Have You Heard About Denmark's New Fat Tax?

Thank you to Fooducate which is where I first heard about this story. It was originally reported by the BBC over the weekend. Apparently, the country of Denmark has passed the world's first 'Fat Tax'. Starting soon all foods with a saturated fat content of greater than 2.3% will carry a tax of aproximately 8 cents per ounce.

Oh, this is wrong on so many levels. I was rather angry when I first heard about the tax because it doesn't make alot of sense to me. The tax is only on products containing SATURATED fat. The types of products to be taxed will be items like butter, coconut oil, lard, some meats, cheese and full fat milk and the products that contain them like ice cream and pizza. It means that candy, chips or french fries fried in soybean oil, cakes and cookies made with canola oil or deconstructed fat free milk products will remain untaxed.

The items to be taxed are largely unprocessed items that my healthy weight family eats every week. Meanwhile the products that we avoid to maintain our health, like chips and cookies will remain untaxed!! While I am sure that some processed products will be taxed, it will be quite easy for food companies to reformulate those products and circumvent the tax. Manufacturers of butter would be unable to reformulate, of course. The tax means that a pound of butter will cost about $1.28 more! Raising the price of unprocessed food seems counterintuitive. Don't we want people to start making their own food rather than letting some unknown company do the cooking for us? Food is expensive enough already, levying a tax on so many unprepared foods makes little sense to me.

Perhaps it surprises you that I am against this tax? Actually I am all for taxing unhealthy foods. I fully support the once proposed NYC soda tax. I supported the once proposed ban of sugary beverages from being part of the SNAP benefit plan. I just disagree with the item being taxed here. If you want to address obesity, tax sugar. Our bodies need fat, even saturated fat. But our bodies don't need sugar at all!! Obesity is undoubtedly a complex problem. It is not one that a single bad ingredient or food caused. The causes of obesity are cultural as well as food related. But it makes no sense to me to blame the foods that we have been eating throughout history.

I don't anticipate additional countries following suit. I will be curious if the law even lives. Sometimes bad international press can turn the tide against such laws. This could be a difficult additional expense for the average Danish family. Suddenly your meat, milk, butter and cheese have an added tax. It could end up being $5-10 a week on otherwise unprocessed healthy foods. Over the course of a year that could mean an extra $250-$500!!!

It is clear to me that many people in positions of authority do not understand nutrition. Many folks do not understand the partnership between healthy fats and satiety. Meanwhile, how many hundreds of calories could you ingest of saturated-fat-free potato chips before you burst? I think the Danes got it all wrong. If the government should have any say over our diets, it ought to be them standing strong against sugar and banning non-food chemicals from the food supply. This tax is completely off base.

Do you agree with government taxes on food items? Why or why not?

This post is shared with Traditional Tuesdays and Real Food Wednesdays and Simple Lives Thursdays and Fight Back Fridays

I Weigh 142 Pounds

I am guessing that 40% of the people who clicked this link did so because they are in the habit of, or enjoy reading this blog. I am guessing that another 40% clicked the link because they are interested in what I have to say about my weight. And finally I assume that 20% of the people who clicked this link did so because they automatically hate me for weighing 142 pounds and bitching about it. Then again, I am just guessing.

I am 5' 7" and I weigh 142 pounds. That is 42 pounds less than I weighed the day I gave birth to Thing 1. It is 33 pounds less than I weighed the day I gave birth to Thing 2. It is 3 pounds less than what I weighed the day I got married and 13 pounds less than I weighed a month after my mother died when I realized that I needed to stop eating to cope with my loss. It is also 7 pounds more than I weighed when I graduated from college. It is 17 pounds more than my mother always told me that she weighed. It is 21 pounds greater than the weight of my closest colleagues, which I know thanks to a work weight loss challenge. And most importantly it is 9 pounds more than I weighed at this time last year.

Why am I so preoccupied with weight, clothing size and numbers in general? I assume many of those reading are silently struggling too. How much are these emotions a part of my inability to scale the wall this time around?

