GAINING WEIGHT?

Balboa Press

Contents

Introduction.........................................................vCHAPTER 1. 140 IS THE NEW 110 –................................1"Gaining Weight?"....................................................1Vanity Sizing........................................................4Kids Too?............................................................7"Food" Additives.....................................................8CHAPTER 2. READ THE LABEL!...........................................11Salt.................................................................11Carbs, and, I Love Dessert!..........................................17Eating For Health....................................................21Zits.................................................................23Beware of Blue Food!.................................................25What is Cheese-Food?.................................................29Ramen Noodles........................................................31My Food Comes in Plastic.............................................32CHAPTER 3. DOES YOUR BODY KNOW THE DIFFERENCE?.......................37HFCS vs Sucrose (Table Sugar)........................................37Where Does The Stuff Come from?......................................42What Does HFCS Do to ME?.............................................44Are We, In Fact, Getting Fatter?.....................................45Fat Rats and People Too..............................................50What Controls my Appetite?...........................................50OK, But, What Controls my Appetite?..................................52A Couple of Research Results.........................................54Fat Rats.............................................................56But I Drink Diet Sodas!..............................................58Aspartame, a Toxic Sweetener.........................................59CHAPTER 4. METABOLIC SYNDROME........................................61What Happens if I Keep Eating It?....................................61CHAPTER 5. YOU CAN DO IT! HERE'S HOW.................................75Month #1 - Fast Food Eating..........................................77Month #2 – Your Kitchen Fast Turnovers.........................79Month #3 – Replacing the Slow Moving Items.....................80Month #4 – The Replacement Package.............................80CHAPTER 6. APPENDIX..................................................83Caloric Intake Assignment............................................93Ingredients Assignment...............................................94Label Assignment.....................................................96References...........................................................99About The Authors....................................................103

Chapter One

"Gaining Weight?"

Last summer my sister and I were painting in my studio in the backyard, commenting on this and that. We got around to health issues since she has been teaching in that area, to college students, for about 32 years. Both of us always struggle to keep our weight down, and, had been discussing the trend in weight gains among students. She told me about her students who had lost weight by just giving up high fructose corn syrup. Thus, the idea for this book was hatched. I begin with a story about my son.

Last year, my son had been searching a popular free dating website and was growing discouraged by the fact that prospects were worse in the smaller city where he was now living. My husband suggested to him that he just let me take over, for him, on the site. To our surprise he agreed. Being his mother, of course I looked at all the best looking women who said all the right things. I was thinking about having beautiful grandchildren and being able to get along well with my future daughter-in-law. I was also worried about the fact that he was looking a lot at women from outside of his geographic area, because he could find women that were more girlish looking for their ages. I didn't want him to drive too far, after all, I am his mom.

The few women that he had dated previously were hard to talk to because they weren't accustomed to our family habit of sarcastic humor. They did appear, however, to be slimmer and more feminine than the group of women listed on the website as living nearer to him.

I've struggled to maintain a normal weight all my life, due to some social and family pressure, of course, but probably mostly due to the fact that, growing up in southern California in the 1960's, the men all wanted a woman who weighed less than 120 pounds. There were so many fat jokes among the men that we were afraid to gain a single pound. Those same men could grow a huge beer gut and feel they were still "Mr. Macho". But we couldn't.

If a young woman ever wanted to sample all the holiday treats, she would have to diet the week before or the week after the party to make sure her husband or boyfriend wouldn't be able to say anything about the obvious three pounds that she had gained. I remember my older sister fasting for four or five days before Thanksgiving so that she could eat anything that she wanted. The problem with that approach is that, when you fast like that, your stomach gets used to it and, when you try to eat a lot, you fill up too fast. And, you get full even before the dessert comes!

Even after having three children, I was expected to stay thin. I remember a couple of times that I gained five pounds over the holidays and thought that my favorite pants had gotten shrunk in the dryer. I couldn't get the button hole over to the button and was appalled at the little mounds of fat between the two sides of my jeans zipper. Looking back at my old photos, when my friends and I were in our mid 30's, and had two or three children, I can see that we all looked like we weighed around 115 lbs. But most of us still felt fat and we were trying to get down to that ever elusive 110.

So, for my son, I was looking for a female, 30 to 40 years old who was, in the terms used on the website, "thin or athletic". To my surprise, all the athletic women appeared, in their pictures, to be overweight. The weirdest part, to me, was that the obese women, (according to the body mass index chart), thought that they were only a few pounds overweight, and, those that looked overweight classified themselves as average. And, the athletic girls looked, at least to my son, like they had better go to the gym two more times a week.

Since I know how easy it is to gain weight when you get pregnant, (yes, I was thinking of grandchildren) I wanted my future daughter-in-law to be a normal weight to begin with. So, at that point, being a determined mom, I decided to do an advanced search. This time I specified "thin." I was amazed to see that, with a couple of other specifications, such as a "nonsmoker" and someone between 5 foot and 5 foot 8 inches tall, the search, within a 10 mile area, came up with zero. I broadened the search to 25 miles, then to 50, and then to 100, and finally came up with two ladies. Los Angeles was within that 100 mile area! What happened to us?

