Laugh your way to better health!
Category Archives: Interesting Tidbits
10 Amazing Ways To Stop Overeating
This is a great video by Quirkology about ways to “trick” yourself into eating less. It’s also a great excuse to go buy little red plates and decorative mirrors for your kitchen! It’s science, Honey, I have to go shopping.
Just click on the link below.
Christmas Cards Through The Years
2014 is my year to reach my goal! How about you?
Merry Christmas! And Happy Birthday, Jesus!
Glutton Study
I found this fascinating; and encouraging! For those of you who don’t want to click on the link, here’s a summary: get your tushie off the sofa and exercise! Even a little bit makes a huge difference, so go for a walk or race your kid to the mail box. Your body responds positively on a cellular level. I love it when science agrees with me 🙂
(Click below to read…)
Good News For Gluttons! – Read This Before You Start “The Season Of Stuffing”by sunnysleevez |
Jurkey and Junesgiving
One time per year; that’s it. Pecan pie, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and turkey are limited to one day out of three hundred and sixty five, but I say “NO MORE!” (Or should that be “Please, sir, I want some more.”?)
I’m starting a new holiday: June Turkey. (Jurkey, perhaps? Or Junesgiving?) Thanksgiving dinner is so good, we need to eat it more often, and eating it in the summer might be even better than November. Here are the benefits as I see it:
1. It never hurts to be thankful. The USofA would be a better place if we gave thanks more and ate less. Chew on this for a moment: If your family income is $10,000 a year, you are wealthier than 84 percent of the world. We’re struggling to eat healthier in the face of an overabundance of junk food; much of the world is struggling to eat enough in the face of an under-abundance of any food.
Maybe Gratitudiet should be a new diet craze: write a thank you note to a farmer, grocer, or God before you eat…EVERY time before you eat. The eventual hand cramps will limit our ability to use forks or spoons and slow down our caloric intake.
2. No more pressure to stuff yourself silly on Thanksgiving Day. You only have to wait 182.5 days for the next turkey instead of 364; ie the world will not end if you don’t eat another mountain of mashed potatoes.
It’s actually a great idea to fill a second plate, just make sure you save it to eat later (hours later, people, not minutes!). Sometimes knowing I get to repeat a great meal helps remove the temptation to go for seconds NOW.
3. Better veggies. Let’s face it, summer is the time of year when vegetables are growing, so it’s easier to find them fresh and cheap. Instead of green bean casserole, you can have fresh green beans. Peel and cook some turnips and mix them with the potatoes for some extra nutritious mashed tubers. Take the recipe for sweet potatoes and cut the “good stuff” (butter, sugar, marshmallows) in half, or try roasting them with olive oil and cinnamon. The more vegetables you add to your meal, and the closer to “naked” you eat them, the more you can fill your plate, fill your belly, and stay on track for a healthy lifestyle.
4. Practice, practice, practice. Ladies of my generation, if your mother, grandmother, or mother-in-law usually cooks the turkey, then you probably have no clue how that sucker gets from fridge to table. But your day is coming! Granted, by the time we’ve become the matriarchs, we’ll probably be able to click on a turkey on Amazon and it’ll be shipped directly to our oven fully cooked, but it’s still a good skill to have so you can brag to your grandchildren that you cooked your own bird back in the “good old days”.
I used to think it was really complicated, but one day I saw turkey on sale for 69 cents a pound and thought “It’s just a giant chicken! At 69 cents per pound, I’m willing to take a risk and try it.” I discovered it’s pretty easy. The hardest part is manhandling the slippery carcass. Rinsing the bird is like giving a one year old a bath in the sink, just less messy.
Here’s what you do: buy a turkey now while they’re on sale. If you’re an awful cook, buy two: you need the practice. Put it in the freezer. (I once forgot about a turkey in the back of my freezer for a year and it cooked up just fine. Make sure you grease the chain saw with olive oil before you slice it. Just kidding :)) Check the weather in June and pick the hottest, most humid day you can for your Junesgiving; you’re not going outside anyway, so you may as well make the house smell good!
There are two traditional Thanksgiving dishes that I haven’t found a healthy “fix” for: stuffing and pecan pie. I made a sweet potato-pecan pie last year that my husband loved because it wasn’t sickly sweet, but I can’t call it healthy. And stuffing is stale bread baked in turkey grease; if you remove the grease part, you’re left with bad croutons instead of turkey-belly-ambrosia. I think this calls for some experimentation! What if it were zucchini cubes baked in turkey grease?
That’s what’s so great about Jurkey! You can try new ways to eat great food without 17 relatives critiquing your stale bread and turkey grease! I’ll let you know how the zucchini stuffing turns out. I’m off to buy my June Turkey; it’s on sale today for sixty EIGHT cents a pound.
