Uncle Sam Breakfast Swap Challenge

This is a sponsored post through Attune Foods. I received a free box of cereal in return for an honest blog post.

I participated in the Uncle Sam Breakfast Swap through Attune Foods. In exchange for an honest blog entry on Uncle Sam Cereal, Attune Foods sent me a coupon to receive a free box (valued at $3.89). I’m not sure if they’ll like what I have to say because this isn’t a raving review, but I was asked to “Eat a bowl of Uncle Sam for breakfast every day for a week and then write a blog post about how your week went.” This will include only my honest opinions and thoughts.

I should add a caveat about my biases. I’m not a cereal girl in the first place; I would much rather have eggs and toast or waffles. Also, the only Uncle Sam cereal that I could find in town was Original. My reaction may very well have been different if I had been able to find strawberry or something else. Since I began writing this, I received an email from Attune Foods regarding the launch of their new website. Now I can buy the other flavors!

The first day was pretty miserable. I ate 3/4 cup (the recommended serving size) with skim milk. At first taste, the cereal reminded me of Rice Krispies, which I love. Then, I realized that it was a little chewy, and it seemed to take ages to get through one bite. On days two and three, I added chopped apple. On day four, I tried banana. For the remaining days, I tried combinations of apple and banana in a desperate attempt to improve taste and texture. While the apples and bananas certainly improved the experience, I still didn’t enjoy having it for breakfast.

I must say, it’s definitely not my favorite. In fact, I was going to call the box a loss until I noticed that Kenlie at All the Weigh had used it on yogurt. This was brilliant! I had a small bowl of Greek yogurt with local honey and Uncle Sam cereal, and it was delicious and so filling.

One of my sayings is “I’ll try anything twice; the first time might be a fluke.” I will go to the website and order one of the other varieties of Uncle Sam and see if I find it to be better. Although I cannot--at this time--recommend this cereal for breakfast, I whole-heartedly recommend it for a snack with yogurt!

Friend Makin' Mondays: Defining Moments

Friend Makin' Mondays is a regular feature from All the Weigh, a blog which I heartily recommend!

Was there a defining moment in which you realized that you needed to lose weight? If so, will you elaborate? (If you experienced this moment in some other area of your life, please feel free to share that too!)

My moment was less like Kenlie's moment. I didn't have an event that worked as a catalyst; rather, my moment was more a realization of how I felt about myself.

I had been overweight for the later part of elementary school and all of junior high. In high school, I maintained a healthy weight, but I didn't realize it was healthy because I was overweight by BMI standards. My color guard instructor constantly found reasons to criticize my body, and he made us run two miles every day while wearing wrist and ankle weights. (One day, I'll discuss this at length.) In college I gained quite a bit of weight for a variety of reasons. I joined Weight Watchers in my second-to-last year of undergrad for shallow reasons. I had yet to realize that my self-worth was tied so tightly to my weight.

WW didn't help me at all; in fact, it hurt. I had to stop going to WW because of the financial and emotional strain, and I gained another twenty pounds. For about a year, I set aside my weight and tried to focus on myself. After graduation, I moved to Lexington to start my master's degree. I decided that things had to change. The light bulb finally clicked that I should lose weight because I love myself, not because I hate myself. My family has a history of medical problems that can be weight-related: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. If I wanted to take care of myself and avoid these problems, I needed to lose weight and eat better.

It pains me to watch shows where the overweight people decide to lose weight because they say they hate themselves. They hate seeing their reflection in the mirror. They hate the rolls or the way their clothes fit. Personally, that seems to be the wrong reason to start this journey. We all have our reasons, but the underlying cause should be because you want to do better for yourself.

Concession Confessions

From dictionary.com: addiction - "the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma"

This post by Skinny Emmie resonated with me. For weeks I hid from my choices, only to realize how much it was costing me. I must admit that, as much as I try, I do have to make some concessions in my dietary choices.

Everyone heralds the benefits of quitting soda--there's even an entire website dedicated to it--but I simply can't do it. At least, not yet. During the fitness program last semester, I tried to stop because my personal trainer urged us to give up sugary drinks for water entirely. I wanted so badly to accomplish what I haven't been able in years, so I stopped buying soda at the grocery store for several weeks.

I soon discovered that, even without soda in the fridge, I found ways to get it. I started ordering Jimmy Johns every evening so that I had a reason to order a soda. Or, I'd avoid packing lunch so that I could buy a soda with my lunch on campus.

If this sounds like an addiction to you, that's because it's close. It doesn't meet the medical definition for an addiction, but it's an incredibly difficult habit to break. My mom likes to joke about how I would only play tea party if she gave me soda for my plastic tea set. That's a sweet story, but that learned behavior set me up for a lifelong (so far) addiction to sugary drinks.

