Probably the second most common topic of discussion for singers (after singing) is diet. Diet, dieting, how to lose weight, how to keep weight off are all a source of constant concern for many—and also a continuous source of income for the publishers of endless diet books and purveyors of dietary aids. In the next few paragraphs, I would like to share some of my thoughts about dieting, nutrition, and weight. These are simply ideas for you to consider with no specific recommendations. If there is a leitmotif in what follows, it is this: eat mindfully and take control of your dietary intake. You are what you eat.
Diet: What Is It?
First, the word “diet”—a word that has lost its meaning, a word that has been appropriated by the weight-loss industry. When did “diet” become a verb? The word “diet” was, in its original meaning, not a verb that means “to change what you eat in order to lose weight” but rather a noun that simply refers to what you normally eat, such as “a koala’s diet consists of eucalyptus leaves.” We are all “on a diet,” whether it is a diet of plants, meat, or McDonald’s Happy Meals—our diet is, simply, what we eat!
Why am I fussing over this semantic point? Because it is more than that. We must first of all realize that our diet is not a two-week stint of eating grapefruits or cabbage soup in order to lose weight. Our diet is what we eat, day in and day out. It is therefore self-evident that the purpose of any diet is not weight loss but good nutrition and good health. Weight adjustment (whether up or down) to our optimal and healthy weight should follow naturally, once we start eating in a healthy way. More than weight, our bodies, inside and out, will function optimally. After all, good skin, good hair, all of the surface appearances that society spends time and money on—these ultimately reflect the internal health of the entire body. Once we adjust our daily diet to reflect our nutritional requirements, it follows that our bodies will thrive and assume the shape that they are meant to have. Our diet should not be an arbitrary sentence imposed by the latest guru, but simply a response to our bodies’ physiologic needs.
Can you ever “cheat”? Of course. Just always be mindful of what you eat, even when “cheating.” What gets us into trouble is not the occasional indulgence, but rather what we habitually put into our mouths, day after day, year after year.
There are a few principles that should govern our nutritional intake. First, consider the purpose of food: it provides energy, usually represented as calories, to the internal combustion engine of our bodies. Some foods, such as fats, have more calories per ounce. Others, such as leafy vegetables, have less. But the primary purpose of eating is to give the body calories that it can use (I am ignoring for now vitamins, enzymes, and other nutrients). When you put that piece of food into your body, the body will extract the calories, and then do one of only two things with it: burn it up or store it. And that’s it! It is a zero-sum game. Food cannot disappear into the ether: whatever calories you eat will either be burned up or stored.
Once you accept this simple equation, you will immediately see that in order to not gain weight, you can do only one of two things: eat less or burn up more. And, ideally, you should do both. So, a simple diet might have you decrease your caloric intake (smaller, less calorie-rich meals) and increase your exercise level. And that is the first principle of a healthy diet: eat less and burn up more.
This is so crucial, it bears repeating: when designing your diet (from a caloric content aspect) you should not eat any more calories than you are going to use up. “Using up” refers of course not only to exercise, but to the constant metabolic needs of every cell in your body. There is an absolute minimum caloric requirement—the basal metabolic rate, the caloric burn that occurs when you are asleep, at complete rest. Any additional physical and mental activity increases the caloric needs. Every calorie you eat in excess of what you need gets stored.
Once you look at things in this black-and-white way, you will immediately start to give those high-calorie indulgences a second thought. OK, so if it takes 40 minutes on the treadmill to burn 400 calories, and 3 minutes to impulsively wolf down a Starbucks pastry (420 calories) . . . well, you get the message.
Carbs or Fat?
Here is another important truth to consider: any carbohydrate you don’t burn up is ultimately stored as fat. Your fat cells gain or lose weight, depending on how many excess calories you have ingested. Carbs, then, is just another word for fat! By contrast, the fats you eat are actually a good source of energy and may not be the primary source of your body fat. Everything in moderation, of course.
When You’re Hungry
Let’s now talk about hunger and satiety. Hunger is primarily triggered by low blood glucose. A second, less important, determinant of satiety is gastric distention, the sensation of something in our stomachs. Using this second fact, some diet manuals suggest that you drink water or a distending shake before your meal, to trick your stomach into thinking it is full.
