelings of hunger and temptation. But then, use your higher brain to map out a future that contains an honest assessment of the ramifications of acting rashly based on that hunger.

In our chocolate chip cookies example, we can imagine the butter or margarine in those cookies clogging up our arteries. A mental picture that I use involves me imagining myself eating tempting food, but then staggering into a walk-in angioplasty clinic afterward (yep, I'm completely serious, and this mental image works wonders for me). Another idea: notice and acknowledge your feelings of hunger, but then envision yourself in future years weighing an extra ten, twenty or fifty pounds.

Don't try to alter your initial temptation impulse--there's simply too many millions of years of evolution behind that impulse to resist it. Instead, alter the higher brain's reaction to that impulse. Before you know it, you'll build a habit of consistently rejecting the unhealthy foods around you.

Readers, what successful techniques have you used to help you resist hyperpalatable food? Share them below!

Related Posts:
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating
Review: The End of Overeating by David Kessler
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
Eat Right to See Right: Foods for Better Eye Health

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The Priming Reflex: How to Control Your Appetite (And Turn Your Back on a Million Years of Evolution)

Why do "appetizers" make us hungrier, when in theory they should make us less hungry? Why is it so easy to keep picking and nibbling at the food in front of us, even when we're full? And why do we always have room for dessert?

It's all because of priming.

Psychologists use the term priming to explain why people become reflexively hungry in the presence of a large supply of tasty food.

There's a simple logic to why this trait exists. Back in prehistoric times, food was scarce and infrequently available. That delicious mammoth that your tribe just roasted up might just be your last meal for a while. Having the ability to summon an enormous appetite so you could consume extra food would significantly increase your odds of surviving until the next mammoth roast. That's why it made a ton of sense for our brains to develop adaptations which would enable us to eat far beyond satiety when the (infrequent) opportunity arose.

In the modern era, however, we are constantly surrounded by cheap, palatable and energy-dense foods. And this has turned the priming reflex into a singularly harmful adaptation. It drives us to wolf down our food, ingest calories far beyond our needs, and worse, do it again the next day, the day after that, and the day after that. After all, the food never runs out, and neither, it seems, do our appetites. As a result, priming has become one of the key drivers behind the global obesity pandemic.

What can you do to help fight off the priming reflex? How can you stop it from subverting your health and your diet?

1) Wait.
Everyone knows that the sensation of fullness occurs with a lag. Your stomach always waits a good twenty to thirty minutes before it decides to tell your brain that it's full. This time lag is in fact a key part of the priming reflex, because it makes it lot easier to eat beyond satiety.

The trick is to recognize that those twenty to thirty minutes are the most precious minutes of mealtime. They offer you a fulcrum moment: you can overeat during that time and hardly notice, or you can take your time, slow down and eat sparingly for the first half hour of your meal. These delaying tactics will allow your brain to catch up to your stomach, helping you push away from the table without eating too much and without feeling hungry or deprived. (See more ideas on how to avoid overeating at the dinner table.)

2) Think, don't react.
Remember, priming is just a reflex. It's nothing more than an autonomic urge. You, however, are are much more than the product of your reflexes and urges: you're an intelligent human being, blessed with an enormous cerebrum that sits up on top of those unruly, instinct-based parts of your brain. If you use your higher brain to intellectualize the urges and appetites you experience, you'll find that your unhealthy instincts and reflexes suddenly have a lot less power:

"I know that chili relleno platter looks amazing to me right now, but if I eat the whole thing I will feel awful in an hour. If I split it with my friend, then I'll still get to taste plenty of food, and I won't regret it later."

Having a quick internal dialog like this is a great way to bring higher-order mental processes into an eating situation. If you can train yourself to have a higher-brain conversation like this each time you sit down to eat, you'll find it a lot easier to outwit the priming reflex.

3) Notice.
Finally, build a habit of using noticing and mindfulness techniques every time you sit down to eat. Pay close attention to the taste, smell and sensation of your food, starting with the very first bite. Chew slowly and carefully, and take the time to savor and enjoy the full experience of eating. Do this throughout your meal.

