In today's world, it's nearly impossible to escape the constant stream of messages categorizing the food we eat. "Only real ingredients," "Paleo-friendly," "Vegan," "Gluten-free" - these labels fill our Instagram feeds and often lead to an unhealthy fixation with food, regardless of our good intentions. But does indulging in a single cookie truly derail your diet? Let's delve into the complexities of food, weight management, and the role of treats in a balanced lifestyle.
The Pitfalls of Food Categorization
Categorizing our food intake can easily lead to an unhealthy fixation with food. The cultural messaging that tells us to eat a certain way can be overwhelming. It's easy to get caught up in the idea that some foods are inherently "good" and others are "bad." This mindset can lead to feelings of guilt and anxiety around food, making it difficult to develop a healthy relationship with eating.
Intuitive Eating: A Path to Freedom
However, there's an alternative approach: intuitive eating. This involves listening to your body and eating what it needs, without judgment or restriction. When you learn to eat intuitively, you care less about the type of food you eat and more about how it makes you feel.
As long as you don’t eat five of them a day, eating a cookie does nothing to change the way your body looks or feels. If anything, eating a cookie makes you feel happier. Eating a cookie gives you joy. Our bodies can be a lot stronger than our minds. Because our bodies do best when they are given what they need. They don’t fret over the choices we make. They just take in the food we feed them, and turn it into energy. So our bodies don’t give a shit when we eat gluten-free pasta over regular pasta. Or regular ice cream over vegan ice cream.
Challenging Food Rules and Finding Balance
If you feel like this post resonates with what you’re going through right now, I want to challenge you to try to cultivate a nurturing relationship between you and the food you eat. As stupid as this sounds, before each meal, thank the food you’re about to eat for nourishing you and giving you the energy you need. Before you eat foods you think of as “bad,” thank it for making your tastebuds happy. You can absolutely eat gluten-free and vegan if that’s what truly makes your body feel good. It’s alright to eat full fat yogurt, and honestly you’ll probably be more full in 3 hours than if you ate the low-fat yogurt.
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The Cookie Connection: A Daily Dose of Delight
If there’s one food most people have no problem eating no matter what time of the day, it’s a cookie. Think about it-whether you want to indulge in something sweet alongside your morning coffee, need a mid-day pick-me-up, or want a treat after dinner, a cookie does the trick. If you happen to feel a deep connection to the Cookie Monster, you might wonder what your habit of snacking on cookies is actually doing to your body.
The Calorie Question: When and How Much?
Years ago, nutrition pioneer Adele Davis gave her well-known advice to “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.”Yet the conventional wisdom today is that a calorie is a calorie, regardless of when you eat it, and that what causes weight gain is simply eating more calories than you burn. Department of Agriculture’s Weight Control Information Network web site, “it does not matter what time of day you eat. It is what and how much you eat and how much physical activity you do during the whole day that determines whether you gain, lose, or maintain your weight.”
Still, there are good reasons to be cautious about eating at night. Diet books, dietitians, and even Oprah recommend not eating after dinner (other than a small, calorie controlled snack) because it’s just so easy to overdo it.People eat at night for a variety of reasons that often have little to do with hunger, from satisfying cravings to coping with boredom or stress. And after-dinner snacks tend not to be controlled. They often consist of large portions of high-calorie foods (like chips, cookies, candy), eaten while sitting in front of the television or computer. In this situation, it’s all too easy to consume the entire bag, carton, or container before you realize it. Besides those unnecessary extra calories, eating too close to bedtime can cause indigestion and sleeping problems. (This type of nighttime eating is not to be confused with the medical condition “night eating syndrome,” which requires professional medical attention.)
There’s nothing wrong with eating a light, healthy snack after dinner as long as you plan for it as part of your daily calories. To keep from overeating, pay attention to your food while eating, avoid eating in front of the TV, and choose a portion-controlled snack. Some good options are packaged 100 calorie snacks, small servings of popcorn, ice cream bars, low-fat yogurt or fruit. The benefit of eating meals every three to four hours is it helps regulate your blood sugar, and thus control hunger and cravings. The bottom line: More research is needed on humans to determine whether calories eaten at night are more likely to cause weight gain than those eaten early in the day. Kathleen Zelman, MPH, RD, is director of nutrition for WebMD.
