Diet Etiquette: Is It Rude to Discuss Other People's Diets?

So yesterday a member of one of my Medifast Facebook groups -- let's call her Carol -- started an interesting thread about co-workers who make derisive comments about her diet. She had declined to partake in the chicken tenders, rolls and potato salad served at a lunch meeting, and someone remarked, "Oh, are you going to be eating your special diet food?"

What's weird is that Carol could have easily responded with some equally snarky comment about her co-worker's hyper-carby meal and how sleepy she and the others would feel after lunch. But having been raised by non-wolves, she just smiled and said "yes" while smarting inside over the rudeness of being called out for eating differently.

While everyone on the thread agreed there is really nothing you can say to jerkwads who try to make you feel like an oddball for not eating what everyone else is eating, the thread digressed to a more general discussion of whether it is ever polite to comment or ask about other people's diets.

To me this dilemma is similar to asking to touch the belly of a pregnant woman. Some expectant mothers are extremely offended when someone requests to touch their belly while others think it is cool that someone wants to share in their miracle.

Though some people who deviate from the standard American diet don't like to be asked what they're eating or why, others welcome the question and relish the chance to talk about it.

The problem is you don't always know who is who.

Personally, I am fascinated by what other people eat, but I always test the water before diving into the pool. I'll ask a simple question or make a comment about someone's meal and then check to see how they react. If they act like I just asked how much money they make, I'll back off immediately. But if they seem comfortable with my food question, I usually follow up. More often than not, I learn something beneficial and forge a tighter bond with that person.

Like weather, food is a great universal ice breaker; and it's a far more interesting topic.  I mean how many times can you say, "Wow, it's really hot outside today!"

My only advice is to refrain from criticizing the way other people eat or suggesting that your way of eating is superior to theirs. How we eat is a deeply personal subject, and if someone is trusting enough to discuss this subject with you, it's not cool to show disdain for their choices.

Why You Should Give Your Maintenance Diet a Name

Now that I have successfully maintained my Medifast fueled weight loss for over a year I am increasingly fascinated by the topic of weight maintenance.

I used to think of weight loss dieting as a finite process. Once I sprinted to the goal, I had won. The race was over.

So even though I had "won" this race many times over with the help of Weight Watchers, Atkins, Jenny Craig and their ilk, I failed to grasp that weight loss is just the beginning of a much longer and more complicated journey called weight maintenance.

Which isn't even a race at all (though if it were, it would be more marathon than sprint).

In the course of our lives, the amount of time it takes us to reach our ideal weight is a sliver compared to the huge slab of pie that forms the rest of our days.

And just as we need a specific plan for how to lose weight, we need a specific plan for keeping that weight off for good.

The cool part about weight maintenance is that we get to figure out that plan for ourselves. Which brings me to why it's important to give our new way of eating a name.

I just finished reading Refuse to Regain by Barbara Berkeley, which provides a very specific guideline for weight maintenance that revolves around something I'm pretty sure the author made up called the Primarian Diet. This diet plan contains a contradictory jumble of concepts, simultaneously claiming to be to be primal and natural, yet including such "foods" as diet Jello and Lean Cuisine. If you are interested in reading this book and learning more about the Primarian Diet, you can check it out here.


One thing I like about the Primarian Diet is that it has a name; so when Aunt Betty offers you a slice of birthday cake you can say, "Oh, sorry, I'm a Primarian; so I can't eat that." She will be too embarrassed by her ignorance to ask you what the heck a Primarian is and refrain from cajoling you into eating just one little piece.

So as you approach your ideal weight, I encourage you to start researching all the various ways of eating out there and develop your own plan that will allow you to maintain your weight loss once you reach your ideal weight. Just because you lost weight with Medifast does not mean the Medifast maintenance plan will help you be successful at keeping your weight off. You may be better off with a Paleo type diet or adhering to some kind of daily carb/protein/fat macro range -- or just avoiding certain food categories like flour and sugar.

Most likely you will tweak your maintenance diet along the way, but ultimately you will create a customized way of eating that will help you maintain your weight loss over many years.

Oh, and do give your new diet a name. Naming something makes it real and present instead of amorphous and easily forgettable. Not only will your Impressivesoundingname Diet help you fend off Aunt Betty and her carb-riddled cake, it will also help remind you not to eat those nachos or cookies and provide you with self-imposed rules for what you can or cannot eat most of the time.