Mindful eating is in fact a perfect synergy of all three of today's eating tips. It helps you enjoy your food on an intellectual (higher brain) level, rather than a reflexive (lower brain) level. It slows you down. And most importantly, while you're carefully chewing your food, you're also chewing up the clock, making it all the more easy to use up that critical 20-30 minutes of critical "fulcrum time" while your brain catches up to your stomach. Result? You will eat much less, yet still leave the table perfectly satisfied with your meal.

Remember, hunger is often a highly misleading mental state, and the priming urge causes us to experience hunger far out of proportion to our nutritional and caloric needs. With the help of our higher brains and a few minor habit changes at the dinner table, we can permanently put the priming instinct where it belongs--in the dustbin of human history.

Wait, think and notice, and recognize that hunger doesn't have to be mindlessly obeyed.

Related Posts:
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food

I owe a debt of gratitude to David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite for prompting me to think about the issues in this post.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating

I have a long and storied history of overeating during the holidays, so much so that I know exactly where the Tums are in every home of practically every single member of my entire extended family. But a few years ago, I started to build my own personal list of tips and techniques that I use to survive a time of year when, for me, overeating is all too easy.

Today's list of tips will give you plenty of ways to resist holiday snacks and food, whether you're staying with family or in-laws, hosting the holidays at your own home, or even if you're at a holiday dinner out at a restaurant.

This list comes in two parts: Part I contains tips you can apply to prevent subversive overeating--the kind of overeating that occurs gradually, with you hardly even noticing, over the course of an entire day. Part II contains tips designed to help you once you sit down to a specific meal where you think you might be at risk of overeating.

Part I: Managing Food Intake Over the Course of the Day

1) Start The Day With Exercise
One of the best ways to set the right tone when you know you're going to be surrounded by food all day is to get in some exercise the very first thing in the morning. Any sort of physical activity will do: treat yourself to a brisk walk with family, go for a run, or play some tennis with your nephew.

Why at the beginning of the day? Three reasons: First, when you exercise first thing in the morning, not only do you start the day having burned a few hundred extra calories, but the exercise also helps suppress your appetite. Second, once you get started with the day's eating, you'll have less and less inclination to exercise as the day goes on. Third, the extra exercise will put you in a healthy frame of mind and help you resist the high-calorie food you'll be surrounded by all day long.

2) Make Your First Meal Mostly Fiber
Breakfast is often an informal meal at most homes, which means you'll be able to choose more carefully what you eat for this meal without offending your hosts. So take a pass on rich, energy-dense foods like eggs, sausage or pancakes, and have a small bowl of high-fiber/low-sucrose cereal and two or three pieces of fruit instead. Rather than starting the day off 1,000 calories in the hole, you'll fill yourself up with healthful antioxidants. And if you followed tip #1, you'll likely find that this is exactly the kind of food your body craves after healthy morning exercise.

3) Allow Yourself Some Treats....
Nobody likes a Grinch. I don't want to force you, especially during the holiday season, to gnaw on rice cakes all day and abstain from all cookies or goodies. So go ahead and indulge yourself a little, and enjoy a cookie or two, in moderation, every so often over the course of the day. However, when you do indulge, be sure to...

4) ...Alternate with Fruits and Veggies
Ah, there's always a catch, isn't there? After you've enjoyed your occasional cookie or other fiendishly energy-dense snack, make your next snack a piece of fruit or some raw vegetables. Alternate the good with the bad and you'll be able to have some holiday fun and still save yourself hundreds of calories over the course of a day. Try the alternating snack method this holiday season and see if it works for you.

5) Skip Lunch
Another idea to save yourself a few hundred calories is to skip lunch entirely. Normally, I wouldn't recommend skipping meals, but these are the holidays--you're surrounded by food all day long, and you're likely to end the day with an enormous dinner. You certainly aren't going to starve. If there's any meal you won't miss on days like today, it's lunch.

6) Brush Your Teeth
Would you like a powerful, foolproof and easy strategy that will prevent you from eating anything for a minimum of one hour? Just give your teeth a good brushing. There's no better temporary protection from snacking. Who wants to eat anything when you have a minty-clean mouth?

