Everywhere one looks there are advertisements for back-to-school stuff. Doesn’t anyone wear last year’s clothes or use pens that were still working in May? Lunch boxes and snack-size packages of cookies, crackers, chips and pretzels are being pushed to the front of supermarket shelves and columns about interesting school sandwich ideas are starting to appear in the newspapers.
Alas, the cute lunchboxes and imaginative snack options (frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!) will not solve the decades-old problem of bad food, poor food choices and insane lunch times at many schools.
A few years ago I worked with a teen who was quite active in a sports program and wanted to lose weight and keep fit. She was willing to follow a healthy eating plan; the problem was that her school schedule did not give her anytime to eat. Would any of us have time to eat on this schedule?
7 AM board school bus
10:30 AM lunch (this is not an exaggeration)
2:30 PM classes end and time for snack from vending machine
2:45 PM – 4:30 PM soccer practice
5:00 PM or so home
Sometimes she could drink some juice before getting on the bus but she ate her breakfast at the school-designated lunchtime. She told me that since she had only twenty minutes to eat, she couldn’t wait in line for food so she grabbed some peanut butter crackers and a diet coke from the vending machines. The same machines supplied her next meal right before soccer practice because the cafeteria was closed by then. Supper at home was the only time she got to eat an actual meal and once the soccer games began, she often arrived home after 6.
Despite the public gnashing of teeth over the fat-filled, nutrient-poor foods our kids are getting at school, little attention has been given to the often absurd conditions under which they, and indeed their teachers, are eating. Many of the faculty is also squeezed into early or late lunch periods and unless they bring their lunches, have the same limited options from which to choose their meals. The noise-filled rooms in which the food is consumed are about as relaxing as being in the middle of an erupting volcano.
Reform of the school lunch program must include when meals are scheduled, whether there is a realistic amount of time for kids to stand in line, buy their food and eat it before going to their next class, and the conditions under which they are eating.
Of course, compounding the shortage of time is the lack of nutritional value of the foods that are being gulped down. There is an enormous body of literature that details exactly what foods will promote learning, thinking, and mental response time while decreasing mental fatigue, improving concentration and maybe even memory. Much of this information has gone into formulating foods for inhabitants of the space station and for soldiers in combat to make sure that their mental performance is improved—and not diminished—by what they eat.
Kids sitting in class for several hours and required to pay attention and remember where to put a semi-colon in a sentence or what happens to water molecules when they boils need brain power. And that comes from eating the right foods and having the time to consume them. They should have protein foods for breakfast and lunch, plenty of water to prevent dehydration, very little fat, and carbohydrate at the end of the school day. The protein will activate mental power, avoiding fat will prevent the brain from feeling muddled and confused and the carbohydrate will decrease stress.
If there are no good food choices at your child’s school, put protein bars, a juice pack and fruit in the lunch box along with some low-fat munchies like popcorn or pretzels. Complain to the school administration if your child ‘s schedule eliminates time for lunch. If enough people complain, maybe things will change. And when your child comes home, have a snack ready. Cut-up vegetables, or low-fat cheese (like Laughing Cow wedges) and whole-wheat crackers and low-fat milk are a good afternoon snack.
If enough people are aware of the importance of their children eating right, and having enough time to do it, maybe we will finally start to see some changes. The time to begin is now.
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( 3 / 24 )A few days ago we purchased a portable GPS. As someone with no sense of direction and a tendency to get lost, even in department stores (I can never find the down escalator), I look upon this support system with great anticipation because the system always knows where you are, even when you don’t. And although I have not tested it yet on some complex maze of roads to get me home, according to the promotional material it will.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were a GES or Good Eating System to tell us what to eat, what to avoid, warn us about eating obstacles ahead such as all-you-can-eat brunches, fried clam shacks, and fair grounds with fried dough and corn dogs? Better yet, if the system were somehow attached to some yet to be identified metabolic site in our body, it could sound an alarm when we exceeded our calorie allotment for the day.
Actually, such devices are being developed as hand-held weight loss counselors. One I have heard about is in use and undergoing improvements as more is known about how well it works. It is programmed with information about eating and exercise habits, caloric and nutrient needs, and life-style demands. If you commute to work and are used to stopping and buying a doughnut and coffee before getting on a commuter train, the device will warn you to take breakfast with you and skip the doughnut. With information about your evening nibbling habits, you might get a message around 8PM as you head off to the kitchen for some ice cream to get on the treadmill instead. And if you are sitting in a Chinese restaurant trying to decide whether to order battered dipped chicken in a salty sauce, you might be steered to steamed vegetables and tofu instead.