In all practicality, I want to lose the 9 pounds I have gained since last year because my clothes are tight and I don't want to buy new ones. And because I felt really good about myself last summer and this year I see the difference. I didn't exercise for 10 months and it shows. The changes I have made to my diet in the last year have been good ones, but I admit, I have eaten more fat and food in general than my body probably needs. This summer has been about me playing with the amount of protein and fat in my diet. And I have discovered that I need a nice mix of animal products, meat, cheese and butter but I feel best when I am eating mostly veggies and some fruits and those fats and animal products are a support. (FYI, I am talking VOLUME here, it is likely that since vegetables are so light in calories that animal products are still supplying me with the greatest percentage of my calories. But that is a different post for a different day). I am certain I am addicted to grains, and I have steering away from them overall. I am going completely by how I feel, not what the literature says.

In order to lose the weight I have started running with a friend in the morning three days a week. I am excited to also add some simple weight exercises to support the running. While running alone is hard on the body and can lead to injury if you overdo it, getting out in the fresh air makes me happy as does running with a friend. The running makes me feel fit enough that some simple floor exercises do not seem overwhelming. I am lazy on my own, but having a friend keeps me working hard.

I have also cut back on my daily food intake by 10-15%. That's probably not enough for quick weight loss, but it's enough for me right now. Most experts believe that a reduction in calories of 300-500 calories per day is optimal for weight loss. Anymore and your body is shocked into starvation mode. In this case, more is really less. Progress has been slow, BUT the only structured diets I have ever done have been in the first year postpartum when your body is in prime fat burning mode. Losing weight now, when Thing 2 is almost 2 years old is completely different. It is slower for sure.

Eating less makes me feel lighter and sharper. Sometimes I believe that our misguided attempts to eat the same VOLUME of food while on a diet is missing the point. Just loading up on less nutrient dense foods doesn't help to shrink the stomach or address one's hunger cues, even if you lose weight from consuming less calories. Though right now I would love to switch to low fat dairy product and 'light' dressing just to shed these pounds quickly. But that isn't what's best for my health. I need really to cut back my portion sizes. Overeating is taxing on my digestive system for sure. More food just means more...you know. And I have to assume that mere workload is the reason that I get irregular when I overeat.

Calorie restriction is a good thing when we talk about restriction within reason. The American ideal of going to extremes doesn't much help here. I mentioned that in a recent article. Incidentally, just after I began drafting this essay, Dr. Mercola published a very interesting article all about hunger, dieting and calorie restriction. Thanks for being so timely Dr. Mercola!! Too bad I can't find it to link back to. Oh well, you are going to have to trust me. However even though I am touting the benefits of calorie restriction, don't misread me. This is hard and I am hungry. And the muffins are definitely talking to me.

But I originally promised you an article that was about my struggle with the struggle, not just about losing weight in and of itself. I have known for many months that I needed to cut back, even though I was eating pretty clean. But a great debate brewed in my head. I said many things trying to sort this out. "If I am eating the right foods and I weigh 142 pounds, maybe I am just meant to be 142 pounds?" "142 pounds is still well within a healthy weight zone for a woman my height, shouldn't I just accept my weight and move on?" "But if I was meant to weigh 142 pounds, then how come I easily maintained a weight of 133 for a couple of years? What am I doing differently today?" "Why do I want to weigh 133 pounds?" "Why do I always strive for perfection? Is this drive serving me?" "If I have to give up the foods that I love or foods that are good for me, like coconut oil, is it worth being 133 pounds?" "Do I have to give up anything to lose these pounds or do I just have to eat less?" "If I have to obsessively write down the food that I eat, is it worth it to be 133 pounds?" "Was I healthy at 133 pounds?"

I don't have answers for any of those questions. And I think each of us have different answers leading to find a different ideal weight. I keep coming back to the idea that I felt better when I eat less, not when I eat differently, just less. I own the same oversized dinner plates that most Americans do. I know my sense of portion is skewed. And although it is a drag to measure and write down everything I eat, I know me and that is what I need to do to lose weight. I simply can't justify not putting forth the effort. I know that if I can readjust my portions I don't have to give up everything I love.

But do you know what has made this time around so hard? I have had a really hard time saying no. Take last weekend for example. After a whole week of smaller portions and drinking less wine I let loose Friday night with some girlfriends and ordered barbeque Saturday night with a dear family. By Sunday I ate everything in sight. I couldn't say no to beer, potato chips or additional slices of pizza. All the self control that I had just a year ago has vanished.

To date I have lost one pound. But I am exercising and I definitely feel better. But I have made little to no progress on eating less. I am highly discouraged.

