Tag: diet

Help feed the hungry. How to make your charitable contributions count.

~ Green Apple Dietitian ~ Leave a comment

Photo by Alexander Mass on Unsplash

I feel compelled to write about helping the less fortunate in the wake of the SNAP benefits fiasco. Access to food is a fundamental right, no matter race, gender, body size, age, or economic status. There’s no reason on Earth that food should be denied to anyone.

In all the years I’ve been a registered dietitian, food distribution remains a system with many forces that challenge it. There are days when my emotional side doesn’t agree with food service regulations that lead to food waste, despite my education and experience in dining services.

Reasons for food waste include:

  • Overage: When the amount of food served is less than what the kitchen forecasted. People don’t eat as much as kitchen staff anticipated, there’s poor inventory management, or a lack of proper storage.
  • A decline in food quality, such as spoilage, increases the risk of food-borne illnesses, which can be serious or deadly for certain segments of our population.
  • Aesthetics: Ugly edible food that doesn’t meet a retailer’s standards is discarded. How food looks to us is a normal biological defense mechanism against unsafe foods. If it doesn’t look good, we won’t eat it.

Yet my emotions surface when I observe full untouched pans of food getting thrown away minutes after the scheduled meal ends. At the very least, it should be available to the employees as a benefit of employment. Workers’ salaries in food service range from $11 to $19 per hour in the US, the last time I checked, which is abysmal in our current economy.  I’m burnt out on hearing about food and staff shortages, while food service employees live in their cars.

I’m not here to claim I know everything about food service operations, but to the casual observer, discarding food always comes off as a stingy way of doing business. I don’t have to tell anyone that we seriously need to do better.

But I digress…

There’s a point when ranting no longer serves its purpose. It’s time to focus on making a difference. Here are some things I learned along the way, which will hopefully make it easier for folks to lend a helping hand. Let’s not become deer in headlights because we don’t know what to do.

How to feed the hungry. Don’t assume. Ask.

Start with the obvious, like donating food at a local grocery store. During the holidays, chances are you’ll see the familiar barrel dropped off by the local food pantry. There might even be a handy list of what foods they are asking for. Grocery stores also offer ready-to-eat meals or prepackaged bags of food for purchase. The hard work is already done.

Feeding America is nationally known. Log on to their website to learn about many aspects of giving. It’s a good place to begin if you’re starting a journey toward helping others.

Become more familiar with your local food bank. Visit their website, call them, and schedule a visit. Volunteers are more than happy to help navigate ways to help and are thankful when charitable people reach out. It’s the best place for the most current information about local people in need.

How to organize yourself and others to give generously

Alone or in a group, you can:

  • Start a food drive. Visit your local food pantry’s website and fill out an online form to have volunteers drop off one of their food barrels during a designated collection time. Otherwise, you can arrange to drop off donations.
  • Volunteer with family, friends, or co-workers to fill up food stock boxes, or participate in Meals on Wheels, to feed the elderly in need
  • Donate money directly on the pantry’s website or purchase items through their Amazon wish list. This is by far the easiest way to contribute, and you can do it periodically throughout the year.

Bust the myths of charitable giving. To make your donation count, don’t:

  • Assume what you eat will be the same as what everyone else eats. Not everyone has access to a stove, other cooking appliances, or even refrigeration. In lower-income neighborhoods, apartments for rent don’t always come with modern conveniences.
  • Buy bags of candy because you think that poor children never get to eat any. Yes, all children deserve candy or a cake on their birthday without judgment, but let’s leave that decision to the parents. Aim at acquiring food components that can be prepared and served within their economic environment. Research shows kids do better academically when they receive proper nourishment.    
  • Clean out your pantry of old and expired food to give to charity. If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t expect others to, or to be grateful for food that’s past its expiration date.
  • Push your healthy eating expectations, which only leads to unhelpful assumptions, by expecting them to choose foods that don’t make sense financially. Help them get access to all foods in every food group.

