Surprise, surprise, no one was reading all that.

That’s okay. I’m breaking it up into a few parts that everyone will be able to digest slowly and properly (pun intended), and hopefully we can explore why healthier, cleaner, more chemical-free food choices are so important. It is critical that any person embarking on a clean eating journey have an understanding of why the journey is so vital to their success in losing weight.

Consider this the conclusion of the series.

Taking that one step further for those of us who DO indulge anyway, what about the fact that the average processed food contains more calories than it’s “real” counterpart? Remember my ranch dressing recipe that I shared? My recipe was 300 calories a cup. Kraft’s ranch dressing was easily 1400 calories. Let me tell you a secret I learned from working in restaurants. Foods that have to be reheated to be cooked are pumped with extra fat, because it helps maintain the flavor through the reheating process. Chemicals – like monosodium glutamate, found in processed foods with rich, thick, almost meaty tastes – help reheatables that have to be pumped with extra fat taste more pleasing to you. The convenience that the food offers may be a welcome benefit, but it comes at the cost of a massive excess in calories and unnecessary additives and preservatives.

So here we are, living in the new millennium. For breakfast, we’re eating cereal. For lunch, we give our kids lunchables. For dinner, we heat up a pot pie. (If you want a laugh, look at the ingredients list on the back of any of those.) For a drink, we have a capri sun or a coke. Instead of nutrient-filled calorie-light whole foods, we’re now indulging in calorie-heavy nutrient-light foods that’ve been mainly cooked FOR us. When we take in foods, our bodies are expecting a certain amount of nutrients and vitamins. If our body doesn’t get what it’s looking for fast enough, what happens? It compels you to eat more! Yes! Have you ever inhaled half a bag of wafers, only to be hungry again moments later? All that work your body put in to digest this vitamin-free food, only to find that there are no vitamins in it? Yes, it’s going to tell you to try again and eat something else.

The problem for many of us, is that because it’s so much easier and quicker to grab another processed food item instead of cooking.. we try to fix the problem with something that’d only make it worse. All the while scarfing down the calories, forgetting all the nutrients, and packing on the pounds while we’re at it. The convenience, the fact that very few of us know how some foods are cooked, let alone what the foods SHOULD consist of, has allowed us to eat much more with much less effort. Is that a bad thing? If you know how to moderate yourself, of course not. Many of us, apparently, don’t.

We have to scale back in a major way if we want to be healthy. If we truly seek to better our health and change our bodies for the better, we have to take control of the different elements that affect that, and that consists of both food and activity. You can burn what you eat, but if you aren’t eating the stuff that leaves you most vulnerable to overeating and malnutrition, then you don’t have to worry about burning it off. At all.

That being said …perhaps we should go back into history, during this February… and talk about what food used to look like for Black folks before processed food took hold?

The Problem With Processed Foods, Part IV: The Conclusion is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part I: What Is Processed Food?
2. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part III: Nutritional Deficiencies
3. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part II: The Change In Food Manufacturing

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Hip Raises is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Calf Raises

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Image: Whole Foods Market in the East Village of New York, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from shankbone's photostream

You know, I spent an entire week writing about shopping at grocery stores and how to get the most bang for your buck.. but it’d be wrong of me to fail to acknowledge that access to those kinds of stores is a privilege. I mean, thinking of all the options and opportunities that I have to get what my daughter and I need.. but it wasn’t always that way.

I can remember being very young – maybe around age 5 – and going to my Grandmother’s house every day as my Mother would go to work. I cling to these memories because she passed away when I was about 10. As my Mother was always working like a dog to care for me, Grandma pretty much raised me during those years.

Grandma, quite frankly, lived in the projects during the majority of the time she spent watching me. I hated fighting the other kids (and hell, let’s be real – my other cousins and Uncles) for the TV, so I was always outside playing or reading when I wasn’t in school. I mean, I was gone, man. Didn’t really love the other kids in the neighborhood – and Grandma knew that – but she wasn’t about to let me grow up “by myself,” so to speak. I guess after raising 7 kids of her own by herself (her husband, my Grandfather, passed away too soon), she knew what she was doing.

For me, my thing was always asking my Uncles for $0.50. Two quarters was all I needed to creep across the street, grab a bag of potato chips and a Big Red pop. That’s all I wanted. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, that served as lunch some days. It wasn’t every day that I had to enjoy the …deliciousness of a Dorito, because one of the houses in the projects was devoted to offering up free lunch.

Ahh, yes. Free lunch. The equivalent of a lunchable with a carton of milk. All the kids in the projects would come running at a quarter to noon because if you were late, you were out of luck! You got your two pieces of bread, your piece of bologna, your packet of mustard, a piece of cheese, two cookies and chocolate milk. I can remember free lunch days being the only days I got chocolate milk. Grandma just… could never keep stuff like that in the house. Everyone would always beat me to it.

I can also remember spending summertime, as a child, in Selma, AL with my great Grandmother. She, who was and is still anti-processed foods, gave me these fantastic memories of playing in her garden and watching her tomatoes, squash and lettuce every day. I even remember her neighbor, Mr. Sandman, who made his own vanilla ice cream – in my mind’s tongue, I can still taste it. Whenever Aunt Sissy (for anyone unfamiliar with proper Southern diction, that “Aunt” is actually pronounced “Ain’t“) didn’t get to me first, he was always stuffing me with something fresh from his stash. A summer of squash, fried green tomatoes, corn pancakes and other dope-yet-somehow-still-not-fattening delicacies was how I… “got by.”

A whole community of folks who were pretty much used to only having each other to “get by,” and used to being reduced to only what they could get access to in order to make it. I mean, keep it real – if you can’t afford to buy a $3 carton of ice cream, you can certainly grab some ice, salt, vanilla extract and milk from your fridge and make your own, right? My Aunt Sissy, who is looking forward to her 100th birthday today… is still tending to her garden and frying the hell out of some green tomatoes, no doubt.

Why the trip down memory lane? This:

In the Seattle area, a region with an average obesity rate of about 20 percent, only about 4 percent of shoppers who filled their carts at Whole Foods Market stores were obese, compared with nearly 40 percent of shoppers at lower-priced Albertsons stores.

That’s likely because people willing to pay $6 for a pound of radicchio are more able to afford healthy diets than people stocking up on $1.88 packs of pizza rolls to feed their kids, the study’s lead author suggested.

“If people wanted a diet to be cheap, they went to one supermarket,” said Adam Drewnowski, a University of Washington epidemiology professor who studies obesity and social class. “If they wanted their diet to be healthy, they went to another supermarket and spent more.”

The findings held true for the three highest-priced grocery stores in the Seattle region, including Whole Foods, where an average market basket of food cost between $370 and $420, and obesity rates went no higher than about 12 percent.

By contrast, at the area’s three lowest-priced stores, including Albertsons, the same basket of food cost between $225 and $280, and obesity rates went no lower than about 22 percent. – [found via "Skinny People Shop At Whole Foods"]

I keep thinking of my Grandma who, on her fixed income and the money she made from sitting for children, would’ve had quite the tough time trying to feed us all on the pricier diet. Conversely, my Aunt Sissy wouldn’t have cared. Her stuff was just as good as theirs… maybe even better since it grew by her hand and with her love.

But wait – there’s more:

His research team studied 2,001 shoppers in the Seattle area between December 2008 and March 2009, tracking their choice of supermarkets and comparing it with their education, income and obesity rates. They measured obesity by asking consumers to report their height and weight, then calculating body mass index. People with a BMI higher than 30 were identified as obese.

Drewnowski was quick to note that the study focused only on Seattle, which has an obesity rate much lower than the U.S. average of about 34 percent. He doesn’t claim that the same rates would bear out in other cities.