But blood glucose is the real master of hunger and satiety. When we eat food, glucose (sugar) is absorbed into the blood stream. As our blood glucose rises, we start to feel satisfied, and our hunger abates. Triggered by a rising blood glucose, the pancreas liberates insulin into the circulation. The insulin, in turn, clears the sugar out of the blood stream. Whatever is not used is then stored, mostly as fat.
Depending on the food we eat, it takes a certain amount of time for our blood sugar to rise and our brains to signal “enough food.” By eating too fast, we can easily overshoot this point and present to our bodies too much sugar. Since the job of insulin is to clear sugar from the blood, the more we eat and the more our blood sugar rises, the more insulin is liberated. If this happens often enough, the insulin-secreting cells of the pancreas can finally wear out, and diabetes results.
The take-home here is twofold. First, eat slowly! By increasing your blood sugar more slowly, you are less likely to overshoot the point of satiety and less likely to eat beyond your caloric needs. And secondly, avoid foods that break down into sugar too rapidly—the idea, again, is to more gradually increase your blood sugar. This is where complex (slower-to-break-down) carbohydrates are recommended over simple (quick-to-absorb) carbs. Candy, cakes, white sugar, fruit juices, and some fruits such as green grapes provide quickly absorbed simple sugars that will rapidly raise your blood glucose and will cause your pancreas to over-secrete insulin.
Eat Your Breakfast
An easy way to change your diet is to minimize simple carbs for breakfast. If your breakfast is a bagel, a Danish, or a bowl of sugared cereal, you are not only giving your pancreas a hard kick, but also are likely to produce so much insulin that it will over-clear the blood of sugar. The result? Low blood sugar, and you are starving by 11:00 a.m.
A better breakfast is one that is either low in carbs (such as an egg-white omelet, or yogurt with nuts and dried fruit) or that contains complex carbs (cooked, rather than instant, oatmeal). If you eat a low-carb breakfast, you will find, to your surprise, that you are not so hungry, even by lunchtime. This is because your pancreas didn’t release an excessive amount of insulin and your blood sugar didn’t drop precipitously in response.
Well, how about a no-carb breakfast? You could just have that egg-white omelet by itself, but most of us prefer some balance of nutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrates), and the idea is to find the diet you can live with. I read a few years ago that the “All-American breakfast” of bacon and eggs was the invention of an ad man who worked for the pork growers’ industry, back in the 1930s. Similarly, the sugared corn and wheat cereals that, according to TV ads, let your kids excel at school, are the promotional deception of the food industry, whose purpose is . . . guess what? To sell more food. Therefore, look for a balance—protein, some fat and, if carbs, then complex, slow-to-break-down carbs.
Perils of the Restaurant
Even if you have achieved a healthy diet at home, restaurants present a challenge. A common theme in dieting circles is “portion control.” Most visitors to the U.S. are amazed at the Brobdingnagian size of our restaurant servings: salad bowls the size of a bird bath, an order of ribs that represents some poor animal’s entire thoracic cage . . . enough to feed an entire village in the third world. While restaurants may feel they need to serve these huge amounts of food (in order to justify their prices), you are not obligated to eat it: after all, it is their portion, not yours!
One suggestion is to ask for a second, smaller plate, and use their plate as a platter, and you take from it onto your smaller plate. After two or three helpings, you will be full and there will still be enough left to take home or share. Using this technique not only slows down the pace of the meal, but also addresses the important psychological need to “clear your plate.” You will clear your plate—just not theirs.
Since it is a fact of modern life that most of us eat meals at restaurants and cafeterias, whether at work or while traveling, here are some other practical tips:
1. Don’t start with bread and rolls (simple carbs).
2. Don’t order the whole meal (appetizer, main course, dessert) in the beginning, when you are hungry. If time permits, try ordering an appetizer and then the main course. If eating alone, take half of the main course home.
3. Consider how restaurants pace your meal—you immediately have your drink order taken (alcohol is a simple carb, and their markup on wine is about 500 percent), and then you need to wait and wait for your food order. The idea is to sell you a second drink, since you finished the first, eating up all the bread and waiting for your main course. Solution? You might ask the waiter to take your food order with the drink order to bring both together, or find some other way to assume control of the pace and sequence of the dinner.
4. Consciously monitor your level of “fullness.” Restaurant noise, alcohol, and animated conversation all conspire against this. Try to stop before you are completely stuffed and then notice how, over the next 10 minutes, you will go from not quite full to pleasantly full. This is your blood glucose catching up and telling your brain that you are done.