Follow these tips and develop a way to give that will work for you and your budget. It’s time we stop accepting government shutdowns that cause unnecessary delays and do what we can to lift others. Let’s build a society where everyone can reap the benefits of a dignified life.

Links to explore:

U.S. Hunger Relief Organization | Feeding America

Find Your Local Food Bank | Feeding America

Volunteer Opportunities at Your Local Food Bank | Feeding America

Effects of poverty, hunger and homelessness on children and youth

The New York Times Replica Edition

Misfits Market, Imperfect Foods & the Battle Against Food Waste – Consumer Reports

How to defend yourself against Diet Culture during the holidays

~ Green Apple Dietitian ~ 1 Comment

I was in a big box hardware store yesterday, looking for purple and orange lights to add to my Halloween decorations. In one aisle, an oversized skeleton let out an evil laugh, while in the next aisle, Christmas music was blaring near the leftover Thanksgiving swag on sale at 20% off. I’m not sure how everyone else feels, but I need breathing room between Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas to take it all in.

Now that it’s October, for many folks, their attempts at dieting are all but a memory. In my experience, patients who succeeded in slimming down have realized some weight gain once their hunger soared out of control and the “healthy diet” fell hard against normalized eating patterns.

In starvation mode, the hungry body fights for calories by accelerating cravings for carbohydrates, which are impossible to ignore. With three holidays back-to-back, there are opportunities for delicious and savory foods that aren’t available any other time of the year. But with new insight and introspection, it doesn’t have to be a recipe for disaster.

This year, I followed the diet industry’s yearly cycle and wrote about ways to rise above it.

How to Avoid Plugging Back into the Diet Culture this January

January is over. How is the weight loss diet going?

Right now, advertisers are heavily focused on holiday giving to maximize sales, which will soon be followed by the dieting and exercise industry’s application of pressure to eat less and move more. And the only way you can attain the thin ideal is with (add whatever diet/exercise company here) in your corner. What a perfect time to declare us all as gluttonous for being “too merry” over the holidays. This year, harness your inner strength so you can turn your back on all this nonsense once and for all.

Three ways to build a healthy body image

It won’t be easy. But nothing worthwhile is easy. I’m going to share with you the accumulation of my experiences with patients who struggle with their weight and their relationship with food. I offer a different approach to the holidays to help you find the confidence to eat and nourish your body on your own terms.   

Practice body compassion

No matter where your weight falls on the BMI scale, your nutrition needs are unique. Most people parrot nutritional information without much thought. If everyone’s doing it, it must be right. Except that it’s not right when people who are otherwise healthy go to extremes to be in a smaller body, or believe that the only way to better health is to lose weight. Ask yourself how much joy you’ve lost by telling yourself you can’t eat certain foods while limiting yourself during social situations. Body compassion will shield you from a negative body image by avoiding unhealthy comparisons. Focus on what you can change instead of what you can’t change.

  • Gratefulness: appreciate how your body works and its functions that keep you alive. All the systems in your body work together to keep you going. As humans, we are aware of our own mortality and possess the ability to change the course of our lives in many ways to achieve positive outcomes.
  • Acceptance: acknowledge the imperfections of your body without harsh judgment. Acknowledge the good things, whether it’s your eyes, your hair, your smile, or your ability to do something most others around you can’t do.  
  • Kindness: Tell yourself that you’re doing your best with what you know right now. As Maya Angelou once said, “Once you know better, do better.” Treat yourself like you would your best friend. Kindness costs nothing.

Tune out the health and wellness chatter. Most of it isn’t worth your time and attention.

Nutrition is a topic everyone has had a lived experience with. It’s not like neurosurgery, where a select few possess the knowledge. Everyone has their list of eat this, not that, but most advice falls within the “I didn’t ask you” category. All the good intentions won’t make it helpful.

Social media makes it extremely difficult to know what advice to trust. Even credentialed health practitioners don’t always share accurate information. They’re experts in their field of practice, but remain severely uneducated in the study of nutrition. I’ve witnessed highly educated practitioners share ideals that were disproven by science long ago. It can be overwhelming, and I sympathize with my patients who come to me looking for clarity.   

