Rookie Diaries: Solving the Protein Puzzle

For something that comes so naturally to us, there sure is a lot to keep in mind every time we eat. A burrito, for example, isn't just spicy, gooey goodness wrapped in a tortilla—it's also a mix of proteins, fats, carbs, and nutrients, all of which have different effects (positive and negative) in our bodies. So eating—while pleasurable and necessary—is also a bit of a brain-teaser. You want the numbers to add up to "healthy."

For me, the equation is a cinch when it comes to carbs: I simply toss a nice mix of whole grains, fruits and veggies into my cart. I know I'm getting enough and getting the right kinds. I also don't get worked up over fats; we only need a little anyway, and I always make sure I grab some low-fat dairy (I looooove full-fat cheese, but try to keep it in check because nutritionists view it as more of a fat than a protein) and stick to healthy-fat foods like nuts, avocados and olive oil. But protein is another story. It's the wild card in my diet—I never really know how much I'm getting, and because I don't eat a lot of meat, I'm constantly worried if I'm meeting my needs.

I know protein is satiating, and that getting enough at each meal is key to feeling full, curbing cravings. And I have a general sense of which foods are protein-rich (dairy, nuts, meat, fish, eggs). I also know I'm supposed to choose lean protein, like low-fat dairy, poultry and fish. Beyond that, I'm clueless! How many grams am I taking in? How many grams do I need? Am I over, under or just right?

To get an accurate snapshot of my protein intake, I tracked my protein grams for a day. Experts say that protein should make up anywhere from 10 percent to 35 percent of your calories—and the Best Life plan falls at a nice middle-ground, at approximately 20 percent. That works out to about 75 grams on the 1,500-calorie plan, and 90 grams on the 1,800-calorie plan. My theory was that I wasn't getting enough, especially because I didn't eat any meat or fish on this particular day. Were my instincts right? Below, the big reveal!

Breakfast
Homemade breakfast burrito: 2 small corn tortillas, ¼ cup canned veggie chili, 1 egg, scrambled, 2 tablespoons part-skim mozz; 2 cups coffee, each with ¼ cup one percent milk
Calories: 400
Protein grams: 17.5
Biggest protein players: The egg and the milk

Snack
1 ounce dark chocolate
Calories: 50
Protein grams: 1

Lunch
Best Life snack: 2 Wasa crispbreads topped with 2 tablespoons ricotta, 2 tablespoons peanut butter, 2 teaspoons jam; 1 orange
Calories: 454
Protein grams: 16.3
Biggest protein players: The peanut butter, by far, followed by the Wasa crispbread (surprise!)

Snack
1 ounce Parmesan cheese
Calories: 111 calories
Protein grams: 10

Dinner
1.5 cups wild rice, 1 cup steamed broccoli topped with 1.5 tsp olive oil and juice of ½ lemon; 1 ounce dark chocolate
Calories: 500
Protein grams: 15.5
Biggest protein player: Wild rice, with a whopping 10 grams!

Late-night snack
Corn tortilla with 1 ounce melted cheese
Calories: 191 calories
Protein grams: 7.9 g

DAY'S TOTAL CALORIES: 1,706 calories
DAY'S TOTAL PROTEIN GRAMS: 68.2 g

The Results: At 68 grams, I'm getting 16 percent of my calories from protein (there are 4 calories in 1 gram of protein), which is in line with general recommendations (although a bit low for The Best Life plan). But the big surprise is that the quality of my protein isn't up-to-snuff. Here are the changes that Janis Jibrin, M.S., R.D., Best Life lead nutritionist, recommended I make:

"Although your total daily protein is within the recommended range, not all of the protein is high quality. By that, I mean protein that delivers all the 'essential' amino acids—the ones our bodies can't make. You're doing great with foods like eggs and milk, which are excellent sources. Cheese delivers as well , but it also comes with a lot of fat and salt. But you kept portions in check, so I'll let you slide! Where you got tricked a bit was with the wild rice. Yes, it's got a good dose of protein, but the protein isn't very high quality, skewing to certain essential amino acids and skimping on others. A little chicken, fish or tofu added to your dinner would have filled in the gaps perfectly."

