Last week we discussed the importance of just starting on a lifestyle modification plan. Your lifestyle modification plan needs to be comprehensive, realistic and actionable. No matter what diet you select on the healthy diet spectrum, getting your head in the right space and setting yourself up for success is invaluable. Action is where the tire meets the pavement, though!
Being willing to change is great, but ultimately talk is cheap. Let your action be the physical manifestation of your commitment to change!
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Willing is not enough; we must do.”
– Bruce Lee
The acronym for the standard American diet is SAD. Our diet here in America is so bad that picking a place to start that will show immediate results is like standing in front of a dartboard blindfolded and hitting a bullseye with the first six throws. The SAD diet is just that bad! Often during weight-loss dietetic consultations, if a person is overwhelmed by the breadth of the lifestyle modification challenge, I will say, “You know what, forget about all of that. Why don’t you just pick one thing that you feel is contributing to your weight problem and give that up for just one week and let’s see what that does?” The “just one thing” approach often provides a welcome sense of relief to folks that are intimidated by trying to change many aspects of their life in one go. I leave it up to them and invariably name one thing that should be changed in their diet without any assistance from me. It doesn’t matter if you call them “low hanging fruit” or “no-brainers” or something else. You don’t have to look far to find half a dozen food items that everybody in the country knows are contributing to American’s weight problem in a significant way! Today we are discussing cheese.
Of all the weight-gain no-brainers, this may be the most subtle. Most Americans have a feeling that cheese is a significant source of salt, fat and sugar in their diet, but they don’t know the details.
If you chart how American waistlines have increased against the increase in consumption of calorically dense processed foods like cheese, you will notice that they are pretty much identical. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been tracking American consumption of agricultural products since the turn of the 20th century. In 1909, American per capita cheese consumption was 3.8 pounds per annually. In 1960, it had more than doubled to 8.3 pounds. In 1978, it doubled again to 16.8 pounds per person, and in 2014 it doubled yet again to 34.2 pounds. In 2019, the average American consumed 38.3 pounds of cheese! That’s 30 pounds more per person than we consumed in 1960! I know that is hard to believe, but look below in the references below and then check out the data yourself!
Full-fat milk is another issue that needs to be thought of in terms of weight loss. Per eight-ounce cup whole milk has 148 calories, eight grams of fat (4.6 grams saturated), 24 mg cholesterol and 105 mg sodium.
The DASH diet (dietary approaches to stop hypertension) is a diet I suggest as a good starting point for most people. For a 2,100 calorie diet, the DASH diet wants you to eat no more than 27 percent of calories from fat (567 calories or 63 grams), six percent of calories from saturated fat (126 calories or 14 grams), 18 percent of calories from protein (378 calories or 95 grams), 55 percent of calories from carbohydrate (1,155 calories or 289 grams), 150 mg of cholesterol, 2000 mg of sodium and get at least 30 grams of fiber per day. When you look at drinking one glass of milk per day, that represents seven percent of your allocated calories, 12.7 percent of your allocated grams of fat, 33 percent of allocated grams of saturated fat, 16 percent of allocated cholesterol and 5.3 percent of sodium allocated for an entire day. Just one eight-ounce glass of milk!
Cheese is a condensed form of milk. Per eight-ounce cup, melted cheddar cheese has 982 calories, 81 grams of fat (51 grams saturated), 256 mg cholesterol and 1515 mg sodium. Think about that in terms of a pizza. What is that? Three slices of Pizza Hut-style pizza? Could you eat that amount of pizza? I am answering hell to the yeah on that one! Absolutely, with no problem! Look what it does to even the moderate daily nutrient parameters the DASH diet gives you. Just the cheese on the pizza completely blows the DASH diet parameters away, all of them!
The chances are very high that if you just eliminate or seriously reduce the cheese you eat, you will show a weight reduction in just one week!
Next week we’ll throw another dart and see if we can hit a bullseye again!
Here are the references for today’s healthy eating tip.
U.S. Department of Agriculture. Economic Research Services. Data Products. Food Availability (Per Capita) Data System. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-per-capita-data-system/.
To access data on per capita cheese consumption: Dairy Products. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/50472/dymfg.xls?v=7817.4. (Accessed 4/30/2021.)
Barnard, ND. The Cheese Trap. New York: Grand Central Life & Style, 2017