Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week how genetic tests impact your motivation, moralizing food linked to weight regain, and Whole Foods packaging linked to cancer.

Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

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Becky is normally a healthy eater and exercises regularly. She isn’t overweight, but would love to lose a few pounds. She also knows that if she stopped her periodic binges the weight would likely take care of itself.

Becky has also read Foodist and Summer Tomato, and knows that dieting isn’t a good strategy and that she has a tendency to moralize her food choices in a way that undermines her efforts. Yet she doesn’t know how to stop and continues trying to use willpower to both change her beliefs and stop her bingeing, which clearly is not working. She often finds herself bingeing at night after going out with her husband and friends, consuming thousands of calories at a time and feeling horrible the next day.

Knowing that your beliefs are counterproductive isn’t enough to change them, and willpower isn’t the answer. Reshaping your beliefs is difficult and you can hear in Becky’s voice how hard it is for her internalize the idea that pleasure is a valid reason to eat. Her experience to date has only shown her that she loses control around these foods and feels bad afterward, so it is almost impossible for her to see at this stage how a middle ground is possible.

In this episode I help Becky recognize the fundamental limitations of her approach and develop a strategy to start to unravel her rigid belief that she should only eat for fuel and nutrition. There are multiple issues she needs to work on, but she’ll have a much greater chance at success with this new approach.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

No, You Don’t Deserve That Indulgence Today

Listen:

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Listen on Soundcloud

If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

Laura works at a hospital and sees people suffering daily from chronic diseases she knows are caused by unhealthy food choices. Diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer are all fates she’d like to avoid, but still her love of sweets calls to her.

In Laura’s mind, foods fall into categories of “good” and “bad,” “healthy” and “unhealthy.” She knows that moralizing her foods this way makes her crave sweets even more, and that when she does give in she experiences the What-the-hell Effect and overeats them. But because of her job, it’s hard for her to stop thinking of sweets as “bad” and vegetables as “good.”

Not moralizing your food is easier said than done. One huge reason for this is that it feels true that veggies are good for you and junk food is bad you. How can you stop thinking this way when you actually believe it?

Food moralizing is very common, and undoing it takes more than willpower. In this episode I walk Laura through the steps necessary to get past the moralizing mentality and into one that is more helpful for her long-term health goals.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

No, You Don’t Deserve that Indulgence Today

How to Be Thankful After Campaign 2016: Foodist Edition

How to Eat More Mindfully in 19 Seconds (4-7-8 breaths)

Listen:

Listen on iTunes

Listen on Stitcher

Listen on Soundcloud

If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

“I’ve had a really hard day…”

“I went to all my workouts this week…”

“I ate a salad for lunch…”

“I’ve put up with my in-laws for four days and didn’t snap once…”

…I deserve it.

On the surface it seems to make sense. In so many parts of life good behavior is rewarded with some kind of treat, whether it was a sticker in kindergarten or a bonus at work. It’s natural to want to apply the same logic to the food you eat, especially if you’ve ever adopted a dieter’s mindset (or trained a puppy).

I’m here today to shatter this illusion.

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Jane is a wellness coach and has a deep and technical knowledge of nutrition, so by nature she eats super healthy and enjoys it. She also suffers from Celiac disease and has many other food sensitivities, so has to restrict her foods even more to avoid serious health problems.

Her biggest issue is that because she knows so much about nutrition she feels guilty eating anything that contains starch, because of a lingering five pounds she’d like to lose.

This tendency to moralize her food choices as “good” or “bad” causes her to second guess even some of her healthy choices and she feels terribly guilty eating some of the foods she loves (like oatmeal and sweet potatoes), even though they are nutritious Real Foods.

So even when Jane “indulges” it is hard for her to truly enjoy it. For those five pounds, Jane has been suffering like this for eleven years.

Together we dissect where her perfectionist streak is coming from and come up with a strategy for moving on. I also offer her a few ideas on solving her “last five pounds” issue that don’t involve skipping out on the few foods she really loves.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Why I’ll Never Tell You to Eat “Heart Healthy” Foods

Darya’s diet history

Foodist book

4 Reasons Why Some People Do Well as Vegans (While Others Fail Miserably)

Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control

Mindful Meal Challenge

Listen:

Listen on iTunes

Listen on Stitcher

Listen on Soundcloud

If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

Over the years Saba has learned to eat healthy by cutting down on processed foods. But her new healthstyle has caused her to forego nearly all the foods she loved as a child since she has moralized them as “bad and unhealthy.” Now she uses her “good behavior” to justify overeating “healthier” snacks like nuts, even though she eats so much she feels sick afterward. It’s a cycle she would like to break.

Saba’s issue combines both food moralizing and emotional eating, which makes both issues more complex and difficult to unravel. Together we come up with a plan for her to move forward.

Relevant links:

Why I’ll Never Tell You to Eat “Heart Healthy” Foods

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Listen:

Listen on iTunes

Listen on Stitcher

Listen on Soundcloud

Photo by Rubyran

If you want a glimpse of hell you needn’t look any further than my inbox. Every day, without fail, I receive dozens of pitches from people that would love to hijack my site to serve their own purposes.

Whether it’s PR firms trying to get me to mention their clients’ crappy products or spammy content marketers pitching horrible and pointless articles to get some SEO juice from a respected site. I’ve seen everything. You might not realize this, but one of my many jobs is to protect you guys from the onslaught of BS the internet is trying to hurl at you.

What’s interesting though is that so many of the guest post pitches I receive rely on exactly the same formula. It goes something like this:

_(insert number)_ Essential _(insert food or nutrient)_ for a Healthy _(insert body part)_

Clearly this formula works on many health and nutrition bloggers, or all the content marketing folks wouldn’t be using it. But it also embodies everything I despise about nutritionism and the misleading health advice we’ve been fed for the past half century.

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For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week “clean eating” gets the boot, exercise snacks control blood sugar, and why nutrition is so %&* confusing.

Want to see all my favorite links? (There’s lots more). Be sure to follow me on on Delicious. I also share links on Twitter @summertomato,  Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you. (And yes, I took that pepper heart pic myself).
Read the rest of this story »

Photo by Rubyran

If you want a glimpse of hell you needn’t look any further than my inbox. Every day, without fail, I receive dozens of pitches from people that would love to hijack my site to serve their own purposes.

Whether it’s PR firms trying to get me to mention their clients’ crappy products or spammy content marketers pitching horrible and pointless articles to get some SEO juice from a respected site. I’ve seen everything. You might not realize this, but one of my many jobs is to protect you guys from the onslaught of BS the internet is trying to hurl at you.

What’s interesting though is that so many of the guest post pitches I receive rely on exactly the same formula. It goes something like this:

_(insert number)_ Essential _(insert food or nutrient)_ for a Healthy _(insert body part)_

Clearly this formula works on many health and nutrition bloggers, or all the content marketing folks wouldn’t be using it. But it also embodies everything I despise about nutritionism and the misleading health advice we’ve been fed for the past half century.

Read the rest of this story »