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

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

This week exercise leads to better habits, Big Food manufactures authenticity, and sleep reduces stress eating.

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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After successfully losing over seventy pounds on a meal replacement diet Cara has reached her ideal weight and is feeling great. But now she faces a new challenge: weight maintenance.

Knowing that diets rarely work long-term and that she needs a more sustainable approach to her healthstyle she is ready to tackle the hard work. In Cara’s case, that means getting over one of her biggest fears.

Cara hates cooking, but knows that learning how to prepare her own food is necessary in order for her to maintain her weight loss. After putting it off her entire life, she says she is now “trying to focus on how to make the hard work doable.”

Together we explore the story Cara has built up in her mind over the years regarding food preparation. Having struggled with this topic myself, I share how I got over my own fear of cooking and suggest ways she can approach it in a much less intimidating way, find inspiration and even get excited about it.

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:

Foodist Kitchen

How To Overcome Your Fear of Cooking

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.

Amy has been working on her healthstyle for over a year. Slowly she has changed her eating, exercise, sleep and mindfulness habits, and she finally feels like she’s in control of her health.

Now she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Amy is a natural worrier, always ready for something to come along that negates all the hard work she’s done. She knows this is a tendency of hers, yet it’s hard not to feel like there’s some truth behind her fears since even successful diets have always left her in a worse place.

Her question for me today is what: does success look like from here now that everything is great?

This is an educational episode whether you’re a seasoned foodist or a newbie finding your path, since it will give you an idea of what the endgame looks like. Your brain judges success by what it expects it to look like. One great way to know this is by listening to someone who is already there.

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:

Mindful Meal Challenge

The Worst Thing You Can Do if You’re Trying to Lose Weight

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.

For The Love of Food

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

A trifecta of exercise benefits, the secrets to maintaining weight loss & new benefits of language learning.

Want to see all my favorite links? 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).

Links of the week

• Exercise May Protect Against Brain Shrinkage <<Some new data suggesting that physical exercise is more important than mental exercise in maintaining brain volume with age. (New York Times)
• Exercise Boosts Satisfaction With Life, Researchers Find <<In my experience this is entirely true. Few things improve how I feel on any given day more than getting in my workout. This data adds that exercising for a few extra minutes could help even more. (ScienceDaily)
• Exercise Makes Middle-Aged People Smarter <<Regular interval and strength training not only improved health and enhanced weight loss, it also improved performance on cognitive tests. Seriously, exercise is good for you. (ScienceDaily)
• Fish, But Not Fish Oil Supplements, May Shield Against Stroke <<They don’t know why, but it seems fish is more effective than fish oil supplements in preventing stroke. (Medline)
• Low levels of vitamin D in blood double risk of bladder cancer <<More good news for maintaining adequate vitamin D levels. (LA Times)
• 9 Ways You Might Be Inadvertently Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Efforts <<If you’re one of those people that thinks you’re doing everything right but still can’t seem to lose those last few pounds, check out these tips. (Mark’s Daily Apple)
• Mastering Weight-Maintenance Skills Before Embarking On Diet Helps Women Avoid Backsliding <<I’m a big fan of this. What’s the point of losing weight if you can’t keep it off down the stretch? (ScienceDaily)
• Speed-Learning a New Language May Help Brain Grow: Study <<Tim Ferriss suggests in his book The 4-Hour Work Week that language learning (which he prefers to do rapidly) is uniquely beneficial for enhancing life. Here’s some evidence that he may be right. (Medline)
• Andrew Weil’s new cookbook aims for ‘True Food’ that’s easy, tasty <<I’ve had the pleasure of dining with Dr. Weil at his home and at his restaurants, and his food never ceases to impress. His latest cookbook (which I also have), True Food, let’s you bring these healthy, delicious recipes into your home. (LA Times)
• Fuji Apple and Baby Kale Kimchi Salad + A Ramble Through the Woods <<I’m a bit of a kimchi fanatic, and turning it into a salad dressing for this beautiful autumn salad sounds divine. (Tartine and Apron Strings)

What inspired you this week?