In the next few weeks, I started looking around at the beach where my husband and I take walks on the weekends. This was southern California; mind you, land of the "stars". All those beautiful bodies have disappeared from the beaches! Once, I saw a group of teenagers celebrating one of their coming of age parties for 15 year old girls. They were all posing and getting their pictures taken, in their formal attire, out on the rock jetty in Oceanside. The girls were all in strapless gowns and the boys where in new white shirts and black dress pants. All of the girls and boys were overweight or obese!

The enormity of the problem hit me! I thought this was only a problem in places like the south, where I went to visit my daughter and her children. This was a state where the natives ate things like "hush puppies" and corn chowder and sausage gravy on biscuits. Yummy, but you might as well rub it on my hips!

Once, on a visit there, with my husband, we were in a large retail store and my husband spotted a whole rack full of pants that were about six feet around the waist and were just labeled as XL. He thought it was a joke. I assured him that there were people that large. But, not so many, in the recent past!

Now the obesity problem is everywhere. It's an epidemic! No longer could my son insist on dating a thin woman. There weren't any available! Why?

Vanity Sizing

If you are over 55 you may remember something that I brought to my sister's attention a short time ago. We used to wear bigger sizes. Right now I am almost the exact size in weight and measurements that I was 40 years ago but I remember distinctly that the dress I bought for my older sister's wedding was a size 8. Now I wear a size 4. My sister was dubious at first when I told her this. I used to sew my own clothes when I was a stay at home mom, so I decided to try to find some old dress patterns from the 60's. When I sent her some old patterns I found, she was dumbfounded. She responded, "Wow! The difference is amazing, 5 to 10 inches. The hip size for a size 12 was 34" on one pattern. Now, on the recent standard for sizing in the US on the chart below you can see that the hip size for a size 12 is 41".

On the patterns I found for sale on-line, a dress size of size 12 had a bust size of 32 inches, a waist size of 25 inches, and a hip size of 34 inches. No wonder they always said that Marilyn Monroe was a perfect size 12.

Now you can be 7 inches larger in the hips and still say you wear size 12. The waist size of 25" in the sizes 10 and 12 in the patterns I found are now for a size 2.

You can check out lots of vintage patterns for sale on eBay and many other web sites. They give you the sizes and the measurements for each size.

A few weeks ago my husband and I were sitting in the yard and a couple we knew walked by and decided to sit down with us and talk. She told me that she recently went to buy some jeans and was having a hard time getting jeans that fit right. She ended up getting some that were the same size as the ones she wore when she was in college. She thought, "This can't be right. I know I'm 30 pounds heavier than I was then!"

See the recent jeans size chart below. The garment industry is just trying to get you to buy clothes and ignore how big you're getting. I used to be a size 8 in the 60's. Now all my jeans are a size 4. By this chart, it appears that Australian sizing is the closest to what ours used to be.

Kids Too?

After having worked in the pediatric medical field for many years, I have recently begun to notice that there are also a lot more overweight children. When I was a kid there were usually only one or two overweight children in a class of 30 kids. Unfortunately most of the other kids made fun of them and the nice kids would whisper that they must have a "thyroid condition". Now, this is a phenomenon I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. What are their parents allowing the children to eat?

Most of the kids came into the clinic between breakfast and lunch, and, they were carrying a package of chips and a boxed fruit-flavored drink with a straw. By eleven o'clock, they were promised fast food meals, if they behaved. So, why were they so hungry all the time even though they never stopped eating?

Were they eating breakfast?

I asked the kids what they had for breakfast, and, most of them had already eaten cereal, toast, and/or donuts. I know that, if I only eat something sweet in the morning, I am hungry again, in a couple of hours. But, I never remember being allowed, when I was younger, to eat in the doctor's office. It must be what the parents were giving their children for breakfast. Even though the food was full of calories, it was not satisfying them. They were still hungry! This book will tell you why. Parents all seem to believe that a whole baby bottle full of fruit juice is appropriate for a one-year-old. Are doctors telling parents to do this? And, what was in that fruit juice?

Maybe I go a lot on intuition, but, I always figured that, if it doesn't come like that, in nature, you shouldn't consume it that way. It takes about four good sized oranges to make a large glass of fresh squeezed orange juice. You only need one whole orange with the fiber around each wedge to feel perfectly satisfied that you have had enough orange juice. The rest in that bottle has just too many calories, and, as we are about to explain, too much high fructose corn syrup (6 grams of fructose in an orange vs10 grams in the juice).

Can you imagine how many apples it took to make that baby bottle full of apple juice so devoid of fiber that it has no resemblance to apples? Did you know it is probably full of high fructose corn syrup?

It has only been in the past few decades that there is even a home device for extracting juice out of things like carrots and apples. I had a friend who used to use two pounds of carrots in her juicer each morning for her glass of carrot juice. Her grocery bill was phenomenal. And, by the way, she weighed close to 300 pounds. So drinking carrot juice was not going to help her lose weight.

