I was reading the news today about different ways people and organizations celebrate the 4th of July weekend and came across the most ridiculous and stupid meal at Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield, Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t bad enough that so many Americans are overweight that it’s turning into a huge national crisis that’s going to cost billions in unnecessary medical expenses, Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub has decided that people aren’t quite fat enough yet.

Yep, introducing the “Beer Barrel Belly Buster Burger.”  A full FIFTEEN POUNDS of burger, bun, salad and condiments!  I looked at the photo and then showed it to my husband who said, “who could eat that?”  At first I agreed with him but then after reflecting for a moment I realized that of course people are buying it and eating it.  If the restaurant sells it then obviously it’s not too much to eat, right?

I don’t know what it’s going to take to change peoples’ thinking about portion size but the Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub certainly isn’t helping vulnerable overeaters in any way at all!  That one burger would feed me for an entire week if I ate nothing else at all.

Happy 4th of July and I hope you’re eating smart.  If not eating smart, I hope you’re not being stupid. 

I was visiting Dying for Food blog today and found this post very interesting.  Here’s a snippet of it but you should really click The Big Breakfast Diet to get the whole story.  With a lapband on, this is not an option for me because I can only hold 1 cup of food at a time.  I couldn’t fit all that food in one sitting, but if you don’t have a band and are looking for ways to lose weight, why not try it?  Anything with chocolate or candy in it works for me!  Here’s the post:

We’ve all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but now a study has concluded that you can lose more weight if you have a big breakfast.

Women who were on the big breakfast diet lost almost 5 times the weight than did those who were on a low carb diet.

Dr. Daniela Jakubowicz has this explanation for the process. Upon awakening, your body looks for food. The metabolism is geared up for it and your levels of adrenaline and cortisol are at their peaks. The brain needs energy immediately and if you don’t eat or have too little, it has to look for that energy elsewhere. So it goes into a system that takes energy from muscle, which destroys the muscle tissue. When you do eat later in the day the body saves the energy from the food you just ate as fat.

To make it even worse, the levels of serotonin in your brain are at their highest in the morning. So your cravings are at their lowest. Later, when the serotonin levels start dropping you get cravings for cake and chocolate and things like that. When you give in and eat those treats the level of serotonin rise. This is not good because your body associates the treats with feeling good and that becomes addictive.

Check out the whole story at Dying for Food.

Since having the gastric band put on my stomach last November, I’ve really been paying much more attention to food. Not that I didn’t always think about food before, but now that I can only eat small portions (make that REALLY small portions) I am careful to make sure that the food is fresh and nutritious. That brings me to the growing wave of people calling themselves “locavores”. I’m not a locavore yet, but I just might be one day soon.

A locavore is someone who is very concerned about all the miles food travels to get to them. It’s been said that most food travels 1500 miles from farm to plate and that’s a lot of gasoline and fumes adding to global warming. I love growing my own vegetables and in the past I’ve been very successful at making my own tomato sauce, ketchup and jams, plus freezing berries and the occasional green beans or corn. I have never considered only buying at the local farmer’s market.

Locavores say that their movement means improvement in the quality of the food they eat, less impact on the environment and the small local farmers get a big boost to stay in business. It all sounds good to me. I doubt I’ll ever be 100% locavore. I love mangos. The American part of me needs the occasional homesick food cure. I can say that I will do much more to support our local farmers because it just makes good sense to do it.

My in-laws are visiting from Australia. While I love to cook and entertain, this stupid gall bladder of mine really restricts what I can eat. I know I should be a better person but I’ll be darned if I’ll spend hours cooking something I can’t eat. Call me shallow and selfish if you want, I probably deserve it, but I want to cook what I can eat. Sadly, that’s no butter, cream, ice cream or anything yummy. I have introduced “the olds” to the joys of fresh veggie and fruit juice and they like it – a lot. So now my juicing time is extended to about an hour and fifteen minutes to get all the nifty goodness out of a bushel basket of fruit and vegetables. They’ll go home healthier, I know.

My father-in-law is nearly 87 and he has arthritis and bad knees, but this man can eat like a horse. I’ve read where the older you get, the more bland food tastes so you don’t bother eating too much. Not so with him. Not only does he finish his huge plate but if anyone leaves anything, he feels duty bound to clean it up because tossing it out would be wasteful. He’s a small man, no fat on him, so I think it’s wonderful that he has a great appetite at that age. He eats more slowly now because of his age. Sometimes he naps in between bites. He’s really cute for an old fellow.

My mother-in-law is 83 and she’s the sexiest old woman I’ve ever known. She’s not overtly sexual, don’t get me wrong, but she’s got a sparkle in her eye that just doesn’t quit and she still flirts every chance she gets. She’s very petite and dresses like she walked out of a magazine layout. I want to be just like her when I’m over 80, that’s for sure!

So what have we been eating? One night my husband cooked scallops while I had pumpkin risotto, but the rest of the time I cooked. We’ve had a rare roast fillet of beef, lamb cutlets, roast chicken and tons of roasted vegetables. I haven’t eaten a lot, and made sure I didn’t have even the teensiest bit of fat and I have been ok. Well, sort of ok. We took them to Russell one day for lunch and I had a bit of green curry chicken and within 4 hours I was writhing with gallstone pain. No more of that!

Bottom line is that I can still entertain, and do it nicely, without causing any discomfort OR gaining any weight.

Since drinking spinach juice a few times a day, my husband doesn’t need any medication for diabetes.  He tests his sugar and he’s always around 6 (108).   Mine is a bit higher than that because he doesn’t like sweets.  I’m an American first and can’t pass up a small piece of something sweet after a meal.  Last night it was a Weightwatchers apple bar.