So how is that for a post? I have many questions and no answers. Where I used to feel like weight loss was a simple recipe of eating the right foods and eating less while exercising, now I am experiencing it as a complex web of emotional and health related issues. Maybe Weight Watchers worked for me because it kept me accountable? Maybe WW was like my running partner, who would be sad if I just stopped going downstairs at 5:15am. I don't know. In the mean time I am working toward the goal, and staying focused and picking myself up when I fall off the wagon. Maybe next week I will squeeze off one more pound. Anything would be good. I am in need of some progress to keep me going.

This post is shared with Simple Lives Thursdays and Fight Back Fridays and Traditional Tuesdays

The 100 Calorie Letter

The other day I received an organic hit from a search engine under the search term “I have only eaten 100 calories today will that help me lose weight”. Since writing the post about A Nice Healthy 200 Calorie Meal, I get 5-10 hits a week from people looking for 200 calorie meals. And I don’t come up on the first page. Which leads me to believe that people are searching hard for low calorie meals in spite of some nutritional math that doesn’t add up (Even 5-200 calorie meals in one day still only adds up to 1000 calories, well below what a normal person should be eating).
But to the person who hit my site having eaten only 100 calories, I would like to write this post directly to you…

We as Americans are desperate to lose weight. We will try fake diet food, starvation (for a day at least), diet pills, shakes and even scary surgery to help us. But at the end of the day, we continue to gain instead of lose. I carried around with me for years an extra 10-15 pounds and I alternated between being completely obsessed with losing weight and not caring and embracing my cheeseburgers “curves”.

Eating only 100 calories in a day might start out as a great weight loss trick. But if you are able to maintain fasting for more than 12 hours (most people cannot when surrounded like we are by food), then your body will likely enter starvation response mode. Starvation Response is the process that the body undergoes when it is deprived of calories. It is a survival technique that evolved to enable humans to survive food shortages typical in a hunter/ gatherer lifestyle. Starvation Response allows one’s body to conserve energy for the brain while maintaining cognitive function and muscular structures, at least at first. According to Wikipedia, the brain typically uses glucose for its fuel, though the body can break down fats into glucose. When you stop eating your body first turns to its fat reserves and the brain must switch to using fatty acids for fuel, which under normal conditions it will not do. The body then conserves glucose. After several days, the body will begin to breakdown lean muscle. The proteins taken from your muscular structures can be converted into glucose that the brain can use. Take a look through the whole Wikipedia page, I found it enlightening. Plus I could never explain all the biological nuances.

Over time, the starvation dieter will find that he is able to lose little weight. And during celebration or binge eating, he will likely gain weight quickly as the body scrambles to add fat reserves. Many people (including me) believe that this preoccupation with low fat and low calorie foods is causing much of our metabolism problems. People regularly eat silly 200 calorie meals only to have their ‘reserve’ break down a few hours later and consume 600-800 calorie snacks! This doesn’t make any logical sense to me.

To maintain health we must focus our diets around quality protein and lots and lots of veggies. Then we can add whole grains, fruits or possibly dairy to that. But all the fake doctored up diet foods are causing even more trouble. There never was anything wrong with food. In fact it was all we could eat back before our current obesity crisis, back before diet foods and fake foods. And we were all a lot skinner then. God made food the way it was supposed to be, the way it was intended to be, the way we need it to be in order to be healthy. We were not plopped here on earth to figure out what to eat. We evolved with our food, and that’s why it works so well.

And of course, it comes back to love. We must love ourselves. When we love and respect ourselves, we can take care of our bodies in the proper way. For me, that took having children. In trying to set a good example for my kid’s eating habits, I realized that I needed to care for myself in the same loving way I was caring for them. Loving and respecting myself enough to say ‘those Doritos don’t love you back’ became a key point in my current good health. Now I view food as something that can keep me running in tip top shape. I do still eat some junk and when I do I pay with lethargy and grumpiness. I don’t appreciate food doing that to me. Junk food is like an abusive spouse.

So Dear, whoever you are, wherever you are…Starvation is not the answer. It is not about the food being in control. It is not even about major changes! Proper weight management is all about some small shifts: eating more veggies to get all the nutrients you need (you already knew that), eating foods whole so as not to eliminate the fats or fiber you need, and eliminating the stuff that you are eating that is not actually food (i.e.-chemicals and preservatives, etc). The food stuff is easy, the loving yourself enough to eat properly is a bigger concern. But when you begin to do that, you just might find that you have the upper hand, not food.

This post has been shared with Simple Lives Thursday