Corn Doody

I swear, I didn’t invent the term Corn Doody but according to the highly reputable Urban Dictionary it’s “what you find in the bowl the morning after eating corn”. And to be clear, we’re not talking a bowl bowl. It’s corn season, clients ask the darndest things and lately I’m fielding numerous corn doody queries. I always chalked this occurrence up to insufficient chewing but is there more to it with corn? After all, not all foods come out whole.

The outer hull of corn is made of cellulose that is indigestible to humans; we do not have the necessary enzymes to break it down. Even when you chew a kernel (we can’t all be inhaling our corn) it’s mainly the inner portion that’s digested. The cellulosey outer layer remains, one website likened it to an empty sleeve.

I know what you’re thinking, I do. How come what’s in the “bowl” doesn’t look like an empty, flattened sleeve but a full or whole sleeve? It’s because WARNING GROSSNESS as corn makes its way from top to bottom, it is refilled (nasty I know). So there you have it.

And though corn doody may be a seasonal concern, don’t be alarmed by quinoa, beans or flax doody either. While odd this isn’t usually a problem unless accompanied by other GI symptoms that I’ll refrain from discussing today, enough is enough.

Have you, you can admit it, experienced corn doody? Have you wondered why? Are their other foods that seem to "pass through" whole? Are you wondering if I've lost it?

Weighing In

My office isn’t large. On one wall are two chairs for clients with a window in between them. My chair and a small table for my computer sit opposite. On one of the two remaining walls hangs my favorite painting and against the other rests my healthometer “doctors”scale. I’m a nutritionist and having a scaleis pretty much a prerequisite but I can sense the stress creates, the metal elephant in the room. I remember when I was first counseling, I had an office in one of the Manhattan gyms. They had a scale, much like my healthometer, in the locker rooms. On a daily basis members would come to the front desk complaining the scale was wrong. It may have been slightly off but it wasn’t broken. Finally, a sign was posted above the scale simply stating “it’s not the scale.” Harsh but true.

I weigh most of my clients backward, with them facing away from the scale’s numbers. I do this because clients are fully dressed (though some slightly disrobe) and come at various times of day. I tell them if they’re up or down and approximately how much. I do this to avoid the number game and yet even without a number of pounds the scale can affect our behavior. There was a Cathy cartoon that comes to mind. In this cartoon Cathy gets on a scale and proclaims “I didn’t lose weight I may as well eat more.” In the next frame she gets on the scale again and says “ooh I lost weight, now I can really eat more.” Many clients, though fully dressed, take every last piece of jewelry off. One client insisted I deduct from her weight because she was in blue jeans. I told her it doesn’t matter that much. She weighed her jeans when she got home and called me “they are 1 pound heavier than my pants.”

While this all seems silly, the scale seems to be an important tool for weight loss and weight maintenance. The National Weight Control Registry , which tracks the habits of people who have successfully lost and maintained 30 pounds or more, shows that 75% of their maintainers weigh themselves at least once a week. I have a nutrition colleague who has also lost a good amount of weight who has been known to travel with her scale. She finds it keeps her in check to weigh herself daily. Others feel the scale makes them crazy and instead judge by how their clothes fit. My worry with this is that for clothes to feel different we’re talking close to 5 pounds lost or gained. As for me, I weigh myself post-poop and pre-dressing when I remember. Hey, if Oprah can talk about poop on a vegan diet I can talk about it with the scale. And in case you’re wondering (I know you are) poop tends to weigh between 6 and 8 ounces. And no I didn’t weigh any poop to find that out.

How often do you weigh yourself? Can you remember what you weighed at various times in your life? Any amusing scale stories? Please weigh in.