Is Your Weight Stuck? It May Be Your Salad.

Salads are the quintessential weight loss food.  However, grouping all salads together and assuming they are healthy is like presuming all siblings are alike because they’re in the same family (and that’s complete nonsense). In February’s Allure I was interviewed for a fun story called “Eating Amnesia”. It’s all about the calories that sneak into our mouths that we forget about or never even realize. One section of the article discusses salads, “a bed of lettuce isn’t a magic wand that turns anything low calorie. 

There are the obscene salads at chain restaurants across the country with “crispy” aka fried chicken and noodles that I have to think everyone knows aren’t a nutritious choice. Chili’s Quesadilla Explosion salad with 1300 calories over 2000mg of sodium and Applebee’s Chicken Bruschetta Salad also almost a day’s worth of calories and a day and half of sodium are not uncommon on chain restaurant menus. Salads with Steak, Mexican and Asian salads tend to be high calorie. Aside from the flagrantly unhealthy salads, there are the salads that I find more deceptively damaging. These are salads that seem OK but are just a little too interesting. The popular Cosi Signature Salad has chicken and cranberries and vinaigrette. It seems like a decent option but has 623 calories. Le Pain Quotidien, a place I love, has a shrimp salad that’s over 500 calories.  These are the salad traps more of my clients fall into.

A salad doesn’t have to be unhealthy to be too much. Dried fruit is going to run you at least 100 calories and 2-3 tablespoons of sugar.  Cheese in your salad will be 150-200 calories and can be, in case of feta, up to 800 mg of sodium. In terms of dressing- most condiment cups hold 2 to 2.5 ounces. For various establishments this is 200-350 calories from dressing alone. Restaurants and salad bars sometimes use more than a condiment cup’s worth. And that piece of bread that’s so small and free with your salad is 100ish calories but I know, you never have the bread (wink, wink). So you can easily be at 500+ calories before the lettuce, veggies or protein.

Sometimes, what I call an “entrée” lunch is a cleaner choice:

Grilled Chicken, 2 cups of broccoli and a little olive oil = 345 calories

Poached Salmon, 2 cups of asparagus and some oil for cooking is 400 calories.

These calculations use a Blackberry-sized (no iPhone for me) piece of protein or 5oz. Many restaurants will give you a gross amount of protein- ½ to ¾ pound is “normal” ick. And a sandwich on 1-2 pieces of sprouted bread with lean protein and veggies can be a nice lunch option too.

If you’re a salad enthusiast or saladophile my suggestions are:

• Choose a good green as your base. I love dinosaur or lacinato kale, butter lettuce (Gotham Greens are fantastic in NYC) or escarole.
• Add a minimum of three other veggies.
• Keep “treat” ingredients: nuts, seeds, avocados, dried fruit, avocado, chickpeas to 1 per salad. You can have walnuts and dried cherries and goat cheese but not on the same day.
• Protein should be Blackberry not laptop sized.
• Don’t eat ingredients in your salad you don’t generally eat (chips, croutons-greasy white bread, bacon).
• For dressing, use olive oil and lemon or olive oil and vinegar with 1 tbs of oil.
• Your whole salad shouldn’t be the size of your head or in a bowl you would use for a family of 4.

One of our Foodtrainers’ favorite salads is Gotham Greens butter lettuce, jarred tuna, red onion, jicama and cabbage, 1/3 avocado sliced, olive oil, lemon juice and of course hot sauce, salt and pepper.

If you’re looking to loose weight keep salads at around 400 calories give or take. If you watch size and “treats” they can be a healthy choice, as long as you don’t have eating amnesia.

What’s your favorite salad green? Overall salad? Favorite “treat” ingredient? How similar are you to your siblings?

Skinny Jeans and Size Lies

Many new clients come to my office with weight goals. Some want to lose 10 pounds, others more. There are women who want to reach their “wedding weight” and men who want to be under 200 pounds. The brackets on the scale are meaningful. I have a doctor’s floor scale and the each bracket represents 50 pounds. Other people declare that they do not care about “the number” on the scale that they just want to be a certain size or for their clothes to fit.  These clothing-based goals appear sensible but have some inherent problems.