But, he said, it’s likely that similar patterns might be found elsewhere: Wealthier people who shopped at higher-end stores would be thinner, while poorer people who shopped at cheaper stores would be fatter.

It’s not a matter of availability, Drewnowski said. All of the stores in his study stocked a wide range of nutritious food, including plenty of fruits and vegetables.

Instead, he contends it’s because healthy, low-calorie foods cost more money and take more effort to prepare than processed, high-calorie foods. In a separate study two years ago, Drewnowski estimated that a calorie-dense diet cost $3.52 a day compared with $36.32 a day for a low-calorie diet.

I just.. I don’t know. Aside from the fact that I have a few questions about some of the numbers this study offers up, this is a bitter pill to swallow. And let’s face it. Considering the locations and resources that a vast majority of the Black community has to cope with, where does that leave us as a collective? Two thirds of us overweight? Dying of wholly preventable diseases?

I look at my Mother now. Successful by her own hand. A beneficiary of her very hard work who, after sticking with that same company for several decades, has access to opportunities and options that are incomparable to what her Mother – or her Mother’s Mother, for that matter.. regardless of whether or not she would’ve made use of them – would’ve had. I imagine my Grandma would be proud of her for having resources she did not, and hope that she was taking advantage of ‘em. My Aunt Sissy, though, would probably tell her to save her money and grow her own damn tomatoes, already.

At this point, all I have are questions. Is this the bitter reality of society and, mind you, Capitalism? The more money you have, the more access you have to better opportunities? Or is it a matter of not taking advantage of the community and resources you have and making it work? Or hell.. do we even know whether or not people know they have options and resources to use? If the disparaties are caused by money, how do we make it easier? If the problem is time, how do we make it quicker? If the issue is that it’s too daunting a task, how do we fix that?

‘Cause really, at this rate… without effort, movement, education and progress? We ain’t gon’ make it.

Skinny People Shop At Whole Foods: A Poor Kid’s Perspective is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Cleaning Up The Happy Meal: Do Toys Advertise Unhealthy Foods To Kids?
2. Why Your Kids (And Probably You Too) Don’t Like Veggies
3. Study: “There Are Good Foods And Bad Foods”

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 40 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: capitalism, family, grocery shopping, obesity, poverty, studies, tradition, university of washington, whole foods

4 slices of chicken breast

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp basil

1 tbsp oregano

1 tbsp parsley

1 tbsp tarragon

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp coriander

half a pinch of salt (and I mean half a pinch)

two plates

Mix your seasonings up in a separate bowl. Lay your pieces of chicken flat on a plate. Rub one side of your chicken with the olive oil first – only use half of it. Use your oily fingers, stick them in the seasoning, and rub the side of your chicken. Take the second plate, put it on top of the chicken, and flip both plates over so that the bare side of the chicken is now facing up. Rub the chicken with the olive oil, then seasonings just like before. Try to use all of your seasonings. Let it sit for an hour.

Take a skillet, spray it with olive oil, and start cooking your chicken.

In the picture, you’ll see wheat pasta with parmesan and literally a teaspoon of cream, fresh tomato slices and french bread baked and rubbed with the exact same seasoning combination as on the chicken.

It’s Italian night! Enjoy!

Basil Rubbed Chicken A La Erika is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Erika’s Thanksgiving Swindle
2. Weekend WTF: He EATS The Chicken In A Can!
3. Weekend WTF: Chicken In A Can?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: clean eating, pollotarian, Recipes

I don’t eat wheat grass and cattails all day, darn it. I like my edible hedonism to come in the form of nice gooey cheesy things. Like Cheddar Bay Biscuits.

I’ll talk about my philosophy on “treating” yourself or “cheating your diet” another day… ’cause all you want is the recipe, anyway!

• 1 cup flour
• 1 & 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 3/4th cup heavy cream
• 1/2 tsp garlic
• your choice: either 1/4-13rd cup of parmesan, or 1/3rd cup of sharp cheddar

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

2. Combine everything except the cheese in a medium bowl using a pastry cutter or a large fork. You don’t want to mix too thoroughly.  Add cheese, milk, and garlic. Mix by hand until combined, but don’t over mix. I take parsley and shake it over the top of the dough, and mix it in a little more. Just makes it more attractive to the eye, to me.

3. Drop approximately ¼-cup portions of the dough onto an ungreased cookie sheet using an ice cream scoop.

4. Bake for 15 to 17 minutes or until the tops of the biscuits begin to turn light brown.

5. When you take the biscuits out of the oven, you can also mmix a little olive oil with garlic powder and some dried parsley flakes. Use a brush to spread this garlic spread over the tops of all the biscuits.

I will tell you, the parmesan version is MUCH lighter on the calories, and thanks to the combination of flavors, you can get away with using less of it and still getting great flavor. I make these literally maybe every two months. I’m not one for “treating myself” with food anymore. I treat with shoes. Mmm… shoes.

Cheddar Bay Biscuit Recipe is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Have You Voted In The BGG2WL Recipe Contest Yet?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Recipes

credit: imallergic, flickr

Q: What clean eating/whole foods can you eat when you are having digestive issues? Every time you have some stomach issues, it’s recommended that you eat refined foods such as white rice, soda crackers, white bread, and to drink apple juice or other clear juices and electrolyte drinks like Gatorade. Now, those foods aren’t exactly clean eating and I find that even when I am barely eating these foods (because, well, I am sick and I can’t keep them down), I feel really bloated! What simple, whole foods can you suggest to eat and drink whenever someone is feeling sick?

A: I think we’ve all heard these – though, I’ve got to wonder about the white rice/white bread thing – and it feels like a challenge to move away from what we’ve always known to be “feel better” agents in the name of clean eating. In the same token, though, embracing clean eating takes a lot of “moving away from what we’ve always known.”

That being said, a cup of ginger tea and a grapefruit or an orange can work wonders for digestive issues, though I must admit that after embracing clean eating in its entirety, I don’t encounter digestive troubles. Everything goes where it’s supposed to go and does what it’s supposed to do now, so to speak. However, I do drink ginger tea when I have cramps – my cramps rival child birth, and I’ve actually birthed a child – and the relief is almost immediate. In fact, you can actually put a

Making ginger tea is pretty simple. If you don’t have fresh ginger around you, there’s nothing wrong with purchasing some pre-made tea bags at the store. If you can get your hands on a fresh piece of ginger, here are a few quick steps to help you make your own:

Clean your ginger, and slice it into very thin slices. Boil some water in a small pot, and drop in your slices. The more slices you add, the stronger the tea. I’d make it strong at first, then add water to dilute it as necessary. Cover your pot and give it about 15 minutes. Strain your tea and get all the slices out, and add your honey or fruit as necessary. Bada boom, bada bing.

Ginger is a big deal – from nausea to cramps to indigestion, it’s got you covered. It’s also really easy to work with, too. It might be hard to find in the stores – I had never seen actual ginger before I moved to South Florida – but you can always find the pre-made tea bags online.

What do you do for digestive issues, clean eaters? What did I leave out?

Q&A Wednesday: Clean Eating For Tummy Troubles? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Q&A Wednesday: Is Clean Eating An Eating Disorder?
2. Q&A Wednesday Clean Eating Style
3. Q&A Wednesday: What IS Clean Eating, Anyway?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: digestive issues, ginger, ginger tea, indigestion

Gotcha.

But why not try a different version? Something that may not be “better,” but still delicious in its own way?

I’ve had versions of potato salad that were so good, it pissed me off because I know that I’d not only never get my hands on that recipe… but I’d probably never be able to eat it again. That’s okay.. because I have something close to 8 different recipes for potato salad that are all awesome in their own right… and they allow me to enjoy both my fruits, veggies, nuts and – gasp! – potatoes.

