Damage Control: How to Ease Off a Sugar Binge

Regretting last night's splurge? Here's how to run diet damage control

Q: What is the best way to run damage control after a sugar binge?

A: Sugar. We’re programmed to like it from birth, our brains get addicted to it like any other drug, but our waistline detests it. Sometime social situations or stress get the best of us and we indulge in more sugar and calories than we should. Other times we schedule planned cheat meals to reward our laser like fitness focus. My point is that getting off track is normal, it happens to everyone. Regardless of what brought on your sugar binge, here’s what to do (and what not to do) when running dietary damage control.

What to Avoid
1. "Starving Off" your Binge
Don’t starve yourself the day after a sugar binge. Instead, wait until your body feels hungry again and eat a small protein- and fiber-rich meal like broiled salmon and roasted broccoli. A meal like this will keep your blood sugar in control and stimulate hormones that encourage your body to burn sugar that it has stored for energy (which you’ll have a lot of because a big sugar binge can super-saturate your body’s sugar stores). Drink a lot of water and continue to eat a higher-protein, lower-carbohydrates diet for the entire post-binge day. This will help you burn off that extra sugar, as well as the water weight that goes along with it.

2. "Blocker" Supplements
There are several supplements that claim to block the absorption of sugar and fat in your diet—avoid them like the plague. I don’t recommend the use of these products in the context of a normal diet and especially not in a situation when you would be consuming large amounts of the food that is supposed to be blocked.

When the absorption of fat or sugars is blocked in your digestive track, it continues to pass through your body, resulting in increased gas, bloating, and overall discomfort. The level of these symptoms is proportional to the amount of the “blocked food” you are eating. So if you take a fat blocker and eat a low-fat diet, you won’t experience many of these side effects. If you take a fat blocker and have a very high-fat meal (like a splurge meal), the unwanted side effects will be much greater. Avoid absorption blocking supplements, as they will cause more harm than good.

Supplements that May Help
1. Alpha-Lipoic Acid (ALA)
ALA is a potent antioxidant that can improve your body’s ability to use carbohydrates as energy (burn them off). Foods like spinach and broccoli deliver small amounts of ALA, but a supplement is required to really reap its “damage control” effects. Take 200mg before your meal to give your body an extra boost in insulin sensitivity.

2. Cinnamon Extract
Cinnamon is another compound that can improve your body’s ability to metabolize and use carbohydrates. Research shows that you can experience this effect with one tablespoon of cinnamon added to a meal; but unless you are splurging on oatmeal, this flavor burst is probably not appropriate. This is when a cinnamon extract supplement like Cinnulin PF comes in handy. A 250mg dose of Cinnulin PF taken prior to your splurge and then another 250mg dose before your next meal should help with your damage control efforts.

Planning Ahead and Exercise
If you know that you are going to be splurging on your diet and enjoying lots of sugary foods, the best thing you can do is exercise before you eat. Fitting in a short workout before you splurge is the biggest bang-for-your-buck strategy in this article. If you don’t or can’t exercise before your splurge, try to get in some movement afterwards. This doesn’t have to be a formal workout (no one wants to take a spinning class after eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy), but going for a moderate/long walk should be the minimum standard.

You can pick and choose which of these strategies to use or your can put them all into play at the same time. Regardless of what you choose, remember that a splurge is only one meal. Your health and body fat is determined by your long-term habits. So if you eat a lot of sugar and didn’t really want to, don’t beat yourself up too much, just get back on your plan with the next meal.

This article originally appeared on shape.com and was written by Dr. Mike Roussell

 

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A Doctor's Top 5 Foods For Better Sleep

Proteins from the food we eat are the building blocks of tryptophan, which is why the best bedtime snack is one that contains both a carbohydrate and protein, such as cereal with milk, nut butter on toast, or cheese and crackers. Melatonin is a naturally occurring hormone that regulates sleepiness.

Does what we eat really affect our sleep? Short answer: yes. Just as a triple-shot Frappuccino at 9 p.m. would be destructive for your sleep, there are also foods that can help support a good night's rest.

Here are five great ones I recommend to patients:

1. Fermented foods

What the heck do fermented foods have to do with sleep? Fermented foods promote a healthy gut, and a healthy gut is a prerequisite for our bodies to feel at ease. In fact, there's a direct line of communication between our gut and our brain, called the vagus nerve. When the brain is relaxed, it gives the gut permission to devote energy toward digestion. Conversely, if we're running from a tiger and in a panic, it tells the gut, Hold off on that for now; we have other things to worry about.

Meanwhile, the vagus nerve also carries information from the gut to the brain. If the gut is inflamed (maybe you've eating something you don't tolerate, or the gut ecosystem has gotten out of balance after a course of antibiotics), then the vagus nerve tells the brain: feel uneasy. This can make us feel anxious or depressed during the day and sleepless at night. Perhaps it's designed to motivate us to change our behavior. Ate pizza → felt uneasy → maybe I shouldn't eat pizza. Unfortunately, pizza hits our brains like a drug, so as with any other drug, cravings can trump our awareness that something is making us sick.

