To Sleep, Eat Fence-hopping Sheep

I try to spread good news like butter. Also, I love to pluck unhealthy headlines from the media forest and wrap them up with duct tape, capturing it all for later analysis. Let's cover the following, and look for common themes:

Eating Eggs in the Morning Cuts Calories

Lack of Sleep has Effects on Calorie Consumption

FDA Picks the Wrong Culprit: Fat

So you go to sleep at night thinking "I'm so glad I had that low-fat cookie for desert, now I can breathe easy and sleep softly." You usually get around seven hours of sleep, but tomorrow you have to wake up for a out-of-state weaving techniques convention so you are only going to get 4 hours tonight. In the morning, you almost make scrambled eggs but instead opt for a bowl of Fruit Loops and some white toast. Um, yum! 

After a few hours on the road, you truly, madly, deeply crave not on a Savage Garden CD but the latest in the ever-advancing low-fat Cheez-it product line-up. Why? Several reasons.

In the 70's, the FDA asked that Americans cut down on saturated fat intake. Not only did we oblige, but so did food manufacturers, blessing us with low-fat gifts at the turn of every supermarket aisle. The result: obesity rates doubled, diabetes has a huge grin on its face, and heart disease is donating plaques of achievement to the middle-aged all over the United States.

This is not to say that saturated fat is good for you necessarily, and the article points out the real reason for the perfect downward spiral thrown by Lazy-boy Monday morning quarterbacks: processed carbohydrates. Foods that are high on the glycemic-index. High glycemic foods quickly raise blood sugar levels and stimulate fat storage, leaving you hungrier at your next meal. White breads, doughnuts, cookies, etc. Um, yum!

Aside from picking foods low in glycerin, what can you do to regulate hunger? Regulate your ghrelin hormones. I know this is going to be a hard one for teens. Ghrelin is a hormone that increases your appetite, usually right before a meal. There are a few lifestyle choices that can swing ghrelin levels; to increase, go short on sleep, to decrease, eat some chicken kids in the morning. 

Ghrelin

Subjects of the sleep study ate more and were more likely to overindulge on snacks and carbohydrates after a night of insufficient sleep. Basically, someone spikes your orange juice with ghrelin. So grab some eggs. Subjects of the egg study ate 100 calories less at a buffet three hours after an egg-filled breakfast, and 400 calories less in the following 24-hour period. Eggs lower your ghrelin levels.

So there it is, the proof is in the ghrelin. 

The moral benefits of Fiber

One of the stabbing attacks I used when fighting my natural urge to gorge on anything remotely edible was to add a lot of fiber to my diet.

Check out the health benefits:

• Weight Control
• Digestive Fun!
• Heart Healthy

We are supposedly supposed to be getting 20-30 grams a day, so I did the manly thing and set my goal at 35 grams. I wanted to balance out my caloric intake while adding fiber, meaning I didn't want to just eat four cups of almonds and call it a day, when I could be chewin' on some broccoli, which has the highest fiber-to-calorie ratio.

Here is a chart I created to help find foods that are high in fiber relative to their calorie content. Notice the tasty stuff at both ends of the spectrum; just pick a few from the upper and bottom halves everyday, and you'll be stuffed full of fiber. And they said it was like eating cardboard... please.

I did leave cardboard off the list, but I think the average shoe box is 20 grams of fiber and 2 calories. Give it a try.

Two caveats: the beans were black, and the whole wheat bread was high fiber. Look at the label, you know the drill.