Our Must-Have of the Week: Healthy Alternatives for Favorite Treats

While it's OK to indulge in treats occasionally, it's also nice to have healthier craving-stopping alternatives that you can enjoy more often. Here are some of the foods I turn to when I want a lower-calorie substitute for some of my favorite higher-calorie splurges.

Instead of: French Fries
Try: Roasted cauliflower. You might be a little doubtful about this trade, but give it a try. You'll get the crispy-crunchy texture that you enjoy with French fries, but with significantly fewer calories. Chop cauliflower into florets, toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roast at 400 degrees until golden and crispy (about 30 to 45 minutes), stirring once. It will be crispy on the outside, tender on the inside and you can even eat it with your hands like fries.

Instead of: Cheese Pizza     
Try: Pita pizza. I always keep a good marinara sauce and two percent mozzarella on hand so that I can get that pizza flavor without having to dial for delivery. Spread marinara sauce on a six-inch whole-wheat pita, or on two halves of a whole-wheat English muffin or half of a bagel. Then, top with mozzarella, a dash of Parmesan, and some fresh basil and Italian seasoning. Broil or bake until cheese is melted and enjoy!  

Instead of: Bagel with Cream Cheese
Try: A two-ounce whole-wheat frozen bagel (like classic Lender's whole wheat) spread with reduced-fat cream cheese. You can even add a side of fruit and still come in at about 160 calories and 4 fat grams less than the typical bagel store calorie bomb.

Instead of: Potato Chips with French Onion Dip
Try: Popchips or baked potato chips dipped in low-fat plain yogurt seasoned with onion and garlic powder.

Instead of: Chunky Premium Full-Fat Ice Cream (like Ben & Jerry's)
Try: One quarter of a sliced banana, 1 teaspoon chopped walnuts, and 1 tablespoon mini chocolate chips mixed into ½ cup Edy's Slow Churned Light Vanilla ice cream. At 200 calories, this homemade Chunky Monkey saves you 100 calories (with less than half the saturated fat) over the original.

Instead of: A candy bar
Try: Three dark chocolate Hershey's Kisses and a cup of tea with steamed fat-free milk. Candy bars can be tough to portion–even if you intend to eat 1/3 of the bar, the other piece is still there to tempt you. Instead, I opt for Hershey's Kisses, which are much easier to portion since they're small and individually wrapped.

The Rookie Diaries: What I Learned from My Week Without Added Sugar

This past week, I challenged myself to a diet of no added sugar. My goal wasn't to deny myself the pleasure of a sweet fix—after all, we're programmed to crave sweet foods; babies are born with a predilection for sweets so they'll want to nurse mom's breast milk, which isn't sugar-sweet, but sweet in the scheme of natural foods. Rather, I was curious to see how many of my go-to foods were harboring sugar, foods that I didn't necessarily reach for when I wanted to sate my sweet tooth but which were delivering sugar calories all the same. I also wanted to determine if I felt more energetic, less prone to bingeing and, frankly, could survive without my chocolate.

I couldn't rely on the nutrition panel on products to suss out added sugars. Food makers are not required to differentiate between the sugar grams that are naturally occurring in a food (such as the milk sugar, lactose, in yogurt) and sugar grams that are added. Instead, I scoured ingredients lists: If a product's ingredients list contained "sugar" or any of its aliases—sucrose, maltose, dextrose, high fructose corn syrup, evaporated cane juice, honey—it was forbidden; naturally occurring sugars are not listed in the ingredients list. (A less extreme version of a no-added-sugar diet would be to choose foods that only listed sugar as one of the last couple ingredients—ingredients are listed by weight, so products with sugar in the first five ingredients are the big no-no's.)

