A bunch this week on the diet foods post, including Dani’s sugar substitutes, Anne’s Tasti D-Light observations, and Kelly’s inventive SnackWells sandwiches. Plus, check out Slinkystar2002’s solid, extensive comment on Touchy Subjects: Confronting Loved Ones About Weight and Money Problems. It’s a bit long to cut-and-paste here, but her stories provide some good insight on the subject. (It’s the last one.) Finally, three cheers for Elaine, who dropped 50 pounds! Nice!
On Popovers and Out
Collier: I woke up starving this morning with nothing in the house but egg whites, flour, skim milk and pam. so i made this recipe substituting pam for shortening and using three egg whites in place of one egg and two whites. they are delicious, and cooked in 20 minutes under 450. the batter made 12 popovers at about 50 calories a serving.
On The Problem with Diet Foods
Dialectially_yours: To make things 'fast food easy' and to control portion sizes a bit more, I sit down and portion out snacks into the plastic snack bags. It's a good visual activity to SHOW someone how quickly those calories have stacked up.
Jaime: 90% of the time, I'm much happier eating a mango and a small piece of dark chocolate than 2 100-calorie packs of Oreo wafers. Of course, the other 10% I'm clutching a bag of BBQ Fritos like my life depends on it, so who am I to say.
Annie K. Nodes: One thing I've noticed lately...I rarely see anyone who's thin eating Tasty D-Lite.
Elaine: I know ALL about the SnackWell Syndrome. I think that's part of how I gained weight a number of years back. BTW, in the last year I've lost 50+ pounds, mostly by reducing portion sizes & taking up bike commuting.
Kelly: On Snackwell's syndrome: in high school, I used to take a Snackwell's brownie, slice it in half lengthwise, and fill it with peanut butter. This was my favorite side dish for a while. The more I pay attention to nutrition and to my eating habits, the more I'm convinced that eating as little processed food as possible - diet or regular - is the way to go. If I eat, say, a Lean Cuisine for lunch, I'm hungry again almost before I'm done eating. The same calories in homemade beans and rice fill me up all afternoon!
Sally Parrott Ashbrook: It's taken my taste buds a couple of years to adjust to a whole-foods, no-fake-sugar diet, but honestly, now that they have adjusted, a much smaller portion of the sweet stuff (the real sweet stuff), homemade or from a bakery, is far, far more satisfying than a larger portion of diet foods is. And I have the ability now (that I previously did not possess at ALL) to tell that some foods are actually too sweet to enjoy much of.
Daniel Koontz: What worked for us was this: instead of buying diet foods, we switched most of our weekly meals to vegetarian. Vegetarian cuisine is typically higher in fiber, more nutritious, less energy-dense and best of all, cheaper. We still eat meat, but only on occasion.
Dani: To cure sweet cravings, go cold turkey on sugar and use an unprocessed equivalent like muscovado or rapadura. They're not addictive and you'll find that in no time at all the sweet cravings have gone.
