Mental dieting
By Bernard Jacks
September 12, 2008
A fun behavior many of us practice is "calorie denial," a means we use to convince ourselves that some of the calories we ingest can be ignored.
You might consider this wishful thinking, but I have in fact devised a method -- patent pending -- that you can use to deny calories with scientific accuracy, a development involving pure reason and a touch of higher mathematics.
I admit there are older approaches, but they don't work. One well-known denial method says that if you hack a slice of cake into tiny little bits before you eat it, the total number of calories consumed is less than if you simply work your way through the whole slice lopping off big mouthfuls with a fork. Well, for goodness' sake, what is the scientific rationale for that? Calories are extremely tiny things. You can barely see them, even with a good magnifying glass, and carving up your piece of cake is not going to damage any of those calories and render them harmless.
And neither is a similar method, which holds that if you push the icing off the top and eat it after you consume the cake, you reduce the combined calorie intake, especially if you kind of stick your fork into the gob of yummy maple-walnut butter cream and don't actually eat it, but dreamily nibble it off the fork until it is gone, all this while pretending to listen to the dinner table conversation flowing around you. Sorry, this is calorie self-delusion.
A technique that may actually have some physiological merit is to eat the cake while you are standing over the sink. True, you use up a few more calories by standing, rather than slouching in your seat at the table, but the saving is minimal, and is difficult to do if you have company for dinner. "Excuse me, folks, I'm going into the kitchen and stand over the sink to have my dessert. Anyone care to join me?"
A friend suggested that eating ice cream out of the carton while standing in front of the fridge with the freezer door open is an effective method of calorie denial. Possibly. It's cold standing there with the freezer fan blowing on you, so you probably won't work on that container of rum raisin for long. Frankly, this technique involves actual reduction of calorie intake and has no place in a discussion of calorie denial.
The best bet, and the cleverest, if I say so myself, is to use the mathematically elegant method of denial I have devised. I call it the "Law of the Diminishing Extra Calorie."
How does this work? Simple. The word "extra" here refers to the last calories that you take in at any given meal. This is usually dessert, but the formula works for any part of the meal where you eat more of an item than you know darn well you should.
Say you are dieting after recently gaining six pounds, and have just eaten a modest veggie and green salad dinner containing 500 calories. As a reward, you allow yourself that leftover piece of scrumptious strawberry-rhubarb pie for dessert. Brace yourself now -- if the pie contains 250 calories, it adds 50 percent more calories to your otherwise 500-calorie dinner. Fifty-percent more calories!
But now consider that the meal, before dessert, contains 1,000 calories, counting the three chicken wings and the extra helping of mashed potatoes with the totally indulgent pat of margarine you sneaked onto it. In the case of this 1,000-calorie meal, the extra 250 calorie piece of pie adds only an additional 25 percent to your calories. You have reduced the caloric hit of the pie from 50 to 25 percent just by eating a bigger meal! And if you're talking about a 2,500 calorie Hanukkah feast, eating an extra 250 calories worth of latkes to finish up the broken ones on the serving platter would add only a scant 10 percent to your meal. So what's to worry? The more you eat, the less the extra calories count.
Of course, you can't go on and on increasing the calorie content of the meal to reduce the percentage impact of those last calories to an infinitely small level -- I think Einstein had some law about that.
In any case, enjoy! Have another latke!
Bernard Jacks lives in Marlboro.