Everything in life has plusses and minuses.  Go to a club on Saturday night and have a great time, but have a hangover Sunday morning.  Buy a beautiful fast car with leather seats, pay more in insurance.  Go shopping often and spend most of your paycheck, then have nothing put aside for a rainy day or retirement.

Food is no different.  Yes, there are a lot of perfectly yummy things you can eat that are healthy and won’t make you overweight.  But there are far more things that taste super-fly fabulous, but have no nutritional value and are guaranteed to make you fat.  Does this mean you should never eat them?  No, but you should follow what somebody once told Dr. Hekier is the 80/20 rule.  Eat 80% of your meals for nutrition, 20% for taste.  You simply can’t have the most yummilicious thing to eat for every meal if your version of yummy is chocolate covered peanut butter or fried anything.  You can have treat-ish stuff 20% of the time, or 1 in every five meals, but the other 4 out of 5 meals need to be nutritional and waaayyyy inside the box.  And even that 20% of the time, you shouldn’t go super-ultra wild.  Is pizza your downfall?  Then let your 20% be a slice or two of pizza, but not half the pie (and preferably not a double decker, stuffed crust, meat lovers delight either). 

Learn how to eat to live, not live to eat.  To quote Remy’s father from the Disney movie “Ratatouille”, “Food is Fuel”.  I’m not saying to eat tasteless bland crap 3-4 times per day, but do look at each meal as an exercise in taking in the nutrition you need – the protein, the calories- and not as a chance to find the most fabulously delicious thing on the menu.  Look at a menu trying to find the lowest fat, lowest calorie source of protein on there, not the double battered chicken fried steak with gravy.  If you change your fundamental approach to food, then dieting and maintaining your weight becomes a habit, not something you have to constantly fret over and work on.

Is it any wonder why New Year’s Eve brings a flood of resolutions to lose weight and why gyms experience their highest volume of new clients in January?

While I can’t steer anybody away from making poor choices over the holidays, I can help with a tip for the leftovers.  If you’re anything like me, you hate to throw food away.  It’ll sit in little plastic containers in the fridge getting whittled away a few bites at a time.  While it feels profoundly wasteful, THROW THE LEFTOVERS AWAY.  I know, I know- I hate to do it, too.  But most of the leftovers of this season- candy, pie, broccoli rice casserole – are high fat, high sugar, or high calorie and not what you should be eating more than a little smidgin of anyway.  Eating a few tablespoons of each at Thanksgiving is one thing, eating it for the whole next week is quite another.

One of my patients (who FYI lost weight over the Thanksgiving holiday) told me today that she had baked a chocolate pie for her sister to eat for the holiday.  Sadly her sister is ill and had to be hospitalized earlier that week and stayed in the hospital over the holiday.  Since she couldn’t give it to the intended recipient, she threw it in the trash.  Yes, a freshly baked, never touched, chocolate pie.  She tried to give it away, but since nobody wanted it she said, “..I’ve worked too hard to lose this weight and I like it too much to risk ruining it for a pie!”

To say I’m proud of her goes without saying

The sweet signora did not speak any English.  I spoke only  rudimentary Italian.  So the first night I was there we had a kind of stunted conversation with my dictionary open on the table.  While she cooked her meal, she tried to explain to me why she stayed so healthy and vigorous at her advanced age.  She said the key was ”mangiare tutti i colori dell’arcobaleno”.  Being as confused as you might be at that sentence, I started looking up some of the words.  I knew mangiare = eat, tutti = all, i colori = the colors, dell = of the ….. but what was arcobaleno? 

The definition of arocobaleno in my Italian/English dictionary was rainbow.   When I looked at quizically she said, “si, si! Come i fiori!” Like flowers?!? I thought.  My impression was of either a demented woman who habitually chewed on daisies in the front yard or a serious failure of communication.

But colors and flowers were what she meant.  She actually did eat some flowers (violets), but her main point was that one’s plate should be varied in color, not just one bland sea of white or beige.  I’ve thought of this again recently when discussing food choices with Band patients.  A lot of the things that are good for you are found in the colors of the rainbow: red tomatoes and strawberries, purple eggplant and onions, blueberries with all their anti-oxidants, yellow squash and all the many wonderful variations of green that you can find in the vegetable section of the grocery store.

What do you not see in a rainbow?  White and taupe.  White like rice, pasta, Wonder Bread.  Taupe like gravy, french fries and chips. 

Try this: try not eating white or taupe foods for a week.  You may substitute brown rice or whole grain bread, but don’t eat anything that is pure white or dingy taupe.  No coffee creamer, no whole milk, no mashed potatoes with butter.  No oils – except for olive (which is good for you in moderation) these are all dingy brownish taupe.  Do see how many different colors you can get on your plate.  With these simple rules, you’ll avoid lots of empty calories of high-glycemic carbs and fat and you’ll load up on taste, texture, anti-oxidants and vitamins (not to mention fiber). 

Who knows?  With all the money you save on white/taupe fast food, you might be able to take a trip to Italy someday.