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If you're a lover of Rachel Ray, a daytime channel surfer, and fan of home invasion movies, you're in luck. Today's Rachel Ray Show has me and a camera crew of 6 sneaking into Peggy's home in New Jersey and doing a kitchen makeover to help make her family of seven (5 teenagers . . . aargh) automatically eat a little bit better. Although I can't spill the beans, you can get some flavor of the behind-the-scenes action in the blog below. The 2-minute video also shows how you can do the same to your own kitchen this weekend. Also, when we were back in the studio, it was cool to hear Rachel going off topic and start talking about our cool work in schools with the Smarter Lunchroom Movement. If you are a lover of school meals or a well-meaning critic, you'll like what you see at the website.
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  I just spent two days shooting a new episode for the Rachael Ray Show. At the same time, I was originally supposed to meet with Ben Missbach, a Ph.D. eating researcher who was visiting me from the University of Vienna. My solution? Take him with me. When he asked, “Who’s Rachael Ray?" I said, “She’s like the fun, happy girl next door who’s also a great cook.” The Rachel Ray Show is an hour-long mix of cooking segments, guest segments, and maybe a remote segment filmed elsewhere. Her executive producer had an interesting plan. Instead of having to choose between either doing a remote segment or a guest segment, she wanted to do both. Here’s the plan: [] Send me to a sight-unseen home of one of their audience members, [] Teach that person how to do a Slim by Design Kitchen Makeover, [] Do it for them while its being filmed by two camera crews [] Show up to the show and the next day and report back ----- Less than 20 minutes after checking into our New York City hotel, we were car-napped off to a home in New Jersey. There I met Peggy – a happy, photogenic mother of 5 teenagers – and 6 guy camera crew. These Kitchen Makeovers are eye-opening to homeowners. While the basic ones only take an hour or two, the more thorough or complicated ones (like for celebrities) take about 4 hours. For Peggy, they wanted me to do a basic one. But since they wanted to film it from three different angles, so after I did it, I did it again, then again. Five hours later, Ben and I were back in the hotel. That night their editing crew cut 5 hours of tape down into a one 3-minute segment: Meet Peggy and her family, Brian invades her kitchen, changes are made, Peggy & Brian high-five or hug (depending on which cut they decide to use). ---- The next day, our segment with Rachael and 140 jacked-up, happy audience members was filming at 3:30. The car picked us up at 2:00. The rest of the day went like this: traffic jam, backstage entrance, make-up, meet Peggy again, sound check, Dos and Don’ts (let Rachael take the lead, stay on track, don’t look at the cameras, and so on), and . . . GO! Our cue to go out on stage had been when Rachael starting introducing Slim by Design. As we walked out, they rolled the 3-minute segment of the makeover. Peggy and I were led out to one of the 2 stages and positioned on either side of Rachael. After the segment ended and people were applauding, Rachael talked briefly (totally off-script) about my Smarter Lunchroom program and how it helped support the great work she was doing in schools. [It’s this sort of candid, off-script enthusiasm that makes her popular with so many people like me.] She then asked me, “Dr. B., how can a person eat better and lose weight without dieting?” I said that it's better to change your immediate environment than to change your mind, and it's easier to become slim by design than become slim by willpower -- willpower has to last for ever, 24/7. She then pointed to five different props that were sitting out (a bulk package, strange vegetables, a side-by-side refrigerator, a divided plate, and so on), and asked me to explain how they could be used to help people cook more and eat in balance. She ended by plugging Slim by Design again (the Kitchen Makeover approach I did for Peggy is described in Chapter 2), and giving copies to each audience member. Yumo! From start to finish: 9 minutes. When I got backstage, Ben and I said good-bye to Peggy and her daughter, and we said goodbye to our Producer and Associate Producer. Within 4 minutes we were headed home. ---- This segment airs on the Rachael Ray Show on Tuesday January 24th (10:00 AM on CBS in some markets and different times and places in others). Even if you only make 4-5 of the changes I made to Peggy’s kitchen are relevant to your kitchen, you’ll be pounds ahead even if you only do two of them. Let me know what two changes you’ve put into action and how they work for you. 