On any big eating holiday, you can use this technique a couple of times over the course of the day and you'll be shocked at how much less food you will consume.

7) Keep Track
Another powerful and foolproof strategy (although admittedly one that's not quite as easy to implement as brushing your teeth), is to keep track of the food you eat in written form. And when I say keep track, I mean literally writing down absolutely everything you eat over the course of the day.

This doesn't mean you have to show up to Christmas dinner with a pen and notepad like detective Harry Bosch. There are ways to do this with various degrees of discretion. For example, you can quietly retire to your room every hour or so to record the things you've eaten over that time.

But the basic concept at work here is this: what gets measured gets controlled. Just the simple act of writing down (and therefore observing) what you've eaten over the course of a day will cause you to eat less. This strategy is probably the most labor-intensive on today's list, but it is also the most powerful and effective.

Part II: Once You're Seated for Dinner:

8) The Two Glasses of Water Method
Everyone knows the old trick to drink a large glass of water before a meal. Water takes up extra room in your stomach and it contains no calories (actually, cold water contains negative calories, if you want to get all technical-like).

Think of this tip as the water method on steroids. By drinking two glasses of water instead of just one, you will have significantly less room in your stomach for food. You will likely eat much more sparingly. Interestingly, I find that I enjoy my food even more when I apply this tip, despite the fact that I end up eating quite a bit less.

9) Eat Half Portions
I always go back for seconds. There's something about that second plate of food that adds extra satisfaction to a big holiday meal. But let me tell you about one year when I did something really stupid: thinking I had discovered a way to eat more efficiently, I piled a double portion of food onto my plate, thinking I'd save myself a trip back for seconds.

Well, guess what? I outwitted myself and I still had seconds. And I had to lie totally still the rest of the evening to avoid doing a Mr. Creosote.

What I thought would be a quantum leap in eating efficiency actually taught me a valuable (if counterintuitive) lesson: the truth is it didn't matter how much I ate on that first trip: my meal wasn't going to seem complete until I made that second trip for more.

The next time you sit down to a huge holiday meal, use this counterintuitive logic to your advantage. For your first plate of food, eat a half portion of everything. If somehow you manage to avoid making a second trip for more, congratulations! But even if you still serve yourself that seemingly inevitable second plate, you've still only eaten two half-portions of food, which is just another way of saying one regular portion. At holiday mealtime, that's still a big victory.

10) Wait to Go Back For Seconds
Most people know that our stomachs tell our brains "I'm full!" with about a 20-25 minute lag. The reason it's so easy to overeat is simply because Mr. Brain doesn't think to tell Mr. Hand to stop ramming food into Mr. Mouth until it's much too late.

But we can turn this staggeringly unhelpful evolutionary trait to our advantage by combining the half portion method (tip #9) with a 15 minute delay. At your next holiday dinner, try eating a half portion for your first plate of food, and then wait 15 minutes before you go back for more. That oh-so-brief 15 minute lag, combined with the time you spent eating your first plate of food, should get your brain on the same page as your stomach. Result? You'll probably take much smaller portions for your second plate of food. Oh, and you'll score a rare victory over human evolution too.

11) Alternate Bites of Food with Drinks Water
Remember our tip #4 above, which recommended you alternate treats with healthy fruits and veggies over the course of the day? This tip is similar, but it's designed for the dinner table. It's easy to do: alternate every bite of food (and I mean every bite) with a swallow of water. Just put your fork in one hand and your glass of water in your other hand and take turns.

This technique aids in digestion, and it causes you to eat much more slowly. Your brain will catch up to your stomach and get the "I'm full!" signal before you've eaten too much, yet you won't really experience any feelings of deprivation or hunger. You'll be amazed at how much less you will eat over the course of a full meal using this strategy.

12) Don't Clear Your Plate
One of the less-than-helpful traditions dating from the Great Depression is the maxim, usually told to us by our parents, to clean your plate. Well, guess what? The rules have changed. You don't have to obey your parents, and it's not the Depression anymore (although, now that I think about it, what if history repeats itself and it is the Depression again?).

