Here is a book excerpt
that examines eating habits in a whole new perspective. It's focus is on
smart ways of eating and to resist quick-fix diets by rethinking and examining
your eating habits. Dr Edward Abramson uses a simple, smart and safe three
step 'intelligent' approach that can show you how to eat intelligently,
look at your body intelligently and use your body intelligently.
Body
Intelligence: Lose Weight, Keep It Off, and Feel Great Without Dieting!
By Edward Abramson, Ph.D.
If you associate dieting
with hunger or are just concerned that cutting back on your eating would
leave you feeling unsatisfied, you shouldn’t worry because calories don’t
count in satisfying your hunger. The amount of food you eat will determine
whether you are hungry or satisfied regardless of the caloric content
of the food that you’re eating. In other words, you can be more satisfied
and lose weight by eating larger portions of less dense (fewer calories
for the same size portion) foods instead of a smaller portion of more dense
food. If you’ve found that dieting always leaves you feeling hungry, eating
less dense foods can help you lose weight without this discomfort.
According to Dr. Barbara
Rolls, Professor of Nutrition at Penn State and author of The Volumetrics
Weight-Control Plan, for 100 calories you can have one-quarter cup of raisins,
or for the same 100 calories you can have almost two cups of grapes. If
you choose the grapes, you will be less hungry than if you choose the raisins.
Since raisins are just dried grapes, the difference is water. When you
drink water by itself it is unlikely to make you feel full, but when water
is a significant part of the food you are consuming you will get full on
fewer calories. Fruits, vegetables, stews, cooked grains, lean meats, fish,
poultry, and soup have high water content, so they tend to be filling even
though they are less dense. Likewise, foods high in fiber such as whole
grains and beans are filling without adding a lot of calories. An additional
benefit of high-fiber diets is a lower incidence of constipation and colon
cancer. In contrast, high-fat foods, such as butter, full-fat salad dressings,
and most desserts, are dense because fat has twice as many calories per
serving as carbohydrates or proteins. Many dry foods like pretzels and
crackers, even if they are low fat or fat free, are also dense. Five pretzel
sticks have about twenty-five calories but won’t make a dent on your hunger.
A whole tomato would be more filling and has the same number of calories.
One study demonstrated the
value of low-density foods, especially when they are served at the beginning
of a meal. Thirty-three women ate lunches consisting of a salad, followed
twenty minutes later by a pasta main course. During the seven-week study,
the density of the salad was varied and the amount of pasta consumed was
unobtrusively measured. When the women ate a large portion of low-density
salad, there was a 10 percent decrease in total calories consumed.
How hard would it be to plan
to serve a large portion of a low-density salad or soup as a first course
(The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan has twelve soup recipes and twelve
salad recipes) and wait a few minutes before starting the rest of the dinner?
Remember, you don’t have to give up all high-density foods, just make sure
that you have healthy servings of low-density food before you have smaller
portions of the high-density foods.
One advantage of this approach
is that, unlike diets that restrict the foods you can eat, it encourages
you to add foods to your diet. Put fruit on your cereal, include apple
slices in your chicken salad, place salsa on your chicken or fish, add
vegetables to your marinara sauce, put eggplant in your lasagna, and add
veggies to your shish kabob skewers. By adding low-density foods you will
become full sooner and eat less of the high-density food. For a more detailed
description of this approach that includes low-density recipes see Dr.
Rolls’s book.
Reprinted from Body
Intelligence: Lose Weight, Keep It Off, and Feel Great About Your Body
Without Dieting! By Edward Abramson, Ph.D. Copyright © 2005 Edward
Abramson, Ph.D. Published by McGraw-Hill; July 2005.
Author: Edward Abramson,
Ph.D., is an internationally recognized expert on eating and weight disorders
who lectures to professional and lay audiences around the world. He is
a professor of psychology at California State University and a former director
of the Eating Disorders Center at Chico Community Hospital. Dr. Abramson
has appeared on "Hard Copy," "20/20," PBS, "Good Day LA," "Joan Rivers,"
and other TV and radio programs, and his work has been written about in
Reader's Digest, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Self, the New York Times,
the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and other major publications.