Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong. I’ve gone and done it now, haven’t I? I’ve made a statement that can be disagreed with or even proven wrong! Well, I believe it, or rather, I don’t believe in it. I don’t think that dieting is healthy or good in any way. Don’t worry. I’ll explain.

Dieting vs. Diet

Dieting is eating or drinking according to a regulated system that is often designed to reduce or suppress the appetite. Dieting often if not usually involves restricting oneself from certain foods or from sugars, and it almost always involves limiting your calorie intake, sometimes severely.

Diet, on the other hand simply refers to the usual or regular food and drink one ingests.

Weight Loss Via Deprivation

I don’t argue that you can’t lose weight by dieting. On the contrary, I’m sure that you can. In fact, I’ve done it myself! The problem is that when you restrict your intake for a period of time to lose weight, you will usually find that when you stop that restriction, you gain back all the weight that you lost.

Whether or not your lose weight and keep it off with dieting, though, is not my concern. The problem I have with dieting is with the actual practice of dieting, not with the result.

Our bodies were designed to need certain nutrients, some of which we enjoy and some we do not enjoy so much. If you take away foods or food groups from your diet, you’re going to be either depriving yourself of something you need or something you want. Neither is good!

If you take away a nutrient you need through dieting, your body is going to suffer. I don’t know how our bodies copes with the loss, but however it’s done, it’s not healthy. Taking away all carbohydrates is not healthy, Dr. Atkins! Carbs serve a purpose!

If you take away a nutrient you want through dieting, your morale is going to suffer. Depressing yourself through your eating habits is not going to serve you well in the long run! By depriving yourself of what you enjoy you’re only more likely to quit your diet and splurge once you do quit. I don’t think that even having one Cheat Day now and then is enough to counteract the affect this has on your emotions and mental state.

Alternatively: Alter Your Diet

The alternative to dieting is to alter one’s diet. It is a more long-term action that is based on determining what is good for your body, mind, and soul when it comes to food. Choose to make good eating habits. The idea is rather than making strict guidelines as to what you can and can’t eat, and limiting your intake to lose weight – rather than that – try to eat a healthy, well-rounded diet. Then to lose weight, eat slightly less of what you would normally and increase your activity levels!

Good Habits

You have to decide what you can consistently live with, and what you can live without. You already know which things are healthy and good for you, and which things aren’t. Most good eating habits can please both your mind and your body, but you’ve got to think for yourself, not simply follow a prescription laid out by someone else. That being said, I will go through a few recommendations.

• Eat that salad that is offered to you before your meal. If you can stand salad, try to make a habit of going ahead and taking it. It’s good for you, you’ll eat a little less of your meal because you’re not as ravenous, and you might even feel a little better about that pizza you eat afterwards.
• Don’t skip dessert if you have a sweet tooth! I would go nuts watching everyone eat dessert without me. I need my sweets! So guess what – I don’t skip dessert! No, it’s not good for me to intake too much fat, but it’s good for my soul to have that dessert. I try to take small portions if I’m trying to lose weight, but I don’t skip it.
• Cut down on soda. Of all the nasty things we put in our bodies, I think soda is among the worst. There is almost no redeeming quality to it. But we do so love it, right? If you can stand it, try cutting down on the soda. Limit yourself to a few less sodas per week, to start. I would recommend drinking water instead, but if you are like me, you hate water. You may need to change to something a little easier to handle, like sweet tea (which has sugar and some of the caffeine you’re missing from that soda!), juice, or milk.
• Water yourself as much as you can handle. Believe it or not, water really does help fill you up. So if the health aspect isn’t enough, maybe you can force yourself to drink it because it will help you eat less. It’s hard to have too much water. Take in as much as you can, even if it’s an extra glass per week.

Zen Habits posted on their blog recently about The Simple Way to Stick to a Meal Plan, and there are some really good hints in there, such as eating real, whole foods that you love. I find the author’s 1800-cal meal plan a little extreme, and more towards the “dieting” end than simply altering your diet, but I would still highly recommend the read.

Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

Are any of you cooks? I’m a fairly amateur cook, myself. I enjoy it, and I succeed pretty regularly, but I’m not very skilled. I’ve learned how to follow recipes and sometimes improvise a little, but that’s all.