Note: Bob Greene recommends limiting your intake of artificial sweeteners for many reasons—they're even sweeter than sugar, so they make naturally sweet food seem less sweet, and they can actually trigger sweet cravings. He's also concerned with the lack of data on safety for many artificial sweeteners. But I had to allow myself some sweetness to ward off a binge—Bob does say that it's OK to use them to wean yourself off the real stuff—and I stuck with Splenda, which has received the best marks for safety thus far. I'm hoping my reduction in real sugar will help me lower my Splenda use as well.

Here are 10 things I learned that can help you reduce your intake, too.

10. Inhaling three chocolate chip cookies the night before starting a no-added-sugar diet as a last hurrah does nothing but deliver 21 grams (about 5 teaspoons) of sugar into your body before it has to go cold turkey…making it even harder to go cold turkey. For a person on an 1,800-calorie diet, like myself, that's half my day's allotment of 45 grams (11 teaspoons) of added sugar!

9. Cereal may likely be one of your biggest sources of added sugar, even if it's a "healthy" whole-grain version. For example, my whole grain cinnamon O's oat cereal lists cane sugar as the second ingredient and delivered 10 grams (2½ teaspoons) of sugar in just ½ cup. Plain O's are, well, plain tasting, but when eaten with berries, are palatable and more filling.

8. Doing an inventory of your kitchen contents for traces of added sugar can resemble the moment in a horror film when the heroine discovers her boyfriend is the murderer. "Nooooo! Not my favorite pizza, my beloved vanilla yogurt, noooooo!" If you discover that just one of your go-to frozen dinners (burritos, in my case) gets the green-light, consider yourself lucky. And yes, sugar will appear in some unexpected places—like pizza and burritos! In some cases, food makers add it to their products to mask the taste of other ingredients (like cheap, bitter tomatoes in pizza). In other cases, it's added simply to make the food more appealing; it's a known fact that people like the taste of sweet food.

7. If it's a snack item—and it's not tortilla chips or plain air-popped popcorn—it probably has added sugar. Sadly, salsa is also a heavily sweetened snack, so eat those chips solo or make your own salsa.

6. Your craving for fruit will increase dramatically—have lots of it available to get you through the times when you would normally be sitting in front of the tube snacking on cookies or chocolate (while watching "the most dramatic rose ceremony ever," for example).

5. Sugarless gum will become your new BFF during intense cravings.

4. You will become a more frequent and accomplished cook…and likely save money at the same time! Discovering, for example, that all of the eight brands of frozen pizza at your supermarket contain added sugar, you will head to the bookstore for an easy recipe to prepare on your own. (Side note: Some recipes do require a bit of sugar to help activate the yeast for the dough, which, if the rest of your diet is sugar-free, is more than OK.)

3. You'll start to imagine some extreme and distasteful things you'd do for a single bite of chocolate: Watch a whole hour of The Jersey Shore; collect trash on the highway in an orange jumpsuit; submit to rabies injections; jog down the street in nothing but a thong. Instead, you snack on air-popped plain popcorn and vacuum.

2. The two packets of Splenda you normally put in your morning coffee are starting to taste too sweet. You ratchet down your packs to one per cup and find it does the trick.

1. You will break down at some point. You will end up eating way too many olives, almonds and bowls of popcorn in an effort to quell your craving for starchy, sugary snacks, like Goldfish or crackers or chocolate. When you realize that savory substitutes are not working, you will pull your chocolate chip cookies from the back of the fridge (where you stashed them in the hopes you wouldn't remember they were there), hold one of the cookies in your hand, call a close girlfriend to tell her what you're about to do, respond "OK, I won't eat it" when she tells you to stay strong, then eat it when you hang up. It tastes…amazing. So amazing, in fact, that you feel truly sated after just one cookie and are able to put the rest back in the fridge without wanting more. Maybe this no-sugar thing is working after all.