Last week, the NYT ran a story about the confusing state of clothing sizes. “One Size Fits Nobody: Seeking a Steady 4 or a 10.” The article discussed what many women already know and that’s that your “size” depends less on how much you weigh or what size you are and more on the whim of the retailer. Depending on the store your size can vary by a few sizes.

Many retailers, responding to their, ahem, growing consumer base have resorted to a practice called vanity sizing. Vanity sizing involves labeling clothes with smaller sizes so that a size 10 customer feels as though she’s a size 6 because that’s what fits her. I don’t think most people are gullible enough to think they’ve dropped a couple of sizes unbeknownst to them; rather it just makes shopping confusing.  A company known as My Best Fit developed a potential solution. My best developed kiosks at malls across America. Basically, your measurements are taken and you are given a report indicating the size you should select at various different retailers. To me, vanity sizing is like the mirrors at a carnival distorting what you look like and the kiosks some sort of fortuneteller. Knowing your size shouldn’t be that hard.

Aware that sizes are unreliable many people rely on a certain article of clothing as their litmus test. I don’t know why but this piece of clothing is a pair of jeans more times than not. We’ve all heard about “skinny” jeans, I have a client who calls her test jeans “reference jeans”. Others know they’re in good shape when they can buy jeans- period. I caution using clothes as your arbiter of size or fitness. For starters, your body can change. I have female clients who, like Aidan who we discussed last week, get back into tip top shape after babies. Yet, your body may change. Sometimes your hips are permanently a little wider after childbirth or things simply redistribute.  Changing your workouts can also alter the way apparel fits. You may have a certain look when you were running and your “inches” may be different if you start kickboxing. Slip your skinny jeans on in these instances and you may feel discouraged but the truth is clothes that fit at one time may just never fit well again even if you look great.  I also have to add that laundering and dry cleaning can shrink clothes or at least we think it can…

So what to do? We try to be more evolved and not let a number on the scale determine our success with food and exercise but other assessment methods have their flaws. It may come down to what Crunch gym said so well in one of their ad campaigns, we just need to see when we “feel better naked” although I like the jeans concept better.

Are you a scale person or do you go by your clothes? How do you know when you’re making progress with food or exercise? If there’s a piece of clothing you use as a reference, what is it?

Lose Weight With The Blue Plate

When we think about factors that affect our appetite, stress, sleep and exercise may come to mind.  Each of these can influence hunger but so can something else you may not think as much about. Our eating is impacted by our eating environment and particularly sensitive to color. The color of your dinner plates, dining room or kitchen influences eating behavior. There’s one color that really shows promise as an appetite suppressant. That blue plate in the photo above? It just may help the scale budge.

There’s research behind color and appetite. In one study participants were placed in different colored rooms to eat. In the blue-colored room they ate over 30 percent fewer calories. In another study blue food coloring was added to food and resulted in fewer calories consumed (though food coloring isn’t suggested).One theory explains this based on the dearth of blue foods in nature. Other than blueberries, blue foods are scarce and as we evolved we used visual cues to determine if a food was edible. Blue was viewed as a non-food color possibly even poisonous. Blue is also a calming color and helps us feel more relaxed.

If you want to know what colors rev up your appetite, look no further than the golden arches. It is no accident that red and yellow are appetite stimulants. Steer clear of those colors if you’re trying to lose weight. On the other hand, blue plates, blue placemats, or even a blue light in your refrigerator may be useful weight loss tools.  I have to admit that when I first heard about blue plates, I asked myself  “who uses blue plates anyway?” Then I remembered my mother in law does. She’s Swedish and her house is filled with blue. And you know what? She’s pretty darn skinny.

Have you ever noticed color affecting your eating? Do you buy into the psychology of color? Anyone contemplating a renovation or a new blue kitchen? What’s your favorite color?