If you have type 2 diabetes and you’re not a sweetaholic, try spinach juice.  It’s better than taking medicine!  I’m taking 1/12th the amount of Metformin that I was taking before being banded, so I’m really pleased.  I was down to 1/6th before I started drinking the juice.  Maybe I’ll get to the point where spinach juice does the trick.  Fingers crossed!

Spinach. I checked my sugar level first thing this morning and then drank spinach and carrot juice and my level dropped a few points but not significantly.   I was a bit apprehensive about drinking green juice but I needed to know.  It turns out that spinach and carrot juice is quite tasty.  I think it takes a lot like the smell of freshly cut grass but sweeter because of the carrots.  I could drink that every day.  Let’s hope it is what I’m looking for.

As any type 2 diabetic will tell you, when you most want to test, that’s when you run out of little electrode strips. So I can’t test til I go to the pharmacy.

My daughter arrives in New Zealand today from Orlando. I haven’t seen her for a year so we have a lot of catching up to do. I’m still curious about what lowered my sugar so I’ll keep testing. I’ll pick up the strips at the pharmacy on the way to the airport this morning.

I’ll keep you posted! Anything not to have to take drugs would be such an improvement on my life. I hate taking medicine.

Something in the juiced concoction I made the other day lowered our blood sugar but damned if we can figure it out.  I haven’t given up yet but I know it’s not carrots or red cabbage or feijoas.  I still have a few more to isolate and then it has to be the combination.

I didn’t write down what I had in there or the quantity so it will be a hunt and peck operation for a while I suspect!

Many of us who are overweight or obese confuse what a proper portion size is. We go to restaurants (and not just the ones that offer super-size) and think that what is on our plate is what we should be eating. I think a lot of blame goes to the joints that think offering 2 or 3 serving sizes is the way to keep customers coming back.

My son used to run restaurants in the Southern US for quite a few years and I would always ask him why the portions were so huge. People can’t eat that much, I’d tell him. His reply was always the same.

“If I don’t give them more than they can eat, they’ll go to my competitor. They want more than they can eat so they can take some home,” he said.

Maybe he’s right, maybe the restaurants are only providing what their customers seem to want. To hell with their health. Where’s it going to end?

I’ll never forget going to Las Vegas for a conference several years ago and my husband and I went to a famous steak place and I ordered prime rib. As an American living in Australia – prime rib just doesn’t exist unless you cook it yourself, so it was a real treat for me. Imagine the surprise when my dinner arrived and the prime rib was nearly 2 1/2 inches thick and didn’t fit on a platter without hanging over on one side. A platter! I like beef but I’ve always eaten just a small portion of meat and porked it on by eating lots of veggies AND dessert.

I’m learning and it really is a learning exercise to change your perception of what a portion size should be for you. I say it that way because I’m barely 5′ tall, so my portion size is always going to be tiny. Sad.

First of all, let me lay the framework for what’s going on in my life. After being type 2 diabetic with high blood pressure, I had a gastric band put on my stomach in early November 2007. I lost around 2 kilograms a week which was more fat than my liver could process so it stored it inside itself and it’s causing some problems. I also have gallstones which I have been told is quite normal when losing a lot of weight in a short period of time.

Doctors told me to eat a lot of raw veggies so I decided to buy a juicer. I wrote the other day about how tasty some of the juice was but I had no idea whether it was doing me any good or not. Last night I found out that it was. Sad thing is, I don’t know which veggie did all the work! I’ll work on identifying which veggie juice worked its magic on me and let you know.

I juiced carrots, celery, red cabbage, parsnip, pea shoots, beets, apple, ginger and zucchini. I had a glass before dinner that I cooked for some friends who are visiting from Australia. We had steak on the bbq, roasted kumara, white potatoes and steamed broccoli. For dessert we had a kiwi favorite – pavlova with whipped cream, kiwifruit and mango. I figured I’d better test my glucose level because it would be off the planet.

It wasn’t

It was 5.5 mmol – for Americans that’s 117. I had eaten starchy potatoes AND pavlova and my sugar was 5.5 with NO drugs. That’s not diabetic! A reading of 6 is normal and a reading of 8 up to 2 hours after eating is still considered OK. How cool is that?

My husband just rolled his eyes and said, “right…” So I asked him to have some juice and sure enough, he had a low reading on his test when it should have been much much higher.

Now if I just knew which veggie to give the credit to I’d be much happier. I’ll sort it out though. It’s really got my curiosity going a million miles an hour!

If you’ve been reading my blog you know that because I’ve lost so much weight so fast I have a bit of a liver problem. The doctors have said no red meat, no dairy and stick to low fat. So I got a masticating juicer and the first few I tried were like eating liquid poop. Not so today!

I put 8 carrots, 2 apples, 1 pear and a small knob of ginger in that thing and it was devine. I could live on that stuff.

I read somewhere on the net yesterday that I shouldn’t mix fruits and vegetables when I make juice. Something in my brain started to whirr because I would eat a fruit and a vegetable together, no problem. Why would juicing it make a difference? I don’t care if it does make a difference – getting a juice that’s tasty and healthy to drink is the top order of the day around here.

Tomorrow I’m going to try some fruit that I’ve never seen before moving to New Zealand. I’ll juice up some tamarillos and some feijoas. I tasted a tamarillo the other day and it was as sour as anything I’ve eaten in the past so I’ll put something yummy with it. With a taste like that it’s got to be good for me.