The Impact of Cookies: A Closer Look
This one shouldn’t really come as much of a shock, but it’s still important to keep in mind. If you’re eating tons of packaged cookies, you could see the number on the scale go up. See, these store-bought cookies are a prime example of processed foods, and plenty contain high-fructose corn syrup. What you might not realize is that part of the reason why you’re eating more cookies is that your body is actually craving them. When you eat something like cookies that are loaded up in sugar, there is a rise in your blood glucose. That blood sugar spike leads to a crash, and your brain then wants more of those types of foods, so you start craving them.
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A big issue with cookies? They’re often lacking in fiber. One serving of Chips Ahoy! Original Chocolate Chip cookies-which is three cookies-has less than 1 gram of fiber, for example. Foods that are high in fiber will keep you fuller for longer, which means you won’t keep snacking, and fiber intake has been associated with lower body weight. Eating a diet filled with high-fiber foods can also help combat your risk of developing heart disease and cancer, so it’s a win-win! Consuming a large amount of cookies each day is only going to harm your heath in the long run. It’s been proven that those who end up over-consuming sugary foods can end up not only developing obesity but also type 2 diabetes. Another study in the Journal of the American Medical Association even discovered that those who get 25% or more of their calories from added sugar (which by now, it’s clear cookies are loaded up with this stuff!) are more than twice as likely to die from heart disease. If you’re trying to keep wrinkles from forming (isn’t that always the goal?!), munching on cookies all day isn’t necessarily the best move. Your skin has collagen and elastin, but those can be damaged, thanks to elevated amounts of sugar you get from foods like cookies. That damage can then lead to the development of wrinkles.
The Power of Moderation and a Balanced Lifestyle
At my heaviest, I weighed 205 pounds. That may not seem too big, but it is when you’re 5-foot 6-inches tall. My body fat percentage was between 40 and 45, and I was obese. I’d always been a big kid, but then two things happened that helped me pack on even more pounds. While there, I really took to the food, especially the ice cream, which you can have delivered right to your door. The second thing that happened is that I tore my right ACL, and I couldn’t walk much. Today, I weigh 150 pounds and my body fat percentage sits around 12 percent (I had it tested using a high-tech DEXA scan). How’d I do it? With a little exercise, smart eating, and cookies. At first, I walked 10,000 steps a day. That’s it! I then started to lift weights, and over the course of a few years lost an additional 35 pounds. (Want to look and feel great yourself? Through all that time-still today-I’ve eaten at least one cookie every single day. And people did! The #cookielife became an ad-hoc movement of hilarity. Since the #cookielife was born in January of this year, I’ve had over 70 people send me cookies. This phenomenon has also opened up a lot of interesting discussions about food and weight loss.
Eat consistently more than you burn, and you’ll gain. Eat consistently less than you burn, and you’ll lose. Eat about the same as you burn, and you’ll stay the same weight. You might be wondering what a tech entrepreneur knows about weight loss. We have a team of researchers and Ph.D.s who read all the research on a given nutritional topic and translate it into easy-to-understand information for the average person. Now, does the overall quality of your food matter? In general, all of our nutrition researchers agree that you should focus on eating whole, unprocessed foods. For the vast majority of people, as long as your calories stay at the right level-for whatever your weight goal-there is zero reason you can’t also enjoy a daily treat. I know incredibly fit people who drink two beers, or eat a chocolate bar, or McDonald’s cheeseburger every day. I, myself, make sure to eat ample proteins and vegetables every day. The other three days I try to walk 10,000 steps. This ensures I both build lean body mass and have a reliable cardiovascular system. (My resting heart rate used to be about 90 beats per minute. But I always finish dinner with a cookie. Or two. Of course you can. Sol Orwell is a 33-year-old entrepreneur who co-founded Examine.com. Which is why we were so intrigued to stumble across this bikini selfie by Shannon Eng.
Embracing the #cookielife: A Sustainable Approach
“I didn’t gain weight. “Am I advocating that you eat a cookie every day?” she continued. “Maybe, if that’s your thing! Can you fit it into your macros? Absolutely! My point is this: I ate a cookie every day, it only added 130 calories per day and on a 1800 calorie/day plan it’s a very small part overall! If you ate something that’s perceived as not healthy, that’s okay! “So can you maintain your weight or lose weight even if you eat a cookie every day? Of course, you can. “They’re not sustainable,” she explained. “Let’s say that cookies are my favourite not so healthy thing to eat. And I decided to restrict myself from eating them.
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