More from Diet Skeptic:

Why I'm Addicted to Chia Seeds

Why Fat Head Pizza Is the Holy Grail of Low Carb Pizzas 

The Shocking Truth About Imported Olive Oil 

Making Cauliflower Rice in the Vitamix 

Why WebMD Doesn't Want You to Get Well


Follow Nancy's board Low Carb Recipes on Pinterest

The KonMari Method as a Perfect Metaphor for Weight Loss

I admit to being a little late to the game in hearing about the life-changing magic of tidying up made popular by the younger, non-felonious Martha Stewart of Japan, Marie Kondo, who has paradigm shifted the formerly dreary and anxiety filled chore of de-cluttering one's living space (and, dare I say, making it almost enjoyable).

In case you are even further behind the 8-ball than I on this pop cultural phenomenon, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing is not only an international best seller whose author was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2015, the KonMari method (as it's known) is a metaphor for ridding yourself of the emotional baggage tied up with your $#!+ load of stuff.

Which includes clothes that are toolargeortoosmall, the stuffed bear your 16-year-old boyfriend wholatercheatedonyouwithyourbestfriend won at the county fair, and the tapioca beads sitting in your cupboard because two years ago whileinashoppingtranceatSafeway you had the ephemeral desire to make scratch tapioca pudding. Which, of course, you never did.

The signature concept of the KonMari method is to pick up each item in your home and ask yourself the profoundly simple question, "Does this spark joy?"

(Obviously, there is a lot more to it and I highly recommend you purchase the book to learn all the secrets, including how to properly fold socks.)


I have already begun applying the KonMari method to my clothing and am astounded by how many items I was able to discard by asking myself what I wanted to keep instead of what I wanted to get rid of.

Now that may seem like a small difference, but it turns out this counter-intuitive filtering method yields dramatically different results in how many Glad bags you tote off to the Goodwill or dump in the trash. We tend to hold on to things for perverse reasons, such as feeling guilty that we bought them in the first place or having a sentimental attachment because someone gave them to us.

For instance, using the KonMari method on a scarf your mother gave you for your birthday, you would ask yourself "Does this spark joy?" And if the answer is "no," you would thank the scarf for being a reminder of your mother's love and inform it you are now going to help it find a new home where it will be loved and appreciated.

Or let's say you bought a dress on a whim two years ago but never found an occasion to wear it. You might say, "Thank you for that moment of joy I felt when I purchased you, but it turns out we are not really a match; and now I will set you free so that you can find you a better owner."

Of course, you do not really have to make a goodbye speech for each item you discard, but if you're having trouble letting go it is surprisingly helpful.

The main point is the items we hoard store in our homes that we do not use or love impart negative energy every time we interact with them. They figuratively weigh us down by making us feel guilty, wasteful or ungrateful. They also create clutter, making it harder to find the items that do bring us joy.

By lightening our physical load we lighten our emotional load, and this liberating feeling carries over to other aspects of our lives.

Whether it's a friend to whom we no longer feel a connection or a food we eat just because it's sitting on the table, once we get in the habit of choosing things that bring us joy we are less likely to reflexively settle for whatever happens to be there.



I was reminded of this principle the other day when a friend at work offered me a Keebler chocolate chip cookie from her lunch sack. At one time I might have accepted it, even though packaged cookies don't really appeal to me. But these days, I am more selective, and on the rare occasions I eat a cookie it has to be home made or from a good bakery.

Interestingly, the KonMari method promises that if we follow its principles we will never rebound and have to wade through a huge household mess again, which is similar to losing weight and never gaining it back. By consciously seeking joy instead of driving through life on autopilot, we are bound to make better choices that will ultimately make us happier and healthier.

For more information on the KonMari method, watch Marie Kondo's Google Talk or check out my favorite KonMari vlogger Lavendaire here.

What's the Point of Pasta?

What's a meal without pasta? Healthier.

Thinking back on my pre-low-carb life,  I can't believe how much I used to count on pasta to complete my meals. If I wanted to prepare a recipe that contained sauce, I thought I needed pasta to ferry the savory liquid to my mouth -- an edible mini van, if you will, whose main purpose was to transport something from one place to another.

Who ever heard of meatballs and marinara sauce without spaghetti? Or Chicken Alfredo without fettuccine?

Of course, there was another "vehicle" that sat humbly on my plate all along that could have done the job just as well -- and with far less damage to my fat cells.

Yep. Good ol' vegetables.

Turns out these colorful foods, which spring from the ground instead of being made in a factory, have the same amazing ability to carry sauce as pasta or rice.

And even though vegetables also contain carbohydrates, they have far fewer grams and way more fiber. Not to mention other healthy stuff, like phytonutrients and vitamins that are not first stripped out and then added back.

Last night I was musing on how much my meal composition mindset had changed when I was contemplating what vegetable to serve with my tomatillo chicken, which had slow cooked all day and was now Tindering for a partner.