Time for a little number crunching! A twelve-pack of Pepsi runs around $4. If I'm lucky, I can catch it on sale for closer to $3. That sounds a little expensive, right? My average meal at Jimmy Johns, including a sandwich, chips, soda, and tip, runs closer to $11. One of the less expensive meals on campus, normally a sandwich and soda, costs about $6. Let's say I ate on campus and ordered Jimmy Johns that night: that's a total of $17 to get my soda fix! I could buy between 4 and 6 12-packs for that much. A 12-pack of soda will last me about a week and a half. So, for the price of one day of eating out to get soda, I could have stocked myself up for nearly two months. That's not to mention the money I could have saved by cooking the food that I had on hand.

I'm doing better now. My concession confession is that I always keep soda in the house; if I don't, I'll revert to ordering in and eating out just to get my soda fix. Since I've started keeping soda around, I've only eaten out (or ordered in) a few times. When I do order in, it's usually a plain turkey and provolone sandwich from Jimmy Johns and their delicious Thinny Chips. When I eat out, it's those rare evenings when I need to have dinner between working and attending an evening meeting on campus. Even then, I try to get a light meal so that I can eat something better upon returning home.

It's a long, harrowing journey, but I'll get there.

Friend Makin' Mondays: What's in your fridge?

FMM is a regular feature from the fantastic blog All the Weigh, which I heartily recommend!

1. List a few common items that can always be found in your fridge. Milk, eggs, and shredded cheese are the only very consistent things. I often shop sales, so it changes regularly.
2. What kind of milk do you drink? Skim. I'm so used to the taste that I'm not sure I could go back to whole milk.
3. Do you prefer fresh or frozen vegetables? Fresh potatoes, but frozen everything else. Because I'm only feeding myself, most of my fresh veggies tend to spoil. I never can seem to eat them quickly enough. Frozen veggies, on the other hand, last ages without going bad, so that I don't lose money and food.
4. What do you currently have to drink in the fridge? Water, milk, Lipton Diet Green Tea, a few Honest Teas, a few gatorades, SoBe Lifewater, and Fuze. What can I say? I like variety!
5. How often do you clean out your refrigerator? Every week when I take out the trash. I always check the fridge before I close the bag.
6. What’s the healthiest thing in it right now? Hm...probably the frozen broccoli in the freezer. Most of the foods are pretty healthy, but the broccoli is probably the best. The Greek yogurt might be healthier, but I don't eat it as often.
7. What’s the most unhealthy thing in it right now? A couple boxes of Girl Scout cookies that I usually forget to eat but can't bring myself to throw away. I like to have two or three cookies after dinner on occasion.
8. What do you wish you had in it that you don’t have now? Good question! I wish I had some Lean Cuisine individual pizzas. Those are delicious.
9. How often do you shop for groceries? Once a week or less. My pantry is fairly stocked, so I only shop to refill things that run out, like milk or eggs.
10. What’s the weirdest thing in your fridge right now? I'm not sure I have anything that would qualify as "weird" right now. I do have a few Earth Balance "vegan buttery sticks" leftover from making vegan stuffing balls a few months ago. At Whole Foods, the "vegan buttery sticks" (which I swear is the name on the package) were cheaper than the regular butter, so I gave it a shot. They tasted fine in the stuffing balls, but I haven't been brave enough to try them on just toast or a roll.

Your turn!

PSA: Correlation is not causation

Today I'm going to do a public service announcement: correlation is not causation. How does this relate to healthy habits and weight loss? Stick around!

Journalistic standards tend to fall when authors are reporting on medical findings. I believe that the reason for this is two-fold: 1) journalists aren't necessarily well-versed in science, and 2) saying something is associated to another factor is far less interesting than saying that it causes another factor. The most common problem I see, aside from misinterpreting some results, is that reporters write as though correlation is the same as causation. I saw a headline today that really threw me--potatoes can add plenty to waistline--so I had to investigate!

Anyone who has taken a basic statistics or research methods course can tell you that there are three rules for determining causation:

1. Establish correlation.
2. Define time relationship.
3. Eliminate intervening variables.

I'll briefly cover what those mean. The first one is pretty simple; you have to show that two things are related reliably (meaning that your test can be replicated and return the same results) and validly (meaning that your test measures that which you intend to measure). The second one is also fairly simple; you have to demonstrate that item A (the causal factor) precedes item B (the caused result).

The third is slightly more difficult, and it's the one that journalists skip most frequently. Intervening variables include anything that could have an effect on item B, even though item A may appear to cause the change. My statistics professor gave the best example I know. Let's say you're at a football game. It starts to rain. Everyone opens umbrellas, and the game continues. However, suddenly the rate of fumbles increases. After a number of games where you observe this, you notice that people always open umbrellas before the fumbling increase. Therefore, you conclude that umbrellas cause fumbles.