5 medium sized potatoes

1/4 cup vinegar

1 cup fage 0% fat yogurt

3 tbsp red wine vinegar

2tsp rosemary

1/3 tsp sea salt

1/3 tsp black pepper

1/3 cup celery

1/4 cup red onion

1 whole granny smith apple

1 1/2 cups walnuts

1 cup blue cheese

1/3 cup raisins

Grab a large pot and boil some water. It’ll need to be enough to cover your potatoes. Take your potatoes and chop them up into chunks no larger than an inch on any side, and toss them into the pot. Let it boil for approximately 25 minutes.

While that’s going, chop your celery, red onion and apple into chunks. Crush your walnuts so that they’re in smaller pieces. Toss your chopped celery, red onion, apple, walnuts, raisins and blue cheese in a large bowl that should also be able to accommodate your potatoes as well as the rest of your ingredients.

When your potatoes are done cooking, they’ll be able to be speared with a fork, but not crumble at the touch. Pour them out of the water and toss them in the vinegar. Let them cool down (you can refridgerate them – I didn’t.) After they cool, pour them on top of the ingredients in the large bowl, and stir lightly to blend everything together.

In a side dish, blend your yogurt, red wine vinegar, pepper, salt and rosemary together quickly, and pour it all over the top of your potato salad in spoonfuls, stirring your salad inbetween spoonfuls. You might find that you need less dressing… or more. Totally up to you.

It’s that easy!

Erika’s Blue Cheese Walnut Potato Salad is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The $36 Salad: An Exercise In Elitism?
2. Weekend WTF: The Supa Dupa Fly Ho With Cheese

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: apples, blue cheese, celery, onion, potatoes, raisins, red onion, red wine vinegar, rosemary, vinegar, walnuts, yogurt

Surprise, surprise, no one was reading all that.

That’s okay. I’m breaking it up into a few parts that everyone will be able to digest slowly and properly (pun intended), and hopefully we can explore why healthier, cleaner, more chemical-free food choices are so important. It is critical that any person embarking on a clean eating journey have an understanding of why the journey is so vital to their success in losing weight.

Consider this part III of the series.

So, if the foods aren’t nutritionally deficient, why is this a problem?

Well, how much credit do you give food science? The rule is simply that the foods cannot be deficient in nutrients that science recognizes as valuable. What about what science hasn’t spotted yet? What about all these hyphenated chemicals that science hasn’t identified (or is prevented from identifying) as harmful to our health?

And before you call me a conspiracy theorist, consider this: it took science decades to recognize that trans-fats – once a massive part of margarine and other major foods – were hazardous to our health. Believe it or not, the government still allows trans-fats in foods, and actually allows food manufacturers to lie about how much trans-fats are in their foods. (More on that later.)

What else, in these foods, is doing us in? Science doesn’t know yet. And really, since most of our food science studies are funded by the very industry they affect… do you genuinely expect science to find out? I’m not telling you that they’d intentionally fudge numbers to present favorable results – trying to remain unbiased, here – but I am telling you it’s easy to divert funds elsewhere… as in, another study. Maybe even… a study attempting to debunk something claiming their products are harmful.

That’s not the conspiracy theorist in me. That’s just smart business on their part… regardless of what it does to the consumer. Keep the consumer far enough away from the research, and they’ll never know the downfall of buying my product. It just happens that way.

So since this is all cyclical, let’s go back to that availability of food thing. Now, all this food (food, mind you, that seeks to NOT be nutritionally deficient although it admits that it is) is available to our families. We, knowing what it’s like to have to worry about food not being available, begin to indulge. Factories – and factory jobs – are springing up because industries are blossoming. Longer work hours, both adults in the household are now working, and all this super convenient food at hand. We’re eating what we can, when we can, and eating a lot of it… since we’re enjoying the ability to eat at our discretion, not at the discretion of a ration.

Keep in mind, also, at this time… a new generation of children are being born under this new understanding of food. Family tradition might lend to certain dishes being made a certain way, but lots of dishes are being replaced by the magic elixir in the box. Some of us have that Grandma who insists on cooking everything from scratch. We tend to write her off as crazy or paranoid because “Times have changed” and “No one has time for all that cooking,” or maybe because “This is the [insert decade]s, Nana, we don’t live in the kitchen the way you used to!” Things that are all true, but come with consequences.

I asked you, dear reader, to keep in mind the point I made earlier about hyphenated chemical ingredients in our food, right? I hope you did. The interesting loophole in the FDA’s policy about imitation foods is that there’s very little limit to what can now be put INTO food. That’s an important point.

You know how, if you leave food sitting out, it will attract flies? Why? Because flies and rodents are attracted to the same things that our bodies are attracted to in food – nutrients. Ever notice that with ALL the food in a supermarket, there’s rarely any ants or bugs in the aisles, but you have to swat them away from the tomatoes or kiwi in the produce area? That’s not because every area in the grocery store – except the produce – is sprayed down. I can only offer theory as to why that is. For starters, the processed foods have to be processed to maintain shelf life. They have to be able to handle being transported to the facility. They have to be able to withstand sitting on a shelf until purchased. They have to be able to withstand sitting in your cabinets until you cook them.

Can you do that with your home made cooking? I doubt it.

Here’s another question: What do you think they’re putting in these processed foods to ward off insects and rodents?

Last question: Do you think it’s a good idea to ingest the same chemicals that are put in food… food that flies don’t even want? The same chemicals that prevent flies from desiring our food, are the same chemicals we’re ingesting when we eat this stuff anyway. How healthy can that be? Nothing in the world can debunk what feels like logic to me.

Stay tuned for the conclusion of “The Problem With Processed Food!”

The Problem With Processed Foods, Part III: Nutritional Deficiencies is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part I: What Is Processed Food?
2. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part IV: The Conclusion
3. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part II: The Change In Food Manufacturing

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

A: Planet Fitness is… a strange place, I think. I mean, I get it. It’s profiting off of making a place where those who are insecure about hitting the gym can come and be in peace, I guess. I spoke about my insecurities regarding being in the gym when I first joined. I even went to the gym at 11 at night – it was a 24-hour location – so that I could avoid all the people who would see me sweating and all gross and nasty slaving away on a treadmill. (Obviously, I was one of those self-loathing fat girls. I really don’t recommend that life for anyone, because no one should be afraid to be seen anywhere.)

Quoting the article:

I’ve felt that discrimination myself firsthand. I’m not what you would call a bodybuilder, mind you, or a regular Planet Fitness member, either. But I have been to number of different Planet Fitness locations in the past few years, mostly as an “emergency gym” when I’m traveling. (The fact that I even have an emergency gym should tell you something about my approach to working out.) In some respects, it’s not a bad place to lift weights—very clean and quiet, and set up in an unusual yellow and purple design scheme with painted signs reading, “Judgment-Free Zone.” No one will judge you, presumably, if you partake of the bowl of candy on the reception desk, or of the weekly Pizza Mondays promotion. (Yes, they serve pizza in the gym.)

[...]

I’m not the only one who’s noticed this assault on people who are actually trying to get a workout. Men’s Health called Planet Fitness “The Worst Gym In America,” and over the past few months, my comrades-in-(big)-arms have been speaking out against the chain on blogs, in bodybuilding forums, and at the websites of weightlifting and health-club magazines. In March, a group of lunk activists successfully banded together to have the Planet Fitness You Tube channel shut down by organizing a mass flagging of their commercials as offensive material. The chain was forced to start a new one, under a different name. And other gyms have started making their own commercials in response to Planet Fitness.