Sure I could have served this delicious protein dish over rice or noodles. Or wrapped it up in a tortilla.

But I had some fresh baby spinach in my fridge; so I sauteed it a few minutes with some good olive oil and a few grinds of Trader Joe's garlic and sea salt blend. Then I added the chicken and topped the melange with a handful of Italian four cheese blend until the whole thing was melty and gorgeous. The only thing I forgot to do was take a picture; so you will just have to imagine how good it looked.

The point is that these days, instead of figuring out what shape of pasta will go best with my meals, I consider instead which vegetables will best complement them and leave pasta and rice out of the picture altogether.

Why It's Harder to Quit Carbs Than Cocaine

Can you imagine going to a birthday party where everyone celebrates with a line of cocaine?

Maybe if you live in Hollywood or hang out with high rollers.

But most of us mere mortals who are not surrounded by mind altering drugs on a daily basis are more likely to be tempted by pizza and birthday cake than powders and pills.

Which is why it can be harder to avoid refined carbohydrates than cocaine.

First there are the TV commercials.

Unless you DVR your favorite shows and zip through the commercials, your subconscious will likely absorb hundreds of hypnotic images a week flashing images of happy people eating carb-laden foods.

Then there's work where a non-stop conga line of cupcakes and bagels dance into the break room on a daily basis.

For Sunday dinner, Aunt Sally serves chips, lasagne and ice cream -- unless it's someone's birthday and there's cake to go with the ice cream.

If you dare say "no" to the cake, Uncle Roger will chide, "What's wrong with you? It's a special occasion" -- as if someone having a birthday is a rare event.

Meanwhile, every day you pass dozens of fast food joints pushing crispy french fries and puffy buns -- and nearly as many coffee shops shilling adult milk shakes disguised as coffee drinks.

Even the new Starbucks Mini Caramel Frappuccino has 29 grams of sugar. That's 7 teaspoons -- three times more than a Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut.

Which means unless you hang out with a crowd that spends most of its spare time doing drugs, you are a million times more likely to be confronted with high-carb foods than heroin or cocaine.

Obviously, it would not be reasonable to expect your friends, family and co-workers to forgo their favorite refined high-carb foods.

What's important is to recognize how difficult it is for you to stray from the average American diet -- to deliberately decide to be different than the "normal" eating community.

When high-carb foods are pushed on you on a regular basis, it can takes enormous will power to resist them -- especially since they light up the pleasure center in your brain and can give you the same intense high as a street drug.

So when you do resist, be sure to high five yourself. Because it's way, way harder than it looks. 



More from Diet Skeptic:

Why I'm Addicted to Chia Seeds

Why Fat Head Pizza Is the Holy Grail of Low Carb Pizzas 

The Shocking Truth About Imported Olive Oil 

Making Cauliflower Rice in the Vitamix 

Why WebMD Doesn't Want You to Get Well


Follow Nancy's board Low Carb Recipes on Pinterest

OMG!!! Medifast Gave JezebeI Blogger an Eating Disorder

Does Jezebel has a truthiness issue?

One of the first rules of PR is to know your audience. You would not send a press release for tampons to a men's magazine. Nor would you send a gushy evite to a snarky anti-diet website asking it to write a blog post on a quick and easy weight-loss program for brides.

Except that a naive Medifast PR staffer (maybe a MacDonald niece who needed a job after college?) did just that.

The resulting blog post on Jezebel's I Thee Dread blog titled "I Tried a Wedding Starvation Diet and It Really Fucked With My Head" was the most scathing review of the Medifast 5&1 Plan I have ever seen.

Here are just a few choice excerpts:

You read that correctly. 850-1000 calories a day. This is a starvation diet and it is being marketed towards brides.

I chugged the rest of my water to cleanse my palate and got up to pour another glass. I’d been rather dreading the water requirement but I quickly see that it will be no problem at all to hit my daily quota of eight glasses: all that fake food isn’t going to wash itself down.

I grimly finished the pretzels and left the house to run an errand. The sourness lingered. The food felt like a punishment.

The thought of eating a reconstituted packet of dust fills me with dread, so I decide that today I’ll stick mostly with the bars and try some of the Cinnamon & Brown Sugar Cereal Crunch I’ve been sent.

 This diet was, very quickly, sending me into a depressive spiral and it was time to cut bait. So I did. As of this writing, I’m still shaken by the experience and, if I’m being really honest with you, I had a hard time returning to healthy eating habits. Three days is all it took for this diet to essentially trip my wires into disordered eating.

Yes, you read that right. Just three days of following the Medifast diet program GAVE THIS BLOGGER AN EATING DISORDER!!!!! Or so she claims.