I’ve been wondering recently about peppers and the differences between them. I keep two main peppers in the kitchen: ground black pepper and ground red pepper. Black pepper is common and used in many recipes. I use one of them in almost anything I make. If I am cooking from a recipe, I usually use black pepper because that is what is called for. On the other hand, ground red pepper is, I think, misunderstood. From what I can tell, the red pepper in my kitchen is not paprika or cayenne because those are sold labeled as what they are. What I have is a generic Ground Red Pepper.

Sometimes I wonder how other people use them. Do you use them interchangeably, or does each have a specific flavoring purpose? Do you ever use both of them in the same recipe? I find the red pepper a bit easier to handle if slightly more spicy, and I frequently use it for flavor on my sandwiches or in Ramen. For my hubby, I use a dash of black pepper so that the spice doesn’t kill him. If I’m just going for a tiny bit of spice and extra flavor, I have a hard time choosing between them because to me, in small quantities, they taste very similar. In larger quantities, however, I can tell a difference even though I can’t define it. It’s kind of like the black pepper is more harsh, maybe more acidic, and the red is a bit smoother.

I really want to know how other cooks treat peppers! Do you use these peppers at all? How do you use them or choose between them? Do you have any advice for me, an amateur?

I read last week that the FDA may change nutritional labeling on our favorite foods. They want Americans to be confronted with calories and fat content right on the front of the packaging of the junk we eat almost every day. More, they want to change serving sizes.

At first, I thought the idea of changing serving sizes was a pretty darn bad one. The serving sizes on our nutritional labels currently are supposed to reflect suggested rations, but typically we eat double or triple whatever that suggestion happens to be. I thought that by changing the serving sizes to reflect what we actually eat, the FDA would be giving in and encouraging us to gorge ourselves. But apparently the intentions are much better than I initially thought.

What they want to do is give us accurate information about what we’re putting in our bodies. I figured out on my own, as a pre-teen, that the packages of Ramen I was eating were actually intended to be two servings, and so I doubled the calories on the package to see what I was really eating. But I was a pretty smart kid, and you probably were too. Unfortunately, some other people might not realize that they may be taking in a whole day’s worth of calories with a couple slices of pizza and a “serving” of chips and soda.

“Consider the humble chip: most potato or corn chip bags today show a one-ounce serving size, containing a tolerable 150 calories, or thereabouts. But only the most disciplined snacker will stop at an ounce. For some brands, like Tostitos Hint of Lime, that can be just six chips.” –NY Times

My personal suggestion is that we stop eating pre-made, pre-packaged foods and get back to cooking our own. Cooking our food makes for way tastier, way healthier meals. Even my favorite (and expensive) canned soups are lacking something in flavor if I don’t add my own spices to them, but how much better were my mom’s homemade soups? And how much healthier…? I will probably always use cans of tomato paste in my homemade spaghetti sauce; I just don’t have time to start with fresh tomatoes to make enough sauce for a meal! So I suppose we can’t get away from it entirely. That being said, I think the more accurate-to-life serving size information is a good idea. The next best thing would be publishing a book: Reading Nutrition Labels for Dummies.

What do you think? Is it a good idea or not? Do you think the FDA can actually enforce it and make companies change their packaging?

Got leftover ham from Christmas? Here’s a good way to use it up. I found this recipe online and modified it with my hubby to make a tasty dinner for three, and we used up all of our leftover ham! It could have easily been doubled – possibly even tripled – using the same glass casserole pan. There was plenty of leftover space in our pan when it was cooked.

Ingredients:

• One can of Cream of Celery Soup
• ½ cup milk
• 4 small red potatoes, sliced
• About ½ large onion, diced
• 3 cups cooked ham, diced
• Your choice of spices
• ½ to 1 cups grated cheese

Directions

1. Preheat your oven to 375ºF. In a small sauce pan, combine the soup and milk over low heat, blending until smooth. Then, pour into a casserole dish and add spices. I used about ¼ tsp. black pepper and a bit of garlic powder, which are simple staples that I can use in most recipes.

2. Layer the potato slices on top of the soup and milk mixture. Try to spread them out evenly across the casserole dish. On top of that, layer your onions and the pre-cooked ham.

3. Make sure to cover your casserole dish with tin foil before putting it in the oven to cook for about one hour. Then, take it out, uncover it, and sprinkle your cheese on top. We used a combination of parmesan and cheddar. Return to the oven uncovered to cook for an additional 20 minutes. (If you cover it back up, the water from the cheese can’t evaporate, and it makes it a weird consistency.)