5. Dessert? Maybe skip dessert. Or try waiting a bit, until the glucose from your main course can signal your brain whether you are full or not. Consider sharing a dessert with the others. Or, if it’s a nice evening, how about a coffee only and then going for a walk to the ice cream parlor a few blocks away? Chances are, you will feel full by then and not crave the dessert.
A Few Words about Snacking
Snacking is good. You may have heard that our bodies were originally designed to forage, to eat whenever we come across anything edible—i.e., small but frequent increments of food throughout the day, rather than three square meals. Ideally, we should never be really hungry and never be really full. This keeps our pancreas and our insulin humming along at a healthy rate rather than in stressful lurches, and it also lets our caloric intake parallel our caloric output over the course of an active day. Another major benefit of snacking is that you are less likely to over-order and over-eat at meal times. If you need, by virtue of your work hours, to eat by the clock rather than according to what your body tells you, I would suggest a mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack, and then a smaller lunch.
If you agree that snacks are good, the next step is to design your own snacks, rather than rely on the high-calorie, nutritionally empty offerings of the office candy machine. Take a Ziploc bag of almonds, perhaps mixed with dried prunes or raisins, and apple or a banana. It is then your snack, not theirs—again, that recurrent theme of taking control.
The Lies They Tell
At the risk of stating the obvious, the goal of the food industry is to sell us more food. It is not to make you more slim and beautiful, your children more intelligent or productive in school, or your teenagers better athletes (with a nod to the Breakfast of Champions). No, they simply want you to buy and eat more. They need to make cheaply produced food more appealing. To this end, they over-salt and over-sugar your food, and they fluff it up with hormones, antibiotics, and fillers. They pretend that food is “fun.” (Where did that bizarre concept originate? Does anybody really believe that the Bush Baked Beans dog can talk?)
And, finally, the ultimate deceit: they pretend that your good health is their fervent aim. So, here are some lies you should be aware of:
1. “Pure fruit” or “nothing but fruit,” when applied to juices, usually means that they have added white grape juice, a cheap, high-carb, simple sugar which stresses your pancreas, raises your blood sugar, and increases your weight. And what is grape juice doing in my cranberry “cocktail,” anyhow?
2. “Reduced salt”—reduced from what? Most of our food is over-salted. It is a flavor we are addicted to and it hides the underlying lack of flavor of much of processed food. “Reduced salt” is like “reduced prices.” It has no objective meaning.
3. “Reduced sugar” falls into the same category. Americans are also addicted to sugar. Most foods have added sugar (including French fries). If you have ever eaten ethnic foods in their country of origin (like China or Thailand), you will know the difference between the original and “Americanized” ethnic foods: sugar!
4. “Organic sugar” = sugar.
5. “No added sugar” = sugar.
6. “Less salt/sugar per serving” means they have changed the size of the recommended portion, so of course you get less when the “portion” is smaller.
7. “Low fat” is often high carb (and more sugar, to make up for the loss of “flavor” by lowering the fat). And remember, excess carbs are stored as body fat. And how low and what kind of fat is it? Again, a comparative term with no objective value.
8. “No fat” = high carb (and again more sugar).
9. “Individual servings.” Try, in general, to avoid prepared foods, foods in packages or cans. When reading the label, consider not only how much carb or salt per portion, but also what is a portion?
10. Small print: read it. Ever turn the volume down on a TV ad touting that breakfast cereal and try to read the small print on the bottom of the screen? It may say something like, “when part of a healthy and balanced lifestyle of diet and exercise.” Jeez! Anything is OK to eat, when part of an otherwise healthy life of diet and exercise!
In Conclusion
I have tried to give you a general explanation of why we eat and how we use what we eat. Apart from some pet peeves, I am not recommending or castigating any specific diet, and all of these suggestions are actually pretty easy to implement—they do not require going on a starvation diet or becoming a triathlete. After all, none of us can realistically subsist on a diet of tree bark and kitty litter for the rest of our lives. Ultimately, any lasting dietary change requires something you can live with. But even with such simple modifications, you will feel better, have more energy, and look better. To go the next step, you should consult a nutritionist, really take control, and make your diet a central feature of your mindfully lived life.
