Non-hunger reasons we eat

• tiredness
• boredom
• anxiety
• restlessness
• pleasure-seeking desires
• habit
• social setting that encourages eating
• location
• eating customs
• "last supper" mentality
• rebound from food restriction

    Which of these have you experienced recently? 

Hunger and Satiety: When to eat and when to wait

     Many of us have grown out of touch with knowing when to eat. Babies tend to be good at crying for milk when they are hungry and stopping to eat when they are satisfied. As we get older, other influences encourage us to eat. We are coaxed to finish our dinners, offered sweets as rewards, and we start using pleasurable foods to calm our nerves. It takes a lot of relearning to get back to that "baby" state of eating when hungry and stopping when full.

    One way to reteach ourselves this skill is with the use of a hunger and satiety scale. With this scale, we can rate our current state and have prespecified points that correspond to "time to eat" and "time to stop eating." We will use a 10 point scale. Let's put "starving" at 1 and "uncomfortably full" at 10. If you at a 1, you have waited too long and allowed yourself to be too hungry. If you are at a 10, you might have stomach discomfort or pressure in your abdomen from the quantity of food eaten. At the midpoint, near 5-6, is where you are neither hungry or full. You could eat without making yourself uncomfortable, and you could wait longer and not be too hungry. Around 3 on this scale is where you feel hungry and ready to eat, but not ravenously hungry. This is a good time to seek out something to eat and begin a meal. The meal can continue until you reach about an 8 on the scale. At this point you are comfortably full, but not overstuffed. Based on this scale, we want to remain in the range of 3-8. This prevents us from getting too hungry or uncomfortably overfull. 

    At first, knowing when to eat out of hunger and stop when full will be a conscious effort. It will take effort to remember to check in with your inner hunger and satiety cues. You might sometimes forget, and then later notice that you allowed yourself to get ravenously hungry or uncomfortably full. With practice, you will remember more frequently to notice your inner hunger and satiety signals to help you remain in the 3-8 range. And with even more practice, it will become second nature. 

How to improve your eating with mindfulness practices

• When you are deciding what to eat, take into account how you will feel after the meal—what you think will help you stay satiated, how much you need to eat to be satisfied but not overfull, and what will be comfortable in your stomach without GI discomfort.
• Sit down while you eat.
• Don’t multitask while you eat. Don’t watch TV or videos, don’t read.
• Focus your attention on the eating experience. Note the different sensations: the aroma, what the food looks like, the taste, the texture, the mouthfeel, the temperature.
• Consciously slow down your eating. Put your utensil down between bites. Allow yourself to taste every bite.
• Once you are finished your portion of food, give yourself 15 minutes to allow the satiety signals to get to your brain. Then you can make a decision if and what you should eat next.
• When you have an urge to eat, notice if it is driven by hunger, boredom, stress, loneliness, habit, socializing, or another cause.

How much juice is too much?

 

Last week I had a discussion with a patient about juice intake. She has diabetes and was concerned that her blood sugars have recently been higher than her goal range. Together we were trying to figure out if there were any food-related culprits contributing to her higher numbers. She was familiar with carbohydrate foods, and her portions were appropriate for her needs. Additionally, her meals contained a variety of nutrients, and she rounded out her plate with vegetables and protein. We then moved on to discuss drinks. She assured me she was not drinking too much juice, and that she is mostly drinking water. As a dietitian, I like to get the details, so I asked a few questions to get clarity of how much of each beverage she was drinking. She described that she was drinking 1 cup of unsweetened black coffee in the morning before breakfast, water throughout the day, and one cup of orange juice with each meal.

This reminded me that everyone has different definitions of “not too much.” From her understanding, one cup of juice with each meal was “not too much.” Perhaps, to her, “too much” might be drinking juice in between meals in addition to at meals.

What is too much for one person could be different than what is too much for another person. For this patient, with her blood sugar goals, 3 cups of juice would make her blood sugars too high—she was not able to get her numbers in goal range with her current juice intake. She decided to do an experiment and skip the juice for a few days and see what her numbers looked like. I am happy to report that with this change, she was able to get her numbers in her goal range!

Reminder to self: always define your terms

A yogurt break

                I decided to take a break from making yogurt for a little while. I had two batches in a row that spoiled really quickly, and I was frustrated. I suspect that this was due to bad starter. I had been dividing a quart container of yogurt of yogurt into 10 little bags that I kept in the freezer and took one out at a time to use as starter. I wonder if the starters all got contaminated when I was dividing the container of yogurt into the little bags. Eventually, when I was ready to get back into making yogurt, I threw out the leftover starter I had in the freezer and used fresh yogurt. I just made my second batch with this new starter, and so far it has been lasting long enough to eat it all! I like making it, and I definitely take pride in being able to make foods on my own that take a bit more effort. Good to be back in the routine.

Trying to make yogurt with an Instant Pot

                Apparently there is always more to learn about yogurt. I was recently gifted an exciting kitchen gadget—an instant pot with a yogurt setting! I was so excited to try it, and on that weekend I made a batch of yogurt. Because I had always depended on a thermometer to make yogurt, I tested the temperature of the milk and yogurt throughout the process. After heating the milk, the temperature was only 165⁰ F. I tried to rerun that setting, but it would not heat much further, so I used the regular slow cook function to get the milk to 180⁰ F. Then, I cooled the milk as I usually do, added the starter, and set the machine to the fermenting setting for 14 hours. As soon as it beeped to let me know it was finished, I checked the temperature, and it was below 100⁰ F. The texture was much thinner than I get when the yogurt ferments at 155⁰ F. The yogurt still tasted good, but it was not quite the texture I was hoping for. 

                I contacted the Instant Pot customer support, and their answers were not particularly helpful. I am still unclear if they intended the Instant Pot to ferment yogurt at below 100⁰ F or if the pot does not work as it is supposed to. At one point they offered to send me a new heating element, but I want to see if I can get it to work well enough with the one I have first. I am going to try to ferment it for 18 hours to see if fermenting it for longer can make up for the lower temperature and still result in a thick yogurt.

Instant Pot yogurt

Sugar Cookies

                Last year I thought it would be a good idea to make sugar cookies without using margarine. And while that is a great idea on many levels, I decided to make the “real deal” this year. It was well worth it—a taste of nostalgia. I have been using this recipe to make sugar cookies for as long as I can remember baking. Sometimes I would color the dough and make fancy patterns, but in more recent years I made colorful glaze. A tall pile of sugar cookies in all the colors of the rainbow was so exciting. And the best part of it for me was sharing them with my friends and family. The joy of good food is multiplied when I can share it and let others enjoy it too.

                This year, I did not buy food coloring, but I did get margarine especially for this recipe. I had not bought margarine in two years probably. The recipe needs only two sticks, and the other two sticks are now in the freezer. (Maybe for next year?!?) I did have colored nonpareils, and the cookies did have the riot of color that I wanted, despite not using colored glaze.

                But who could I share the cookies with? I did figure that part also. I met a fried for lunch, so she got some, and I also sent a package with cookies to my family. Those cookies are still in transit, but I am looking forward to hearing that they received the coolies.

                I am so glad I made “real” sugar cookies this year. It’s a once a year thing for me. Food is not just to sustain us physically. We attach all sorts of values and emotions to food, and those are important to recognize and understand too.

colorful nonpareils

lots of cookies