Realistically speaking, I think there’s something to Planet Fitness’ end game, here. The truth of the matter is that the big huge weight lifting dudes can appear to be aggressive, scary and kinda obnoxious with all the grunting. That is… if you’ve never lifted 300lbs to your shoulders, before. The “no grunting” rule is silly – YOU try to lift 300lbs to your neck and see if you don’t grunt a little bit. Hell, once upon a time, the BAR ALONE was giving me grief, shoot.

However, as with most people that we unnecessarily stereotype or assign hateful qualities to. they’re usually nowhere near as evil or bully-ish as we think they are. It’s usually just in our minds.

That being said, having “the workout environment that doesn’t make you feel like you’re working out” feels a little troublesome for me, but I’m merely going off of what’s in the article. Someone will have to tell me if there’s more to Planet Fitness than there is in the article, but not having heavy weights? Assumedly, because they’re intimidating?

Really?

I can understand not wanting to feel intimidated in an environment where people are already tacitly admitting that they’re there to work on their flaws, but you have to try to develop a thicker skin and understand that we’re all in different points in our journeys. While there may be lots of people there who are farther away from their goal than you, there will always be that ONE (at LEAST) person there who is closer than you, and you can’t let that intimidate you.

And think about where that intimidation factor comes from? Is it about anything legitimate? Or is it about “Oh, in comparison to THESE people, I’m huge!” So what? You’re there to develop fitness, not to “compare” yourself to the people around you. Besides, no one pays that monthly fee to gawk at other people and beat themselves up for not looking like them. If it’s like that, you can do that outside of the gym for free. Stay focused.

At any rate, a gym that serves its clients pizza (which is, assumedly NOT clean probably the crap from a franchise pizza joint) and doesn’t have trainers to assist you in using the equipment – again, the article might’ve been sensationalizing one experience so I don’t know if it’s a company policy or not – doesn’t sound like a place that wants to encourage your fitness. It sounds like a place that is cheap enough for you to choose to maintain your membership all the while encouraging you to not lose much weight.

Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t about encouraging people to work out at a place where the environment makes them feel shame. It IS, however, about encouraging people to consider where the shame comes from and if it’s even legitimate. It usually isn’t. Save the shame – if you must indulge in it – for outside of th gym. That space that you pay to share with those “lunkheads” and “fit bitches” is just as much yours as it is theirs. Claim it.

That being said, let’s talk about how to pick a gym that does work for you. To me, there are six key things to keep in mind when it comes to picking a gym.

• Hours: To me, the hours are important. Here’s a good example why: whenever I stay with my mother, I get a gym membership. I can go hit the gym during the hours my daughter is sleeping, not worry about her (because she’s with Mom), not have to worry about Mom complaining about watching her (because, technically, she’s not) and get everything done with minimal interference. No waiting on equipment, no gang of people to walk around, no common gym chit chat.
• Security: Security is ahuge issue for me because, well, I’d hit the gym at 11 and come home around 1. If it’s a 24-hr gym, what are the security measures like? My former gym had impeccable security. You had to swipe a card to get in. Cameras were trained on the parking lot AND all over every area of the gym (excluding the bathrooms.) The owners had the “control panel” for the cameras, where they could view each camera and keep tabs on what was happening, both in their office as well as at their house. You had “life-alert” style badges that you could wear in the gym where, if you press the button, it alerts the police to come to the gym. The cops passed by there every hour. A woman could feel safe there if she came after hours. A lot of thought went into that.Those are the kinds of things that are possible when it comes to gym security. If your gym is in a questionable area, ask about security measures during the dark hours. Things like security cameras and mandatory identification (like those key cards) matter. They serve as a deterrent.
• Size: Cute little boutique gyms are awesome and all… that is, until they become popular and cannot accommodate their membership anymore unless they accept that they’re being forced to expand. If you’ve only got an hour for lunch, and you go there during your lunch hour and see 6 cardio machines but 6 people are using them with another 4 people waiting in line? You might need to invest in a new gym.
• Equipment: You want your gym to have an extensive weights section, and a considerable amount of cardio machines. If you are a person who enjoys classes and variety, try to find a gym that has an all-inclusive membership that includes all the classes they offer, as well. Make sure that they can accommodate you.
• Location: Just like you can’t pass that fast food spot without feeling like you’ve got to go in, strategically position your gym along your ride to and/or from work.Also, consider whether or not its in a safe location. Nothing worse than leaving your work clothes in the car… only to come back and find that they’re gone. Just sayin’. Don’t do it to yourself.
• Contracts and Price: The flexibility that the contracts allow make a difference. There’s nothing worse than paying “Only $10 a month!!” …for 10 years… and you don’t even live near that gym any more.Consider what you’re getting from that gym, and whether or not it’s commensurate to what you’re paying for it. My gym – with all the high-fangled security, 24-hr surveillance AND more than enough gym equipment to accommodate us all – was $35/mo in a midwestern town.Gyms often offer up flexibility for those who only want a few months at a time. All you’ve got to do is ask for it. Don’t be afraid to negotiate, either. You’ll never know what opportunities will arise until you ask, and don’t be afraid to “walk out the door” if you think that’ll help you get the deal. But if you’re walking out disappointed, you CAN come back the next day and simply say “Well, I thought about it…”

So…. needless to say, there’s a lot to consider with the gym industry, and you should always remember that you have the money in this situation. If you’re going to be signing a contract you need to ensure that you’re getting all of your needs met, and for the best price possible. If you’re as cheap– er, frugal as I am, you’ll want to make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck. I know I do.

Did I leave anything out? What other tips do you have for finding the right gym for you?

Q&A Wednesday: On Planet Fitness & Picking The Perfect Gym is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Q&A Wednesday: Talking Fitness With Loved Ones
2. Q&A Wednesday: Share Your Experiences With Video Game Fitness!
3. The 80/20 Rule… Fitness Style

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 22 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: exercise, gym, workouts

The entire article is very long and I think the information included within is hard to digest all at once, so I figured that digesting it in pieces – no pun intended… okay, maybe a little – might make it easier to discuss.

The first part I want to talk about is the part that discusses the failure of diets:

The most immediate reason that diets don’t work over the long term is that they promote a loss of the internal signals for hunger and fullness that are necessary for normal eating. This was the finding of a classic study conducted by Janet Polivy and Peter Herman at the University of Toronto, published in 1999. In this experiment, a group of dieters and a group of nondieters were given the task of comparing ice cream flavors. Participants in each group were divided into three subgroups. Before getting the ice cream, the first subgroup was asked to drink two milkshakes, the second subgroup was asked to drink one milkshake, and the third subgroup wasn’t given any milkshakes. Next, the researchers offered the groups three flavors of ice cream and asked the participants to rate the flavors, eating as much ice cream as they desired.

The results revealed that the nondieters ate as you might expect: those who hadn’t consumed any milkshakes ate the most ice cream, those who’d consumed one milkshake ate less ice cream, and those who’d consumed two milkshakes ate the least. The dieters, by contrast, reacted in the opposite way. Those who were offered no milkshakes before the taste test ate small amounts of ice cream, those who drank one shake ate more ice cream, and those who’d consumed two milkshakes ate the most ice cream!

The researchers termed what had happened to the dieters “disinhibition,” which occurs as a result of a “diet-mentality.” The milkshake preload had a different effect on dieters than on nondieters. Nondieters, eating in an unrestrained and normal manner, tend to regulate their food consumption according to internal physical cues of hunger and satiety. Therefore, in the experiment, nondieters regulated the amount of ice cream they ate based on perceived fullness. What could be more obvious and natural?

