If you've been following my Wednesday morning WHEE diaries for the past couple of weeks, you know I've been writing a series that I call Geek My Fitness. However, this week, I am working a bit of overtime at work, and I don't have the time to do justice to a Geek My Fitness subject. Instead, I would like to give you...something More.
WHEE (Weight, Health, Eating and Exercise) is a community support diary for Kossacks who are currently or planning to start losing, gaining or maintaining their weight through diet and exercise or fitness. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are working on your weight or fitness, please -- join us! You can also click the WHEE tag to view all diary posts.
I would like to talk about More.
Many of us here in WHEE (myself included) are working on losing weight. But how did we get to where we want/need to lose weight? Simply put, we ate...More.
In The End of Overeating, Dr. David Kessler explains that the overwhelming majority of overweight and obese people got that way by consuming More -- More than "normal"-weight people. Individually, on the average, we ate and drank More than we expended.
Have we eaten a lot More? Yes - some of us, some of the time, have eaten a lot More than we needed. For example, I have eaten spaghetti and tomato sauce in bicycle racer quantities, which worked out all right for a while - but not so much after I quit bicycle racing while continuing to eat the same amounts. I have also been the scourge of Chinese food buffets, going back through the line and picking up a day's worth of calories two or three times.
However, not all of us eat much More. In fact, as Brian Wansink points out in Mindless Eating, all one needs to become overweight or obese is just to eat a little More. Just 100 calories per day More than we need translates to 10 pounds of weight gained per year. 100 calories - that's just a couple of bites of General Tso's chicken, or less than a single can of soda. That's not much More at all.
Why do we consume More? There are a number of explanations. Low-carbers say it's because our diet has More sugar and starch than it used to. Low-fat advocates say it's because we eat too much fat, and vegans say it's because we eat too much meat. Dr. Kessler and others argue that food companies are adding More fat, sugar, AND salt. Barry Popkin points a finger at our habit of drinking More caloric beverages - More soda, fancy coffee drinks with More sugar and fat than many desserts, and even More fruit juice.
And in the aforementioned Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink argues that we consume More -- because we're served More. Wansink is a food and marketing researcher, and Mindless Eating is a highly-readable account of how larger portions lead to larger quantities consumed, followed by larger consumers. You may have read about the Bottomless Soup Bowl (Wansink was awarded the IgNobel Prize for that experiment, which was written up more seriously in Obesity Research).
We're being served More in restaurants. When McDonalds started, there was one size of their famous french fries - about 300 calories worth, the size of the fries on today's Dollar menu. A McDonalds employee named David Wallerstein told founder Ray Kroc that people would pay a good bit More for a larger serving that only cost a little bit More in ingredients. Kroc didn't see the need for the larger serving - he believed that anyone who wanted More would just buy two of the small bags. Wallerstein and Kroc visited a McDonalds, where Wallerstein pointed out that the patrons were digging into the bottom of the little bags, eating the last little bits of salty, overcooked potatoes. He argued that people didn't want to look like "pigs" by buying two bags, or going back up to the counter for a second bag. He convinced Kroc to offer a larger size - and that size is now the usual order of french fries at McDonalds and at other fast food restaurants.
What happens when you eat More? Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock [no relation, as far as I know] decided to find out. In Super Size Me, Spurlock documented his experiment of eating nothing but McDonalds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 30 days. He Super Sized his meal every time the cashier asked, and as a result, averaged 5000 calories consumed (including beverages) each day. He gained almost 25 pounds in that month (and lost it by dieting for the next fourteen months). Shortly after the movie was released, McDonalds dropped the Super Size option from their menus. However, the larger menu items that made up the Super Size option are still on McDonalds' menu, and similarly sized menu items can be found at other fast food restaurants.
The problem is certainly not limited to fast food restaurants, of course. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) published the Xtreme Eating Awards in 2007 with the goal of shaming chains like Ruby Tuesday and the Cheesecake Factory into de-emphasizing highly caloric offerings. How well did the effort succeed? CSPI has revived the Xtreme Eating award this year, and has decided to make it an annual "honor" - plainly, their efforts have fallen short of "overwhelming success." Eat This, Not That, a book by David Zinczenko, expands on the oversize foods offered by chain restaurants.
We're eating More at restaurants - but what about the things we eat at home? A few years ago, Swanson's brought out a line of frozen dinners under the Hungry-Man XXL name. I haven't seen any commercials for these dinners for a couple of years, but Swanson's Web site still uses the tag line from the commercials: It's Good To Be Full. Incidentally, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson is a great-grandson of Swanson's found Carl Swanson.
It's not just prepared foods - recipes, too, have gotten larger. Earlier this year, Brian Wansink published a comparison of calorie counts of recipes from the seven editions of The Joy of Cooking. According to Wansink,
Of the 18 recipes published in all seven editions, 17 increased in calories per serving. That can be attributed partly to a jump in total calories per recipe (about 567 calories), but also to larger portion sizes.
Only the chili con carne recipe remained unchanged through the years. The chicken gumbo, however, went from making 14 servings at 228 calories each in the 1936 edition, to making 10 servings at 576 calories each in the 2006 version.
(the study was originally published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, but it was referenced in Wansink's blog in Prevention magazine, Food Think with Wansink)
Where will it stop? Who knows? As Wansink noted in Mindless Eating,
Even diet foods have supersized. Lean Cuisine has come up with frozen dinner with 100 bonus calories called Hearty Portions. And Weight Watchers has introduced Smart Ones, with larger portion sizes than their regular fare.
(Mr. Bumble, the character screaming "MORE?" in the above clip from Oliver!, was played by actor Harry Secombe, who suffered from diabetes himself in his later years)
Future diaries:
Aug 5:
Wed PM - rdluu
Aug 6:
Thurs AM - Darthstar
Thurs PM - Albatross
Aug 7:
Fri AM - NC Dem
Fri PM - sheddhead
Aug 8:
Sat AM ???
Sat PM ???
Aug 9:
Sun AM - louisev
Sun PM ???
Aug 10:
Mon AM ???
Mon PM ???
Aug 11:
Tues AM ???
Tues PM ???
Aug 12:
Wed AM - Edward Spurlock
Wed PM ???
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