For the Love of Food

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

A quick reminder that next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

This week smash the patriarchy with vegetables, “overfat” is the new “overweight,” and why cows are eating Skittles. 

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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For the Love of Food

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

A quick reminder that next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

This week the Western diet gives you the munchies (literally), when to expect fitness results, and vegetables trump pesticides.

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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The Mindful Meal Challenge has a new website. Join us at mindfulmealchallenge.com

UPDATE: The Mindful Meal Challenge was such a success we’re going to run it again every week. Sign up now to start on Monday!

Mindful eating is the most underrated health habit everyone is talking about. Self-proclaimed wellness websites love to tout the benefits of slowing down and savoring your food, yet it almost never comes up in conversation with someone who is serious about losing weight or improving their health.

This is probably because mindful eating is a deceptively simple idea that is incredibly hard to implement.

Most people aren’t even sure what mindful eating actually is, and so they say things like “I try to eat mindfully” then just keep eating the way they always do and hope that one day they’ll magically stop going back for seconds. Fat chance.

But mindful eating really is an amazing thing if you can turn it into a habit. Focusing on the experience of eating has a bigger impact on how satisfying a meal is than the number of calories it contains (1). As a result you enjoy your food more, while naturally eating less.

Eating mindfully can also make you less vulnerable to eating triggers that can cause you to eat more quickly (2) and overeat (3).

For many healthy eaters, mindful eating is the last piece of the puzzle for finally losing those last few stubborn pounds.

Personally, mindful eating has helped me feel back in control of my eating experience. When I was a dieter one of the terrible eating habits I developed was gobbling my food in a frantic rush whenever I sat down to a real meal.

My frenzied eating was trigged by a combination of extreme hunger (since I rarely let myself eat when I wanted) and the guilt I felt from giving into it, making me want to get the meal over with as quickly as possible. These were not my finest moments.

Mindful eating is what enabled me to snap out of my frantic mindless eating habit and actually appreciate the beautiful food I am so lucky to have access to.

But dang is it hard to do.

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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 how your gut sabotages your diet, how to teach your kids to love veggies, and why exercise leads to weight gain.

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.

Read the rest of this story »

Photo by Jules Clancy

Huge thanks to Jules Clancy of Stonesoup for this week’s article introducing me to the concept of mindful cooking. I’ve certainly made the mistake of viewing cooking as a nuisance, even though I know it ultimately benefits me and my family. I love this new way of looking at it.

Jules LOVES real food and hanging out in her kitchen. She has a degree in Food Science and is the author of ‘5-Ingredients 10-Minutes’. For a free eCookbook of delicious 5-ingredient recipes sign up for the Stonesoup weekly newsletter.

Recently I realized I’ve been making a huge mistake. Like many modern food writers, there’s one thing I’ve had completely wrong. Rather than celebrating the joy that cooking can bring to our lives, I’ve been guilty of apologizing for activity in the kitchen.

I’ve stressed how quick and easy my recipes are (I did write a whole book called ‘5-Ingredients 10-Minutes’) instead of sharing how great they taste or how good they make you feel.

I still believe cooking need not be complicated nor time consuming to produce delicious, satisfying results. But I now realize that apologizing for time spent in the kitchen, sends the message that cooking is a chore. Not an activity worthy of your precious minutes and hours.

The thing is, I love cooking. And I want to share that love.

I hope to inspire you to reframe how you think about cooking. Because there’s so much more to gain than just improving your healthstyle.

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As a lifelong healthy eater, Sherry wasn’t trying to lose weight. Sure she would have been happy to drop 5-10 lbs, but she was comfortable with her body and health. She even thought she was a mindful eater until a stressful event in her life caused her to start a consistent yoga practice.

Yoga, it turned out, became a catalyst to help her relieve stress and let go of difficult emotions. As she developed this talent during strenuous yoga poses, she noticed it began to translate into her eating behavior.

Without specifically trying to change anything, Sherry became more aware of her eating habits and started to eat more mindfully. As she did this she naturally started eating slower and being more thoughtful about her food choices.

To her surprise, she discovered she had been eating way more food than her body actually wanted or needed. She also started slowly changing the composition of her meals to be more plant-based, since this was more in line with what she was craving.

While she still enjoys sweets like chocolate cake on occasion, Sherry has embraced mindful eating and over the past year lost 16 lbs without actively trying to lose weight.

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

Meditate much?

Health is about far more than food. If you’ve spent any time poking around Summer Tomato you likely already know everything you need to know about how to be healthy.

Eat lots of vegetables. Source high-quality fish and meats. Be an adventurous eater. Minimize processed grains, sugars, oils and proteins. Be active, not sedentary. It’s pretty simple.

Of course if knowing those things were enough we’d all be frolicking in a field of rainbows to celebrate our excellent health. The reason healthy eating is hard is not because you don’t know what to eat, it’s because you haven’t figured out how to change your habits.

It’s the mental game that holds you back.

From the first days of Summer Tomato I’ve been obsessed with helping people crack the code of behavior change, and time and again the science has led me to the practice of mindfulness.

Mindfulness, or being aware of what’s going on in your head in the present moment, is the secret sauce for success in nearly all aspects of life. For health in particular it helps you make better food choices, eat proper portions, and find the habits that work best for you.

This is because in order to make the best decision––the decision you really do want to make––you need to be aware of the unconscious reactions you have to the world around you. You need to turn off the autopilot and ask if it is sending you in a direction you really want to go.

Mindfulness is the pause that provides the space for wisdom. It is also incredibly difficult to cultivate.

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

This week industrial food loses power, placebos are getting stronger (?!), and the best way to stay motivated.

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

Want to see all my favorite links? (There’s lots more). Be sure to follow me on Delicious. 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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For those who haven’t heard, I’m currently on a 10 day silent meditation retreat in California.

Yes, completely silent. No computers, no cell phones, no talking, not even any books.

10 Days! Crazy, I know.

The reason I’m subjecting myself to this strange form of amputation is so that I can experience what it’s like to have the internal chatter in my mind stop completely, and just be present in the current moment.

Few things have benefit my life as much as meditation and mindful practice.

Mindfulness helps me focus and work more efficiently.

It helps me be more aware of my emotions so I can be more honest and compassionate with others.

It helps me feel gratitude for both the simpleness and complexities of life.

It even helps me sleep.

Mindfulness has also had a tremendous impact on my eating habits. I used to eat incredibly fast (“efficiently” was what I told myself), and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.

Then I started noticing all the scientific research about the importance of eating slowly and mindfully and decided to give it a try.

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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 trans fats might be healthy, a simple way to lose 7 lbs, and why we were thinner in the 80s.

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

Want to see all my favorite links? (There’s lots more). Be sure to follow me on Delicious. 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.

Read the rest of this story »