Uh, in any event, I give you permission to leave food on your plate this holiday season. This tip works particularly well with holiday dinners out, since you can take that extra food home and save yourself from cooking another meal later in the week.

13) Cut Back on Your Alcohol Intake
"You can't seriously want to ban alcohol. It tastes great, makes woman appear more attractive, and makes a person virtually invulnerable to criticism."
--Mayor Quimby

Alcohol may be the cause of, and the solution to, many of life's problems, but it can present particular difficulties at your holiday dinner table. Few foods are more disturbingly efficient at delivering excess calories into your body. And because alcohol is absorbed through your stomach, it only fills you up temporarily, thus letting you continue to drink and thereby ingest still more calories. So at your next holiday dinner, drink extra water instead of extra glasses of wine, and take a pass on the before-dinner cocktail or the after-dinner liqueur. Note: Do not follow this rule when staying with annoying relatives or in-laws.

14) Talk
Here's a radical tip for the next time you're sitting down at a big family dinner. Instead of concentrating on your food, why not ignore your food and concentrate on the family and friends around you? Have a few bites, but then put down your knife and fork and just talk. Ask a few questions of the relatives sitting closest to you, and get them talking too.

If you ask the right questions and get a really good conversation going, 20 minutes can go by in a flash. And of course another wonderful thing happens during those 20 minutes: your brain "catches up" to your stomach and figures out that you're full! Voila, you've just avoided overeating at dinner, and you've had an enjoyable time conversing with your family. I can't think of a better way to spend the holidays.

15) Save Room For Dessert
If you've successfully implemented some or all of the tips in this post, congratulations! You deserve to indulge yourself. This last tip is a rule-breaker of sorts that takes advantage of that curious breach of the laws of physics that happens at the end of every big dinner: no matter how much you eat, no matter how full you are, there is always room for dessert.

Well, help yourself to dessert then! And enjoy it, because you deserve a pat on the back for eating a lot less over this holiday season than in prior years.

But save that second piece of pie for tomorrow's breakfast.

******************************

Readers, what did I miss? Which of these tips did you find most effective? Which were the least effective? And what other tips have you found helpful that you'd like to share?

Related Posts:
The Dinner Party: 10 Tips to Make Cooking for Company Fun and Easy
The Pros and Cons of a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet
When High-Fat Food Can Actually Be Healthy For You
Brown Rice: Dietary Penance

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
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Thanksgiving Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating

Seeing as how Thanksgiving is tomorrow and we're in the middle of a series of posts on different types of diets, I thought I'd share my Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating post with readers once again.

On turkey day, strategies #6, #7 and #8 will be most useful.

So this Thanksgiving, why not try:

• 1) Using a smaller plate (try it, it really does work),
• 2) Taking a little extra time to eat slowly and notice (and enjoy) your food, and
• 3) Stop eating before you feel full (but not too soon before you feel full).

You'll feel a lot better after dinner, I can guarantee you that.

Finally, I know lots of us can get so caught up in the logistics and preparation of Thanksgiving that we sometimes forget to enjoy the meal itself and the company we're with. I don't mean to be too preachy and prescriptive, but be sure to take a little extra time tomorrow to be grateful and enjoy the moment.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!!

Chocolate Mousse Supreme Cake Update

A quick and entirely spurious update on my birthday chocolate mousse cake:

It’s now been more than one month of what feels like constant chocolate mousse cake eating, and we’ve just crossed the halfway point towards finishing off this enormous (and fortunately freezable) cake.

Believe me, this is a great cake, the best I’ve found in the New York region, but I’m not sure I’m exactly in love anymore.

I’d say I’ve crossed over from love into more of a quiet determination: I. Will. Finish. This. Cake.

But then I think I might have to go on another chocolate fast afterwards....


Carousel Cakes Factory Outlet
5 Seeger Drive
Nanuet, NY 10954
Tel: 866-659-CAKE

Related Posts:
Carousel Cakes: Chocolate Mousse Supreme
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating

The Chocolate Gene
Chocoholics Anonymous
Chocoholics Anonymous: The Chocolate Fast, Day 6
Chocoholics Anonymous: The Chocolate Fast, Day 13
Chocoholics Anonymous: The Chocolate Fast, Day 24
Conclusions from the Chocolate Fast

Conclusions from the Chocolate Fast

Well, it’s over.

