Thursday, October 12, 2006

Quobesity

Last week was my wife's birthday and as per our family's tradition, she picked her dinner of choice.

Just because I practice obesity medicine certainly doesn't mean I'm a perfectly healthy eater, nor do I preach to my patients that they need to be. It's about living the healthiest life a person can enjoy, not living the healthiest life there is.

I believe that one of the worst things someone trying to lose weight can do is to irrationally restrict dangerous foods. Doing so creates what I call "forbidden foods" which in turn have been shown by Christopher Fairburn to be very common triggers for binge eating (His book, Overcoming Binge Eating is linked on the sidebar and is certainly the best self-help book for binge eating disorder ever written).

What can happen to folks with forbidden foods is that when they do finally decide to have some, not knowing when they'll get some next, they tend to binge on it. Often post-binge guilt is tremendously demoralizing and may lead a person to in fact binge more due to the now severe emotions, and those binges can sometimes lead a person to abandon their weight loss effort altogether.

In my practice I've literally written prescriptions for chips, chocolate, ice cream, pizza, chinese foods and more so as to get rid of the notion of danger foods.

There's a simple question to ask yourself about any high-calorie food, "What's the least amount of ______ I need in my life to like my life".

We ordered from a local place that truly makes great Chinese takeout.

Today's Quobesity comes from the front of the menu.

I highlighted it to help you read it.

It reads,

Healthy, low fat foods, cooked in 100% vegetable oil


Let me tell you, that food was dripping with health!