Weight Loss For “Foodies”
I am constantly asked “how can someone in my profession stay so slim?” Vanity can be a wonderful motivator to diet. It worked for me. When I started my TV show “Let’s Eat! with Prudence Sloane” in 2000 I took one look at my rear end in the camera and thought “where on earth did that come from?” I was always a skinny person but when I got involved in the food business the pounds sneaked up on me. We started shooting immediately. I was desperate to lose weight so I thought I’d try Weight Watchers.
What I learned at Weight Watchers was what I suspected all along – calories count. It’s not what you eat but how much you eat. As a TV food journalist, where my job is to eat and eat everything, this philosophy works great, and it can work for anyone who is a “foodie.” Weight Watchers works on a point system. Instead of painstakingly counting calories, you count points. Each food has a certain number of points. It took about 3 months of meticulous measuring and weighing my food to work out how many points most of the foods I ate contained. From then on it became second nature.
It has worked like a charm and I have evidence to prove it. We produced one show a week and every week I looked thinner at the rate of 1 ½ to 2 pounds a week. By the end of the first season of shooting I was 18 pounds lighter and had reached my initial goal having lost a total of 24 pounds.
Pru’s 2 Strategies for Foodies
1) Don’t Leave Home Without It
Eating low in points is easy when you are at home, but what happens when you are out and about? You’re hungry, in a hurry and the only thing on the horizon is a 2000 calorie hamburger at a fast food joint staring you in the face. My strategy is to carry “emergency rations” which include Wasa Rye Crisps, high fiber popcorn, almonds and no-fat no-sugar yogurt. Another good car food are hard-boiled eggs. Just make sure you’ve peeled it before you go. I once made the mistake of grabbing what I thought was a hard boiled in its shell and tried cracking it open on the dashboard. It wasn’t a pretty sight and even worse to clean up after a 45 minute drive with the hot sun baking it. Apples are good, and so are bananas. Except with bananas about 15 minutes of the car parked in sun with the windows rolled up turns the banana peel into a noxious air freshener! It’s all a matter of choices. A fast food burger, fries and a regular coke while on the run instead of herb crusted rack of lamb, over wild mushroom and Swiss chard risotto and a glass of pinot noir for dinner? It doesn’t take long to figure that one out!
2) Let’s get real.
There is nothing more depressing and impossible for a “foodie” to order the steamed fish, no sauce, plain veggies and skip the dessert when she's finally secured a reservation at Lidia Shire’s restaurant "Scampo" in Boston, where her famed dish that night is roasted spring baby lamb-al forno in a rich Roman style sauce. Now that I’m at my desired weight, two nights a week I throw caution to the wind and order or make at home whatever I want without counting points. The rest of the week I make sure I’m eating low on the point scale.
Keeping it off
A healthy weight is a lifetime commitment. Because I’m only 5’ 3” two to three extra pounds is a warning I’ve eaten over my limit. At that point I pull back and begin measuring and counting points until I’m out of the danger zone. I still have my old Weight Watcher books and charts to help me get back on track. But now there is a Weight Watchers online plan, which has many more bells and whistle. Over the next few months I’m going to check it out with the “foodie” in mind and report back.