Once, a couple brought their 15 year-old son to the Cardiologist whom I was working with. They complained that their son was short of breath. He weighed 400 pounds! These parents seemed clueless of this fact. I felt like asking them if they would get short of breath if they had to carry around two 100 pound bags of cement all day. The poor kid probably didn't even want to get out of bed in the morning. He had to have been obese at a very early age. When did we get oblivious to obesity? When did it become OK for a 15 year old to weigh 400 pounds?

Whose fault was it? Obviously his parents didn't plan this.

Our society has learned to accept obesity at a great cost to health. It is now OK for our kids to be overweight or obese at even a young age. I recently went to a popular animation movie where even the main character, a ten year old boy, was overweight. The cartoonist had actually drawn the character to be obese. This was obviously an attempt to reach out to what had become the normal child viewing audience. It is now acceptable in our society to have kids who are overweight. Considering the metabolism of a kid, can you imagine how much messed up food it must take to create an obese child?

"Food" Additives

I used to read every label on canned or packaged foods that I ate, looking for unnecessary salt, sugar, preservatives, coloring, and lists of things that didn't sound like food. We will show you how to do this. I bet you have not done this and that is one of the problems. We have lost our ability to read labels and tell what we are eating.

One of the things I noticed, in the seventies, was that a lot of food began to have "corn sweeteners" listed on those labels. I just figured that they were trying to make everything taste better. At the time, I was trying to avoid sugar, and I figured corn syrup was just as bad as sugar. We will describe, in this book, that it is actually worse than sugar! I looked for the can of beans with the ingredients that mom used to make "homemade beans" with; beans, salt, onions, maybe a little bacon, and, some celery. When fruit was out of season, I'd looked for the can of peaches that said "in its own juice". I figured that, if the fruit was ripe, it wouldn't need sugar. I actually found applesauce made with nothing but apples! This is really hard to find now. Most cans of fruit now contain high fructose corn syrup. And, we are just too busy anymore to read those labels and see what has high fructose corn syrup. We will give you a list, in the Appendix, of foods without this unhealthy food additive.

Canned fruit used to come with "sugar" when I was a kid. Now it almost always contains high fructose corn syrup. I figured that they had added the "high fructose" phrase to make people think it was somehow from fruit fructose. But you should not be fooled. Even though fruit has fructose it's also loaded with fiber, and, not high fructose corn syrup. This fact alone, we will show you, has contributed to the growing trend in obesity in this country and, maybe, in your family.

I remember having an old bottle of corn syrup in the cupboard. Occasionally some recipe in my cook book would call for it. The bottle would sit there for years and, in a pinch, if I ran out of pancake syrup I could use it for less tasty syrup on my pancakes. Now, you drink it every day, as a sweetener in soft drinks. And, your kid's breakfast cereal is filled with it.

As I checked labels, I started seeing "corn syrup" not only in beans, but, also in vegetables and just about every packaged food that used to contain sugar, and, sometimes even in odd things like catsup. I thought maybe there was a really big surplus of corn in our country. I wasn't too political at the time, being kind of a hippie artist housewife, in the hills of northern California, but I had read that they were subsidizing farmers not to grow certain crops and that imports of certain foods were being limited.

One of these was sugar which had been replaced by high fructose corn syrup! Lobbying power, anyone?

In the coming chapters we will show you how bad your diet has become, and, what you are allowing to happen to yourself and your children. By not being aware that you are consuming an unnatural diet, filled with high fructose corn syrup, you are gaining weight younger, and, at a higher rate than ever before, in human history! And, we will show you how this leads to a dangerous condition called Metabolic Syndrome, even in your kids!

We will give you a list of brand name foods that do not contain high fructose corn syrup. You will come to know that, unlike what those ads tell you, high fructose corn syrup is not the same as sucrose and, yes, your body does know the difference. By substituting these food brands into your diet you will be on the way to increased health.

We hope that this book will help you and your family to get back on track to a healthy life.

And to start you on the right track, let's begin with reading labels.

Chapter Two

I was probably in my teens when I first started reading labels. I was a teen bride and pregnant at sixteen. My older sister (18 years old) and I got married within a week of each other and our daughters were born within two months of each other. By my eighth month I had gained 35 pounds and the doctor told me my blood pressure was up. High blood pressure runs in the family. He wanted me on a salt-free diet. I know that some of you have had to do this and it is not easy. It takes a long time to adjust to a low salt diet. Things taste better with salt!

In this chapter, we will tell you how to read labels, and, we start with the basics, salt.

Salt

Sodium chloride, brine, sea salt; no matter how you name it, there have been whole cities, countries, and cultures built around salt. Entire countries have perished in wars over salt. The use of salt to preserve food allowed armies to travel by foot or in boats to take over other countries and change the geopolitical structure and our history. In Roman times, their armies took over cities and countries just because they had salt. People were sold into slavery to work in salt mines and were said to be worth their weight in salt. Salt can be used to pickle, preserve, change the taste, prevent bacterial growth, and take the water out of foods. We would not have developed as a culture without salt. However, too much salt is not a good thing.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from GAINING WEIGHT?by Dee Takemoto Joanne McIntyre Copyright © 2012 by Dee Takemoto, Ph.D. and Joanne McIntyre, R.D.C.S. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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