The Secret Ingredient for Weight Loss

You have a big presentation to give for work. You have prepared well but are a little anxious about how it will go. You picked out an outfit to wear and feel pretty good after all you’ve been working out and eating well, you’re trying. The morning of your presentation you get to the conference room early. There’s the usual unhealthy work meeting fare: the bagel platter, the Danishes and of course the plate of cookies (your favorite).  You remind yourself you’re “being good” and take a cup of already burnt tasting coffee and review your notes. The presentation is well received and you’re relieved. As you leave the room you grab 2 chocolate chip cookies, you deserve a treat, right? You eat the cookies on your way back to the office. Once in your office mental scolding begins “how could I have just had those? I really blew it.  Why can’t I avoid the sweets?” Pretty soon someone sticks their head in and tells you there’s pizza that was ordered. You’re in a bad mood; the day is ruined and you polish off 3 pieces of pizza.

The above scenario isn’t about anyone in particular but I hear a version of this from clients almost daily.  What went on here? The person just described associated getting through something difficult with a reward. In itself that isn't the problem. However, she wasn’t able to eat the cookies guilt free. She berated herself which didn’t make her snap out of it; instead it perpetuated the poor eating.

The New York Times Well Blog recently ran a piece describing a burgeoning area of research called self-compassion. The woman above would probably have a poor self-compassion score, as many of us do.  Yet there is reason to improve self-compassion as “preliminary data suggest that self-compassion can influence how much we eat and may help some people lose weight.” I know exactly how the nutrition session would go following my imaginary client’s cookie, pizza and god-knows-what-else eating.  She would come into the office and the first thing out of her mouth would be something to the effect of “I really screwed up, I’m so annoyed because I was doing so well and then I just lost it. I just can’t manage to put a week together without something coming up.”  I would then say “OK, now tell me what you would say if a friend was complaining to you about their eating.” Most of us know how to comfort another person, we have compassion just not for ourselves.

One of the tools I use with Foodtrainers clients is Treat Training. Clients practice treating themselves using four criteria 1) treats should be planed 2) treats should be portioned (two cookies not 10). 3) Treats should consumed guilt free and 4) next meal or snack on track. These steps help turn something guilt-ridden into something enjoyable. The Times article described a study conducted on female college students. Students thought they were doing taste tests. Two groups were given doughnuts. One group was told not to be hard on themselves that everyone in the study eats this stuff. Later women were asked to taste candies. The women not given the self-compassion message ate more.

So when you hear yourself using your critical voice try to frame things more positively. I have clients list their victories or behaviors they feel good about each day. Perhaps you ate a good breakfast or made it to the gym or avoided the cookies but dwell on these things versus the others…and if you don’t I’ll kill you!

Do you have self-compassion? What strategies to you use to be more kind to yourself? What are your victories today?

No Roll Model

I was on a phone session last week with a client on the West coast. We were talking about exercise and this client told me she hadn't been doing anything regularly for exercise until she found this class she loved. It was an interval class with spinning and weights taught by an “inspiring person.” While this client clearly liked the class and the teacher’s energy she explained to me that the teacher was extremely fit. The instructor’s physique was something to aspire to. We continued talking about lots of things but when we hung up I was stuck on this.

I cannot say, in my own life, I am very different from this client. I can recall a core fusion class I took last spring. I signed up for a class at a time I didn't usually exercise and walked to see an overweight instructor. I don’t remember the class, it may have been fine, but I remember thinking that I wasn’t inspired. I also remember giving myself a hard time about noticing the teacher’s size and objecting to it. In this case the person leading the class was significantly overweight. I’m not sure I would’ve recalled if the teacher was average size.

At work, my clients aren’t shy at all commenting about my appearance. Some clients look at me and ask if I’ve ever struggled with my weight, another recently asked “how do you run so much without losing weight, you must eat a lot!” I always joke that if I gained 20 pounds I would be out of a job…and there’s some truth to that but isn’t this sad? Many of us don’t analyze our doctor’s health habits or our shoe salesman’s shoes but we do judge a book by its cover when it comes to food and exercise.
Would you be as “inspired’ by an instructor who was overweight? Have you ever chosen a teacher, trainer or nutritionist based on size or physique? Do you feel this is normal or embarrassing?