The dieters, however, reacted in the opposite way — the more milkshakes they consumed, the more ice cream they ate. Why did they lose the capacity to regulate their intake? According to the researchers, this “counterregulation” occurs because a milkshake preload disinhibits a dieter’s usually inhibited or restrained eating, almost like a switch: “I’ve blown it anyway, so I might as well keep eating before I go back on my diet.” This is an almost irresistible incentive to go on eating well past physical fullness.

This passage made me think of the blog post I’d most recently written about deprivation:

If there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s this: the more I try to deny myself access to something, the more desirable that something becomes. Be it cupcakes, cookies, ice cream, brussel sprouts… whatever. If I deny myself access to it for long enough, the more desirable it becomes.I’m willing to bet I’m not the only person wired that way.

Depriving myself of something, in a sense, means that even though I “reeeeeeeeeally want” something, I’m still saying “no.” This isn’t just a simple “I’d like to have it.” This is an “OMG I WANT IT AND THIS ISNT FAIR DAMN IT!” craving. That kind of compulsion is strange and it means that something else may very well be behind the craving – like a sugar addiction, perhaps? – that needs to be addressed.

Isn’t this part of what makes dieting so silly, though? Not only do you not address the real issue (why the craving exists), and not only do you deprive yourself of something you want, in most cases you’re depriving yourself of lots of the things you need. Like, well, food. C’mon – grapefruit is awesome and all… but I couldn’t imagine eating only grapefruit for breakfast and lunch and then having “a sensible dinner.” Substitute grapefruit for an [insert brand name] shake and, well… the same thing applies.

Excerpted from A Few Thoughts on Cravings, Deprivation and Indulging | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

Does this study surprise you? Does it confuse you? Do you share these experiences? Thoughts?

Why Diets Make You Fat: Why Diets Fail is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Why “95% Of Dieters Fail”
2. “Why Even Resolute Dieters Often Fail”
3. Q&A Wednesday: I’m Not Gonna Make It Through Labor Day!

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dieting, why diets make you fat

I’m with Mark Bittman on the awesomeness of oatmeal, and especially with him on the notion of not overloading it with sugar, and, consequently, not ordering it from McDonald’s. But I wonder about this:

Others will argue that the McDonald’s version is more “convenient.” This is nonsense; in the time it takes to go into a McDonald’s, stand in line, order, wait, pay and leave, you could make oatmeal for four while taking your vitamins, brushing your teeth and half-unloading the dishwasher. (If you’re too busy to eat it before you leave the house, you could throw it in a container and microwave it at work. If you prefer so-called instant, flavored oatmeal, see this link, which will describe how to make your own).

If you don’t want to bother with the stove at all, you could put some rolled oats (instant not necessary) in a glass or bowl, along with a teeny pinch of salt, sugar or maple syrup or honey, maybe some dried fruit. Add milk and let stand for a minute (or 10). Eat. Eat while you’re walking around getting dressed. And then talk to me about convenience.

I often hear this complaint from people who cook directed at people who don’t. The notion basically holds that cooking isn’t as inconvenient as people make it out to be. I don’t know. I make my oatmeal in a pot at home–there’s something blasphemous about microwaving it–but I don’t own a dishwasher, and cleaning up actually is work. Moreover, I’m assuming people standing in that McDonald’s line can, text, tweet, e-mail or whatever while they wait.

The bigger thing here is understanding why people go to McDonald’s in the first place. I strongly suspect that the entire experience is comforting. In a day of constant work, pushes and pulls, you have this one clean place, which is the same everywhere, dispensing joyful shots of sugar and salt. That’s just me thinking about how I’ve eaten the past–and also how I eat when my brain is crowded with everything besides what I’m eating.

I think what Bittman urges in his writing is is consciousness. He wants people to think hard about what they’re eating. I strongly suspect that people go to McDonald’s for the exact opposite reason–to get unconscious. Understanding why that it is, goes beyond our food. It’s about how we live.

One of the reasons why I find the dialogue here, at BGG2WL, to be so valuable is because its an open and honest place for us to discuss our feelings about our own health, wellness and how our habits either contribute to or harm both. We are a collective of individuals actively concerned with our health, and we stand together to try to help one another by way of enlightenment. Take what you can use, leave aside what you cannot. We do that pretty well, here.

That being said… a very important element of emotional eating is brought up here, and that’s the issue of “someone else taking care of you.” That’s what he’s referring to, right? The idea that, in the middle of a long day, you can unwind and not worry about this one thing for this allotted time while these [trusted] people give you what you want exactly when you want it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with acknowledging and admitting to that.

Yet and still, you have to consider what you sacrifice when you make these kinds of decisions: you’re ultimately entrusting your health and well-being (and, ultimately, your weight) to someone else who does not care more about you than they do their profit margins.

I can vaguely remember reading a book and hearing about this kind of feeling – the feeling of liking someone catering to you – as a draw that restaurant companies use to their advantage. In fact, it was in reference to a… let’s just refer to it as a massive coffee (and pastry… and oatmeal?) chain that’s almost as prevalent as the golden arches. When asked why the chain was so successful, the response was “It’s about warm milk and a bottle; if I could put a nipple on it, I’d be a billionaire.”

I understand the feeling. It’s nice to “not have to do [something],” for once. It also serves the problem of leaving yourself open to having to deal with someone else’s standards in regards to what is acceptable to feed you when you ask for it. McDonalds’ fruit and maple oatmeal – which was actually sued in Vermont because there’s no maple in it – isn’t just fruit, cream and oats. It’s all kinds of stuff that isn’t, for our purposes here, clean:

Oatmeal
Whole grain rolled oats, brown sugar, food starch-modified, salt, natural flavor (plant source), barley malt extract, caramel color.

Diced Apples
Apples, calcium ascorbate (a blend of calcium and vitamin C to maintain freshness and color).

Cranberry Raisin Blend
Dried sweetened cranberries (sugar, cranberries), California raisins, golden raisins, sunflower oil, sulfur dioxide (preservative).

Light Cream
Milk, cream, sodium phosphate, datem, sodium stearoyl lactylate, sodium citrate, carrageenan. [source]

And looking at the details, the oatmeal in and of itself has almost as much sugar as the fruit blend, which should be the natural source of sugar in the list, anyway. At 32g of sugar total… 14g of it existing for very little reason… I question whether or not its worth it to take steps backwards from my goal just to “be taken care of for once.”

Food, no matter how much we try to emotionalize it – “it” being the preparation and intake of food – and no matter how much we try to simplify it, serves one primary purpose in our lives: nourishment. We can never forget that, because it goes right back to the last paragraph in that quote:

I think what Bittman urges in his writing is is consciousness. He wants people to think hard about what they’re eating. I strongly suspect that people go to McDonald’s for the exact opposite reason–to get unconscious. Understanding why that it is, goes beyond our food. It’s about how we live.

The bottom line, without question, is consciousness. Awareness is what grants you the ability to spot opportunities to correct your behavior. Awareness is what enlightens us to make better choices. Really, awareness is how you develop the ability to learn new behaviors and identify how the changes you’re making in your lifestyle are benefitting you. You become aware of the problem, you correct, you notice how your corrections change your life and you develop a new system that comes complete with the reward of a changed life and, ultimately, a changed body.

So yes, you do have to understand why that is – why you eat emotionally and desire to be taken care of in this way – and what you can do to fix that… but in the meantime, that oatmeal ain’t gon’ cut it.

The Comforting Side Of Food is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The Side-Effects of Obesity: “Overweight Is The New Norm”
2. Building A Home Workout Routine: The Side Bend
3. No Myths Here: Food Stamps, Food Deserts and Food Scarcity

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: clean eating, emotional eating, Fast Food, fast food restaurants, mark bittman, mcdonalds, mcdonalds oatmeal, oatmeal, the atlantic

People are lovin’ this thing! I mean, OD’ing on it! Seems like the only ones up in arms about it are deskchair critics like myself, thumping away on our laptops and writing angrily on our blogs. I have to admit. The thing is well received. So much so, that there was a slew of articles written about how “The Double Down Is Less Calories Than The Average Salad… So Let Us Eat Our Two Pieces Of Fried Chicken With Pork And Simulated Cheese In Between In Peace!”