Will this GES work? Like my GPS, if the directions are followed, the answer is yes. If I am lost and want to find my destination, I am obviously going to follow the directions I am given, even if they seem contrary to what I would do on my own (which would keep me lost, of course). And if I am wondering what to order in a restaurant or forget to eat vegetables at lunch, this weight-loss aid will tell me what I should do. It really is similar to being lost and then finding your way again with the help of a Global Positioning System. When that happens, the adrenaline stops pouring out and there is a profound sense of relief and comfort in knowing that you will eventually get to where you want to go. Use of a GES has to bring about the same sense of security, comfort and achievement.
But it does have limitations: It can be turned off, left at home, or thrown away. Instead of being perceived as a help, it can be thought of as a nagging relative who thinks you are too fat and doing nothing about it. Its usefulness really depends on how much you want to lose weight and learn how to keep it off.
What about the long-term use of either of these devices? Will I always need my GPS to find my way to the library or home from visiting a friend? Past experience has shown me that eventually even my directionally-impaired brain will get me home by myself when the way is familiar.
The answer to the long-term reliance on a Good Eating System device is not known. If practiced long enough, new habits and changes in lifestyle do take hold and stick. Perhaps weeks of specific advice concerning meal and snack choices, sleep, exercise, and relaxation will also leave an imprint on the brain so that whole-grain cereal, rather than a doughnut, will be the default breakfast choice and a day without exercise seem uncomfortable.
And who knows? Someday my GPS, which directs me to restaurants in the area, might be programmed to direct me only to restaurants with healthy food. And perhaps if I am in the car too long, it will tell me to stop driving and get out and walk.
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( 2.9 / 32 )An article in by Ellen Tien in the September 2008 O magazine discussed the reluctance of people to state directly what they want. She was not talking about ordering a meal in a restaurant or buying items from the Web. She was referring to women and men being unable to confront others, such as their spouses or other members of their family, with their real desires. According to her, we tiptoe around our desires because guilt at wanting something is stronger than expressing our wishes directly.
As I read this, I wondered if we tend to reach for food rather than what we really want because eating is simple. Eating does not have to involve anyone else. Seeming to satisfy some needs within us, it can be done privately and in secret. And, for a very brief period of time, it seems to quell the “I want” feeling.
This came to mind when I recalled a sad story of a secretary whose husband was emotionally abusive. Because she had four children and very little education beyond high school, she felt incapable of leaving him. “We had a pantry in our basement,” she told me. “After my husband and kids were asleep, I would go down there, open up a box of crackers or cookies and eat them while reading some trashy novel. It was the only time I could do something without my husband screaming at me.”
She wanted her husband to change, she wanted to finish her education, and she wanted independence. But there was no way she could express or act on her wants so she ate instead.
A client in one of our weight-loss groups told us why she gained a great deal of weight as a child. “My mother worked at home and we were trained not to disturb her. But she would stop working if we wanted a meal or snack. So I used eating as a way of getting her attention. I didn’t want the food, I wanted her. But it was the only way I could get her attention.”
One of the hardest things about losing weight is keeping it off. The reasons are as numerous as gnats on a warm summer evening. But among the many pesky causes of weight gain after a diet is the failure to recognize your real wants. No matter how much you want to lose weight, you are not going to stay thin unless you confront your other wants. And the optimal, indeed critical time to recognize these wants is while you are dieting. Waiting until the weight goal is reached is too late.
Before starting on a diet, it would be useful to identify situations in which a “want” is translating into eating. Here are some examples. I want:
• To stop working and go home.
• A baby sitter so I can have some time for myself.
• My spouse to talk to me during dinner.
• My mother-in-law to understand how frazzled I am so she won’t stay with us for 3 months.
While you can’t always get what you want, knowing what your wants are is half the battle in controlling weight gain. Eating won’t change the wanting; it will only allow you to deny or mask what you want.
As Ms Tien says in her article, the solution is to act on your wants. In her words, “What you want isn’t merely what you get. It’s where you’ll be. It’s who you’ll be.”
And one of the things you will be will be thin.