Nonsensical, right? We've established 1 and 2, but we haven't eliminated an important intervening variable: the rain! For such a simple example, anyone would confidently say "Wait! You've got it wrong! The two are correlated, but they aren't causal." A recent study from Harvard University scientists (Mozaffarian, Hao, Rimm, Willett, and Hu) published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "4-year weight change was most strongly associated with the intake of potato chips (1.69 lb), potatoes (1.28 lb), sugar-sweetened beverages (1.00 lb), unprocessed red meats (0.95 lb), and processed meats (0.93 lb) ) and was inversely associated with the intake of vegetables (−0.22 lb), whole grains (−0.37 lb), fruits (−0.49 lb), nuts (−0.57 lb), and yogurt (−0.82 lb) (P≤0.005 for each comparison)" [emphasis mine]. Several dozen newspapers and blog sites around the country picked this important finding and completely distorted it.

Each of those three articles uses terminology to indicate that potatoes "cause," "contributed to," or "led to" weight gain. That's not what the scientists say. It's a subtle difference, but the studies found that daily servings potatoes, particularly fried in some way, were associated with higher weight gain. Everyone in the study gained weight on average, so it's not as though the potato lovers were the only ones packing on the pounds. Journalists are overlooking key intervening variables! Do people who regularly eat some form of potato have other lifestyles that might contribute to higher weight gain? The scientists even point out that you can't say that one food or drink can be shown to consistently affect weight gain across the board: "Eating more or less of any one food or beverage may change the total amount of energy consumed, but the magnitude of associated weight gain varied for specific foods and beverages. Differences in weight gain seen for specific foods and beverages could relate to varying portion sizes, patterns of eating, effects on satiety, or displacement of other foods or beverages" [emphasis mine].

Furthermore, I'm guessing that the journalists didn't actually look at the results graph. The category of potatoes--that they all like to point out adds 1.28 pounds over four years--includes two subcategories: 1) French fried (3.35 pounds over four years), and 2) Boiled, baked, or mashed (0.57 pounds over four years). If you view it that way, French fries were the highest weight gain correlation with 3.35 pounds, far higher than the 1.69 pound gain from eating potato chips. While boiled, baked, or mashed potatoes still weren't a negative correlation, indicating weight loss, that subcategory ranked 8th of the 23 variables in terms of weight gain, landing it between trans fat (0.65 pounds over four years) and refined grains (0.39 pounds over four years).

I know this has been a long blog post, but it's important to keep the correlation versus causation distinction in mind when we read these stories that could influence us to change our lifestyles. Is it easy to learn to interpret statistics to find meaningful results? No, it's certainly not. Is it worth the effort not to mislead the American public? Yes, I absolutely think it is.

Frustrations with Money and Health

I'm going to write about something that's been weighing heavy on my life lately: money. I promise that I'll eventually bring it all back to my weight loss journey, but please bear with me.

Money has been at the forefront of my mind since the start of this summer. I decided that I would continue at my current job at a slightly higher rate of pay for 30 hours a week. My calculations showed that this would be fine as long as I stuck to a very, very strict budget. Things have been pretty tight. Really tight. I had to stop going to belly dance, which I love, and I've had to postpone my violin lessons. Still, I was on top of things.

Until my rent went up. Until I got sick. Last Wednesday I woke up with a dizziness I had never experienced. Long story short, I was diagnosed with an inner ear infection and spent over $120 on the doctor's vist (because I was listed as being out of network because I'm away for school) and three medications. I'm fine, but when you're on a super tight budget, that's huge! That's basically my food budget for the month. I am a crazy, crazy coupon lady, but I've been slacking. I spent Saturday night watching romantic movies--I can't help but love The Notebook--and organizing my coupons. Then, I went to Southern Savers and printed a shopping list for CVS.

I shop at CVS more than other stores for a variety of reasons, but I have two major ones right now: 1) my mom puts a bit of money on my Plus Account once a month, and my local CVS accepts Plus Account; and 2) CVS is currently doing a gas card promotion. Spend $30 on qualifying purchases, and get a $10 gas card every week! It's fantastic. It costs about $50 or $60 to drive to WV and back, so that is a huge help.

Here's where the healthy eating part takes a role. CVS doesn't have very many fresh foods; if they do, they're normally overpriced. I bought several boxes of Easy Mac (as part of the gas card promotion) yesterday. I'll brag for a minute to say that my shopping trip's retail value was $116.40, and I paid $42.69. That's a savings of over $70, or 63%! Anyway, I have to find ways to make these seemingly unhealthy foods work for me, for my new lifestyle. Tonight I had a bowl of Easy Mac. To make it at least nominally healthy, I mixed steamed broccoli into it. (If you haven't tried mac and cheese with broccoli, you really should.) Is it the most healthy choice in the world? No. Was it filling and delicious and full of a very yummy vegetable? Yes!

That's my lesson. I'm going to have to scrimp and save for now. I won't always be able to buy fresh produce, but I can find great deals and coupons for frozen veggies, which are nutritionally similar to fresh veggies or arguably even better. I've learned to make small adjustments to make a meal healthier, like adding broccoli to mac and cheese or baked potatoes. It doesn't take anything away from what I want to eat, it's still inexpensive, and I'm upping my intake of good food. Overall, it's not a bad deal.