Developing Resistance to Junk Food

The past few days at the office have seen boxes of pizza, pastries, cupcakes, Chinese food, and wraps for meetings. Temptation? No--except for the wraps made of turkey and spinach, which I ate without the wrapper, of course. This wasn't any great feat of willpower: after over two years of eating little or no wheat, pizza or Chinese, these didn't even look like food to me. The Chinese food was overcooked (broccoli is supposed to be bright green, not dull chartreuse) and the pizza smelled like a wet dog. I think I understand why the French avoid junk food much more than Americans: they just don't like the stuff because they eat real food.

Here's the problem with a frequent cheat day: it keeps your taste for junk food alive. If a friend were trying to quit smoking, would you recommend a weekly smoking day?

Comments

Angel said…

On the rare occasions I eat junk food now, it usually seems oddly tasteless and "empty" for lack of a better term. I can still taste the overstimulating stuff, but there's no there there - the food equivalent of a house of mirrors. (Note: ice cream is a notable exception, maybe because I love dairy fat in all its many forms.) Real food is genuinely satisfying.

June 09, 2012

Lori Miller said…

Tom Naughton put it well: when you're used to real food, junk food tastes like junk. And I'm sure that chips and such are supposed to be appetite stimulants, rather like casinos with no windows and no clocks.

At least ice cream is mostly actual food. (Full disclosure here: I do love dark chocolate.)

June 10, 2012

Fly with Reuteri

If you're planning to travel by plane and you want to keep enjoying the benefits of l. reuteri yogurt, you might have gotten sticker shock from the price of l. reuteri probiotics. MyReuteri * costs $46 to $83 for 30 capsules, depending on the CFUs (colony-forming units, or the number of viable microorganisms). If you're thinking about economizing by putting some yogurt in a sturdy container and taking it with you, you can do that. I'll break down the pros and cons and look at some alternatives. Photo from Unsplash . Cost Yogurt might be less expensive than probiotics, but it isn't free. A half-cup serving costs about 70¢ to make if you start with a previous batch. It contains about 90 billion CFUs if fermented for 36 hours. This is a lot less than $5.56 for two capsules of 50 billion CFU MyReuteri, but for a one-week vacation, you'd only save $34 by eating yogurt instead. (You can freeze any unused capsules for later.) Furthermore, the yogurt would have to go in ...

30-second Fix for a Cracked Stick Blender

Use Mighty Fixit (if you still have some from 2012) or Rescue Tape (which looks like a similar product) to fix a cracked stick blender. After I fixed the attachment, I washed it in the sink and the tape held up. I also wrapped a knife handle several years ago, and it's been through thousands of washings.

Holiday Dinner Tip from Restaurant Pros: Limit the Menu

After watching some people online getting freaked out about trying to put on holiday dinners and getting overwhelmed to the point that they're thinking about canceling the whole thing, I thought I'd put out a restaurant tip that will help people put on a dinner with less aggravation. A big complaint among the frustrated home cooks I've seen is that family members are not contributing to the dinner. But a bigger problem I see is that their menu is just too big. One lady's family is having her make 12 dishes all by herself, and some of these dishes look pretty complicated. Watch the video here or read on. The reason this is aggravating is that more dishes mean more shopping, more prep, and more cleanup. It's hard to make several dishes that will all be ready at the same time. Even though I used to be a prep cook at a restaurant, I've put on Thanksgiving dinners myself, and I cook from scratch almost every day, there's no way I'd try to make a 12-course di...

The Inner Circle Site is a Maze!

If you're a member of Dr. Davis's Inner Circle site, you know how hard it is to navigate. But I have a YouTube Playlist of videos I've created on using the site--finding yogurt recipes, using the search function, uploading lab tests, finding which lab tests you should take, and more. All videos are under 11 minutes, the longer ones have chapters and time stamps in the description, and in about 30 minutes, you'll be navigating the site like techno-boss. Link here .

Moving on to YouTube

Remember when the blogosphere was a wild ride? Doctors, writers and researchers dove into research, picked apart studies and stood up to official advice and conventional wisdom that didn't work. We found each other in the comments and made a community. Along the way, Dr. T. Colin Campbell's research got exposed as shoddy by an English major, Tom Naughton made us laugh, "safe starch" fads made us scratch our heads, "Diabetes Warrior" Steve Cooksey almost went to jail, CarbSane trolled everyone who was anyone, and CarbSaneR trolled the troll. Now it's very quiet. Blogs don't come up in Google search results anymore and even if they did, most of the bloggers have stopped writing. That's why I've moved on to YouTube. Videos do come up in search results and my shorts--which are mostly what I make--get pushed out to hundreds of people or more. My videos are on food and health (biohacking), but also on growing things and fixing things. If you...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog