Seattle Nutrition Counseling and NutritionWorks Seattle Nutrition Counseling Specialists

Write eating patterns in a food journal to reveal diet-busters and poor nutrition

Starting a food journal might seem, well, fill in the blank: tedious, labor-intensive, more trouble than it's worth, maybe a touch obsessive. But Seattle-based nutritionist Minh-Hai Tran says one significant outcome makes a food journal the right move. A food journal is a chance to stop eating on autopilot or eating just to eat.

"I encourage my clients to look at their behavior from a neutral outside observer perspective (as they record meals and snacks in food journals)," she explained. "My approach involves a lot of curiosity -- no judgment. This is very crucial for information gathering and self-learning. Everything translates to a learning experience."

That even goes for eating a pint of ice cream after a party in which you ate enough that you can't remember everything for the journal.

"One suggestion I would make in this case is to take a few seconds to journal before the person reaches for the ice cream in order to gather more data about what is going on, such as thoughts and feelings," Tran said. "I'm not saying to journal instead of eating but to journal beforehand to encourage conscious eating. The idea is to avoid eating on autopilot."

Bob Greene, Oprah Winfrey's trainer and (surprise) a best-selling author, suggests that the obligation to fill out a food journal can work to your caloric/anti-junk food advantage. "If someone offers you cake at work," he said, "you are less likely to take a slice when you know you will have to write it down in your food journal for the day."

You can do it A food journal is used by many nutritionists as a method for getting a jump-start on helping a client reach fitness goals. Typically, the requirement is to write down all foods and drinks consumed for three to five days, right down to the last bite. That is too daunting for the long run. Tran said keeping track of splurges (or writing a few lines before splurges) is more manageable and pays big dividends.

If you write down what you eat on outrageous days, you can figure out what is a splurge and what has become a regular eating pattern (Exhibit A might be whether you consider a large order of fries the occasional treat or a birthright). Sustain your journal by writing on days when the eating is more, let's say, interesting.

One note: Don't forget to write down all beverages and approximate the ounces. You might discover you don't drink much water or that those afternoon colas or sweetened ice teas add up.

What if you slip? Keeping a journal takes some discipline. If you fall behind on your writing, re-up your commitment in a simple but effective step: Write for a day or three about the times you are less hungry and more satisfied. Explore why. Did you eat breakfast? Maybe a healthy snack of an apple with peanut butter for dip left you not needing to devour the breadbasket at dinner.

For instance, in a recent study, Purdue University nutritionist Wayne W. Campbell found the typical American eats only 15 percent of the total recommended daily protein during breakfast.

He found that volunteer subjects reported that a high-protein breakfast of eggs and Canadian bacon can help you feel more satisfied and less hungry throughout the day than if you "saved" the protein for lunch or dinner. Egg and pork producers helped fund this study, so if you think eggs and turkey sausage or a whey protein smoothie might fill the same healthy purpose, you probably are right.

Another study published in the International Journal of Obesity showed that overweight adults who ate two eggs for breakfast rather than a bagel were more able to lose weight. The egg/bagel breakfasts were equal in calories. Use your food journal to figure out whether your daytime meals are helping you eat fewer calories at night.

Best of all Tran says keeping a food journal is not about snitching on yourself.

"One overlooked personal health factor is the importance of taking the time to get as much pleasure as possible out of what we're eating," said Tran, who, fittingly, is co-founder of a tasty line of energy bars called Zing Bars. "Maximizing pleasure and decreasing guilt are important for healthy weight management. Americans ranked the lowest in (maximizing food pleasure and decreasing food guilt) in a study looking at people's relationship to food and their health. The study included the U.S., France, Japan and Belgium."

So Alex Rodriguez still says he didn’t juice when he was with the M’s, but he did admit at yesterday’s mea culpa press conference that he used Ripped Fuel when he played for the Mariners in the late ‘90s. Great, we don’t feel cheated anymore. But what the hell is Ripped Fuel?

Every confidence-deprived high school kid who tried to compensate for a genetic deficiency by hitting the gym –- including us, back when we had a little less confidence than we do today –- remembers being seduced by the powders and pills that promised big pecs and 24-inch biceps with minimal effort. Turns out A-Rod was just as insecure and naïve as we were, but just for different reasons. Ripped Fuel was one of those pot-luck power potions, but all it really offered –- aside from deceptive packaging that showed some veiny, overly bronzed dude with arms the size of Honey Baked hams –- was basically a mixture of ephedra and caffeine, a short-term buzz, and the potential for heart palpitations. “It was a stimulant,” says Minh-Hai Tran, a local nutritionist and co-founder of NutritionWorks. “Maybe you’d have a little more energy, but weren’t going to get any stronger.”

But back in the late-’90s heyday of hopped-up power hitters, confidence deprived competitive players like A-Rod were willing to take anything they could to keep pace with the guy who was hitting more bombs and making more money than them. “They looked at other people and what they were doing,” says David Rae, the founder of Capitol Hill’s Urban Kinetics personal training studio. “Some of these people think, ‘Oh my god, he’s doing these drugs, so I have to do these drugs to stay on top of my game.’” See? We shouldn’t be so hard on poor, A-Rod. He just had performance anxiety.

Ephedra was eventually banned in the U.S. in 2004, after the FDA received more than 800 reports of serious toxicity linked to its use, and Major League Baseball banned Ripped Fuel in 2005, long after Rodriguez says he stopped taking it and moved on to the, uh, more effective stuff. “A lot of supplements out there base their formulations on extremely early research – maybe even on rat studies,” Tran says. “They’ll have an article that talks about how its benefits have been proven, and there will be a study, but who’s going to read the study to see that it was just tested on rats?” Right, because the results of a rat study wouldn’t be applicable to a guy like A-Rod.

The first thing nutritionist Minh-Hai Tran will tell you about New Year's resolutions is forget the calendar.

"I don't treat resolutions any differently that other fitness goals with my clients," said Tran, who is part of the NutritionWorks Consulting practice in Seattle. "People like starting a new diet on Jan. 1 because it represents a clean slate. Same thing for starting a new plan on a Monday."

But, Tran said, "the whole clean-slate approach leads to unrealistic expectations." So she's here, just in time on this first Monday of 2009, to tell us that "mistakes are inevitable" when striving for health goals.

"If the new year encourages people to take a moment to assess how they're doing, reflect on what's important to them and set goals based on their life priorities, that's great," said Tran. "But it's unrealistic to think you'll develop willpower of steel just because it's 2009 -- that's not human nature. In fact, any behavior changes, especially diet changes, that rely on willpower alone are doomed to fail."

In fact, Tran said lots of interesting studies demonstrate how a diet mentality actually can result in weight gain.

A better approach: Savor what you eat. How's that for a late-breaking 2009 resolution?

Another idea to save your 2009 health resolutions -- or resurrect them after just four days, which happened to coincide with the just finished long weekend -- is to embrace the "kaizen" method of change.

Kaizen is a Japanese term and methodology that, perhaps surprisingly so, originated in the United States. When France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, American leaders realized how rapidly Allied Forces would need shipments of military equipment. So U.S. companies developed a number of training courses to teach how to make equipment faster yet with the same or even better quality and limited resources.

One of the courses focused on "continuous improvement." It was based on how managers can look for hundreds of small changes in the manufacturing process. The idea was not to overhaul everything at once. The kaizen approach spread to Japan after World War II and led to that country's reputation for superior manufacturing acumen and "quality circles" that involve all workers.

It follows that kaizen's small steps can work for personal health changes. Deciding to drop 20 pounds this year might be as improbable as it is impressive. But pledging to drop five pounds by March 15 is a start in that direction that can lead to success and, then, hey, five more lost pounds by summer.

In his book, "One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way," author and psychologist Robert Maurer explains he has used kaizen to help all sort of patients at UCLA's medical center. He urges patients to take small steps, such as marching in place for just one minute per day while watching television. While one minute seems inconsequential, Maurer has found the singular minute often leads to five minutes daily, which then blossoms to 10 minutes and, without resistance, a regular exercise program.

For her part, Tran urges this might be the year to be less self-critical."I encourage my clients to look at their behavior from a neutral outside observer perspective," she explained. "My approach involves a lot of curiosity -- no judgment. This is very crucial for information gathering and self-learning. Everything is a learning experience."

Tran provided an example of being less self-judgmental: You say to yourself, "Oh, so I ate a half gallon of ice cream after the party even though I was already stuffed. Interesting!" Let's take a look at that together and see what we can learn about exactly what was going on for you.

The ice cream "served an unmet need," said Tran, not a biological need for food but more likely an emotional need.

"One suggestion in this case is to take a few seconds to journal before the person reaches for the ice cream in order to gather more data about what is going on, such as thoughts and feelings," said Tran. "I'm not saying to journal instead of eating but to journal beforehand to encourage conscious eating. The idea is to avoid eating on autopilot."

That's a worthy 2009 resolution we all can start today, no matter what the date.

There is a formidable distance between an idea and reality. Many ideas go by way of detour or dead end altogether.

From that comes the first impressive thing about locally produced Zing Nutrition Bars: They exist.

Over the past few years, four Bastyr University-trained nutritionists, three in the same nutrition-counseling practice together, routinely talked about the lack of nutritious and tasty all-natural energy bars on the market. Clients asked for recommendations, and the nutritionists struggled to identify one product that was the perfect fit.

"Either the bars offered good nutrition but didn't taste good," said Minh-Hai Tran, one of those four nutritionists, "or the bars taste great but lack good nutrition."

So Tran and her Zing co-founders decided the world needed another energy bar. It helped that Tran previously had worked with an energy bar company and that the nutritionists had connections with a Seattle-based, family-owned food manufacturer willing to take on the numerous test-kitchen rounds. It is no easy feat to make a bar that not only tastes good but remains stable as it is shipped and stocked.

The testing and product development started in earnest 18 months ago. Last month, the first Zing bars were sold for about $2.50 per bar online (zingbars.com) and at select locations, such as Custom Smoothie in Fremont and Bothell Ski & Bike. The bars first will be marketed nationally to health professionals who want to feel good about suggesting an all-natural energy bar. The next part of the plan is to distribute the bars in independently owned coffee shops, salons, spas and yoga studios.

"We actually call it a 'nutrition' bar to make the point that it is a great balance of protein, carbohydrates and healthy fats," said Tran. "But taste is really important to us. We made no compromise on taste or nutrition. Life is too short to be eating things you don't like."

In a wildly subjective and drastically limited test, here are the findings about the three flavors of bar:

The chocolate peanut butter bar is "wonderful," said a 10-year-old girl from the back seat of my car. She was clearly not talking about the nutrition factor. This is a kid who is always hungry for something delicious right after school no matter how much lunch she has consumed.
"Too much almond for me, not enough blueberry," said an 11-year-old boy and fruit enthusiast in critiquing the blueberry almond flavor. "But I like the peanut butter one a lot."
The third flavor, oatmeal chocolate, reminded me, in the front seat, of homemade oatmeal chocolate chip bars I ate as a child -- that's a good thing -- not only its taste but the texture of the bar. All three bars provided some satisfying crunch and were not at all gooey like some protein-rich bars.

One of the big pluses of these bars is the protein content. Spend a few minutes in the energy bar aisle and you discover many bars don't have much protein, which flies in the face of nutritionists who typically recommend including protein in midmorning or midafternoon snacks for brain power. The Zing bars range from 10 to 13 grams in a 210-calorie serving.

Julie Burns, a Chicago-based nutritionist who has worked with professional athletes and working parents alike, has long suggested that her clients pack or buy edamame (steamed soybeans in the pod or shelled) to go along with their energy bars in effort to boost protein.

Of course, there are protein bars that pack an even bigger wallop but, according to Tran, they "taste like it."

"Protein is the key to helping signal satiety to the brain," said Tran. "We recommend (an energy bar) to prevent long gaps in your day without eating. If you go too long without food, then you will overeat at the next meal. That can lead to weight gains. There are studies that clearly show you can eat the same amount of food (in a day) but have different effects on your weight and metabolism."

As it turns out, Tran is the only Zing bar co-founder who doesn't have children. The others, Sandi Kaplan, David Ingalls and Kathleen Putnam, all were motivated by creating Zing bars that are both healthful and tasty to kids. To that end, the nutritionists made a point of not fortifying the bars with any added vitamins or minerals.

There is a possibility of over-fortifying, said Tran: "The vitamin and mineral counts can add quickly and be too much for some children's bodies."

What's more, the Zing team was afraid that added vitamins and minerals "can change the taste (to their detriment) if they stay on the shelf for a while."

The Zing co-founders made other conscious decisions that will appeal to parents and other nutrition-savvy individuals. There is no soy protein in any of the bars. Two are gluten-free and all three are wheat-free. There are no artificial sweeteners and no corn syrup derivatives.

Digging deeper, the team worked hard to use low glycemic natural sweeteners to promote a "healthy blood sugar balance" and avoid the candy-bar crash. In that product equation is the delicate matter of making a bar that is easy on the digestive tract.

It is not surprising that Zing bars don't contain trans fats. But the nutritionist/entrepreneur in Tran can't resist explaining that while lots of energy bars tout the "no trans fat line" on their labels, there is a catch.

"A number of bars contain fractionated palm kernel oil," said Tran. "This type of palm kernel oil has no trans fat but it is an ultra-saturated fat that we don't think is any better or healthier than trans fats. We didn't want palm kernel oil in any form."

Not to break up the Santa fun, but it's tempting to wonder if all those cookies and-milk snacks won't send St. Nick on a sugar crash rather than his appointed rounds.

"The milk is a good addition to the cookies," said Emily Edison, who operates the Momentum Nutrition and Fitness practice in Kenmore. "You get some protein with the snack, not just carbohydrates and fat."

"Hey, come on, Santa is out there burning a lot of calories," said Kathleen Putnam of the NutritionWorks practice based in Seattle. "And we sort of want him plump."
In fact, both dietitians said snacking, or eating "mini-meals" as Edison likes to call them, can be an effective step to a healthier 2008.

"Mini-meals get people to think more about healthy options than something out of a vending machine," said Edison, whose practice offers nutrition counseling, personal training and fitness consulting. "Mini-meals are more like half a turkey sandwich, a tortilla rolled up with ham and cheese or soup."

Edison said variety is best for your soup choices. "You can look for soups with beans or veggies, ones that are broth-based. Minestrone is a great choice."

She didn't rule out clam chowder. "I'm a big fan myself, so I would never say don't have some chowder. Just not every day."

Santa might not have time for soup, but a half-sandwich might well hit that jelly-belly spot.

Putnam offered other healthy "smaller meal" ideas to get us thinking outside of the vending machine or prepackaged foods aisle.

"You want to look for where you can add protein," she said. "You can get carbohydrates anywhere. So have some nuts with dried fruit. Or cheese and fresh fruit, maybe cheese and crackers. Half your lunch now, then the other half in two hours. Or think portable, like a hard-boiled egg, apple and bun."

The half-lunch idea sounds good, but Putnam acknowledged some clients -- and a former editor friend of mine -- always struggled not to eat the rest of the sandwich.
"Make it three-quarters if you must," she said. "But you want to eat to energize, not until you are overfull. Stop short of that. The reason why your editor wanted to eat the rest of his lunch sandwich is probably because he didn't have a mid-morning snack."

"Lots of people don't get or trust the frequency thing," Putnam said. "They are sort of scared of snacking, especially if they have tried (restrictive) diets. It takes some work on that behavior to get over those beliefs that snacking will add weight."

"It's more that we gain weight when eating at night even when we are not hungry," she said. "That's why I am a huge fan of TiVO. You don't get in the habit of going for a snack (during commercials)."

Edison said that adding protein to your snacks can lead to more clear-headedness and less thinking about being hungry. She talks regularly to clients about eating three mini-meals between a hearty breakfast and a lean protein, whole grain, at least two vegetables dinner. Pull out those half-sandwiches or yogurts with a handful of almonds at the first sign of personal hunger -- not when you are shaky, feeling lightheaded, headachy or irritable. Stomach growling? You waited too long.

"You probably never want to go more than three hours without some food," she said. "And skip the big lunch. Unfortunately, the siesta system doesn't really work in this country."

Both nutritionists emphasized the value of breakfast to not only start the day but help curb mindless eating and "empty calories" snacks.

"A hearty breakfast is three or four foods, while a snack is two foods," said Edison. "Oatmeal with raisins and walnuts, a glass of milk and a piece of fresh fruit is a healthy breakfast. A cereal alone, like Cheerios with nonfat milk, is not going to satisfy you."

Putnam said she realizes it can be hard to get a good breakfast some mornings. Whether you are scurrying or end up at a morning meeting with not so healthy choices (can you say pastries?), Putnam said something in your body typically is better than nothing.

For instance, if "you do the Seattle thing" and coffee is your breakfast, a latte is the healthier choice compared to black Americano with espresso shots and hot water. At the meeting, look for fruit or yogurt. But if a doughnut or scone is all you can get, better to eat part of it with a cup of milk if available.

Which brings us back to Santa's milk and cookies. Edison said it is possible to make for healthier cookies by substituting walnuts for peanuts ("higher in the healthy omega-3 fats"), using some whole-wheat flour in place of all-purpose white flour ("if you use all whole-wheat flour, the cookies will probably get too hard") and using less sugar than designated ("almost every recipe can be reduced about half or so" without affecting the taste or texture of the goodie).

"The tricky part in baking is chemistry-driven," said Edison. "You don't want to mess with it too much."

Let's say the same about Santa's snacks. Happy holidays, and let there be pecan tassies on Earth.

Bob Condor writes about health and quality of life every Monday. You can send him ideas or questions at bobcondor@aol.com.

Sandi was interviewed for Seattle's KOMO-TV, Channel 4, for a report on low-carb diets, titled "The truth about carbs," that aired on Feb. 8th and 9th, 2004.

Kathleen was interviewed by Seattle's KOMO-TV, channel 4, for a report titled "Avoid the holiday food traps." Following this link lets you watch the video and read an article related to the story.

Kathleen was interviewed on KOMO-TV, channel 4, in Seattle, for a report titled "Beware the dieting pitfalls". Following this link lets you watch the video and read an article related to the story.

Kathleen was interviewed about the Mediterranean Lifestyle. The article will appear in the March issue of Health Magazine. Kathleen was also interviewed about blood sugar issues and nutrition. This article will be featured in the August issue of Natural Health magazine.

Sandi was interviewed for and quoted in a feature article on the October/November issue of Natural Health Magazine. The article is called "How to Shop for Healthy Foods".

Kathleen is mentioned in a Seattle Times restaurant review of Functional Fuel, a restaurant in Seattle's downtown. Kathleen is one of the developers of the restaurant.

Kathleen was interviewed in the January PCC newsletter. She was interviewed on the topic of Eating Healthfully.

Press Inquiries:
If you need an experienced registered dietitian for an interview or a quote, contact Sandi Kaplan or Kathleen Putnam.