Being Ethical Isn’t Cheap

God gave the Devil a choice, or so the story goes, between Hell or Texas. The Devil chose Hell because he found the climate to be more moderate.

It's 8:00 AM and the temperature is pushing 80 and they're predicting a high for the day in the mid-90s. If you're going to be out in this kind of heat, particularly if you're going to be engaging in physical activity, you should make sure you have water so you don't become dehydrated. There's a local park that has a 2.25 mile exercise trail that's marked off in quarter mile segments. I'm partial to taking walks there but there are only a couple of spots with water fountains so it's a good idea to carry some bottled water. Based on taste, I'm partial to Aquafina which I buy in both 500 mL and 1 liter bottles. I mostly drink the smaller bottles but if I think I'm going to be out in the heat for an extended period of time I'll take one of the larger instead.

This week I needed to pick up more of the liter bottles so I headed to the store only to find that they needed to restock their Aquafina. Now I prefer Aquafina but I'm not a stickler for it so I surveyed my choices, Dasani or Ozarka. This was when I noticed a new brand on the shelves, Ethos Water. In case the name doesn't make it clear that this is an "ethical" choice, the label proudly declares, "Helping children get clean water." On the back of the bottle is a mission statement that says Ethos Water will donate 5 cents for every bottle sold to humanitarian water programs that help children around the globe gain access to clean water.

Here's the thing. Ethos Water, at least at the store I go to, is the most expensive bottled water on the shelf. It's 40 cents more than the next most expensive bottled water and 69 cents more than my usual choice of Aquafina. For that kind of money I'd better be getting the bottled tears of a virgin or some such but Ethos is just regular water.

Reason dictates that if I really want to help children and others get clean drinking water, it would be better to buy another brand and then donate the money I save directly to a humanitarian program of my choice rather than letting Ethos do the donating for me. After all, $6.90, the money I would save buying 10 bottles of Aquafina instead of Ethos, is a lot better than 50 cents, the money Ethos would donate if I bought 10 bottles of their product.

So I did a little research and it turns out that Ethos Water is owned by Starbucks and produced by PepsiCo (who also produce Aquafina). I also found out, and this is really interesting, that Ethos Water doesn't use recycled plastic in their bottles even though PepsiCo does use recycled plastic in its own bottles. So not only is Ethos Water expensive but it's also one of the more environmentally unfriendly bottled waters. Seems to me that Ethos Water isn't a very "ethical" choice no matter what they claim.

Pop Quiz: Fast Food vs. Home Cooking

Common excuses used to justify eating fast food instead of cooking something yourself is that it takes too long to cook, it's too much work, and I've even heard it said that it's cheaper to hit the local drive thru instead of cooking something yourself. Let's see if that's true. Here are two meals:

Meal A is a hamburger from a local fast food restaurant. It has bacon, cheese, tomato, lettuce, pickles and onions on it. It comes with French fries, ketchup, and a soft drink.

Meal B is a baked tilapia filet, seasoned with some Old Bay low sodium seasoning, with steamed peas and corn and a glass of skim milk. Also included but not pictured, because it was eaten while the tilapia was in the oven, was a lettuce and tomato salad sprinkled with a little cheddar cheese and lightly drizzled with a low fat salad dressing.

1. Which meal took less time to prepare?
   


2. Which meal was less work to prepare?
   


3. Which meal was cheaper?
   


4. Which meal is more nutritious?
   

I'm sure it will come as no surprise that Meal B is the more nutritious meal but it might be a surprise that Meal B was also faster, less work, and cheaper to prepare.

Preparing Meal A consisted of getting in my car, driving to the local fast food place, waiting in line at the drive thru window, and then driving back home with my meal. I could have shaved a little time off by going to a closer fast food restaurant but not a whole lot. While not exactly a lot of work, obviously I couldn't do anything else while driving.

