Huge portions, tiny price

by DMC

This weekend, during the birthday hiatus, I went out to breakfast with the family. We ate at a new restaurant in the Napa Valley--The Black Bear Diner. The restaurant is known for its huge portions and reasonable prices. Normally, that would be a good thing, but for someone trying to watch calories, that proved not-so good.

We had two children in our party, and their mother ordered one child's pancake plate and split it between them. Each "half" of the child's pancake platter (with chocolate chips!) was big enough to feed an adult. In fact, both children left over half their food on their plates, even after starting out with only half to begin with. So, if they had each had one child's plate, they would've eaten only 25% of the food on their plates--25% of the serving of chocolate chips, sweet cream pancakes, syrup and (just to make it "healthy") fruit! Oh, and I can't forget the orange juice. There wasn't an ounce of protein to be found.

As we stood up to leave, the younger child threw up. Her stomach knew what most of us have forgotten--the human body does not need nor want an entire meal made up of SUGAR and refined carbohyrdrates!

Not that I did much better. I ordered one of their most modest dishes -- the "shortstack" of pancakes. A shortstack is two pancakes. That sounded reasonable...until the pancakes arrived and each was the size of a small dinner plate!

The Black Bear diner does have a menu section titled, "A Little Less Breakfast" that supposedly offers smaller portions sizes. However, most meals listed in that section were still too much. For example, the diner offers a "small volcano." The small volcano consists of three pancakes stacked with egg on top and served with bacon and sausage. Another breakfast offers two eggs and two strips of bacon or sausage along with hash browns and a biscuit.

How about one egg and some fruit? Or one mini pancake and one egg? You know, a breakfast that most of us would consider a snack, with a price to match? Something 300 calories of less?

No wonder our nation is getting fatter and fatter. When kid's plates are four times the size they should be and restaurants offer single-serving platters that are big enough to feed a table, it's no wonder waste lines are getting bigger.

And for the record, I'm not against large portion sizes. I believe everyone should have that choice. However, I'd like to see more restaurants offering truly small portion sizes as another option. Doing so allows people like me to go out to eat with the family for special celebrations and still order something reasonable (sure, there's the option of taking leftovers home, but not everything keeps well. Who wants soggy salad or pancakes the next day?).

So, here is a shout out to restaurants like the Black Bear Diner and, while we're on the subject--The Cheesecake Factory. Offer TRULY SMALL meals and desserts. I'll be specific. Cheesecake Factory, your sesame seed chicken and rice meal is to die for. However, it's enough food for four people. How about offering a quarter size portion? And how about taster slices of your cheesecake? And, by a "taster slice" I don't mean half of the "feed a small nation" slice you normally provide, but rather a slice that's good for three bites. That's it. Three bites. Three normal human mouth sized bites, not three elephant-sized bites.

And Black Bear Diner, I have no qualms about how your food tasted and no qualms about the price. But when you have a section for "a little less," go the extra mile and truly offer "less."

My Weekend

My weekend wasn't nearly as eventful. Unfortunately, nary a glass of champagne did I touch. However, I had a binge on Saturday night...ate a cup of nonfat cottage cheese and about 3 chocolate graham crackers. LOTS of calories. Today I was right back on schedule.

I have found in the past that if I have a "binge," a word that to me means an overindulgence of fairly healthful foods, I find that my body stops bugging me, like it's ok with eating less as long as we (my body and I, who are apparently two separate entities with some disagreements about food) aren't actually planning to eat less EVERY day. Weird. Now I can be good for a week with no problem. I've read some interesting diet plans that involve eating different amounts every day so that the body doesn't get into a rut.

For that reason, there's no reason to beat oneself up for having a food freakout, as long as one keeps it within moderate levels and doesn't do it very often.

Birthday Excess

by DMC

Yesterday, I visited family to celebrate two birthdays, and as usual, the family served lots of food! Half the family also happens to be Muslim, and this being Ramadan, the food had to wait until after sunset--7:45 p.m.

I figured yesterday would be a wash in terms of the "waste less" food philosophy. I did my best to moderate myself, but I had a dilemma. I usually don't eat that late, and I knew it would be hard to fast myself until that time. I started off the morning with some of the leftover spaghetti squash and pasta sauce (about a tea cup's worth) and a peach from my tree.

That held me until about 2:00, at which time I was starving. My mother is not fasting, so we went to lunch and split a hamburger and fries plate at Marie Calendar's. I figured, while not healthy, at least halving the portion size was a step in the right direction.

Then the bulk of the food hit around 8 p.m. bechamel rigatoni, barbecued chicken, and bread. My family has not yet mastered the concept of volume estimation. My sister, mother, and I argued over whether five pounds of ground beef and X number of bags of rigatoni were enough to feed 10-12 people. We talked about the history of waste in the household (i.e., they always make enough to feed a small nation and end up with so many leftovers it takes a feat of creative restructuring to fit it all in the refrigerator).

Ultimately, my sister opted to get more rigatoni from the store. You know what happened, of course. Yep. There were leftovers. Not just a little, but she made TWO pans of the bechamel and the second pan never got touched. In fact, at the end of the night, the first pan still had about a serving of bechamel left.