The 30-day trial without chocolate (or 31 days depending on your math skills), unceremoniously ended with the eating of a single individually wrapped Dove dark chocolate square at 12:01am on June 5th.

Like I said before, I had assumed that this would be the longest month of my life, but as it turned out it was only the second longest. And yes, it was certainly a month of privation, but I also went a little crazy playing the martyr.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it definitely sucked and it was pretty hard to do, but nobody died or anything.

Instead, I had what I would call a month with very little joy in the “stop and smell the roses” sense. You know, those little pleasures that collectively add up to making life worth living. [Memo to Laura: that’s what it’s like to crave chocolate!]

So I can say with confidence that I will NEVER do something like this again with chocolate. Life is too short. From now on I’ll stick to real ways to build character--like trying to save more money or trying to exercise more. Or trying to run another marathon. Those are productive tests of will.

I can also admit that this trial didn’t help me snack less or eat less junk food. If anything, it caused me to be subversively creative, as in “hmmmm, what can I stuff in my face that does NOT contain any chocolate?” How’s that for resourcefulness?

A perfect example: the other day I ducked out of the office briefly to buy a box of... no, not my usual Double Chocolate Milano cookies from Pepperidge Farms, but instead a box of stupid, non-chocolate-containing Chessmen.

The problem was, I was still going to eat the same number of cookies (about 1/3 of the box today, 1/3 tomorrow and then I’d finish it off on the third day). Both types of cookies have about the same fat, sugar and nutritional content (or lack thereof). There's just less pleasure in eating Chessmen. What is the point of that?

I bet that’s how it feels to be in a methadone clinic.

One final comment: it’s been an absolute blast reading and hearing all of the comments I received while on this fast--not just on this blog, but also via email and in person. It’s been encouraging to hear the collective sympathy of the chocolate addicts out there (especially the ones I’m related to), and it’s been pretty amusing seeing the proverbial raised eyebrows and blank stares of all the people who just don’t get it when it comes to chocolate addiction.

You’re missing out on one of the great joys of life.

Chocoholics Anonymous: Day 31 and the END of the Chocolate Fast!

There’s a bit of a controversy as to when this chocolate fast actually ends. In the same post from May 5th where I talked about doing a 30-day trial, I also talked about going off chocolate for one month--until June 5th.

One of my better examples of mental clarity.

Of course, May has 31 days, so a 30-day trial starting May 5th actually ends on June 3rd, meaning technically I was able to eat chocolate as of today. A one-month trial, of course, would last until the end of June 4th, making tomorrow the official first day off the wagon.

This either proves once and for all that my math skills are suspect, or it proves I can’t even properly craft a decent test of character. It certainly is compelling evidence that I’m totally addled by chocolate addiction.

Either way, I’m going to stick it out until midnight tonight. I’ve just conducted the toughest test of my personal willpower I’ve ever had in my life, and I don’t want anybody to accusing me of blowing it on some minor technicality.

And yes, I’m going to eat some (hopefully just “some”) chocolate at the stroke of midnight tonight. I’m not joking. :)

The next time I do an exercise in privation like this, I’ll be sure to do three things:

1) Make it a one-month trial
2) Pick February
3) Do something, anything, other than give up chocolate.

I’ll share my final conclusions and closing thoughts on this chocolate fast in a separate post which I hope to put up shortly.

Chocoholics Anonymous: The Chocolate Fast, Day 24

Only six more days to go. I'm pretty sure I can finish. But it doesn't seem to be getting any easier.

At my family reunion this weekend I was able to restrain myself, despite the fact that several unnamed members of my extended family took perverse pleasure in doing things like waving handfuls of M&Ms in front of my face. :) Don't worry, I thought it was pretty funny.

But now that I'm back home with nothing to do this evening, that pathological craving for chocolate has returned. And it's overwhelming.

