Snarf

from jordanc6338.glogster.com

Snarf. This is the word my family uses to describe eating too fast: “You just snarfed that cake/lasagna/popcorn down.”
It has a slightly pejorative meaning. It means that you ate so fast that you really had no time to even taste the food.
Really, it’s the opposite of savouring.

We also use it just to mean fast, too. Example: “You just snarfed through that book!” (Something I do regularly.) However, typically, the savouring of the book gets a bit superficial as well.

Something I have learned on my weight loss journey so far (one of the things, I should say) is that savouring your food, taking time over it, is important. Because I don’t have free rein with food and usually cannot afford the points to go back for seconds, I need to enjoy what I’m eating now. I can’t rush through my meal and then go back for seconds for the “lekker honger.” “Lekker honger” is a Dutch phrase (another phrase my family uses regularly) which is difficult to translate literally, but basically means eating for the taste– you’re not hungry anymore, but you go back to eat more anyway, because it tastes so good.

Another thing I have learned (and am still learning) is eating quality over quantity. This is the complete antithesis of the snarfing and the lekker honger way of eating that I was used to do. Before I would just chose to eat a little more of something that might not even be the best  just to get a little more of the taste; now I try to eat small amounts of good/stronger-tasting things so that my taste buds are satiated sooner.

An example of this might be not eating the entire sickly sweet milk chocolate bar that I got free at a conference, but withstanding the temptation and waiting for a square or two of the sea salt dark chocolate I have at home.  The example kind of comes to mind since this battle occurred just yesterday. lol. (I love dark chocolate and quite dislike milk chocolate (too sweet)–but even so–it was only the fact that I was driving and couldn’t get my purse open that really stopped me. . . *wry grimace*: I gave the milk chocolate to my brother and the temptation is now gone. 🙂 )

 

 

A Bit of “Lite” Reading

I’ve been doing some reading in preparation for the coming school year (I teach a high school foods class), and ran across the following articles/blog posts, which have reconfirmed some of my own ideas about the connection between weight loss and the type of food I eat. (I am currently reading  Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, which mentions Gary Taubes, so I decided to look up his website.)

Here are links to the two articles I read as well as an excerpt from each which I found particularly thought-provoking.

Article #1: Taubes discusses the connection between high-carb diets and the amount of insulin in our systems, which he says, “puts fat in fat cells.” He suggests that perhaps changing the kind of carbs and not the amount is not enough for certain people to lose weight.

What I’m arguing is that for many of us who run to fat, cutting down on the refined carbs and starchy carbs (potatoes, for instance) and on the added sugars will help, but it probably won’t help enough. The dose of carb-restriction won’t be sufficient to deal with the problem. We may stay fat. We may even get fatter. A blanket recommendation to eat fruits and vegetables and whole grains, as Oz prescribes and now Weight Watchers and the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, ignores this aspect of human variability completely. It assumes that people who are predisposed to fatten can tolerate the same foods and benefit from the same very mild dose of carb-restriction that the naturally lean can.

http://www.garytaubes.com/2011/03/dose-of-intervention-land-of-dr-oz/

 

Article # 2 In this post, he talks about looking at why we lose weight on different diets, positing that perhaps the real reason we lose is because we are re-configuring/re-setting the way our bodies metabolize fat, connecting this change to the total amount of carbohydrates we eat.

So here’s the lesson, the moral of this story: before we assume that low-carbohydrate diets are just one tool in the dietary arsenal against overweight and obesity, and before we assume that everyone is different and that some of us lose weight and keep it off because we eat less fat (and more carbohydrates) and some because we cut carbs (and so eat maybe more fat),  we should make an effort to understand the concept of controlling variables and look to see which variables are really changing and by how much. Because it’s quite possible that the only meaningful way to lose fat is to change the regulation of the fat tissue, and the science of fat metabolism strongly implies that the best way to do that, if not the only meaningful way, is by reducing the amount of carbohydrates consumed and/or improving the quality of those carbs we do consume. http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/calories-fat-or-carbohydrates/

 

What I find interesting about Taubes’ arguments is that he doesn’t automatically point the finger at carbohydrates as “the bad guy” in the body, but rather looks at how the body metabolizes different kinds of foods (protein, carbohydrates, fat) and puts forward his ideas based on that. He doesn’t just jump on the “miracle food/miracle diet” bandwagon.

When I started on Weight Watchers, I cut wheat and refined sugar (white and brown)  almost completely out of my diet, subbing in other carbohydrates, such as rice and fruit and vegies, and using agave nectar and stevia in place of other sweeteners. It made a big difference, as far as I could tell, and I lost quite a bit of weight over the next 2 months.  I found that protein was important for me to have in each meal: it kept me full, longer, particularly if I ate it at breakfast. (I talked about this is in my  blog post The Cave Woman Diet.)

Lately I have not been as consistent in getting a lot of protein in every meal, have been eating more carbs in general (more fruit, which equals more sugar, albeit natural sugar), and I haven’t been losing as much weight the last few weeks. Hmm. Could there be a connection?

It could simply be that I’ve gotten to a small plateau in my weight loss. I’ve lost quite a bit and haven’t been at this weight in a while so my body may be reconfiguring its rate of metabolism, etc. But I wonder if I consciously reduce extra carbs and up the protein, if there will be a difference.

I am definitely going to do some more reading on this subject, do a minor experiment in my own diet, and see how things go.