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( 3 / 21 )The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutritional watchdog organization, reported recently that the special “children’s meals’” offered in fast-food restaurants are extremely high in calories, saturated fats, sugar and salt. This news should not be surprising; meals consisting of chicken nuggets, French fries, cookies, and chocolate milk or pizza and soda are certainly going to be nutritionally deficient and excessive in all the unhealthy substances all of us should be avoiding. The article went on to point out the rising number of obese children and blamed this in large part on the enormous number of calories these kids’ meals contain.
What the article did not say was that this would not be much of a problem if kids ate fast food very rarely, say once or twice a year. If, the rest of the time, their meals were well balanced and nutritionally complete, how much harm could these meals do?
I suspect that way back when the product managers of fast-food restaurants tried to figure some way of enticing families to eat in their franchises on a regular basis, they came up with the idea of special foods for kids. It makes sense: Chicken nuggets and French fries are more fun to eat than a grilled chicken salad, and chocolate milk or soda is tastier than low-fat milk.
However, I doubt that 25 or more years ago or whenever Happy Meals entered the American food vocabulary, one could have predicted that these food combos would become standard weekly fare for kids, not only in the restaurants but at school and also at home.
Obviously these extremely high-calorie, nutrient-poor meals are affecting the health and even the longevity of our children. But fast-food franchises are only the most obvious culprits in the deterioration of our children’s diets. There are many reasons why our children may not be getting fewer nutrients, and more calories, than they need; the causes are just not as obvious as the nearest McDonalds.
Do you know what your kids are actually eating? Think about the places where children are getting their food from a very young age: daycare centers, preschool and nursery schools, day and overnight camps, public or private schools, shopping malls, baby sitters, grandparents, school and team trips, and sleepovers. The list goes on and on. It might be interesting to figure out how many times during the week children eat a meal at home.
How do you make sure that your children are eating foods that nourish them, that are acceptable calorically for their size and activity level, and do not contain excessive amounts of substances like saturated fats that may affect their health later on?
It is not as easy or simple as it was years ago when most meals were eaten at home, at least until kids went to first grade. Even then only lunch, if that, was eaten away from the kitchen.
There are two solutions to this problem. One is to supply, for as long as possible, foods that you want your children to eat away from home. The second is to teach your children which foods are, and are not, acceptable to eat. So sending lunch and snack foods to the day care center or preschool, along with the beverages you want your child to be drinking, removes the problem of a graham crackers, mac and cheese and apple juice diet that many day care centers seem to promote.
However, getting your children to make the right food choices takes more effort than that and has to begin very early in a child’s life, preferably when the word “no” creeps into the vocabulary of the toddler.
Children can be taught at a very young age about what foods are acceptable and which are not. I have seen this in the household of neighbors whose kids obey the Jewish laws of keeping kosher. Even before they can read, they know how to look for the small symbol that signifies whether a food is kosher or not. They also know how to look for an additional letter that tells them if the food contains dairy products like milk powder solids. (Since they cannot mix foods containing meat and milk, this is also very important.) The effect of this very early training allows them to say “no, thank you” to foods that they know they are not supposed to eat. Children brought up brought up in vegetarian households, like those of Seven Day Adventists, do the same.
When our children were young, I had just started writing about nutrition and wanted to make sure that I was practicing what I was writing in my own house. Junk foods, including soda, were banished and our kids were served only nutritious foods, even if there was a fight about their eating it. But it paid off. When our younger child went on a class trip at the beginning of middle school, he always asked for water, low-fat milk or orange juice in restaurants. He told me that his classmates teased him for doing so. But his attitude was that his class mates could fill their bodies with junk but he wasn’t going to.
Nonetheless, raising children in a nutritionally-healthy environment has its costs. Some nutritionally healthy foods like fresh fruits and vegetables, chicken, fish, whole grain cereals , yogurt and cottage cheese may appear more expensive than a meal of chicken nuggets and French fries. But it turns out that preparing foods at home and making meals that stretch like soups, stews, meat loaf, pasta or rice and chicken and vegetables is less expensive for a family than individual servings of happy meals or cheeseburger combos. After all what you pay for in any restaurant is more than the food: you are paying for labor, electricity, rent, and the cost of those cardboard boxes and packets of ketchup.
But for some the bigger cost is that older members of the family also have to follow the rules for making healthy food choices. You can’t tell your kids to eat their broccoli while you are munching on a pepperoni pizza. It also takes time to pack lunches and snacks, shop for food and prepare meals. Picking up take-out or dropping in at the local fast-food franchise may seem tempting after a long week of juggling work, family, and household obligations.