Yes, we dutifully sent leftovers home with whomever would take them, but still there are leftovers in the refrigerator, crowding out the leftovers from previous nights.

I know the fear of having "too little" food. It's better to have too much than not enough when feeding guests, after all. But, on the other hand, if my stepfather didn't insist on plopping two pounds of bechamel on each person's plate, we'd never be in danger of running out! In fact, one of our guest's polite but insistent pleas for "just a little" were ignored as the heaping pile of rigatoni, beef, and white sauce made entirely out of butter and four was dropped on her plate.

Afterward, of course, there was cake and ice cream. A rich butter cream frosting enveloped the multi-layered white cake. In fact, butter cream frosting separated the layers of the cake itself. It was a white flour, white sugar extravaganza. Delicious, of course.

But I think my system is still in shock. After going nearly two months (with only a one week hiatus) of strict food moderation and little sugar, my body handled last night with admirable adaptability, but this morning I think it's still trying to process it all. I'll look at last night as a pop quiz for my digestive system--a way of keeping it on its toes!

Anyway, today it's back to the calorie restriction program.

Woman tries to feed family for one month without going to the grocery store

by DMC

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/08/27/mcguire.no.shopping.for.month.kusa

This woman has decided to try to go an entire month without visiting the grocery store. She's living on whatever food is in her home and working out balanced meals using the edibles on hand.

Good for her!

Food Waste

Here's an interesting website:

http://wastedfood.com/

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much food we consume, especially obese children. Not only is it huge in amounts, it's also huge in carbon footprint, because even if kids ate whole, natural foods, it'd cost the planet in water and fertilizer and tractor fuel and everything else in order to produce it. Then, if it's highly processed foods, things get very complicated. Take into consideration the conniption fits currently being had by Kellogg and other breakfast cereal manufacturers because of a major sugar shortage going on (so count on the really crappy cereals costing lots more in the immediate future). But it's not sugar from the US; it's sugar from India and Brazil, predominantly.

OK. So, there's a bunch of carbon footprint involved in growing the foods, including destruction of trees and habitat, careless water usage, and the rest of the list of production details. Then the sugar gets transported to the US on big fuel-greedy liners, soon to be moved onto diesel-greedy trucks, and sent to the various jillions of food factories that use sugar in their products. Then lots and lots of plastic and cardboard gets used to put the various products into, sugar as well as the infinite number of other scary chemicals and maybe a little grain. So. The factory mills the garbage into pretty pastel little munchies that people give their kids for breakfast and then trucks take those boxes all over the ENTIRE US. Difficult to remember that WAY BACK THERE, some human in Brazil drove a stinky old tractor around the sugarbeet field.

OK. So, a jillion little American fat kids stuff themselves on this crap and then get type 2 diabetes when they are ten years old.

Can you even imagine the MASSIVE reduction in carbon footprint and HUGE improvement in health and very cool monetary savings, if little kids would either eat something natural or just cut their intake of garbage in half???

This is all a REALLY good reason for me to reduce my calories drastically. I guess it would be cool to figure out a way to send the unused calories to Haiti or somewhere else where politicians eat all the food and let their citizens starve.

I ate 650 calories today. I read that in the malnourished parts of the Sehalian zone, they eat about 2,200 calories a day (http://www.find-health-articles.com/rec_pub_12891821-food-consumption-patterns-central-west-africa-1961-2000-challenges.htm). I'm confused, at least in part because so few of the websites about starvation actually give calorie counts. Of course, in Haiti they eat mud cookies that are full of fat, which has calories but still leads to malnutrition. See http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/02/19/dirt-poor-haitians-eat-cookies-made-of-mud/4120/

Dinner

by DMC

Yum. Romaine Lettuce. Spinach leaves. Freshly-picked tomato. Small pear, chopped. Sprinkling of feta cheese and walnuts. 20 squirts of raspberry vinaigrette. This mega salad brought my calories for the day up to 764 (and I counted everything, even the lettuce and spinach--70 calories). I made a miscalculation at breakfast and only counted ONE of the pieces of light bread, so it wasn't until I was totalling up my dinner that I discovered the error. By then, of course, I'd already eaten the salad. So, today I went well over my 600 calories...but that's okay. As I said in a previous post, when one's target is 600 calories, a mistake here and there is nothing to sweat over. After all, anything under 900 calories a day for an adult (even a short one like me!) is considered a seriously calorie-restricted diet.

But...the salad is truly a thing of beauty, isn't it?

Lunch menu--variety is the key!

by DMC

Lunch today was half a raw red bell pepper filled with 1/2 cup of lowfat cottage cheese along with some raw, crunchy bell pepper scraps on the side. I also had one rye cracker (25 calories) and 1/4 of a wedge of the laughing cow garlic and herb cheese (one entire wedge is a mere 35 calories). I finished it off with a glass of water, and by the end of it all, I'm actually a little full. Not stuffed. Just nicely satisfied.

Don't worry, I won't bore you with my daily menu, but for the first two days, I thought I'd give everyone an idea of what kinds of foods I'm eating. I'm aiming for variety over the course of a week. For dinner, I'm planning a salad. I have about 250 calories left for the day, so the salad will work in nicely. I may even have some of the kale I bought.

My main concern is eating things before they go bad!