Worse, there's a bag of Ghirardelli chocolates sitting in the fridge right now--only a few steps away from me. Ironically it was a gift from a friend of mine to be eaten when I break the fast.

Note to self: this whole chocolate fast thing is a great way to score free chocolate.

I know I can make it through the 30 days. But I now understand that this--THIS is privation. I'd better go brush my teeth.

*****************************
Finally, let me share some more rather blunt feedback on the Chocolate fast:

From a reader in New Zealand: What the hell were you thinking?

From our friend Tatyana (best if said with a Russian accent): Why would you do this? Why would you suffer like this? What is the point?

I'm beginning to wonder the same thing!

An Admission of Mindless Eating Guilt

Today's post is more of an admission of guilt than anything else. I'd like to publicly admit that Laura and I pretty much broke every one of the rules in my own Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating.

Well, we actually only broke nine of the ten rules. Technically speaking, we followed rule #10.

But just to show that we can break nine out of ten rules as well as the next person, I'd like to share what Laura and I bought from the grocery store last Friday night:

1 lb of dark chocolate M&Ms (not dark enough if you ask me)
1 4.5 ounce Cadbury Royal Dark chocolate bar
1 box of Dark Chocolate Haagen Dazs bars
1 pint of Haagen Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter ice cream
1 pint of Ben & Jerry's S'mores ice cream
1 pint of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream
1 pint of Ben & Jerry's Mint Chocolate Cookie ice cream

You'll note that there are no vegetables on this list, no inexpensive yet healthy dried beans, no generic foods, or anything else that's laughably cheap.

And we didn’t just BUY all this stuff either. We proceeded to plop ourselves down in front of the TV and start in on eating it. That’s of course a direct breach of rule #2.

Guess who felt loagy and had crazy dreams last weekend?

Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating

As I sit here stuffing my face with a diet of repeated spoonfuls of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream, I realize I have a problem.

Mindless eating.

Do you ever sit down in front of the TV, bag of chips in hand--and before you realize it, you've finished the entire bag? (There actually is an official medical term for this: dreaded empty bag syndrome.)

Or after you've finished dinner, do you find yourself watching TV and eating still more food, even though you're not really hungry? Do you eat snacks more out of boredom than out of hunger?

Have you ever gone out with a group of friends, and while talking excitedly and having a grand time, you stuff endless amounts of food in your mouth, swallow it half-chewed--and later hardly even recall what you ate?

These are all examples of mindless eating. Today, I'm going to provide you with a comprehensive list of tips and strategies to stop yourself from this hazardous habit.

This post is a bit longer than usual, but it's an important subject that is worth the extra time.

1) Don't eat out of the bag/box/carton
Readers intimately familiar with this blog know of my personal weakness for Cooler Ranch Doritos, so I'll use them as a personal example: Don't take the whole bag of Doritos to the couch with you. Instead, place a handful of Doritos into a SMALL BOWL and then close up the bag and put it away. Then eat out of the small bowl. If you head back for seconds, it will at least be a partially conscious decision.

This holds true for ice cream too. Put a scoop or two into a small bowl and eat that. Don't start in on the pint (or lord help you, the half gallon!) and then look down and see you've finished it all off.

2) Don't eat in front of the TV
There's a great image from The Simpsons where Homer is sitting down in front of the TV with the game on. He's got bags of chips and bowls of dip arranged all around him: on his lap, next to him, even arrayed above him and behind his head. He eats with both hands, like a crazed and pear-shaped windmill, chewing audibly of course (if I'm thinking of the right episode, one of his coronary arteries briefly shuts off during this scene--Simpsons experts, please correct me if I'm wrong here). And of course he can reach around himself for any chip or dip combination, all without moving off the couch at all!

Sure, this might seem like an extreme example (uh, not as extreme as you might think for me...). But when you're eating and paying attention to something else like the TV, it is simply too easy to look down, and--to your horror--find that the bag of chips you thought you just sat down with is totally empty!

Yes, you've just experienced a classic case of dreaded empty bag syndrome. You've consumed 1,000 calories of Doritos via rote autonomic motion of hand to mouth for the past hour and a half--without even noticing. Don't let this happen to you by being distracted by the television.