Preparing Meal B consisted largely of taking things out of bags and putting them in bowls or cookware. The lettuce portion of the salad was ready made so it was a simple matter of taking a couple of handfuls out of the bag and putting them in a bowl. I used cherry tomatoes that had to be rinsed off in the sink before adding to the salad but that didn't exactly take a lot of time. The cheese was already shredded. The tilapia simply needed to be taken out of the bag, put in a baking dish, sprinkled lightly with seasoning, and put into the oven, which I'd pre-heated while making the salad. The peas and corn came in single serving packs that simply had to be put in the microwave and heated for a couple of minutes. Very little work with most of my time spent waiting for the fish to be ready during which I ate my salad while watching television.

So what about cost? Meal A ran just a hair over $6 while Meal B was around $4.

Nutrition-wise, it's no contest. Meal A is high in fat, starch, and processed sugar. Meal B is low fat, has a nice bit of fish, and several servings of vegetables.

It's easier than ever to make simple, nutritious home cooked meals. The next time you're at the grocery store, take a good look around. You might be surprised at the amount of healthy, nutritious food that comes ready to eat or cook these days.

Bye-Bye Subway

It's just become a whole lot easier to not eat at Subway. It seems they are running a Every Sandwich Tells A Story Contest for kids but homeschooled children need not apply. Ostensibly the reason for the exclusion is because the grand prize is intended for the winner's school but homeschoolers do have organizations that would benefit from such equipment as well. The company could certainly have provided an alternative grand prize that would have been appropriate to everyone. Ironically the original contest announcement contained numerous misspellings. Most have since been corrected but I note that one of the prizes is still a Scholastic gift "bastket." I guess whoever wrote the copy wasn't home schooled.

I wasn't home schooled and I have no children to home school but I still sympathize with those who choose to take their children out of the public school system in order to give them a better education. It seems like every day there's a new story regarding some new outrage at a government school. Take, for example, the recent case at Morningside Elementary in Port St. Lucie, Florida where a teacher called an autistic 5-year-old to the front of the class and then had his classmates vote him out, giving each child a chance to comment on him, i.e. insult, in the process. When did elementary school become Survivor? Until the legislature stops dragging its feet on the issue of school choice home schooling is the only affordable option many parents have if they don't want to subject their child to the public school system.

From a nutritional point of view, it's just as well that I drop Subway. Despite the much vaunted Subway diet, their sandwiches have too much bread and the meat they use is low quality. You're much better off going to the grocery store, buying a loaf of whole grain sandwich bread and having the guy at the meat counter thin slice a roast turkey breast for you.

Diet Tip: Cheaters Sometimes Prosper

Here's a little something I picked up from the Body For Life program. As you adjust your diet to a healthier lifestyle, it's common to develop cravings for foods that you enjoy but no longer allow yourself to eat. It's also common to obsess over the foods you're craving until you finally break and go on an eating binge, gorging yourself on all that good stuff you've been denying yourself. Then you feel guilty about going off your diet, decide that it's too hard and you can't do it, and you give up and go back to your old eating habits. I've done it myself on several occasions.

Give yourself a cheat day. One day a week you are allowed to eat anything you want, diet be damned. When you find yourself craving something, make a mental note to have it on your next cheat day. When your cheat day rolls around, have that greasy burger or pizza or big bowl of ice cream and don't feel guilty about it. Since you're not denying yourself anything, just putting it off until your cheat day, you don't have to obsess over food and it becomes much easier to stick to a healthy eating plan. But there are a few caveats.

• Don't overdo it. Keep meals reasonably sized. Don't go crazy and pig out. If you sit down to a burger and fries with a large pizza on the side washed down by a 2-liter Coke and a gallon of ice cream for dessert you may be getting a little carried away.
  
• Just because it's a cheat day doesn't mean you have to cheat. If you haven't been craving bad food, why eat it?
  
• Designate one day a week to be your cheat day and stick with that day. Don't move your cheat day around and, most especially, don't decide that instead of having a cheat day you'll have three cheat meals instead. If you do you'll get used to thinking you can eat whatever you want whenever you want, you'll lose track of when your last cheat day was or how many cheat meals you've had in a week and before you know it you'll be back to your old habits. You know, the ones responsible for you needing to lose weight in the first place.
  

