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A recent study found that dieters who increased their whole-grain intake shed more belly fat than those eating refined grains — even though both groups ate the same number of calories! The whole-grain eaters also lowered their levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker associated with inflammation and increased risk of stroke.

So, in honor of that finding, I’m sharing my recipe for Tabbouleh, a Middle Eastern dish thought to have originated in Lebanon. This is a simple, flavorful side dish that everyone in my family enjoys. I often make a batch in the morning and leave it in the fridge until dinnertime, but it can just as easily be prepared the night before.

And, yes, it’s budget-friendly!

Overnight Tabbouleh

Serves: 6 (1/2 c. servings)
Calories: 150
Fat: 2.9 gm
Prep time: 15 minutes
Refrigerator time:

Ingredients

• 1 c. bulgur (cracked wheat)
• 2 medium tomatoes, chopped
• 1 cucumber, peeled and chopped
• 5 green onions, chopped finely
• 3/4 c. fresh parsley, finely minced
• 1 tbsp. fresh mint, finely minced
• 1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 tsp. dried oregano
• 1/4 tsp. cumin
• Juice from one fresh lemon
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Wash the bulgur in cold water and drain well. Squeeze to remove all excess water.

2. Place bulgur in large bowl and add tomatoes, cucumber, onions, parsley and mint. Stir to combine.

3. Add oregano and cumin. Stir well.

4. Add oil, lemon juice and salt/pepper. Stir until thoroughly mixed.

5. Cover bowl and refrigerate 8 hours (or overnight) until the wheat softens. Stir before serving and enjoy!

Note: We often have this as a side dish with grilled chicken, steamed artichokes and fruit for dessert.

From what I can tell on my end, Chubby Mommy is back in business with the exception of the category permalinks. Fixing them is going to take a bit more time than I’ve got available today, but I hope to get them working again this weekend.

Meanwhile, I’ve restored the blogroll and have I’added in the ability to subscribe to site updates via email (over in the sidebar).

Speaking of subscriptions… I plan to offer an email newsletter for this site that will share sales from diet- and fitness-related companies, product rebates, coupon codes and even online coupons. Configuring the service I’ll be using is yet another thing on my ever growing To Do list.

You know, I really wish I was one of those people who lose tons of weight when they get stressed out….

Part of the “behind-the-scenes” tweaking that I did over the weekend involved moving ChubbyMommy.com to a new server as well as to the root directory on that server. Previously, you’d been directed to http://www.chubbymommy.com/blog/ whereas now the site resolves to its URL.

I do have a redirection enabled to send people to the front page, but I’d appreciate if you’d update your bookmarks and blogrolls to ensure that you’re visiting http://www.ChubbyMommy.com (without the /blog/) now.

Meanwhile, I’ll get the sidebars gussied up again and the blogroll restored soon.

Oh, sure, it’s only 6°F outside my window right now, but I can sense that Spring is in the air.

How can I be so sure? All I need to do is glance at the huge amount of diet-related email hitting my InBox that promise things like: “Eat all you want and lose 10 lbs. in 5 days !” (which, it turns out, is possible if you eat nothing but air) or “Lose weight while you sleep” (the first requirement for which involves consuming nothing but celery and water when you’re awake).

So naturally I’m a bit skeptical of the email I received from Prevention magazine promising that I can eat chocolate and still lose weight.

How? The diet essentially seeks to affect cortisol production.

Chronic stress produces cortisol which, in turn, interferes with dopamine and serotonin levels. These are known as the “feel-good” neurotransmitters, but since chronic stress keeps people from processing them correctly their brains demand something else to help them feel good. Some people turn to illicit drugs, others to alcohol and still others to food, especially sugary or fatty foods.

So, according to the article, regularly consuming foods rich in mono-unsaturated fatty acids (MUFAS) and stress relief can speed fat loss because the MUFAs deliver pleasure-producing fats, thereby shutting down cycle of cortisol production and pleasure-seeking that leads to overeating.

Sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t like a diet that encourages you to eat oils, nuts and seeds, avocados, olives and chocolate?

Of course, it’s not just about adding these foods to what you’re already eating. The program involves eating four times a day, 400 calories per meal, with each meal containing a specific amount of one of the MUFAs. There’s also a 4-day “jumpstart” during which you drink what they call “Sassy Water” (water with lemon and ginger) and smoothies four times a day. After that, it’s a 1,600 calorie a day plan.

But does it work? The Rachel Ray show recently aired an episode featuring women who dropped significant amounts of weight in as little as 30 days, simply by following the program. Mary Anne Sheshock followed the diet and told ABC’s Good Morning America that she lost 47 pounds in 5 months.

That all sounds good to me, but I know darned well I fall off of diets rather quickly if they don’t produce results. I need motivation, and ordinarily I look to my scale for that. But then I tried the flat belly virtual belly flattener to see what I’d look like after losing 5, 10, 15 or even 20 pounds.

No, I won’t share the photo with you but I will say that I’m giving serious thought to buying their book which comes with a free 3-month online program, too.

Yeah, I looked that good.

Like a lot of senior citizens, my mother relies on Medicare coverage. She was also recently diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer.