Examples of fermented foods include sauerkraut, kimchi, apple cider vinegar, beet kvass, miso paste, lactofermented pickles, yogurt, and kefir (if you tolerate dairy).

2. Starchy tubers

To improve your gut flora, you need the one-two punch of fermented foods plus starchy tubers. Tubers are the food that healthy bacteria like to eat, so when we eat them, we help those bacteria survive in our guts.

Examples of starchy tubers: sweet potatoes, white potatoes, potato starch, plantains, taro, and yucca

3. Tart cherries

I put frozen organic cherries in my smoothie every morning. Cherries are a good source of B vitamins and magnesium, and they even contain melatonin (the hormone that makes us sleepy at night). Research suggests that the melatonin in cherries is bioavailable and acts as useful melatonin in the body.

4. Almond butter

Almond butter is a superb snack to have right before bed. It has a high fat and protein content, so it's slow to digest and will be absorbed into your bloodstream gradually overnight, giving you a safety net of blood sugar. Steady blood sugar supports deep, consolidated sleep by preventing blood sugar dips, which can wake your body up. Almonds also contain magnesium and tryptophan to promote sleep.

If you can spring for it, sprouted organic almond butter is the most nutritious choice.

5. Coconut oil

I prescribe coconut oil to my patients as if it were medication. Coconut oil is anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial, and it contains medium-chain triglycerides, which support cognition and stable mood. I especially like it for sleep because it's a clean, easy fuel source. Like almond butter, it can keep your blood sugar steady overnight.

I have my patients keep a jar of coconut oil and a spoon next to their bed. I recommend a spoonful before bed and spoonful when they wake up in the middle of the night.

This article originally appeared on MindBodyGreen & was written by Ellen Vora.

 

Our Moods, Our Foods

Eating a meal, any meal, reliably makes an animal, any animal, calmer and more lethargic. This means humans, too. Hunger makes animals alert and irritable, which explains why couples always fight about where to eat dinner. This emotional response encourages the animals to find food.

But all this is only in the broadest, most primal “eating = good, not eating = bad” way. The details of the relationship between foods and moods end up being a little contradictory and a lot complicated.

What we tend to think of as “emotional eating” is a specific kind of eating and a specific kind of emotion—eating sugary, fatty, carb-y, unhealthy foods as a coping mechanism for feeling upset.  In reality, “emotional eating” is a much broader term.

“We eat for a variety of different emotions and we eat in a variety of different circumstances which are in turn connected with emotions,” Meryl Gardner, a marketing professor at the University of Delaware, says.

Gardner was the lead author on a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, which looked at food choice and mood, adding to a fairly extensive body of research that already exists on the interplay between moods and foods.

There seems to be a consistent connection between negative emotions and unhealthy foods. What's less clear is what foods we're drawn to in a positive mood.

There seems to be a clear, fairly consistent connection between negative emotions and unhealthy foods, though there are individual variations for what kind of snack people want. In a bad mood, people’s hands tend to float to the cookie jar, the candy bag, the snack drawer. What’s less clear is what foods we’re drawn to in a positive mood.

Some studies say we still want treats. A 1992 study and a 2002 study (one on women, one on men) found that joy led to increased consumption of indulgent foods. A 2013 study in Appetite titled “Happy Eating: The underestimated role of overeating in a positive mood” points out the potential for increased consumption (in this case of chips and chocolate) when we’re feeling good.

Other research says just the opposite—that we’re more likely to eschew the sugar/carb rush when happy. In 2010, researchers found that people in a positive mood were more likely to choose grapes over chocolate than those in a neutral mood. Another study offers a qualification, finding that people would choose healthy foods if they felt like their good mood was going to stick around; if not, they might eat more indulgent foods, to keep the good vibes going.

Gardner’s study also found a connection between negative moods and unhealthy foods, and positive moods and healthy foods, but she and her team introduced the element of time into the equation as well. They had participants think about either the present or the future (by describing their current residence, or a possible future residence). They found that regardless of mood, long-term, future-focused thinking led to healthier choices.

“When you’re in a good mood, you take a longer-term perspective,” Gardner says. “You see the forest, not the trees... When you’re focused on the near term, when you’re looking at what’s in front of your nose, you respond with what’s going to give you quick pleasure. And that’s triggered very much by bad moods. But we can fight that.”

Dr. Leigh Gibson, a psychology professor at the University of Roehampton in London, disagrees, though he says he finds those results interesting. “I’m not sure that’s the way people normally go about their daily eating,” he says. “For habitual behaviors like eating, there tends to be an intention-behavior gap. We have all these wonderful intentions, but when it comes down to it, we’re exposed to energy-dense foods when we find ourselves hungry.”

It does seem unlikely that most of us would take the time to describe our future homes to ourselves before deciding on pizza or a salad for lunch. And as previously noted, there is little consensus on what we typically crave when we’re happy.

