Stop Fighting Losing Battles with Food!

You will win the war by avoiding battles.

If humans were logical, there would be no argument regarding the fact that controlling what food is readily available to you is a smart thing to do. That’s not, however, what people tend to do. What is the most relied upon way of controlling what you eat? Willpower. What’s also the least effective form of what psychologists call “behavioral control?” Unfortunately, it's willpower.

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White Knuckles and Willpower…

If humans were logical, there would be no argument regarding the fact that controlling what is readily available to you is a smart thing to do. That’s not, however, what people tend to do. Exactly what is the most relied upon way of controlling what you eat? Willpower. What’s also the least effective form of what psychologists call “behavioral control?” You guessed it, willpower.

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How to Eat Better at Work AND Save Time and Money

In my last post I introduced the concept of stimulus control: adding healthy food choices to your environment as well as removing trigger foods that tend to provoke eating in the absence of hunger (or overeating). While we have the most control over the food environment in our homes there is plenty that you can also do to set yourself up for success while you are away from home—at work—during the day.

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Information you can trust? Or, your daily dose of misinformation?

You probably already know that you can't trust what you read about weight loss, or dieting, and that has never been more true than it is today with the internet where anybody can write anything (and they do, every day)!

Combating the misinformation in this area could be a fulltime job! Here are two examples from this morning:

Misleading Article #1 - The best fat-burning breakfasts

This article misleads in two ways:

a. Does "eating breakfast really crank up your metabolism?" Any time you eat, the process of digesting what you ate, creates what is called the "thermic effect of food." The thermic effect of food amounts to an average of 10% of ingested calories on a balanced diet, or about 13% of ingested calories on a high-protein diet. There is however, no increase in your underlying metabolic rate, as the "eat breakfast and boost your metabolism" notion promotes. Eating breakfast has long been associated with lower BMIs (body mass index, a weight to height measure) however, researchers suspect that that's because people who eat breakfast have a generally more healthy lifestyle than non breakfast eaters. For instance, "night eaters" tend to eat one (huge) meal a day, and they don't eat breakfast.

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