The infuriating part? My mother is a retired oncology nurse — she spent 27 years caring for cancer patients, and so she’d been fanatic about keeping up with her own physicals, cancer screenings and routine colonoscopies. Last July she’d had her gallbladder removed, and two months previously she’d had her appendix removed.

The “slow-growing” tumor was located precisely beneath where her appendix used to be. The doctor who missed it says he doesn’t know why he didn’t see the lemon-sized tumor during either surgery.

But, if today’s NY Times is to be believed, the failure to diagnose her cancer may be tied to her health insurance.

Previous studies have shown a correlation between insurance status and the stage of diagnosis for particular cancers. The new research is the first to examine a dozen major cancer types and to do so nationally with the most current data. It mined the National Cancer Data Base, which began collecting information about insurance in the late 1990s, to analyze 3.7 million patients who received diagnoses from 1998 to 2004.

The widest disparities were noted in cancers that could be detected early through standard screening or assessment of symptoms, like breast cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer and melanoma. For each, uninsured patients were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed in Stage III or Stage IV rather than Stage I. Smaller disparities were found for non-Hodgkins lymphoma and cancers of the bladder, kidney, prostate, thyroid, uterus, ovary and pancreas.

The study concludes that people without private health insurance are less likely to received routine screenings and timely diagnosis, and there’s a suggestion that such omissions are due to efforts to control health care costs. Ironically enough, a late stage diagnosis requires more aggressive treatment and critical care, ultimately increasing overall costs anyway.

I know what you’re thinking: Tuna Loaf? Ewww. But don’t knock it before you’ve tried it. Not only is this meal inexpensive (tuna’s only $0.69 per can, after all), it’s also filling enough to satisfy my meat-loving husband yet yummy enough to please my two picky kids. As for me, I love that it’s quick, easy and low in both calories and fat.

Tuna Loaf
Serves: 4-6
Cooking time: 10 minutes prep, 1 hour cooking
Calories: 157 per serving
Calories from fat: 43

Ingredients

• 2 large cans of tuna in water, drained and flaked (14 1/2 oz. total)
• 1/2 cup fine breadcrumbs
• 1/2 cup Egg Beaters
• 1/2 cup finely chopped green bell pepper
• 1/2 cup onion, finely chopped (about 1 small)
• 1/4 cup skim milk
• 1/2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
• 1 dash Tabasco
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Spray large loaf pan with cooking spray.
3. Combine first five ingredients in mixing bowl. Add remaining ingredients and mix well.
4. Turn mixture into loaf pan and pat down. Smooth the top.
5. Bake 45 minutes or until golden on top.
6. Remove from oven and allow to rest 10 minutes before serving.

Make a meal by adding: small side salad; steamed green beans tossed with “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter”, dash of fresh lemon juice and 1 tsp. minced garlic; whole wheat rolls.

My son has been making the most of having Daddy home for the President’s Day holiday. Starting this morning, and continuing even as I type this, my son has almost exclusively pestered his father instead of me for a change.

It’s been quite nice. Until a day goes by when I’m not the parent in charge, I never really realize how much time I spend fixing my son’s meals, nagging at him to finish his meals, cleaning up after my son’s meals, nagging at him to pick up his toys, cleaning up his toys, then preparing to fix his next meal. I almost didn’t know what to do with those extra 6 hours in my day!

Fortunately, I put a couple of them to good use. I watched a movie, did a little laundry, caught up on email and blogged at all five of my blogs. Then I exercised, too! I pedaled 5 miles on the exer-cycle then spent about 20 minutes doing some yoga. Lovely, that — the deep relaxation section on one of my favorite yoga DVDs always leaves my body feeling like melted butter.

So, with that on my mind, is it any surprise that after I’d emerged from a nnice hot bubble bath and stood shivering in my bathroom, smoothing lotion all over my goosebumpy skin, I suddenly got a craving for turkey?

Some of you may have experienced what I found myself doing just the other night: I plunked down in front of my computer with a bag of potato chips to eat while reading email. Twenty minutes later I reached for another chip and… they were all gone. Where did they go? I didn’t remember eating it that much. In fact, I couldn’t have because I was still hungry

I hate to admit it, but that very same thing happens to me far more often than I’d like. Does it sound familiar to you, too?

The solution, according to one woman, doesn’t involve taking diet pills. It doesn’t even involve dieting at all. Instead, we need to put our brains to work to lose weight. That is: we need to eat “mindfully”, as Harvard Medical School instructor Jean Fain explains in her YouTube video, “Why a Twinkie?”.

Now, ordinarily there’s not much exciting about watching a grown woman eating a Twinkie while emoting happiness and pleasure, and between the shoddy video quality and Fain’s patronizing over-enunciation I felt like I was back in 8th grade trying not to snicker at a health class video.

But I kept watching, contemptuously, in part to find out just how long she was going to sit there silently eating that Twinkie. A full minute later, and only halfway through the Twinkie, she stopped. Did you get that? She didn’t even finish the thing. In my household that’s almost unheard of. Fain’s point, however, was that we can eat the foods we love and still lose weight if we’ll just eat mindfully.