"Healthy eating is a modern thing that we now need because we're living so long. You could almost say the default is comfort eating."

Part of the reason why it seems our moods rarely drive us toward healthy foods, Gibson says, is that for much of human history, energy-dense foods, or what we now consider comfort foods, were the ideal thing to eat.

“We didn’t evolve as homo sapiens by eating healthy, because all we had to do was reproduce and survive until our mid-20’s,” he says. “We were quite happily sucking the marrow out of bones. We were just getting energy, protein, the basic nutrients we needed, but we didn’t have to live too long. Healthy eating is a modern, cultural thing that we now need, because we’re living so long… You could almost say the default is comfort eating.”

We’re not constantly shoveling mashed potatoes into our mouths (at least not most of the time), so of course this doesn’t mean that humans don’t ever choose healthy foods, just that when we do, it might not be in response to our emotions.

Another reason for this lack of consensus is that there are a variety of moods that can fit under the “positive” umbrella—feeling excited is very different from feeling content, and those emotions could lead to similarly divergent food choices.

For example, Gardner says we tend to go for special, often unhealthy, foods on celebratory occasions, like birthdays or Thanksgiving.

“You eat the birthday cake, you may go out in the evening and eat more appetizers and drink more cocktails than you intended, and it’s all part of the specialness of the occasion,” she says. “And we’ve all learned to celebrate with food. It’s part of so many different cultures.”

Carol Landau—a clinical professor of psychiatry, human behavior, and medicine at Brown University—points out that some comfort eaters turn everything into a celebration, rewarding themselves with food not just for special occasions, but for everyday accomplishments as well.

“Food is such an important part of culture,” Landau says. “I think we’re asking people to do a lot [by asking them] to avoid comfort eating.”

Gibson says this sort of celebratory eating seems to be more prevalent for men than women. There’s also some evidence that the foods men and women turn to for comfort are different—men often get more comfort from savory foods and “general meal-type foods,” Gibson says, as opposed to snacks. Gardner says she has also found men to be more drawn to salty foods.

Sweet foods, however, seem to be a universal crowd-pleaser.

“Sweetness is such a powerful stimulus,” Gibson says. “We’re born initially liking sweetness. It probably helps [that babies] have an appetite for breast milk and so on.”

This may well be why the go-to image of comfort eating in culture is someone crying into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, and why so many studies on mood and food choice include chocolate as one of the unhealthy options.

“If one can characterize [comfort] foods in any simple way, it would be that they’re typically energy-dense,” Gibson says. “Therefore they’re probably high fat, and they might be sweet as well. The perfect comfort food might be chocolate.”

In the chicken-or-the-egg problem of food and mood, do the moods hatch the foods, or do the foods hatch the moods?

But as we all know, the positive effects of eating sweets are short-lived. Whether it’s a crash that comes after a sugar high, or just a feeling of guilt after eating more cookies than you planned, treats are not a ticket to long-term happiness.

So in the chicken-or-the-egg problem of food and mood, do the moods hatch the foods, or do the foods hatch the moods? Studies disagree—the relationship seems to go both ways. A couple recent studies suggest that the foods come first.

In a study published in 2012, Penn State psychology professor Dr. Helen Hendy had 44 undergraduate students keep week-long diaries of how they felt and what they ate. She analyzed the results in terms of four things the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend we should limit to improve physical health: calories, carbohydrates, saturated fat, and sodium. Following those recommendations, Hendy found, seemed to have benefits for improving moods as well.

She found that the link between foods and moods played out over a period of two days—what you ate on day one was linked to how you felt on day three, etc. As usual, the correlation was more consistent with negative moods: “Consumption of calories, saturated fat, and sodium was significantly associated with increased negative mood two days later,” the study reads.

“Some of my research leads me to change my habits, and this one has,” Hendy says. “I have a big meeting [in two days], so today I’m going to watch my calories, my sodium, and my saturated fat, so I can hopefully have a chance to be in a good mood.”

A similar study, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology in 2013, had 281 undergrads keep a 21-day diary, and did find a correlation between eating fruits and vegetables one day and being in a positive mood the next day. The association with eating fruit was stronger for men, but both men and women benefitted from eating veggies. Participants’ BMI did not affect the association.

The exact reasons why healthy eating might make you happy are unclear, but Gibson posits that if you intend to eat healthily, and you follow through, that could put you in a good mood. “Achieving goals is part and parcel of emotional experience,” he says.

Both eating and emotion are such regular, consistent parts of our lives that it’s inevitable they would get tangled up together. Unfortunately, though research has illuminated some interesting possibilities as to how they relate to one another, the knot is still very much intact and it’s hard to see where one ends and the other begins.

“There’s not a very neat story there,” Gibson says. Regardless, there’s a bit more to it than just feeling sad and therefore reaching for a spoon and some ice cream, or whatever your preferred unhealthy snack is. It seems entirely possible that all eating is, in fact, emotional eating. 

This article originally appeared on theatlantic.com and was written by Julie Beck.


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