Dr. McDougall's Online Discussion Board

SewingMom wrote:So glad that green beans are a regular vegetable! I love them so this will help a lot. I know canned veggies probably shouldn't be our first choice but in a pinch it's nice to have a canned vegetable that I truly enjoy

Would you be willing to point me to your 2 favorite salad dressing recipes if they are online or in one of Dr. McD's books?

I have canned green beans and canned tomatoes at work in my emergency food stash!

My 2 fave salad dressings are this: Perfect No-Oil Balsamic Dressing:
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2009nl/dec/recipes.htm

and this: Caesar Dressing (Mary McDougall's)
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2011nl/aug/recipes.htm

All my life, the answer to the question "When am I full?" has been "When the food is gone." Otherwise, I felt I had no internal mechanism that could reliably and clearly tell me when to stop. I'm following MWL fairly strictly now. The only way I will actually lose weight on it, though, is by instituting some behavioral boundaries to compensate for my "satiety blindness". I eat three meals a day with nothing in between (not textbook MWL, but it's what I have to do). I put down my utensil between mouthfuls. It now takes me 45 minutes, eating alone and without interruption, to finish a typical lunch/dinner. I weigh/measure (also not textbook McDougall) the more calorie dense items I eat (starches) . I've become zealous about starting my meals with the less calorie dense foods (e.g., a big salad) and saving starches for last.

And you know what? It's actually helping me. Not only do these parameters (when combined with the principles of calorie density) help me consume fewer calories, they seem to have helped me develop some genuine discernment about when I'm full. Of course, I then have to make a conscious decision to stop eating when I detect fullness. That's a whole 'nother challenge. As is dealing with what happens when I become un-full before my next meal. That part hasn't been easy. My personal experience has been that the dirty little secret of satiety via the calorie density approach is that achieving satiety that way is easy (i.e., eat a trainload of low-calorie-density food and feel full); keeping satiety is hard (i.e., two hours after a huge but fatless meal I'm sometimes hungry again). But that's just another dimension of this issue: Learning how to distinguish actual hunger from, say, the mere lack of fullness, or from emotional hunger.

Another thing about detecting fullness: For me, it's harder to do sitting down. If I stand up, I get a much better sense of whether I've had enough or not. Strange, huh? Anyway, I can see from this thread that I'm not the only one with these kinds of issues. Good topic.

Can you please tell me what nutritional yeast is? Not being an American, I've never heard of it! Mind you, living here in Bulgaria I'd be surprised if I could buy it!

Dorcas wrote:Can you please tell me what nutritional yeast is? Not being an American, I've never heard of it! Mind you, living here in Bulgaria I'd be surprised if I could buy it!

Link. The flavor is hard to describe. Sort of cheesy, nutty. Or like dirty socks, to detractors. You can sprinkle it on salads, soups, or pizza. Or use it as an ingredient in sauces and dressings.

Thank you. Sounds interesting! Seriously doubt if I'd be able to buy it here. May consider amazon.

Well, the specific food questions seem to have been covered. I'll tell you about my experience with feeling full, FWIW.

1)I "peek" at the calories a little. I know I need so much to keep up my lean mass and not kick in starvation mechanisms, so I'll rough-cut the numbers a little now and again, just to make sure I'm in the right ballpark. Thus, I know I'll be eating a particular amount of, say, brown rice in day (or potatoes or succotash or whatever starch I'm eating that day).
2)I divide that roughly into the number of meals I'm having that day. Four seems to work best for me. At a particular meal, I'll have about as much salad as I'm going to have starch, then about as much non-starchy vegetable as well, then finish with the starch.
3)Something I picked up from reading "The Power of Habit" last summer: I brush my teeth and then clean my mouth with original Listerine, as a way of signalling to my brain that I'm done eating. Sounds cray-cray, but it works for me.