 If you want to do your own Kitchen Makeover: 1) Watch the Rachael Ray Show video and adopt 2-3 ideas for one month 2) Read the Chapter pdf posted above the photos to see why this also works in schools, where you work, and where you shop 3) Check out Chapter 2 of Slim by Design. The 100-point scorecard on pages 60-63 will tell you whether your kitchen is working for your diet or against it. It also tells what to do to change. 4) If you want to go really deep on this, sign up for the Slim by Design Course, which is being released this Spring. Sign-up for the newsletter, and we'll keep you posted when it's available “Losing weight is easy. It’s keeping weight off that is hard.” I didn’t believe this the first time I heard this. But I became a convert. It happened a few years back. Washington Post columnist, Jennifer Huget, started her “Me-minus-10” program. To help her, my Cornell Food and Brand Lab worked with Jennifer to find 3 easy changes that she could make each month to lose these stubborn 10 pounds. We analyzed photographs of her kitchen, dining room, cupboards, and refrigerators. We went over daily patterns of her and her family, and we asked how she would respond to different eating scenarios. Based on this we used our Slim by Design approach to suggest find easy, daily changes she should consider. After 3 months, Jennifer had lost 12 pounds. Now comes the difficult part. When we accomplish a goal, it’s easy to backslide because the race is finished. Losing 10 or 30 pounds is a reward unto itself. You did it; you won the race, and you want to staop. The problem is that keeping 10-30 pounds off isn’t easy to celebrate. There’s no reward, or change, or progress to see. Without the motivation to keep the change, how do you do it? There are two different options. One is to find a support group for maintaining weight loss - the TOPS program (Take Off Pounds Sensibly) is one of my favorites (for people on a budget). A second option is to adjust your goal. With Jennifer, we helped her adjust her goal. Instead of having the goal to “Lose 10 pounds,” she changed it to “Get my family to eat healthier (without them knowing it).” She kept focusing on making three small changes that would benefit her family, but also help keep her on track. For instance, she put a piece of fruit next to her husband’s car keys every morning. She put 20% of any dinner entrée into the refrigerator before serving the rest for dinner. She made there were little baggies of cut up fruit or vegetables on the middle refrigerator shelf. Any daily change that keeps you just a little bit disciplined ends up keeping you a lot disciplined. The key to keeping the change, is in making a related change. [There's a nice related video right here]  Bon Jour! Here’s an international question for anyone who’s ever lived in a foreign country for more than a couple months. Did you lose or gain weight? Some people gain weight and some people lose weight. Some move overseas and they walk a lot, and they pocketfuls of funny-looking money on tiny portions, and they lose a lot or weight without realizing it. Or they don’t really like eating yak meat, and they lose a lot. Others eat with abandon until they need a new passport photo. It doesn’t matter what country you’ve lived in – US to Brazil, Australia to Taiwan, Germany to the US, North Korea to South Korea – we’d love to hear your story. Ben Missbach (an amazing new post-doc from Germany) and I have put together the short survey at the link below. If you can fill it out, we can see if we can put together some rules of thumb to help out the future world traveler in you. https://cornell.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_50ljE5Zm0H97Ujj   , London, Tokyo, and Topeka – across the globe, this past week was the worst week for our diets. In no single week does our planet gain more weight. Here’s the good news: That all ended yesterday – on January 3rd. That’s when our collective worldly wait peaks and starts to decline. We know this because we studied the up and down weigh-ins of 10,000 people around the world that had bought wireless scales (focusing mainly on Americans, Germans, and Japanese) and we published it in New England Journal of Medicine. It doesn’t matter if you live in Tokyo or Topeka, you start to increasingly gain weight on December 10, and it keeps climbing until January 3rd, After the 3rd, it slowly started to drop for these people. Especially for those who weighed themselves often. Besides Tuesday being the last heaviest day of this holiday season, the study also has another silver lining. People who weighed themselves at least four times a week, lost half of their holiday weight by the end of January. If you don’t hide from the bad news, it won’t be bad news for very long. These discoveries are important because they show that the more weight you gain during the holidays, the longer it takes to lose it. Instead of beating yourself up for not shedding holiday weight this year, we would be better off making a resolution to keep weight gain down during the next holiday season, Here's the New England Journal of Medicine article Here's the Cornell Food and Brand Lab webpage Who has way too much food sitting around the house right today? Raise your hand and go “Me, me, me!” It’s in the form of colorfully wrapped zucchini bread, warehouse club party packs of crackers, and the sugar cookies Santa left behind because there was no chocolate in them. What happens next to these foods depends on where you put them. Within a week the Associated Press will be releasing a gonzo article telling you what you can do with all of these extras. It’s partly based on some studies an amazing buddy of mine from France (Pierre Chandon) and I did. We looked at what happens when people bring tons and tons of food home from places like Sam’s Club, Costco, and BJs. We discovered the way you pack leftover foods and bulk-bought foods in your cupboard or fridge will trick you the next time you open it. What you see first is what you’re most likely to eat. That first food is the one you compare the others to. You see it, you skim the rest of the fridge or cupboard, and then you take it. Unfortunately, we can’t change your instinct to grab the first food you see. Fortunately, what we can do is to make sure this first food isn’t a plate of fudge or thumbprint cookies. You can make sure the food that’s front and center on our front shelf lines up with our New Years resolution. Now’s the time of the year to load up that center shelf with the fruit that’s slowly withering away in the crisper, or with 10 for $10 yogurts. As for the cookie gift bags, if you wrap them in foil and put them in the back of the fridge, they’ll still be waiting for you next year at this time.