So what’s mindful eating? Susan Albers’ book, Eating Mindfully: How to End Mindless Eating and Enjoy a Balanced Relationship with Food , describes it as consciously savoring your food:

…feeling the saltiness of each potato chip on your fingers when you pick it up. The taste of salt when you put the chip on your tongue. It’s listening to the loud crunch of each bite, and the noise that chewing makes in your head….”

Their other tips: make a celebration of it: if you’re going to eat, do nothing but eat. Eat slowly, free from mental distractions like the TV or computer. Wash your hands first like Mom told you to do. Sit down. Take small bites. Chew slowly. Give yourself permission to satisfy your hunger or cravings and to enjoy the taste while you do so.

Then eat every bite like it’s your first taste of that food… and might be your last.

You know, I think I may just give this a try. How about you?

Some time ago, I read that Courtney Love installed a lock on her refrigerator to keep herself from snacking. At the time I thought, “Gee, woman, just get some willpower!” But now?

Now I’m a lot more sympathetic. I’m also of the mind that locking my fridge wouldn’t simply prevent me from snacking and thereby ruining my diet. It would prevent my husband and son from snacking, too, and thereby ruining my diet.

What, you think that sounds like I’m blaming them for my eating habits? Well, yes, I suppose I am. But I’m not completely off-base here. Turns out, watching someone snack can lead you to snack, too. And not just any snack, either, mind you.

A study at Duke University observed how undergraduates reacted when someone was talking to them while dipping into one of two bowls of snack items. One bowl contained goldfish crackers (yum!) while the other contained animal crackers (okay, also yum). Both the speaker and the observer had access to the same two things, but the speaker only dipped into one of the two.

So what happened?

The observer dipped into the same bowl as the speaker most of the time even if they’d previously stated they preferred the other kind of snack.

“A person who views someone else’s snacking behavior will come to exhibit a similar snack selection pattern,” the researchers from Duke University, University of Maryland and the University of Amsterdam said in a statement.

“This suggests that preferences may shift as a result of unintentionally mimicking another person’s consumption behavior.”

I pointed this study out to my husband this morning as he stood in the kitchen frying bacon. Fortunately, I’d just filled up on All Bran (not so “yum”) and couldn’t think of eating another bite. But, oh, that bacon smelled goooood.

“You know what this means,” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he responded. “It means that you’re going to blame me if you suddenly decide you just have to eat a piece of bacon.”

“No, silly,” I assured him. “It means that when you drop dead of heart disease from all of that fried food I’m going to have to marry me a vegetarian.”

Oddly enough, he didn’t think it was nearly as funny as I did.

Ever since the news broke that your diet soda may be making you fat, pop-addicts have been anguishing over how to get their fizzy fix. (For Mad William it’s all about a caffeine delivery system.)

The good news? There may be a solution, but you won’t find it in the beverage aisle. Marketed by Virgil’s and Zevia, there are diet drinks containing stevia, an herb in the sunflower family. When concentrated, stevia (which is also known as sweetleaf) is 300 times sweeter than sugar, although it can have a licorice-like aftertaste in high concentrations. It has a negative effect on glucose levels, meaning that it can actually enhance glucose tolerance – a fact that’s made it popular among diabetics.

The FDA, however, has refused to approve it as a food additive and requires it be labeled as a “dietary supplement”, a fact that many big-name manufacturers including Coca-Cola are now trying to change. Its been used widely throughout Japan for over 30 years, and to date there are no conclusive reports linking it with health complications. In fact, a 2006 World Health Organization (WHO) study found that it has no carcinogenic effects whatsoever.

So why isn’t it approved for use here in the U.S. where our “war on obesity” would ordinarily prompt us to look at such alternatives? The answer, unfortunately, appears to be purely political. Keep in mind what I said earlier about the fast-tracking of aspartame at the request of Donald Rumsfeld, who was then the COO of the company which discovered and marketed Equal.

Now, note this:

In 1991, at the request of an anonymous complaint, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) labeled stevia as an “unsafe food additive” and restricted its import. The FDA’s stated reason was “toxicological information on stevia is inadequate to demonstrate its safety.”[33] This ruling was controversial, as stevia proponents pointed out that this designation violated the FDA’s own guidelines under which any natural substance used prior to 1958 with no reported adverse effects should be generally recognized as safe (GRAS)….

The FDA requires proof of safety before recognizing a food additive as safe. A similar burden of proof is required for the FDA to ban a substance or label it unsafe. Nevertheless, stevia remained banned until after the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act forced the FDA in 1995 to revise its stance to permit stevia to be used as a dietary supplement, although not as a food additive — a position that stevia proponents regard as contradictory because it simultaneously labels stevia as safe and unsafe, depending on how it is sold.[35]

While all that wrangling is going on, stevia continues to be more closely regulated by the FDA than most medical supplies. However, since it’s been categorized as a “dietary supplement” you can still buy it… you just have to go to the health food section of your grocery store. (I’ve been buying it for years.) Now, you can also buy stevia-sweetened pop, which means that Mad William can now get his caffeine fix again.