Most advice on social media is shared without much thought about the consequences to the viewers. It becomes proliferated by all the clueless and rigid opinions in the comment section. It’s important to know that health practitioners who truly care about your health are not spending time spreading misinformation on social media. They’re in hospitals and clinics working hard to help patients make sense of it all. If you know that social media marketing strives to evoke strong emotions to get a reaction, you’re already halfway there. Here are three ways to navigate nutrition’s complicated landscape.

  • Match the expertise with the advice.
    If a famous actress is selling a weight loss program, chances are it’s a lived experience that worked for them, but would require a complete overhaul of your current lifestyle. It can be hard to tell if what you’re hearing is coming from someone who’s currently struggling with their own issues.
  • Avoid getting pulled in by generalizations
    Savvy marketing uses sound bites to pull buyers in. Notice how many times you hear the words, “all natural, clinically proven, FDA cleared, and lose weight and keep it off.” They create a convincing veil of legitimacy to make a sale by counting on the fact that most people aren’t science experts. But you don’t have to be an expert if you understand what’s behind their tactics.
  • Be skeptical of any nutritional advice from friends or loved ones. People who care about us often believe they’re helping when they comment on something they see as wrong. They want to fix it. Weight gain is almost always viewed negatively and criticized without understanding the true cause. Weight loss is celebrated even if it happens unintentionally. Health advice given without proper training and experience shouldn’t be taken seriously, regardless of good intentions.

Ask yourself how you can be more flexible

The holidays can trigger individuals with rigid eating habits, picky eaters, and patients with eating disorders. Selecting foods only for perceived health benefits is limiting and promotes anxiety around eating. Rigidity should never justify restricting a meal when your thoughts tell you there are no good options. Food is all around us, but unless you’re financially unfortunate, there is no lack of nutritious food. Start with these ways to increase flexibility around foods from any source.

  •  Focus on healthy eating behavior, not the health of specific foods. The efficacy of nutrition is found in pairing many foods together. Health is in variety. Eating one type of food while forgoing many others only leads to vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
  • If a food is new to you, try a small sample. The best way to know if you will like an unfamiliar food is to use all your senses. Judging a food by looks won’t give you enough information. You won’t know what you could be missing out on.
  • Be curious about any anxiety related to uncertainties around food. Be mindful of any fear related to certain foods and why. Find a qualified practitioner if you suspect or have a history of an eating disorder.  

The power to be as you are

While practicing compassion and tuning out the noise of unsound advice, you will find the flexibility you need to be present during the holidays. You’ll no longer be lured in by the “new year, new you” dogma. Balancing a mix of self-care while going with the flow can keep you strong enough to push away the diet culture’s insistence that you need to fix yourself. You’ll gain the power and confidence to believe that you are worthy of being and looking just as you are.

How to Avoid Plugging Back into the Diet Culture this January

~ Green Apple Dietitian ~ 1 Comment

Here we go again! It’s that time of year when “being merry” fades into another tiresome weight loss resolution. The diet industry once more pushes the promise of losing weight and keeping it off. If you are healthy and are planning to go on another diet to shrink your body, here are some reasons you might want to reconsider.

The diet industry is a big part of the diet culture. It uses generalized assumptions to motivate us to criticize ourselves, or perhaps instill a negative body image that wasn’t there in the first place. Internalizing standards of thinness while wasting precious time achieving it can produce dire psychological consequences. Dieting is a risk factor for developing a serious eating disorder.

January is a prime time to lure folks back into unrealistic resolutions under the guise of health. People want to get healthy by reducing their food intake, which is short-lived as they slide back into old eating habits within a few weeks. The all-too-obvious clue is that weight loss programs aren’t sustainable. But what is sustainable? The availability of another recycled weight loss program that makes the same empty promises year after year. The emphasis is on changing behavior while focusing less on other factors that cause weight gain or the mental health consequences of chronic dieting.