How many food decisions do you make in a day? Most people guess between 20 and 30. Do you want yogurt or Froot Loops? Do you want orange juice or water? But it’s not just what we eat, it’s whether you pour a little or a lot, how much milk you pour, if you pour seconds, whether you have toast, what you put on it, whether you eat it before or after a piece of fruit, whether pour a second bowl of cereal, and so on. Many people make 20-30 food decisions simply during breakfast. Every time you look at a donut and say “No,” you’ve made a food decision. We discovered this in a number of different ways, but one way was simply by having people walk around with one little stadium counters and click it every time they thought about food. What we’ve found is the normal weight person makes about 200 decisions about food a day. But heavy people make closer to 300 more food decisions. The problem is that most of us aren’t really that conscious that we’re making all of these decisions, so we can easily be influenced by the size of our cereal bowl, the distance of the box from where we are sitting, what our partner is doing next to us, and what we’re reading on our phone or watching on TV. For most of us, the solution to Mindless Eating is not mindful eating. It’s not to be aware of all 200 of these decisions. That would take most of our day. Instead, the solution is to set up our live so that these 200 decisions we make guide us to eating a little less or a little better. If the size of your cereal bowl is leading you to eat too much, it’s easier to use a smaller bowl than to repeat to yourself, “Pour less, pour less, pour less.” Using a smaller bowl is a resolution we could all keep.  
During World War II, the US was shipping its beef, pork, and lamb over to allies and to soldiers, and there was a fear that there would be a protein shortage on the home-front. The solution? Try to convince American families to eat organ meats -- beef brains, liver, tripe (stomach), heart, kidneys, pigs feet, and other yummy bits. To determine how exactly to do this, they assembled about 150 researchers from a crazy range of social science fields to figure out the next steps (you can read the declassified "Lost Lessons" below). One discovery was that it would be easier to convince people to rotate organ meats into their diet once a week than to ask them to do it every day. Don't do it always. Do it for variety. The first step was to get butchers, reporters, and recipe-makers to stop calling them "organ" meats and to start calling them "variety" meats. Meats you eat to add some variety into your diet -- not because you have to. --- People can adopt new foods into their diets, but a gradual approach is more likely to work than an abrupt change. Sadly, abrupt changes are usually what marketers of new products usually unsuccessfully advocate or imply. Offer your healthy, cool new product as something they can start switching to occasionally. Nobody wants to eat beef brains every night.
During World War II, the US was shipping its beef, pork, and lamb over to allies and to soldiers, and there was a fear that there would be a protein shortage on the home-front. The solution? Try to convince American families to eat organ meats -- beef brains, liver, tripe (stomach), heart, kidneys, pigs feet, and other yummy bits. To determine how exactly to do this, they assembled about 150 researchers from a crazy range of social science fields to figure out the next steps (you can read the declassified "Lost Lessons" below). One discovery was that it would be easier to convince people to rotate organ meats into their diet once a week than to ask them to do it every day. Don't do it always. Do it for variety. The first step was to get butchers, reporters, and recipe-makers to stop calling them "organ" meats and to start calling them "variety" meats. Meats you eat to add some variety into your diet -- not because you have to. --- People can adopt new foods into their diets, but a gradual approach is more likely to work than an abrupt change. Sadly, abrupt changes are usually what marketers of new products usually unsuccessfully advocate or imply. Offer your healthy, cool new product as something they can start switching to occasionally. Nobody wants to eat beef brains every night.
Dear Slim by Design Friend,
This past year I’ve been gone on sabbatical and a lot of Slim by Design changes have been implemented in homes, restaurants, and grocery stores in Europe. There are exciting things going on that I’ll be sharing with you, and I’d love to know what you’ve been up to. I’d really like to hear how Slim by Design has worked for you to either eat better, eat less, or help those around you. Even better, I’d love to hear about the personal changes you've made. Email any written testimonial you want to [email protected]. If you’re interested, I might also share your experience when I refer to the cool and creative things people have done to (almost) effortlessly change their lives. If you’re super ambitious (and tech savvy) you can send a short 30 second to 1 minute video of you telling what you’ve done using the principles outlined in Slim by Design and the difference it made. Please send me this video through the website WeTransfer.com. Here’s how you use WeTransfer (it is completely free!):
All my best, Brian |
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