“I will praise God’s name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving.” Psalm 69:30
Halloween Battle Plan
Do you have your battle plan draw up yet? Halloween is almost upon us, and even if you don’t participate in the festivities, chances are good that your home will be awash in high fructose corn syrup and yellow dye #5. If you prepare your mind ahead of time, you can avoid that fistful of wrappers “ARGH! What have I done?!” moment.
Here are a few tactics you can try:
1. Buy candy only at the last minute. Who are you kidding? How many times have you purchased your Halloween candy at the end of September and had any left on the 31st? You end up buying a replacement bag on the 29th anyway, so skip the 15,000 calorie bag of temptation until you absolutely can’t avoid it. (40oz bag of assorted non-chocolate candy = approximately 15,000 calories = approximately 4.3 pounds of weight gain. How much in chocolate candy? I was too afraid to look!) The stores will not run out of candy. They will run out of bread and milk before they run out of candy. They may even have it on sale.
2. Donate extra candy to charity. Samaritan’s Purse runs Operation Christmas Child where volunteers pack shoe boxes with toys, hygiene items, clothes, and/or school supplies and give them away to poor children around the world, many of whom have never received a Christmas gift before. The collection week for this enterprise is, conveniently, the second week of November – ie, AFTER Halloween. If you don’t want your family to eat that entire bucket full of sweets, take the extra goodies to one of the drop off locations. They’ll be happy to portion the candy into little baggies to add to the shoeboxes. (They do not accept chocolate; it tends to melt on the way to the Equator.)
3. Hide under the bed. Or in a closet. For the month of October. Maybe December too.
4. Fill a bowl. Every time you run errands, fill one pocket with candy. Many offices have a bowl of candy on the front desk, but instead of taking a piece, leave a handful. Secret Agent 00Sweet!
5. Give a handful to the child of the unfriendly mom who made a snide comment about your bathrobe at the bus stop. Then repent, forgive, and…oh, come on, people, it’s a joke, lighten up! It would be funny, though….
5. Make yourself a rule. For example, you can eat a snack sized Twix only after you’ve done ten pushups and thirty sit-ups and jogged up and down the stairs twice. Whatever balances you out calorie-wise so that your net intake is zero.
6. Human Piñata. Fill all of your pockets with candy and go to a play date with your children, grandchildren, nieces/nephews. Be the first ones to leave and as you walk past the children on the way to the door, “spill” the candy. If you want to make a little show of it, put headphones in your ears and groove to the music; the extra shaking makes it more believable when Starbursts and Milk Duds leap from your jacket pocket. Just be careful not to leave the room until you’re positive that your pockets are empty; you don’t want any unsupervised children following you home.
7. Candy Filter Giveaway. We’ve done this a few years in a row; it works great. Trick or treating is generally 6-8pm, so we go out with our costumed kids and collect candy from 6-7pm. We let the boys chose a piece of candy to eat and send them out onto the front porch while my husband and I quickly separate the chocolate from the non-chocolate candy. The non-chocolate, with very few exceptions, goes into the bowl with the tracts to be given out to trick or treaters from 7-8pm. (Why tracts? Because if you come to my house and ask me to fill your bucket, I choose to give you something of value. Candy rots your teeth for a day, but Christ saves for eternity.) By 8pm the bowl is empty and we only have a little bit of chocolate to contend with using #5.
Prepare yourselves for battle, Dessert Snobs! The victory is yours!
“For the Lord takes delight in his people;
he crowns the humble with victory.
Let his faithful people rejoice in this honor
and sing for joy on their beds.”
Psalm 149:4-5 NIV
Attention all pale people! Here’s a new reason to eat salad! I thought I’d pass along a new reason to love lettuce.
Naked Veggies
Jenn had a great question this week and I thought I’d pull it out of the comments and post it just in case anyone else had a similar question and didn’t see it.
Jenn: “You said after you are done, don’t go get seconds, but I always thought you could eat as many veggies as you want. So could you go back for green beans but not the rice and curry?”
Great question, Jenn! And the answer is: it depends on your veggies.
If your veggies are naked (no butter, no dressing, no extra calories) and low calorie, then by all means, fill up! Green beans, zucchini, carrots, celery, lettuce, etc are all in this category. (Peas and corn, on the other hand, are high-ish in calories (for a veggie) and can add up fast.)
The problem is in the flavor, the “good” stuff, that we add to the veggies to make them taste better. An extra helping of green beans is no problem, but the extra butter and salt can be.
If you’re maintaining a healthy weight and going back for seconds on veggies works for you, then do it. But if you’re trying to form new habits, then breaking the habit of RE-filling your plate with anything, even veggies, is essential. You can always get the beans out for a snack later on! When I have the munchies at 10pm and I can reach for leftover stir fry, that’s a good thing. A better thing would be if I just went to bed at 10pm. “Oh, Honey…”
Sex, Soup, and 2 Fisted Eating 
