Health
Habits
Food
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Better Than Butternut: Roasted Delicata Squash Recipe
10 Simple Ways To Eat Less Without Noticing
Juicing: Stupid and Pretentious or Nourishing and Enlightening?
10 Tasty Carbs That Won’t Make You Fat
How To Start Working Out When You Don’t Like To Exercise
Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet if You’re Serious About Losing Weight
Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control
10 Reasons You Aren’t Losing Weight When You Think You’re Doing Everything Right
How To Burn More Calories Without Breaking A Sweat
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Foodists
FOR THE LOVE OF FOOD: The pros and cons of fasting, body fat trumps BMI, and water cuts calories
by Darya Rose | Mar 11, 2016
For the Love of Food
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
This week the pros and cons of fasting, body fat trumps BMI, and how water cuts calories.
Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app I just discovered to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!
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Links of the week
- What’s wrong with the American diet? More than half our calories come from ‘ultra-processed’ foods <<It’s really not more complicated than this. (LA Times)
- Should You Be Getting More B Vitamins? <<Great primer on the nuances of B vitamins. Read this, especially if you avoid animal products. (Mark’s Daily Apple)
- Fasting Diets Are Gaining Acceptance <<I know intermittent and other forms of fasting are gaining in popularity, and I can certainly see the appeal. My biggest concern is that people who have a tendency to diet and moralize foods often binge after fasting (my own anecdotal observations, but I’ve seen it a lot), which is not a sign of a healthy relationship with food and could cause problems once you realize fasting sucks and try to go back to eating normally again. (NY Times)
- Body Fat May Be Bigger Health Danger Than Body Size <<It makes a lot of intuitive sense to me that body fat percentage is a better predictor of mortality than BMI. (Medline)
- Another Reason to Give Babies Peanut Butter <<In case you haven’t heard, those decades of doctors’ advice about pregnancy diets were wrong. (The Atlantic)
- Is Rice Healthy For Me? Does White vs Brown Rice Matter? <<Brilliant and amusing deep dive into the pros and cons of white versus brown rice. Good stuff. (Nerd Fitness)
- Broccoli may offer protection against liver cancer, study shows <<We still don’t know all the reasons eating more vegetables is so good for you. This may be one of them. (ScienceDaily)
- 10 Surprising Reasons You’re Not Losing Weight <<I normally disdain articles like this, but this one is surprisingly spot on. (Huffington Post)
- Drinking More Water May Help Your Diet <<Despite what everyone always says, there’s actually little evidence that drinking more water helps with weight loss. This new research suggests that even a relatively small increase in water intake results in fewer calories consumed. (Medline)
- Easy curried fish stew <<I know this sounds weird, but fish stews are really underrated and not hard to make. Be brave and give it a try. (Jamie Oliver)
What inspired you this week?
Whenever I’d look at the “big picture” stats on white vs. brown rice, I always felt like there wasn’t enough of a difference between the two, especially once I realized my palate had a distinct preference for white rice. Not only that, but the cooking time is shorter for white rice, and I’ve noticed that if I get Chipotle, the brown rice is much more likely to have uncooked pieces in it. I realized after a while that it was pointless to worry about the negligible nutrient differences, since 99% of the time when I’m eating rice, it’s with a colorful stir-fry or other nutrient-dense food.
I don’t know if the people who are always telling me “brown rice is better for you!!” will have the patience for the analysis of the article you shared, but maybe the length of it will frustrate them so much that they will be tempted to abandon the argument and let me enjoy my white rice in peace.. 😉
I tried intermittent fasting a couple of years ago, and it worked well for me then: it gave me peace of mind to know that I was “making up” for any excess the rest of the week and it was all balancing out. Then I stopped to get pregnant (sucessfully).
I tried it again more recently, but it was a mistake: I would eat in excess the night before a fast day to avoid feeling hungry, and eat in excess after a fast day because I was feeling so hungry. I stopped because it wasn’t helping my relationship with food.
I’ll note that I’m still breastfeeding my 1yo (I know, I know: no one would actually recommend intermittent fasting in this context) and I think I need to let my body and my appetite be for now.
That speed reading app is incredible. Thanks for passing it on!
large doses of antioxidants can cause cancer in humans?
Darya, while I am quite sure the 5:2 is not for me, the 16/8 Intermittent Fasting is something that I can do for the rest of my life. It’s so easy. My schedule is: dinner at 5:30pm, fast from 6pm to 10am, breakfast 10am, lunch noon-ish to one-ish. So no skipped meals. It’s basically just a matter of no after-dinner snacking, which I wasn’t doing anyway, and delaying breakfast for a few hours. You can read the details in my blog post: https://www.delightfulrepast.com/2018/04/intermittent-fasting-168-its-not-just.html