Food – The Texas Star

Diet Tip: Read the Label

If you want to lose weight one of the first things you need to do is to start reading the label. Not just at the grocery store but also at restaurants. Many restaurants now provide nutritional information for their dishes which will help you make smart choices about what you eat. If the restaurant doesn’t have something you can look at there, check their website, if they have one, before you go.

A perfect example of this can be found at Pei Wei Asian Diner. Since beginning my diet I have tended to gravitate towards salads on the assumptions that they will be healthier than anything else on a restaurant’s menu and at Pei Wei that means I get the Asian Chopped Chicken Salad. Only when I looked at Pei Wei’s nutritional information it turned out that the salad wasn’t quite as healthy as I’d assumed. Like all of Pei Wei’s dishes, a single bowl is considered two servings and each serving contains 410 calories with 28 grams of fat. That means that the Asian Chopped Chicken Salad contains more fat than any other dish at Pei Wei except for the Mandarin Kung Pao, Sesame Steak, and Orange Peel Steak. So much for the salad being the healthiest choice on the menu. Now looking at the nutrition chart you’ll see they also have a line for the salad without dressing which reveals that most of the Asian Chopped Chicken Salad’s fat and calories comes from its sesame-ginger vinaigrette dressing. So the salad with no dressing is actually pretty healthy. If you have to have dressing on your salad consider asking if they’ll substitute the lime vinaigrette, which has less fat, for the sesame-ginger dressing.

Another place I like to eat is Red Robin Gourmet Burgers where I frequently get the Southwest Grilled Chicken Salad. Now I knew it has some unhealthy things on it but still, its salad so how unhealthy can it be? A visit to the Red Robin website today told me. The Southwest Grilled Chicken Salad is 870 calories with 55 grams of fat, about the same as Pei Wei’s Asian Chopped Chicken Salad. Their Apple Harvest Chicken Salad is slightly better at 812 calories and only 44 grams of fat. Still too much fat. What about their Simply Grilled Chicken Salad? Surely that is healthy? Well, with 2 oz. of lite ranch dressing it’s only 670 calories and 32 grams of fat. That’s better but it is still my entire daily allowance for fat. Does this mean it’s impossible to eat healthy at Red Robin? Not at all, you just have to pay attention. For example you can get the Ensenada Chicken Platter and as long as you don’t use the salsa-ranch dipping sauce its only 535 calories and 18 grams of fat. Similarly you could get the Blackened Chicken Sandwich, asking for a whole grain bun, no mayo, also for 535 calories and 18 grams of fat. (Just don’t forget to also substitute a side salad, no dressing, or melon slices for the bottomless fries.)

Where available always look at a restaurant’s nutritional information. It will help you make smart choices in what you eat. An informed decision is always better than one based on assumptions that may or may not be correct.

The Non-Diet Diet

I’m posting this as a way of keeping myself honest. It’s easier to stick with a diet when other people know I’m cheating.

I need to lose weight. I need to lose a lot of weight and that means I have to start watching what I eat. I’m not interested in fad diets because they’re generally not how you’d want to eat for the rest of your life. You go on a fad diet, you lose the weight and you get off the diet and return to your old eating habits and put all the weight you’ve lost back on. Better just to cultivate healthy eating habits that you can maintain for the rest of your life.

Losing weight really isn’t rocket science. It comes down to a basic equation. If calories consumed are less than calories burned you will lose weight because your body will have to burn fat or muscle to make up the difference. This is why you can even lose weight on the Twinkie Diet. Ultimately it is the principle that all diets rely on even as they make claims about adjusting your metabolism to burn more fat or whatever.

To reduce my caloric intake I am looking to reduce the amount of fat, starches, and sugars that I consume. Note that I said reduce, not eliminate. Many of us consume way more of these things than we need. To reduce fat ideally I’m looking to consume less than 20g a day but if I can keep it under 30g I’ll be happy. Additionally no food that I eat should get more than a third of its calories from fat. Fried foods are right out. To reduce starches I’m staying away from rice, potatoes, corn, and bread. Reducing sugar means staying away from sweets and sugary drinks.

