When NOT to Trust a Food Label?

The FDA recently shut down Clifton N.J.-based Butterfly Bakery “for unlawfully distributing mislabeled food products, such as muffins and snack cakes.” The action was based on findings that samples of Butterfly Bakery products labeled as “sugar free” contained sugar. Additionally the fat content of the samples was also significantly higher than what the label claimed. The bakery had been previously warned by FDA about problems with mislabeled products in May of 2011.

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Weight Loss Plateaus: How to reignite your weight loss

A common development after a few weeks of losing weight is that your weight loss stalls, or stops. The scale isn’t budging. This situation—a weight loss plateau—has all kinds of mythology attributed to it.

When you start a diet, you reduce your intake of calories and a big part of that reduction is from carbohydrates. The reduction in carbohydrates leads to the depletion of glycogen (how your body stores sugar) from both your muscles and liver. Each gram of stored glycogen normally holds 3- to 4-grams of water with it.^[i],[ii]

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Are Successful Losers More Common than You Think?

We’ve all heard the claims that something dire—like 95% of people—always end up gaining back the weight they’ve worked so hard to lose. The point underlying the nay saying and the contrarian remarks is the notion that weight loss is a hopeless, pointless, waste of time.

On the other hand, most of us know someone who lost a chunk of weight and did keep it off. So what made them special? How did they beat the (purported) odds?

The fact is the so often repeated 95% figure, can be traced back to a 1958 research review paper[i] by Albert Stunkard. However, the data from Stunkard’s review was never applicable to the general population.

Part of the reason the 95% myth has been so intractable is that there has been almost no research on weight-loss maintenance that is applicable to the general population.

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Why Portion Size Really Matters…

One day at lunch time I had gone into a grocery store to get a milk. This wasn't my usual routine; I usually packed leftovers for lunch and ate at my desk while reading. But there I was standing in front of maybe ten or 15-feet of “milk section,” scanning for an 8-ounce carton of milk. Remember those? The size they used to serve with school lunch? I wasn’t finding it, when a middle-aged gentleman asked, “what are you looking for?” I looked at him and said, “I wanted an 8-ounce milk, but they don’t seem to have it.” He looked at the shelves, pointed to the smallest carton, and said, “here it is.” The carton he pointed to however was a pint (16-ounces/2 cups). I said, “no, I want one cup, that’s two.” The gentleman got a confused look on his face, glanced back at the container then back at me, and said, “that’s a cup.”

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Manage Yourself to Success!

Would you choose to invest in a company that didn’t bother with the necessary bookkeeping to keep track of their sales, expenditures, and other related business data necessary create and maintain a thriving venture? Not likely!

Similarly "self-monitoring" the key behaviors necessary for weight loss, has long been shown to correlate with successful weight loss (and maintenance).

Weight loss (or more precisely, transitioning to the healthy lifestyle that results in weight loss) is a substantial and challenging project to manage. “Self-monitoring” or “record keeping” is the tracking of your diet and physical activity so you can use that information to problem-solve and manage your project effectively.

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