Anyone else hear the record skip? I did.

It’s bull.

Those of us who are calorie counting… I get it. It’s only 540 calories… it’s tempting. But think about it – if you’re really calorie counting, then you know full well what you can get for 540 calories. You know that that’s over 10 cups of broccoli. (Not that you’d actually eat that, but it leads into a larger point.)

Since I brought up broccoli, can we address the primary issue, here? You’re spending 540 calories on two pieces of fried chicken, pork, and a slice of “processed cheese food.” A primary point of calorie counting is the fact that since you are working to limit your intake of food, you make the most out of each calorie you’re ingesting. FiveThirtyEight offers up a pretty good explanation of what I mean:

Here, the Double Down’s credentials are more impressive. Those 540 calories contain 145 milligrams of cholesterol (more than twice that of the Big Mac and about half of the USDA’s daily allowance) — along with 1,380 milligrams of sodium (the USDA recommends no more than 2,400 per day) and 32 grams of fat (65 will keep you slim, says the government). So, for getting only about one-quarter of the calories that you need in a day, you’re exhausting about half your budget of “bad stuff”. [source]

So, let’s keep it real. For those 540 calories, you’re getting nothing but salt, oil, fat, a pickle and a chemical conglomeration that comes out something similar to cheese.

Thus… we come to the REAL problem I have with the food discourse, right now. Why are we comparing a sandwich made of chicken and pork… to a salad? Certainly, we’re ignoring salads with fried toppings and creamy high fructose corn syrup dressings in this conversation… but a salad with actual nutrients to offer the eater is compared to a sandwich made of sadness and skinny chickens? It doesn’t matter where your calories come from as long as the total amount of calories is relatively small? A calorie is just a calorie anyway, right?

Let me make something clear. A calorie is not, in fact, just a calorie. It absolutely does matter whether your calories are coming from sugar, fat or protein. It matters because your body does very different things with each. And there are far too many people profiting off of continuing this perception that calories are just …calories.

Don’t believe me? Check this out:

“If all consumers exercised, did what they had to do, the problem of obesity wouldn’t exist.”

Know who dropped that little tidbit of nutritional science?

PepsiCo’s Chief Executive Officer, Indra Nooyi. Yep.

It’s the eternal passing of the buck. It’s not that “people are eating too much of my product.” It’s not even “people need to exercise moderation.” The message is “if you exercised, you wouldn’t be fat.” The message is also “there is no reason to stop buying my products, because the problem is only that you don’t exercise!” Understand what that means – it completely absolves the company of their share of responsibility in the obesity epidemic. It says the problem is the fact that you don’t move enough, as if that is the only explanation for why people become overweight. It simply isn’t.

The food industry is great at this – guilting the public into feeling bad about exercise (since, let’s face it – many simply do not) and using that guilt to avoid accepting some of the blame. I start to feel like a conspiracy theorist sometimes when I talk about the marketing and trickery used in their language… but at least I’m not making stuff up or pulling it out of thin air.

Because I know this is confusing to many, understanding why a calorie isn’t simply “a calorie,” I intend to spend this week talking about this very subject. So now, the next time some genius tells you “my double down is better than your salad,” you can let them know exactly what they can – and will – do with that double down.

1. Comprehending Calories: The Basics
2. Comprehending Calories: The Role of Carbs In Your Diet
3. Comprehending Calories: How To Properly Read A Nutrition Label

Thoughts? Let’s hear ‘em!

KFC’s Double Down Reminds Us: All Calories Are Not Created Equal is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Double Leg Lifts
2. Weekend WTF: Would YOU Eat Lab-Created Meat?
3. How Many Calories Are You Drinking?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: calorie counting, calories, dirty eating, double down, Fast Food, junk food, kfc, nutrition, pepsi, soda, soft drinks

Whether it’s Michelle Obama’s health initiatives or programs to make school lunches more healthy, there has been an increasing focus on America’s increasing waistline and obesity epidemic.

However, a suburban community is realizing that there are even more consequences to being overweight than simply high blood pressure and diabetes.

According to WREX in Rockford, Ill., a fire began in a one-story home just before 4:00 a.m. Monday. The two parents, Joe and Delores Herron, escaped, but when firefighters arrived, their daughter and two foster sons, ages 10 and 11, were still trapped inside.

Firefighters were able to get the 2 boys out through the window, but firefighters could not lift Jamaya

Investigators say she weighed more than 500 pounds. through.

Winnebago County Coroner Sue Fiduccia said, “That [the weight] did hamper the fire department and fire rescuers from taking her out a window. They did have to bring her out the door and in doing that, two firefighters we’re actually injured.”

By then, it was too late for Jamaya.

The daughter of a pastor and a singer at the church died at the scene. Fire Chief Derek Bergsten, stated:

“They gave 110 percent, did their best and sometimes we’re not able to save everyone, but we were able to get two individuals out of that structure alive.”

Investigators say Jamaya died from breathing smoke. There will be an autopsy later this week.

Fannie Barbee, a relative of the family, says, “She was very faithful in the church. Whenever I go over there, she was a really nice person.” [source]

Of course, I waited a few days to write about this just because I needed to think without the presence of anger or sadness…

..but then I realized that a little anger might be appropriate.

The video above is from the news clip regarding the events surrounding Jamaya’s passing. (If you’re a subscriber, you may want to visit this post on a computer to view it.)

Far be it for me to disrespect a grieving family, but we’re adults, here. Adults take situations and learn from them all the time. This needs to be one of those situations.

She was the daughter of a pastor and actively involved in her church. Obviously well-known.

All those people in her community… and no one was able to assist her before she reached the 300, 400 or 500lb mark? How does a teenager gain so much weight before they even reach adulthood?

Those of us who read this site know the importance of having a supportive environment full of people who care about us to help us reach our goals. What, in the world, is going on in a church when a girl can be “very faithful” yet still no one was as devoted to her as she was to them?

I mean, I get it – I’m the main one saying that we shouldn’t judge people who stand before us because we don’t know where they are on their journey to wellness. That’s my line. I know it by heart. But Jamaya passed away because no one bothered to stop her before it got to the point where her quality of life was so impacted that she couldn’t even be rushed to safety! This isn’t a young girl who we see outside walking and decide to judge from our cars. This is a girl who no one bothered to intervene with 200lbs ago. Major difference.

Now a while back, I wrote asking the readers of BGG2WL if there was anyone in their lives who was allowed to let them know their weight might be getting out of hand… and a lot of the messages I received publicly and privately implied that no one was allowed to tell them. No one was allowed to make them feel like something was wrong with them for gaining weight. And if you’re 140lbs at 5’8″, that makes sense. No one should be making you feel bad.

Having said that, those of us who are on the path to wellness and are experiencing positive results… You know how hard it was for you to obtain the knowledge you’ve developed. Be it from books, from your peers, even from this site. It is your responsibility to “be the change you wish to see” in your community and be a role model for better health. You don’t have to tell anyone “You’re getting fat” – in all my time, I’ve never used those words – but you can show people that good food doesn’t have to be full of sugar or fat or salt. You can be excited by your own loss and share with people how “easy” it’s been for you. (Maybe “simple” might be a better word.) You can let people know that your success has come from cooking more, being more active, and using less junk foods. People don’t want words, and they certainly don’t want insults. They want to see that something works, then they want to know what that something is. Do you think you’d be here reading MY words if you didn’t know that what I write about worked for me? I doubt it.