Vegetables

I don’t know about you guys, but I had a crazy weekend. In a very uncharacteristic move (I usually work weekends) I found myself at 5 different parties over a 3 day period. Four of these parties involved food.

I did my best to stick with my plan to eat healthy, and mostly I did, but the sheer volume and frequency of eating and drinking was a bit too much and by Sunday night I felt pretty gross.

It is natural to occasionally let your healthstyle slip, and there’s no need to get upset about it, but it is important to get it under control as quickly as possible. This is the essence of weight maintenance–something we all need to master if we want to stay healthy.

I never follow strict schedules or diets, but there are a few rules I keep in mind when I want to get my health and weight back into my comfort zone. These things work best for me, but please let us know what works best for you in the comments section.

10 Weight Loss Rules

1. Cook at home The most important thing for me when eating healthy is cooking for myself. Eating small portions of healthy food is nearly impossible at restaurants. Every breakfast, lunch and dinner this week will be made from scratch from the beautiful veggies and fruit I got at the farmers market on Saturday.
2. Small portions I will be cooking and serving myself smaller portions of food this week, approximately 80% of the volume I would normally eat. I will cut down on everything in general, but most of the calorie reduction will come from starchy carbohydrates and protein. Basically, vegetables (and the olive oil I cook them in) are the only foods I will not restrict.
3. No dessert I didn’t mention cutting out sugar in point #2 because I don’t consider sugar a regular part of my diet. However, normally I allow myself to indulge in dessert for special occasions and other events. This week I will politely turn down any offers of extra calories.
4. No carbs Flour-based products, also not a staple of my diet, are off the table this week too. No bread at all in any form, no pasta, noodles, white rice, etc. I will still eat whole grains like my morning muesli and the occasional addition of brown rice or quinoa to salads and dinners, but these servings will be smaller than usual.
5. Less protein Many self-proclaimed fitness gurus will disagree with me on this one, but I find that my optimal protein intake for weight loss is not as high as you might think. I have nothing against protein as a weight loss tool (especially when greater weight loss is necessary), but protein adds a lot of calories to your diet compared to vegetables. So really this rule is more about portion control than protein itself. For the next few days my protein will come from lentils, nuts, whole grains and fish. Servings will be about 3 oz. I will still be careful to get enough protein and fat in each meal so I don’t increase my appetite.
6. No alcohol Alcohol can be healthy, but it can also impair your judgment about what and when to eat. It also has quite a few extra calories and can create hormone imbalances when consumed regularly. I’m going to skip the wine with dinner, at least until Friday.
7. Daily workouts I always try to work out every weekday, but excuses come easier on some days than others. No excuses this week: weights and cardio Monday through Friday. I may even try to work in a hike or some other physical activities next weekend.
8. Stay hydrated People will argue about how much or how little water is really necessary, but none of this changes the fact that water makes me feel better. Water helps me control my appetite, feel more awake and have better workouts. I always carry around my CamelBak, but this week I will try to fill it up a little more often.
9. Enough sleep For me, the hardest healthy habit to maintain is getting enough sleep. I usually stay up too late and get up early, but this can really take its toll over time. For the next several days I will try to keep myself on something of a regular sleeping schedule.
10. Be good next weekend I have found one of the more futile activities is eating right and being healthy all week then completely throwing all self-restraint out the window on weekends. To really recover from a bad weekend, I need a full 7 days of self-control and good behavior. In essence this will translate into two good weeks, since the inertia from one healthy week can sustain me until the following weekend. The only real barrier is that first weekend, filled with parties and dinner invitations. It’s fine to go out with friends, but skip the fried mac and cheese and hold it together for just a few more days.

What are your favorite tips for getting your health back on track after a wild weekend?