One day of the week I am allowed to cheat. It’s easier to resist breaking your diet if you can tell yourself you can have whatever you’re craving in a few days rather than never again. In my case that day will be Saturday. On Saturdays I frequently have at least one meal with friends and this way they won’t have to accommodate the way I eat so we can have pizza or whatever people want to have. I’ll also make exceptions for traditional holiday meals like Thanksgiving dinner.

I’m also trying to accommodate the way I prefer to eat. I like food to be convenient. If it’s not a special occasion I don’t want to spend a lot of time on preparation and clean up. I have a bad habit of eating when I’m bored which I’ll have to watch out for. I also have a tendency to eat for pleasure which I’ll also have to keep in check as a lot of those kinds of foods contain a lot of fat, sugar, or both.

I won’t be weighing myself every day because that tends to be discouraging as you never lose weight as fast as you’d like to. Instead I will be concentrating on how my clothes fit.

And that, I believe, covers the basics of my Non-Diet Diet.

The Texas Star

Sometimes I’m slow of mind.

I wish I’d known my father better. As a child it seemed like he was always busy with work. That’s often the way it is with people who own their own business. They start working shortly after they get out of bed and keep going until it’s time to turn in for the night. For the rest of us our bedrooms were a place to sleep but for Dad’s bedroom did double duty as an office. He had a desk and drafting table and a shelving unit for blueprints (and hiding Christmas presents). Probably had some filing cabinets in there too though I don’t remember them. When he built his and my mother’s dream home it included an office attached to his bedroom. It’s a claustrophobic little space with no windows and a fluorescent light on the ceiling. Most people would be upset if their boss put them in an office like that but he was the boss and that was the room he designed for himself. Sundays we’d go out to eat, either with Dad’s parents or Mom’s, and then back to their house for a visit before heading home. On the way home, though, we’d often drop by houses he was working on to see how they were doing or drive around residential streets looking at other houses and seeing if anything inspired him.

Food was one of his passions. He’d grown up on a farm where food was plentiful so I suppose it should have come as no surprise that he enjoyed eating, particularly salads. I understand in his younger days, before he started his own business, his co-workers used to joke that he had to bring his lunch up in the freight elevator because it was so big. Always a penny pincher, a result of growing up during the Great Depression, he was always on the lookout for good deals which usually translated into a preference for buffets. Though he wasn’t fat, hours spent waiting for him to finish eating undoubtedly contributed to my own weight problems. While he’d spend a lot of time at the salad bar I was more inclined to go for the desserts as most kids would be.

He liked to travel and so we tended to take trips in the summer when my brother and I were out of school. Dad would spend hours poring over the Mobil Travel Guide figuring out where he wanted to stop on our route. I can remember driving in the family station wagon, caravaning with my aunt, uncle, and cousin in theirs, to Key West and San Francisco and parts in between. There came a time when I was spending my summers at a camp and when they’d pick me up at the end of the session our route home would take us to an amusement park whether it was Six Flags Over Texas, Worlds of Fun, or someplace smaller like Silver Dollar City or Dogpatch USA. Once my brother and I had graduated and were on our own they were able to travel more often and were particularly interested in attending Elderhostel programs.

And that brings me to Dad’s other interest and the reason for this post. He was interested in self-publishing very much like this blog. Only there were no blogs and no Internet when he got bit by the self-publishing bug. Out in the garage sits a printing press and boxes of type to go with it. It’s not his original press but it’s much like it. Today I just type away, run spell checker, and push a button to publish. All very easy. He had to write his copy, set his type by hand, ink it, and run the individual pages through the press. And he did just that. As a member of the American Amateur Press Association he published a journal called The Texas Star. In the 90s he finally got with modern times. Sort of. He’d type his journal up on a manual typewriter and then give the copy to me. I’d then type it into PageStream on my Amiga and print it out for him. I don’t know if he considered it real printing or not but it got the job done.

So it is that it has finally penetrated my slow mind that there is only one name for this blog and that name is The Texas Star. I’ve got a feeling Dad would approve.