At the end of the week—today!—I feel like my relationship to sweets has changed somewhat. They don't seem to hold as much power over me (I know I can get through a week without caving more than once) and I'm not craving them as much. Could it be psychosomatic? Possibly. But there is a strong body of research showing that carb cravings do exist and they can feed a vicious circle: Sugar begets sugar cravings and can put you on an energy roller coaster of climbs and crashes. I don't feel a change in my energy level, but I am more apt to, say, go take a walk than grab a bar of chocolate when I feel tired. I also am committed to keeping sweets confined to a small, once-a-day splurge. The night I cheated and savored that cookie is burned into my brain…not as a mistake or moment of weakness, but as an experience where I truly tasted and reveled in each morsel. I savored it, ate it mindfully, and was satisfied with the experience when it ended. What a sweet discovery.

Let me know if you have any painless tips on lowering sugar content in your diet, or if you’ve experienced any health or mood boosts from doing so.

Want to Slim Down? Stick with Three Squares!

You've likely heard about the benefits of eating three square meals each day, but it's tempting to ignore this rule when you want to lose weight. Skipping a meal or eating only a low-cal salad may seem like an easy way to cut 500 or more calories, but this approach always comes back to bite you. As the research shows, skimping on calories triggers a series of physical reactions that actually encourages weight gain.

An eating schedule of three squares and a snack or two can actually help you drop pounds because it quells appetite. Eating a complete breakfast (about 400 calories), an adequate lunch (at least 450 calories) and complete dinner (500 calories or more) about four hours apart helps prevent a dangerous hunger attack. And when between-meal cravings mount, a healthy snack does the trick. The three-squares approach also speeds up your metabolism. After a meal, the rate at which you burn calories is slightly elevated. In fact, this "thermic effect" of food, as it's called, burns up about 10 percent of a meal's calories

Of course, you still have to watch what you eat for those three meals and snacks. Keep calories in check by following these simple rules:

1. Eat when you're hungry and serve yourself reasonable portions. Have no more than 1 cup of rice, pasta or potatoes (about the size of two tennis balls). Keep meat, poultry and fish to about 3 to 5 ounces; salad dressing to about 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons; and candy, chips and other treats to about 150 to 200 calories.

2. Wait 20 minutes after eating to decide whether you want more. That's how long it takes the brain to register fullness.

3. Use snacks only when you're actually hungry between meals. Otherwise, don't have one. When you do snack, keep it light. Have a 12-oz skim latte; 1/3 cup hummus with celery and carrot sticks; or 50 calories of whole-grain crackers with a tablespoon peanut butter. For more healthy snacks, check out TheBestLife.com.

Dessert Decisions

The other night, I couldn't stop thinking about carrot cake. So I called up a friend (one I knew shared my love of carrot cake) to see if she wanted to walk to our favorite NYC spot to split a piece. She was up for it and I was excited!  

Shortly before I was about to leave, my friend called up to cancel. I was pretty disappointed but still determined to forge ahead with my carrot cake mission solo. As I was walking, I started thinking about why I really wanted this cake to begin with. Surprisingly, my craving slowly started to fade. I thought about how I didn't want a whole piece of carrot cake myself—nor did I want the other half laying around my apartment. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was the whole experience of getting outside for a walk and enjoying my friend's company that had the real appeal.   

So instead of heading to the cake shop, I took a another route and stopped into my local supermarket. As I got to the freezer section, I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but when I saw the Skinny Cow fudge bars, I knew I found the perfect item. They're only 100 calories (a bit less then my half piece of carrot cake would have cost me) and cold and creamy—perfect for a humid summer night. I was happy with my decision!

This is a good example of why it's important to think about what you put into your mouth before you do it. Often times, cravings are present not because of the food itself, but the activity or feelings surrounding it. So the next time you have a craving for something indulgent, first try thinking about what it is you really want. Then if you do decide to indulge in a treat or dessert, make sure you're not too hungry before diving in. And splurge wisely: Look for individually packaged or portion-controlled foods (think Skinny Cow fudge bars versus a pint of ice cream). Can't find a single-serving splurge? Split it with a pal!

For more healthy-eating advice, join TheBestLife.com.