Is it worth doing? Is there any choice? We know that more and more children are suffering from obesity and that their childhood diets may cause adult problems like diabetes, heart disease, and even decreased longevity. So save the Happy Meals or pizzas for very special occasions. If your children get used to eating well, they may want to go out for sushi instead.
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( 3 / 178 )When our hospital based, weight-loss clinic first opened, we asked new clients to fill out a questionnaire about the kind of physical activity they did. Included were activities such as carrying toddlers or their strollers up and down steps, bringing groceries into the house, walking or stair climbing as part of their job, and of course “regular” exercise (running, morning or evening walks, working with a trainer, etc). We also asked whether our clients would engage in a regular exercise routine if they were not concerned about losing weight.
We learned two important things: Most people overlooked the exercise they did as part of their daily life. One client worked in a law office spread over three floors of an office building. She climbed up and down the stairs several times a day to go to meetings, or speak with other lawyers or her clients. She overlooked this frequent form of physical activity because it “was just part of the job.” The second thing we learned was that the primary reason our clients would commit themselves to an exercise program was (no surprise here) to lose weight. Fitness, bone strength, improving their heart health, even decreasing the possibility of late-life memory loss, were regarded as unimportant reasons. “I will exercise if it gets my weight off faster” was the typical response on our questionnaire.
How can people be convinced that regular physical activity is something which should be part of their lives, regardless of whether weight loss is also on their agenda? Most fitness or obesity experts will say that it takes months, maybe even years, for new habits to develop. Consequently, a lot of positive “nagging” is necessary to get people to stick with an exercise routine. Many experts say that they don’t have much success in making this happen.
However. I think what is overlooked in getting people to put exercise into their lives as a given, as routine as brushing your teeth or paying the cell phone bill, is to point out that most of us do physical activity as part of our lives. And maybe the easiest way to start increasing exercise is to put more of it into our daily routines.
A mom whose 7-pound infant is now a hefty 28 pounds or more is obviously becoming more and more fit every time she bends down to pick up her child. Someone whose arms ache after raking the lawn or shoveling the driveway in early fall or winter is going to develop arm and back muscles by the time the last tree sheds its leaves or spring finally comes. I saw a sign in an office building announcing that the elevator is REALLY SLOW and recommending the stairs be taken instead. Climbing the stairs is hard if you don’t do it often but sooner rather than later, your legs become stronger, your breathing easier and eventually you do it faster and with less effort.
Many years ago my husband and I lived in a part of Switzerland at the edge of the hills that eventually become the Alps. All the shops were dotted along a very steep hill, and I had to climb up and down them to do my food shopping. And, as our kitchen refrigerator was more suitable to a dollhouse than an apartment, I shopped very often. One day, soon after our arrival, I watched in amazement as an old woman climbed up the hill carrying two sacks filled with large glass bottles of water. I was puffing and panting after my short climb without any groceries in my hand. But, within a few weeks, I could do the climb without my breath coming in gasps and my hands feeling as if they would fall off from the weight of my bundles. Looking back on that time, I realized that I was doing the equivalent of stair climbing in a gym with heavy weights in my hand. Would I have done that in a gym? I doubt it. But in Switzerland, I did it or we would have had an empty refrigerator.
So maybe one answer to the exercise question is that in many cases, it is the only way we can get through life. And if we take on the challenge (or perhaps can’t avoid it) of increasing the intensity or duration of our daily physical activities, we will emerge the healthier for it.
A neighbor who recently moved from a house in the suburbs to an apartment in the city told me that she is much healthier now. “My bone density has improved, as has my resting heart rate,” she related. When I asked her how this came about, she told me that she has to walk all the time. “If I take my car to get groceries, it takes longer with traffic and parking than if I walk. And the cost of parking the car is about half the cost of my food. So I walk and lug home what I need. Also, we live on the 3rd floor and although there is an elevator, it is really old and slow. So I walk up the steps. We have a dog and no backyard. So I walk even more. After we first moved, I would lie in bed at night and my legs would ache from all my exercise. But now I never notice it. I am really stronger.“
There is an old expression which I probably heard first from my grandmother, which was, “ Live and be well.” It is the “be well” that we have to work on. If exercise is part of the living, you will be well.
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