4. I would suggest serving with green beans or another green veggie. (I’d say peas, but I don’t like those!!) As I said, it should serve 2-3 people, but could easily be doubled or tripled. It tastes a bit like scalloped potatoes with ham.

My husband and I made this recently, as a sort of experiment, and it turned out quite tasty! It’s a simple recipe for an inexpensive salmon dinner and a good way to use up leftovers. I wanted to document what we did so that we can recreate it, and maybe you’d like to try, too!

Ingredients

1. 2-3 (we used 3) salmon filets, skinless and boneless
2. 3 small red potatoes
3. about 1 cup of steamed rice
4. 3 tbsp cornstarch
5. 2 tbsp olive oil or canola oil
6. 1 can of sliced mushrooms
7. your choice of spices
8. optional: about 1/2 green bell pepper, diced
9. optional: about 1/4 cup onion, diced

Directions

1. Prepare your ingredients. Thaw the fish, chop the vegetables. I would suggest readying a non-stick frying pan with some canola oil in the bottom. In the canola oil, you will scatter the seasoning you wish to use on your fish. I sprinkled garlic powder and onion powder, because I was too lazy to use the real thing. This actually worked well and soaked in to the fish nicely. I’d recommend including a bit of savory and/or thyme, dill weed, black pepper, and seasoned salt. Regular salt should work if no seasoned salt is available.

2. Rinse your thawed salmon and pat dry with paper towel. Then, over a plate to catch the excess, pat on an extremely light coat of cornstarch. I read about this on instructables.com and have found it to work very well keeping the moisture in and keeping the desired spices on the fish. Without it, you’ll find you end up with a very dry piece of fish! Make sure to shake off the excess cornstarch, as it is meant to be just a thin coating. Place in your pan, on top of the spices.

3. On the top of your filets, add a light coating of oil with a brush or a spoon, and then spice the top. I did not use all of the same spices on the top, but I did add a coating of the big flavors: the seasoned salt, black pepper, and garlic powder.

4. Cook on medium heat for several minutes. You will know it’s ready to turn when the pink fish has turned white about a third of the way through, and the bottom of the fish will be a sort of crisp golden brown. Simply flip and wait. Remove from heat after the bottom is the desired color. The fish may be either cooked white all the way through, or with a thin line of pink through the middle.

5. We started the potatoes cut into pieces and microwaved to get them soft. Then, we chopped them up into more bite-sized pieces and added them to pan that the salmon was cooked in. By this time, the salmon should be set aside. You will want to add another teaspoon-or-so of oil to the pan. Add any vegetables that need to cook, such as your green peppers or onions. Add your mushrooms, including about half the water in the can. Black pepper and seasoned salt may be added to taste.

6. Lastly, add your pre-cooked rice. We used leftover rice we had in the fridge. Continue to stir and fry until the vegetables are softened and the rice is slightly browned, then remove from heat.

7. Serve the salmon on a bed of the rice and veggie stir fry, and enjoy! (Good for 2 large or 4 small servings)

Why should you drink coffee?

Because it’s made out of a bean, not a nut. Duh.

No, but seriously. I love coffee. I love it even though it give me terrible heart burn, and I have to take Prilosec OTC every day to counter it. It makes me tall! And strong! And smart!

No, but seriously. (What?) I find coffee to be a great social-interaction-maker. I don’t smoke, so when I worked at an office I couldn’t take smoke breaks outside with other people. However, I could go to the back and pour myself some coffee, and interact with the other coffee drinkers. We have something in common right off the bat! When I worked at the hospital on some days, I could go downstairs to the little snack shop, order coffee, and chat with the other customers about how much cream and sugar we use though we know we shouldn’t. And how expensive the coffee is, and how much better it is to buy it here than at Starbucks, where the prices are so outrageous.

Speaking of which, I think I’m in the minority here. I am a coffee lover who actually likes Starbucks. I don’t go there often because I’m a cheapskate, but if I get a gift card…I’m all over it! I love it. The atmosphere, the flavored coffees, the friendly staff. But that’s okay. Not everyone can be as classy as I am!

To sum it up: you should drink coffee because “it does a body good” – or is that milk? Hmm.

What do you think? Love it? Hate it? Drinking it since you were under the age of five, like me?