I question why no one in Jamaya’s community could be “that kind of person” for her. They had 200lbs worth of time to be there for her, and no one did it. I’ll even put it out there – what kind of emotional damage is a teenager going through that she’d rather continue harmful habits than try to get help? The same kind of emotional damage caused by parents who can get out of a house, yet leave their three children inside?

Sorry, I take that back. But I am a devoted parent and… let’s just say there better be a logical explanation for that part.

That is a beautiful girl lost because no one could save her. No one could get to her fast enough. In more ways than one. It is shameful that we have young girls in our community that need help and, apparently, aren’t getting it. It is shameful that they have no one to talk to about their insecurities and seek out some kind of guidance. It is a pain that we should  all feel that there are women who would rather endure the decreased quality of life than do what they need to do to be on a path to wellness.

Make no mistake about it – this isn’t about her dress size. This isn’t about her appearance, either – look at her, she’s a beautiful girl! This is about the fact that a girl, obviously devoted to her church community, was able to become so large that two individuals were harmed in an attempt to save her while she was impaired. That is a serious problem.

This should make us all look at ourselves. What do we do for those individuals who might be struggling? Do we talk to them, befriend them to see if they’re okay? Do we invite them over for dinner and, even though we might endure the “forget this – I want some real food!” comments, at least show them what healthier food looks like? Do we offer emotional support? Offer to go for a walk with them? Or are we just judging from afar, and make sure we can chip in on the casket?

I know that’s a bit sensationalist, but that’s real talk.What are we doing to stop this kind of silliness?

500lb Teen Unable To Be Rescued From Fire, and I Blame EVERYONE is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Teen Girls, Weight Loss Surgery, Body Image and Class Distinctions

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 30 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: obesity, teenage obesity

Oh, let’s get this one out of the way quickly, shall we?

(First, my twitter is @bgg2wl. Just putting that out there.)

Yes, your diet affects your man’s (your?) ability to develop and maintain an erection. How? In a few ways. But first, let’s start with anatomy.

According to WebMD, when a man is stimulated, the brain reacts by telling the blood vessels in the p-nis to relax, thereby allowing blood to flow into the p-nis. At this point, the p-nis uses this blood flow to develop and sustain erection.

Let’s focus on the blood flow issue.

Your diet affects your body’s ability to transport blood freely everywhere it needs to go. An excess of sodium (salt, monosodium glutamate in its various forms) in the diet compels the body to retain water (lovingly referred to as “bloating” among the ladies), “which exerts excess fluid pressure on blood vessel walls. Those walls react to said stress by thickening and narrowing, leaving less space for the fluid already cramped in the blood compartment, raising resistance and requiring higher pressure to move blood to the organs. [source]”

Think about high cholesterol. The unhealthy fats (think trans fat and some saturated fat sources) and excess hyperprocessed grains that affect your high- and low-density lipoproteins (HDL and LDL, respectively) also cause high blood pressure, thereby inhibiting the body’s ability to do its job.

If the heart can’t pump blood adequately to the p-nis, then it stifles a man’s ability to form an erection. It’s that simple.

So…put your man on that “Good Sex” diet and hand your man a stalk of broccoli so that y’all can effectively help you build a fit booty together, please?

And I say that with love.

Q&A Wednesday: What’s This About Erectile Dysfunction? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Q&A Wednesday: Oatmeal, Sweets & Workouts! Oh my!
2. Q&A Wednesday: How Do You Co-Habitate With Clean Eating?
3. Q&A Wednesday: How To Get Started With Yoga

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Yoga: Sun-Moon is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Yoga: Half Moon
2. Yoga: Riding The Wind
3. Yoga: Dancing Sun

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: exercises, workout at home, workout routine, Yoga

Currant-Glazed Chicken With Spinach is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Weekend WTF: He EATS The Chicken In A Can!
2. Weekend WTF: Chicken In A Can?
3. KFC Tests Sandwich That Uses… Chicken.. In Place Of Bread

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: chicken

Toast almonds in small skillet over medium heat, stirring frequently, until pale golden and fragrant, 2 to 4 minutes. Cool almonds to room temperature.

Process cooled almonds, tomatoes, basil, garlic, pepperoncini, 1 teaspoon salt, and red pepper flakes (if using) in food processor until smooth, about 1 minute. Scrape down sides of bowl with rubber spatula. With machine running, slowly drizzle in oil, about 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, bring 4 quarts water to boil in large pot. Add pasta and 1 tablespoon salt and cook until al dente. Reserve ½ cup cooking water; drain pasta and transfer back to cooking pot.

Add pesto and ½ cup Parmesan to cooked pasta, adjusting consistency with reserved pasta cooking water so that pesto coats pasta. Serve immediately, passing Parmesan separately. Serves 4-6, so don’t be afraid to cut it down!

Pasta With Tomato and Almond Pesto is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Q&A Wednesday: Does Enjoyable Whole Wheat Pasta Exist?
2. Do You Think Tomato Paste Is A Vegetable? Your Government Does!
3. Should A 2,500 Calorie Plate of Pasta Be Illegal?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: almonds, pasta, tomatoes, vegetarian

Surprise, surprise, no one was reading all that.

That’s okay. I’m breaking it up into a few parts that everyone will be able to digest slowly and properly (pun intended), and hopefully we can explore why healthier, cleaner, more chemical-free food choices are so important. It is critical that any person embarking on a clean eating journey have an understanding of why the journey is so vital to their success in losing weight.

Consider this part II of the series.

I’m a small business owner, so while I could interject right here about what it does to our local communities to not be able to buy our food locally and keep our money in our communities… I won’t. Just know that I could.

As I said, the larger food manufacturing grew, the more we were distanced from it’s production, and the less oversight we were granted to it’s creation and ingredients. Because (in my opinion) the government wanted to simply do what it could to ensure that the US had a consistent food supply, lots of leeway was given to big food factories to help ease them along their way in supplying our supermarkets with food – glorious food! Want an example? The food industry was able to get the FDA to change the law – imitation foods that weren’t nutritionally deficient in comparison to their whole counterparts didn’t have to be clearly marked as “imitation.” (You can skip the below quote if you like because I’ve quoted it before, but it’s valuable enough to read twice.)

The 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act imposed strict rules requiring that the word “imitation” appear on any food product that was, well, an imitation … [And] the food industry [argued over the word], strenuously for decades, and in 1973 it finally succeeded in getting the imitation rule tossed out, a little-notice but momentous step that helped speed America down the path of nutritionism.

… The American Heart Association, eager to get Americans off saturated fats and onto vegetable oils (including hydrogenated vegetable oils), was actively encouraging the food industry to “modify” various foods to get the saturated fats and cholesterol out of them, and in the early seventies the association urged that “any existing and regulatory barriers to the marketing of such foods be removed.”