3) Don't keep junk food around the house
This one sounds obvious, but it's less obvious than you'd think. Laura and I aren't above making a desperate late night run to the grocery store for salty snacks, but three out of four times the notion of having to get into the car and drive to the grocery store is enough to kill the idea off. So instead we stay home and don't stuff Doritos into our gullets that night.

If you're going to have food around the house at all, first try not to mindlessly eat it. :) But beyond that, just don't tempt fate. Don't have a treasure trove of junk food and goodies lying all around your home quietly awaiting your next attack of mindlessness.

If it so happens that you DO slip into "mindless mode" (and we all do from time to time), try to have the targets of your mindless eating be things like fruit, vegetables, or something on the healthy side. Think about it: if you're going to mindlessly eat something, by definition you aren't going to be paying all that much attention to what it is. Ergo, have it be stuff that's not energy-dense, won't make you regretful, and won't make you feel awful afterwards.

Here's a special strategy for those times like the days after Halloween when you're bound to have goodies in the house: take your leftover candy to the office and give it to your coworkers. The best part of this strategy is that your coworkers will actually like you for it, AND it will help your career when they die off before you do.

4) Don't keep junk food around the office either
I work in a somewhat stressful work environment and I'm particularly susceptible to after-lunch chocolate cravings (once again, readers intimately familiar with this blog know of my near-pathological addiction to chocolate).

If you were to do a time and motion study of my afternoon work, this is probably what it would look like:

• Type an email, stuff a handful of M&Ms in mouth.
• Type ANOTHER email, stuff a couple Lindt truffles in mouth.
• Read an income statement, repeat.
• Watch one of my stocks go up, triumphantly stuff another Lindt truffle in mouth
• Watch one of my stocks go down, dejectedly stuff a handful of M&Ms in mouth...

...and so on. After an afternoon of this, I'll feel loagy, queasy, cognitively foggy--and my teeth will hurt. Worst of all, I didn't even enjoy the chocolate all that much.

I will confess that my M&M eating isn't totally mindless, because I separate them out by color first and then eat each color one at a time. Still, it doesn't stop me from eating more than I should.

The easiest solution here is don't keep snacks in your drawer. If you have to keep snacks around, try and stick to fruit or veggies or at least unsalted nuts.

And if you work with evil colleagues who bring donuts, cookies or other mindlessly tempting goodies to the office (note that you yourself will get a special exemption from this rule on the first business day after Halloween), either avoid the kitchen area or get these alleged "colleagues" transferred to another division. :)

5) Brush your teeth!
I sincerely hope you do this already, at least twice a day.

What I'm talking about, of course, is not your normal brushing, but rather using brushing as a sneaky technique to put an end to the day's food intake.

Let's say it's 8:30, I've finished dinner an hour or two ago, and despite the fact that I'm not all that hungry, I'm looking around for a snack. If I instead go and brush my teeth, I won't eat again the rest of the night. Nobody wants to gnaw on salty Doritos with a minty clean mouth.

I also use this technique during those dangerous afternoon hours at work. Sure, I might indulge myself with one or two Lindt truffles at 2:30pm, but then I make sure to cut myself off and head to the men's room to brush my teeth. Result: I don't eat any more food until dinner time. Try this technique and see if it works for you. I've found it to be highly effective.

6) Trick yourself with size
This is an insight I'm borrowing from Brian Wansink, who is the author of the extremely useful book Mindless Eating. One of the key themes in his book is how our minds judge serving sizes by context, not by absolute measurements. Here's an example: send two groups of people to an all you can eat buffet. Give one group smallish plates and give the other group large-ish plates. Guess what? The group with larger plates will eat significantly more food! When we put our food on larger plate, our brains think we are getting a smaller portion. So we pile more food onto that plate (and eat it all of course) without even realizing it.

The same holds true in many other eating situations. If we eat ice cream scooped with a larger than normal scoop, we'll eat more ice cream. If we eat Doritos out of an enormous bag, we'll eat more Doritos.