Even a fifth grader could tell from the first few paragraphs of this hit piece that blogger Jolie Kerr planned to pan the Medifast 5&1 program even before her food arrived and use as much hyperbole doing so as a teenage girl with a humongous stash of exclamation points.

There are so many things factually wrong with the Jezebel piece that the blogger's credibility -- starting with spelling the company's name wrong (um, it's Medifast, not MediFast) and including the not-so-irrelevant factoid the writer was suffering from an ear problem during her three-day pseudo science experiment, which likely colored how sick she felt and how bad the food tasted.

But, hey, let's not let facts get in the way of a good story. Real news sites that stick to the boring truth are quaint artifacts in the online media age in which snark and exaggeration make the tastiest click bait.

What's surprising is that Medifast brought this $#!+ storm of an article on itself by sending Jezebel an email which began:

“As you are aware spring wedding season is right around the corner. This year, another wave of brides-to-be will want nothing more than to look perfect on their big day.”

Then they sent the blogger a free supply of Medifast food and assigned her to one of its less helpful TSFL health coaches.

But the clues were there all along that the published piece would be anything but a love poem. A quick review of other blog posts from this Jezebel blog channel surfaced the following juicy nuggets:

On brides:

She’s got a Pinterest board filled with pictures of Queen Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she’s gonna look dewy if it kills her, and she’s commissioning a trio of ice sculpture mermaids for the reception, which would look out of place almost anywhere but especially in the suburbs of Cleveland, where this is taking place

On wedding planners:

Weird that at a time when natural births are so in vogue, so too is having cosmopolitan, white-gloved sherpa guide you through each and every choice you make about a big party, down to the very last ahi tuna wonton crisp.

On wedding guests:

Forbes suggests planning early and getting a cheap gift, but even that’s not going to save you from the price creep. Maybe the best idea is to just cut all your friends off as soon as they get engaged. That’s when they stop being fun anyway.

Hey, I like satire as much as the next person. I grew up reading Mad magazine and am old enough to have watched the first season of "Saturday Night Live," um, live. 

But there's a difference between stretching the truth for laughs and twisting the truth so it forms a fiction pretzel.

Because the truth is that Medifast replacement meals are processed foods that are not designed to taste like something from the Food Network. Once you figure out which foods are doable and how to prepare them in a way that is completely different than the package directions, they are perfectly edible. More importantly, after losing your weight on the 5&1 Plan, you can transition to a diet of mostly fresh whole foods and avoid eating all the floury, sugary foods that made you fat in the first place.

But, hey, that is way too boring for Jezebel and its readers who would rather believe you can get an eating disorder from cutting up a Medifast bars into 16 pieces.

Fun Twists on the Serenity Prayer

Having just celebrated a birthday, I can tell you growing older has more pluses than minuses. One of the biggest perks is knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

In other words, living by the first stanza of the serenity prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

For instance, there's not much I can do about war in the Middle East or jerkwads people who take up two parking spaces.

Nor can I cause it to rain in California.

Or make Wall Street bankers have integrity.

Not fretting about things I cannot change gives me more energy to do things that are under my control. Like being kind to other people, learning something new every day and taking care of my health.

My experience has taught me I cannot directly change other people's behavior, but I can change how I respond. Which, in some cases, changes the behavior.

Sometimes role modeling the behavior I want reflected back works, too.

But, ultimately, I am responsible only for my behavior. It's up to others to manage their lives as they see fit.

Not that there aren't times I wish I could disappear annoying people:

But most of the time I am able to cope with a little help from my friends and a healthy dollop of humor:

Not to mention mind altering beverages:

Although, in some cases, I just have to fake it.

Maybe that's why I like my cats so much. There is nothing I can do to control them, and I am totally good with that.

So what does this all have to do with eating healthy or gaining optimal health?

Letting go of things we cannot change gives us more energy to control the things we can.

For instance:

I can't control if someone brings in cupcakes to work, but I can choose if I eat one.

I can't control if someone tries to cajole me into eating something I don't want, but I can say "no thank you."

I can't control if something bad happens to me and I want to comfort myself with food, but I can choose to do something else that makes me feel better.

In other words, I can choose to be a sunflower growing toward the light instead of a hapless clump of seaweed tossed by the waves.

And to feel serene knowing that some crazy lawn mower could mow over me at any time.

More from Diet Skeptic:

Why I'm Addicted to Chia Seeds

Why Fat Head Pizza Is the Holy Grail of Low Carb Pizzas 

The Shocking Truth About Imported Olive Oil 

Making Cauliflower Rice in the Vitamix 

Why WebMD Doesn't Want You to Get Well


Follow Nancy's board Low Carb Recipes on Pinterest