And so they were when, in 1973, the FDA (not, note, the Congress that wrote the law) simply repealed the 1938 rule concerning imitation foods. … The revised imitation rule held that as long as an imitation product was not “nutritionally inferior” to the natural food it sought to impersonate—as long as it had the same quantities of recongized nutrients—the imitation could be marketed without using the dreaded “i” word. — In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

Families who survived the rationing and the famine were happy about this! No more struggling, breaking their backs to stretch food. They could eat like the rich folks! They could also gain weight like ‘em, too. Alas, the way men and women were employed in this era, they weren’t granted the same amount of time for leisurely activity like the rich. In other words, we were eating “like the rich,” but not burning the weight off like ‘em. This part of the story, can be evidenced by Katharine Flegel’s study of weight gain from the sixties to the present. This New Yorker article summarizes it briefly:

In the early nineteen-nineties, a researcher at the C.D.C. named Katherine Flegal was reviewing the results of the survey then under way when she came across figures that seemed incredible. According to the first National Health study, which was done in the early nineteen-sixties, 24.3 per cent of American adults were overweight—roughly defined as having a body-mass index greater than twenty-seven. (The metrics are slightly different for men and women; by the study’s definition, a woman who is five feet tall would count as overweight if she was more than a hundred and forty pounds, and a man who is six feet tall if he weighed more than two hundred and four pounds.) By the time of the second survey, conducted in the early nineteen-seventies, the proportion of overweight adults had increased by three-quarters of a per cent, to twenty-five per cent, and, by the third survey, in the late seventies, it had edged up to 25.4 per cent. The results that Flegal found so surprising came from the fourth survey. During the nineteen-eighties, the American gut, instead of expanding very gradually, had ballooned: 33.3 per cent of adults now qualified as overweight. Flegal began asking around at professional meetings. Had other researchers noticed a change in Americans’ waistlines? They had not. This left her feeling even more perplexed. She knew that errors could have sneaked into the data in a variety of ways, so she and her colleagues checked and rechecked the figures. There was no problem that they could identify. Finally, in 1994, they published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In just ten years, they showed, Americans had collectively gained more than a billion pounds. “If this was about tuberculosis, it would be called an epidemic,” another researcher wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.

Food was becoming way more accessible to us. I do want to go back to the point about the FDA’s law about imitation substances, though. It does a lot more to the food industry than you think it does. Take a loaf of bread, for example. Bread has maybe five ingredients in it – flour, water, sugar, salt, and yeast – but if you look on the label for the bread in your house right now? You see what – hyphenated chemicals. The food industry now has the ability to put anything in your food, so long as it is not deficient in the nutrients that science recognizes are valuable… in comparison to the food it imitates.  Remember this part. No, really – remember this part.

Stay tuned for part III, on the nutritional deficiencies of processed food!

The Problem With Processed Foods, Part II: The Change In Food Manufacturing is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part I: What Is Processed Food?
2. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part III: Nutritional Deficiencies
3. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part IV: The Conclusion

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Bring water, 1/2 teaspoon salt and saffron to taste to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add rice, return to a boil, cover and reduce the heat to maintain a gentle simmer. Cook until the water is absorbed and the rice is tender, 40 to 45 minutes. Fluff with a fork.

About 10 minutes before the rice is done, heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add squash and cook, stirring occasionally, until just tender (do not brown), 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in shrimp and cook, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes. Stir in mint and cook for 30 seconds. Stir in lemon juice; remove from heat. Season with the remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt and pepper. Serve over the rice.

Bean Soup with Winter Squash & Greens is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: brown rice, butter, carrots, crushed red pepper, garlic, lemon juice, mint, olive oil, pinto beans, seafood, shrimp, spinach, squash, tomato

I mean, I’m sayin’. I’m workin’ on it, but who regularly sticks their head in the lion’s mouth without expecting to be bitten every now and again?

For Mothers’ Day 2010, I rushed out and bought a vase, some red stones, lots of red ribbon and red and pink food coloring. My daughter picked out a bunch of silk flowers (my mother, who loves plants, hates floral arrangements because “They die. I’own need dyin’ stuff around me.”) and together, we made an awesome little floral arrangement.

Hidden inside, were three “cake pops,” made of red velvet cupcake and homemade cream cheese frosting.

Do they take a while? Yep. But when I tell you they were worth every single bite, were filling, and made everyone happy? Believe me.

So… my Mothers’ Day gift to you… is my red velvet cake pop recipe. Enjoy!

1 cup organic flour
1 cup sugar
1tbsp cocoa powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 egg
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 & 1/2tsp vinegar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1oz red food coloring
(if you’re cake ballin’, you’ll need some fondant/gum paste… you’ll have to follow the instructions on your package to determine how much you’ll need)

For the cream cheese frosting:

1 8oz pkg of cream cheese
1/3 cup of butter
2 cups confectioner’s sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Note: If you’re making the cake pops, you’ll need to visit a hobby store and pick up these. If you’re going to do it the way I did, you’ll also need these, this and these.

Pre-heat your oven on 350 degrees. Pull out all of your cream cheese frosting ingredients, and let them sit and warm up a bit. (I put them in a bowl on top of the oven to help melt a little more.)

Spray your cupcake pan with a little non-stick spray or oil.

Blend all of your wet ingredients in one bowl, except for your food coloring.

In a separate bowl, blend your dry ingredients.

Combine both bowls and your food coloring, blending out any lumps or air bubbles.

Pour in your cupcake mix, filling each one only about half way.

Shove it in the oven. Give it about 20 minutes before you check on ‘em – you should be able to stick a toothpick in the center of your cupcake and have no cupcake stick to it when you pull it out.

If you’re only making cupcakes, then you’re done. Those of you out there who are cake ballin’, we’ve got a long way to go.

Pull your cupcakes out of the oven, drop them out of the pan, and let them sit until they’re cool to the touch. You might even put them in the fridge for a while. You’ll be reusing this cupcake pan, so be sure to clean it out.

Take 6 of your cupcakes, and break them into crumbs. (The horror!)

At this time, mix up your cream cheese frosting. Take about a third of your frosting, and dump it into about half of your crumbs. Blend them up together until you have a really thick, but still somewhat smooth mix. Slowly add more crumbs to the mix. You want it to be malleable enough to stick together, but you don’t want it to be all cream cheese, either.

Take your lollipop sticks and your cupcake pan, and get them ready next to your crumb and cream cheese bowl.

Start ballin’! Grab yourself a handful of the mixture, and roll it into a doughy ball with your hands. Stick ‘em on top of your lollipop stick. Hopefully, yours will look a little better than this:

Sit it, stick-side-up, in the cupcake pan.

(This is a lot of work, ain’t it? Sheesh…)

After you make the ones you want, go ahead and sit them in the freezer.

Grab the rest of your cream cheese frosting, and drop a little food coloring in there. Mix in about two tablespoons of gum paste in your frosting, and give it about 10 minutes to sit. The paste will thicken the frosting to the point where it won’t be as runny.

Get your pops out of the freezer, and one by one, start coating ‘em up.

I used a spoon to help coat the very tops of my pops. Once fully coated, put it back in the cupcake pan.

Repeat until your stuff looks like this:

Once coated, stick ‘em back in the freezer, and let ‘em hang out for a few hours. Above, you’ll see my pops post-freezing.

Then, you can get creative with ‘em and use your wrapping, your ribbon, your whatever-you-want.

So… after all that work, you get a very rich, very yummy recipe that will possibly fill your belly and remind you why you shouldn’t eat sweets so often. All that sugar? I mean, of course you’re not going to eat the entire batch (or are you? Ha!) but baking is something you do out of love… not boredom. Love wouldn’t compel me to bake with this much effort that often! Ha! And aside from the fact that there IS a lot of sugar in the entire recipe, there’s a lot of real food – not chemicals – in it, as well. You will be full after one pop. Don’t be compelled to overindulge… or you will feel it later. I promise.

I love baking, but there are maybe four times a year when I do major baking – Homecoming, Mothers’ Day, my daughter’s birthday and the winter holiday season. My mother, who I’ve been putting through the nutritional ringer as of late, has deserved every hour of hard work I put into these and enjoyed every bite. I hope you enjoy, as well.

Many thanks to The Kitchn for the tip! And their pictures are WAY better than mine!

How I “Secretly” Enjoy Red Velvet Cake is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Weekend WTF: The Origin of The Kwanzaa Cake Revealed

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: desserts, recipe, sweets