My cheat day is Sunday. I chose Sunday because I almost always have lunch with my parents on Sundays and making it my cheat day means we're not limited to restaurants where I can eat healthy food. Just because I need to lose weight is no reason to punish them. I do allow myself a little flexibility on cheat days though that flexibility is tightly defined and based on a condition not entirely under my control. I occasionally have dinner with friends on Saturday and on those occasions I allow my cheat day to start with Saturday dinner and end with Sunday lunch so if my friends want to order a pizza I don't have to be a stick in the mud. Sometimes being a stick in the mud is unavoidable though. This weekend I may be having dinner with friends on both Saturday and Sunday in which case I'm going to have to insist that we eat healthy one evening.

Recipe: Strawberries with Balsamic Vinegar

Here it is late May and fresh strawberries abound at the local grocery stores. As the weather builds towards summer warmth, they're the perfect little treat as is. Still there are times when you want to do something special with them. Here is a simple recipe that makes for a tasty treat and a relatively healthy dessert.

(Photo courtesty of the USDA Agricultural Research Service)

INGREDIENTS

2 quarts fresh strawberries, hulled
1 cup packed light brown sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup balsamic vinegar

DIRECTIONS

About 1 to 2 hours before serving time, toss the strawberries in a large mixing bowl with the brown sugar, salt, and balsamic vinegar. Refrigerate for 30 minutes and toss again. Refrigerate for another 30 minutes and toss again. Drain and serve cold in a clear glass bowl.

Tip: In order to produce quality food you have to use quality ingredients. When it comes to balsamic vinegar, you get what you pay for. Balsamic vinegar is aged in wooden casks. The longer the vinegar has been aged, the more expensive it is likely to be. A cheap condiment grade balsamic vinegar is fine for making salad dressings but for a recipe like this you probably want an old vinegar that has been aged for at least 12 years.

Healthy Snacks

I frequently attend social gatherings hosted by a friend and his wife. Yesterday he asked me what sort of healthy snacks they could provide that would help me stay on my weight loss program. As it happens, due to my tendency towards compulsive overeating I try to avoid between meal snacking. I really should only be eating because I'm actually hungry. Still, it's a legitimate question. What sort of snacks can we eat that are healthy? (Photo courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service)

A lot of traditional snack foods aren't particularly healthy. Potato chips, corn chips, tortilla chips, attendant dips, crackers, pretzels, cheese sticks, fried or otherwise, bagels, with or without cream cheese, cookies and candy are all bad for us consisting, as they do, largely of starch, fat, salt and/or processed sugar.

These days some nutritionists say we shouldn't snack at all and that the way to avoid snacking is, instead of eating 3 big meals, we should eat 5-6 fist-sized meals over the course of a day. That works out to eating about once every 3 hours. Unfortunately I don't know of too many employers who would looking kindly on their employees taking 3 meal breaks during the course of a day.

So what kind of snacks can we eat that's not bad for us? Fruit, raw vegetables and nuts (little or no salt added please) are all good. In moderation of course. Gorging on anything, even relatively healthy food, is never a good idea. Want a tasty snack? How about apple slices dipped in 100% natural peanut butter? Want to talk about convenience? Few things are more convenient than a piece of fruit like an apple, peach or pear that you can eat without any special preparation beyond washing it off. Many grocery stores sell ready-to-eat celery sticks and peeled baby carrots not to mention containers of pre-sliced cantaloupe, honeydew and watermelon. Nuts are also quite convenient though I would stay away from honey roasted and flavored varieties that may have a lot of added salt and/or sugar.

When I was a child, my grandparents had both a pear and a peach tree as well as some fig trees. One of their neighbors had black walnut and pecan trees. Some of my fondest memories growing up are of Sunday visits with them when we would sit out on the front porch, where they had a porch swing, or at the kitchen table snacking on freshly picked fruit and nuts. I look at modern housing developments, houses packed together tightly on small lots with little room for trees and nary a porch to be seen and I feel sorry for the people that live in them. Sure, they've got their Wiis and their X-Boxes, Playstation 3s and big screen tvs, and all the other amusements that modern life affords. Yet sometimes there's just no substitute for a lazy Sunday afternoon swinging on the front porch talking with friends and family while watching the world go by or stepping out into the backyard and picking fruit right off the tree.