I don't know whether to laugh or be horrified by the fact that in study after study people ate less food when they did nothing more than put it onto smaller dishes. Talk about mindless! But hey, if the technique works, why not take advantage of it? Use smaller dinner plates. Don't eat your Doritos out of the bag--eat them out of that small serving bowl instead.

7) Notice
Slow down. Chew your food. TASTE your food. Enjoy it. Take your time eating it. Don't talk and natter throughout dinner. Think about the tastes you're experiencing. What is good or not so good about it?

These suggestions are reminiscent of the ones I've urged you to use when you're in recipe modification mode. Make a habit to be more mindful whenever you eat, and to notice all the subtleties of what you're eating.

When you are out with friends at a restaurant, by all means enjoy yourself, but don't let yourself get so distracted that you don't pay attention to what you're doing with your food. Instead, when the food arrives, take a moment to look at it, study it and think about it. And then go right back to nattering with your friends.

In the reading I did in preparation for this post, I saw a couple of articles that suggested being the last person at the table to start eating. This sounds like a great idea because it enforces you to pause a bit and get into "noticing mode" before you eat.

Theoretically though, what happens if there are two or more "last starters" at the same table? Do you both starve to death? Flip a coin to see who has to start first? I'm kidding of course.

So, in order to not look like a weirdo staring off into space while all your friends start to eat, why not take a brief look around the table and take in each of your friends' dishes as well as your own? Ask them about their food as they try it. Get yourself into noticing mode and enjoy the whole process of eating, rather than just autonomically attacking your own dish with your knife and fork.

8) Stop eating before you feel full
We're all cavemen (and women) deep down inside. Our bodies were trained over millions of years to overeat and consume food wolvishly because this might be our last meal for a while. Who knows when the next woolly mammoth might stroll by our cave?

Of course in the modern world, food is practically everywhere around us. So we need to learn to NOT listen to our bodies in this one respect. Recognize that hunger (or better said, "fullness") is a lagging sensation for people. You don't actually feel full the moment you are full. Instead, you will feel full 10-20 minutes later. How remarkably unhelpful.

That's why if you actually eat until you're full, you feel awful 10-20 minutes later. For my part, I usually have to go and lie down and close my eyes for a few minutes so I don't explode like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

So my advice to you is this: stop eating when you are 70-80% full. Be mindful that your feelings of hunger will mislead you into eating more than you should, and that your sensations of fullness will lag to the point of uselessness. Make an active choice not to listen to these sensations.

9) Leave some on the table
We're not in the Depression, and you don't live with your parents. You don't have to clean your plate any more.

When you're out having dinner in a restaurant, take some food home with you. When you're eating at home, use the small plate technique. And no matter what size plate you use, remember to eat until you're 70-80% full, and then save the rest back for leftovers later. This has the added benefit, of course, of saving you from having to cook an extra meal.

And when it comes to dessert, keep in mind that the second piece of pie will actually taste better tomorrow morning. You don't need to squeeze it in tonight!

10) Let down your guard once in a while.
I don't believe in pure ascetism. Every once in a while you have to let your hair down and misbehave. Pretend that the next woolly mammoth won't stroll by your cave for a while.

So, yes, Laura and I will do a snack run to the grocery store on occasion where we buy all sorts of ice cream and chips. You already know about my weaknesses for Cooler Ranch Doritos, Hint of Lime Tostitos and of course, dark chocolate.

I cannot stop these addictions, I can only hope to contain them. Consequently, I practice moderation in my overindulgence. I will let myself overeat once every few weeks. And I know that, once in a great while, it's okay to experience dreaded empty bag syndrome. Sometimes life is about just a bit of occasional gluttony. Just recognize it for what it is, and don't let it happen to you too often.

Be mindful! And feel free to share your thoughts, reactions and criticisms in the comments section below.

Related Posts:
How to Modify A Recipe
Why I'm a Part-Time Vegetarian
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
How to Live Forever in Ten Easy Steps

Related Topics:
Brian Wansink's book Mindless Eating
mindlesseating.org -- Dr. Wansink's website. Contains a blog which is well worth a read.




How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.