How can you stop the tidal wave from dragging you back in? Start by deconstructing the ads you see. Look for baseless generalizations. Question the easy solutions to difficult problems. Here are four concepts to awaken your skepticism.

Body acceptance isn’t profitable, but failure is.

The body transformation industry needs a conduit to low self-esteem, or it won’t survive. It’ll lie by withholding the truth about how our bodies grow, develop, and mature. By tapping into the desire for self-improvement, it wants you to believe that every extra pound, wrinkle, and gray hair that deviates from the ideal standard is your fault. They sell hope while they coach you into a better life. They don’t want you to accept what you’re born with and will always convince you to keep paying despite the evidence that what they’re selling isn’t working.

Body acceptance means, in part, accepting, respecting, and caring for your body even though you don’t like certain aspects. Acceptance of yourself reduces the power of ideal standards and the desire to subscribe to them. Failure has no meaning in this perspective.

If you’re new to body acceptance here are three ways to begin moving toward it:

  1. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. This includes comparing your body size to the images of the before and after photos in weight loss ads. Instead, focus on how far you’ve come. Whether you survived or achieved it’s your story.
  2. Whenever a bad thought about your body surfaces, say (out loud) something nice about yourself. Choose words you can believe in.
  3. Acknowledge your worth and value in the body you are in right now.

Sure, it’s easier said than done, but how is not accepting yourself working so far?

Diet culture encourages you to demean yourself.

I’m too fat. I need to stop eating so much sugar. I’m getting old. How many times have phrases like these entered your mind? The diet industry is notorious for promoting ways to compare yourself to others. These generalizations can apply to almost anyone:

  • “Just eat the food and lose the weight!”
  • “Our program is clinically proven to help you lose weight.”
  • “Join millions of others who lost weight and kept it off.”
  • “I feel like my youth came back, it’s amazing!”
  • “Losing weight gave me the energy and the confidence I need!”

One popular diet company encourages food logging. Food records don’t work for everyone and recording every bite of food is unnatural. Obsessing over calories and portion sizes encourages unrealistic expectations and unhealthy categorization of certain foods. The potential danger of keeping a food diary is that it can worsen the symptoms of an eating disorder.

Separate yourself from the gimmick of weight loss.

Any company selling a product or service, whether it involves losing weight (or not), works toward a bottom line. The small ones want to earn profits, and the larger ones owe their shareholders. At what point are they focusing on their customer’s best interests?

People don’t start out believing they need to lose weight. At some point, we all develop beliefs based on the culture that surrounds us. We are taught that fat is bad. In developed countries and on the internet limiting exposure to thousands of weight loss ads is impossible. The diet industry seeks out the vulnerable and coerces them into the fantasy of weight loss for a better life. Their message tells them what nature gave them, isn’t good enough. Every ad has its niche, but all accomplish the same thing, to make viewers fear fat.

You are good enough now not in some future utopia.

There’s no guidebook to life. So don’t leave your life in the hands of conglomerates peddling unrealistic standards that convince you into useless misery. Protect yourself by knowing that most ideals about body size aren’t your own, they are learned. How you internalize them will affect how you treat yourself, and not in a positive way. When it comes down to it, you get to decide what comes into your life and what does not.

All of us are caught in a tug-of-war between the food industry selling convenience food and the diet industry telling us we’re fat. The fault is always placed entirely on consumers while they harp on self-control. Most of us are forced to work long hours to pay for the rising cost of food with less time to figure out how to feed ourselves.

As this post was written, the diet industry is scrambling to stay competitive in response to the heightened demand for GLP-1 injections. The price for weight loss skyrocketed. Even with insurance, patients on Wegovy can expect to pay $650 monthly for 28 doses, about $7800 a year. Not to mention the inconvenience of the weekly injections while placing sharps in an FDA-approved container and legally disposing of them. As with all medicines, there are risks, and once they are discontinued the weight returns.

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