Book Review: Eating By Design by Carrie Latt Wiatt

It may seem strange to be writing a review of a book that, as far as I know, is out of print but I'm going to do it anyway. Eating By Design by Carrie Latt Wiatt is worth looking at if you're trying to lose weight. Psychologists will tell you that your habits are your habits because there's something about the behavior that you enjoy engaging in. Wiatt applies that principle to your eating habits to help determine why you eat what you eat.

The meat of the book is an eating personality test. When you take the test you'll probably find that you score highly on several of Wiatt's eating personality types. I suggest paying attention to all of those. For example, I scored highly as a "Passionflower", a "Soloist" and a "Lotus Eater". What does that mean? Well, a Passionflower is someone who eats for the pleasure of it. A Soloist is someone who makes food choices based on convenience. A Lotus Eater is someone who may actually have an eating disorder, compulsive overeating in my case. In short, I'm someone with a preference for food that doesn't require a lot of work to prepare or clean up after and is a pleasure to eat and I tend to eat for reasons that have nothing to do with what my body actually needs. I'm a lot more likely to be successful in following a healthy diet if I keep all of these things in mind.

Having determined your eating personality type(s), Wiatt presents you with strategies for creating a healthy diet plan that you can stick with and even provides some sample diets. I wouldn't treat this book as the only thing you need to begin eating a healthier diet but it is a good starting point.

If you're looking to lose weight I suggest visiting a used book store or perhaps the local library and seeing if you can find a copy of Eating By Design by Carrie Latt Wiatt.

Get Off the Yo-Yo-Go-Round

Those of us who have been fighting the Battle of the Bulge for a long time are familiar with the yo-yo effect. That’s where you lose some weight, then gain it back and probably a little more as well, lose some weight, regain it, and so on.

My own ride on the yo-yo-go-round began in college. Truly free to make my own food choices for the first time in my life, I chose poorly. I ate lots of fat, starch and sugar and my weight went up accordingly. I used diet pills for a couple of months and lost some of that weight. During a spring cleaning, my roommates found the diet pills and I was so embarrassed that I stopped taking them which was probably just as well since the FDA eventually banned them as unsafe. My weight continued to climb until I graduated and returned home. While I searched for my first professional job I got on the SlimFast diet and lost a lot of weight. I found a job and stopped using SlimFast because I’d reached my target weight. Unfortunately I didn’t stay there long as my weight began climbing once again. A coworker talked me into joining a gym with him and being workout partners and I began eating a low fat diet. I lost a lot of weight and was feeling pretty good about myself. Then I changed jobs and started eating lunch with coworkers who liked a lot of the fattening foods I like and weren’t that concerned about their weight. Up my weight went again. A friend introduced me to the Body For Life (BfL) program and my weight headed down again. Another job change was accompanied by another change in eating habits and up my weight went again. This brings us to the present.

As you might expect, repeatedly gaining and losing significant amounts of weight isn’t the healthiest thing to do. So how do you get off the yo-yo-go-round? I found the answer to that question in the Body for Life program. Now it is important to note that the primary goal of BfL is to sell EAS weight-loss and body-building supplements. That doesn’t change the fact that beneath all the marketing for diet shakes and creatine supplements and fitness magazines, there lies a solid core around which a good fitness plan can be built.

As BfL pointed out, I’m fat because I don’t have healthy habits. I’ve been on the yo-yo-go-round because I lose weight via methods that I can’t or won’t do for the rest of my life. I’m sorry but I don’t want to spend the next 50 years drinking a SlimFast shake for breakfast and lunch. When I reach my target weight or something happens to disrupt what I’ve been doing, I revert to my old unhealthy habits and the weight comes back. This even happened when I did the BfL program because I wasn’t really practicing the “for Life” part of the program.

If you want to lose weight and keep it off permanently, you don’t need diet pills. You don’t need fad diets. What you need is to break yourself of your unhealthy habits and replace them with healthy habits that you can maintain for the rest of your life. To this end I have three goals.

• Eat a healthier and more nutritious diet. (Note: I’m using the word “diet” in the sense of what I eat on a regular basis, not in the sense of restricting the amount of food that I eat.)


• Engage in aerobic exercise at least 3 times a week and preferably more often.


• Engage in weight-lifting exercise at least 3 times a week.

If I can establish new habits based around these three goals and maintain them even when something happens to disrupt my established patterns then I will lose the weight I need to lose and keep it off for the rest of my life. That is the only way to get off of the yo-yo-go-round.

Results Not Typical: 21st Century Snake Oil

Last night I saw a weight-loss commercial that left me speechless. It was for the latest and greatest diet pill and its big selling point was that it would not only make you lose belly-fat but it would also make you lose fat from the rest of your body as well. I was flabbergasted by this because it was rather like advertising that water is wet or that ice is cold. Anything that makes you lose weight is pretty much going to cause you to lose fat from all over your body and not just one specific area, the sole exception being liposuction.

This is a perfect example of how the weight loss industry has become the snake oil salesman of the 21^st century. We want to lose weight. We want to lose weight right now. We don’t want to have to work at losing weight. The weight loss industry is well aware of this and is only too happy to take advantage of these desires.

Back in the 1800s, snake oil salesmen would travel the countryside selling patent medicines that they claimed could cure any ailment, real or imagined. Today, the weight-loss industry bombards us with pills, shakes, diet plans and exercise equipment that they claim will cause us to lose all the weight we want to lose in virtually no time and with no inconvenience at all.

The commercials all start the same. A spokesperson, either a celebrity or some modern Adonis with a perfect body, tells about how their product transformed their life while pictures flash on the screen showing normal people who lost 60 bajillion pounds in only 3 weeks on the product. We then segue to how easy the product is to use and how minimal its impact will be on your life as you continue to eat burgers and pizza and pasta and even chocolate! Finally we hear about how cheap it is, especially if you call RIGHT NOW!!! Sadly these commercials aren’t that different from a 19^th century medicine show. I guess what worked then still works today.

One thing that has changed is that today there are truth in advertising laws. You can make misleading claims but you can’t make false claims. This is why all of these weight loss commercials have disclaimers written in fine print that you couldn’t possibly read before the commercial is over. These typically start with the phrase, “Results not typical.” Sometimes, for variety, they say, "Results may vary." That’s because the average person doesn’t experience anything like the results they claim in the ads and the odds are good that you won’t either.

Forget the pills. Diet pills have been around for quite some time. Remember Cal-Ban 3000? That was the miracle weight loss pill when I was in college. You can’t get it anymore. It was banned after a number of users had to be hospitalized and one even died from it. Then there was Fen-phen which was popular up until it was banned for having such side effects as damaging users' heart valves. Ephedra was great stuff until it turned out that it could cause heart attacks and strokes among other side effects. Now there’s a pill on the market that makes you lose weight by keeping your body from digesting fat. Of course your digestive track isn’t really designed to handle undigested fat so if you’re taking it I hope you’re also wearing Depends. The Mayo Clinic has an excellent page on the effectiveness and potential side effects of over-the-counter weight-loss pills that I highly recommend reading before taking one. Dying isn't much of a weight-loss plan after all.

Forget the gimmicky exercise gadgets too. Like the belt you wear around your waist that shocks your ab muscles while you watch television. It's not going to give you a six pack. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There are a few gimmicky exercise gadgets that might be worthwhile, and I'll talk about them in later posts, but by and large they're just a waste of money.

You can also forget the fad diets. Look, losing weight isn’t rocket science. It’s actually very simple. If you consume more calories in a day than you burn, you gain weight. If you burn more calories in a day than you consume, you lose weight. If you're overweight its probably because you don't eat in a healthy manner and you probably don't get enough exercise. If you're overweight for some other reason then you should probably be talking to a doctor, not getting weight loss advice from some random schmuck on the Internet.

I'm overweight. I need to lose at least 100 pounds. I started this blog for the express purpose of helping me achieve this goal. In the future I'll be talking about how I'm going about losing weight, what works and what doesn't.