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Jackie and Theo Callahan: Modeling good eating habits for their kids.

Client of the Month

Callahans: No Going Back to Donuts Now!

In many ways, Jackie and Theo Callahan are your typical Silicon Valley Couple.  They both have demanding careers, two toddlers at home and can hardly find a moment to themselves.  A fast food diet was quickly becoming a way of life. What makes this Willow Glen couple unique is how they’ve recently taken control of their diet and together have lost a total of 40 pounds since August! 

After the second baby came along last year, the Callahan’s found themselves too exhausted to prepare healthy meals.  Theo says that driving back from a long day at the office, the prospect of the work-load still ahead at home with the babies would be too much. “I found myself stopping for convenience foods: Chinese, Mexican, anything quick, to reduce the work-load at home.”  

The trouble was, not only were Theo and Jackie putting on extra pounds, they were feeling more and more sluggish from a diet heavy in sugars and fats.  “We’d grab take-out, or miss meals and then overeat later-on as a result. The next day we’d wake up foggy; start our day with coffee and something sugary, then start the vicious cycle all over again.”

One day Jackie stuck her head in the door of the Willow Glen Lite for Life store and met managing counselor, Sylvie Nalezny.

“Sylvie has a saying: ‘If you could lose weight on your own, you would have done it by now,” Jackie says.  “The program offered structure.  It called for commitment: both financial and emotional.  Theo was all for it.  We knew the rules about portion size and eating the right foods, but we needed the structure of the program to help us break our bad habits.”

The Callahans understood from the beginning that the best way to make the program work for them was to join at the same time. “It wouldn’t work, if we both didn’t do it together,” Jackie says.  They signed up for 28 weeks and split the program between them. Each visited the store two or three times a week, sometimes separately, sometimes together, to meet with a counselor.

Right away, before even losing any significant amount of weight, they noticed the difference in their energy levels.  Still needing easy-to-prepare dinners, they started picking up healthy convenience foods at Lite for Life.  Favorites are the veggie soups, the breakfast burritos and the tofetti—all low in sugar, fats and salt.

Theo and Jackie agree that the Lite for Life eating program will remain a way of life from now on.  During the stress of the holidays, Theo says he actually ordered Chinese takeout and then called back and cancelled! “We went into the kitchen and made something healthy instead.”

“There’s no going back to the donuts,” Jackie says. “We’re modeling healthy eating for our children now.”

The couple also agree that they couldn’t have lost the weight or established new, healthy eating habits on their own. They needed the support of each other as well as the structure of Lite for Life. Now that they’re close to meeting their weight loss goals, Jackie and Theo have subscribed to the Maintenance Program for all of 2007. 

At the end of the day, after feeding, bathing and getting the babies into bed, Theo and Jackie share a protein dessert - a healthy reward for a hard day’s work.  Jackie laughs, “I say we both needed to get back to our pre-birth weight.  Dads gain too, you know!”

The Salt of the Earth

Salt is hot.  Specialty salts previously only known to gourmands and health nuts, such as Hawaiian Red Salt, Black Salt, Smoked Sea Salt and Sel Gris, or grey salt are starting to pop up on the shelves of higher end supermarkets and on the menu descriptions of chic restaurants.  Chefs love these regional salts for the unique flavors they impart to foods.  Nutritionists love them because most of these salts are minimally processed and therefore more nutritious than the processed salt most of us are used to using. 

Wait a minute.  Salt nutritious?  Isn’t salt bad for you? What about high blood pressure? Won’t salt make me bloat and retain water?

Like many things in life, the answers are all about quality and balance. There is small but important difference between high quality natural salt and refined, processed salt. The effects on your health from the former can be healing and from the latter may be devastating.

Salt is a mineral, the only one you eat.  Naturally occurring salts are mostly made up of sodium chloride, but also contain complementary minerals and trace minerals, such as calcium, potassium and iodine. Trace minerals are important for excellent health because imbalances in vitamins and minerals on a cellular level are one of the basic causes of disease.

Like the transformation of whole wheat into white flour, the refining process of ordinary table salt strips away most of these trace minerals, leaving just sodium and chloride.  In the 1920s, when it was discovered that iodine deficiency lead to low thyroid, salt processors began adding iodine to salt, much the way flour millers began “enriching” flour with some of the stripped away vitamins and minerals that turned out to be necessary to prevent disease.

As we learn more about food and how it behaves chemically in the body, we're beginning to see that simply providing an isolated vitamin or mineral isn't as effective as providing it in its whole food form. This is why Vitamin C is now commonly sold with bioflavanoids, which is the way it's found in a whole orange with the pith, for example. 

When we consistently consume single processed or refined minerals that are out of proportion with the other vitamins and minerals, imbalanced interactions result and over time can cause many problems. For example, Americans typically consume way too much isolated sodium chloride and the result can be hypertension. Some nutritionists suspect that the iodine add to processed salt may play a role in the rise in incidences of hyperthyroidism.

In any event, the body needs sodium and potassium together to effectively create a “pump” which keeps nutrients going into the cells and wastes coming out.  Salt stripped down to just sodium and chloride can disrupt this balance, and the balance of other minerals in the body as well.

To make matters worse, pure white refined salt is chemically bleached and treated with anti-caking agents to prevent clumping. The most common anti-caking agents are aluminum-oxide silicates, toxic metals that some studies have implicated in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Aluminum tends to make the salt taste bitter, so to make up for it, manufacturers also add dextrose, a form of sugar, to the mix.

Lite for Lifers are all well aware of the importance of eliminating refined sugars from the diet! But many of us may not have known that it can be found in ordinary table salt!

Natural and unrefined salts typically cost a good deal more than mass produced processed salt, and critics contend that for the amount of trace minerals you get it isn’t worth paying the extra money.  We disagree.    Not only do these salts taste better, the American diet as a whole is short on trace minerals, and any balanced, healthful source of these minerals should be your preferred choice.  This is the salt that human beings have been eating since they first walked the Earth, in its purest form; a form of salt that our bodies are designed to recognize and utilize.

While it’s true that most health experts recommend limiting sodium intake to no more than 2400 mg daily, don’t be afraid of the salt shaker. What you need to be most concerned about it is the sodium chloride in processed foods.  Fill your salt shaker with tasty natural salt and enjoy!

Prevent Nibbles With a Healthy Chew!

Chewing gum can be a help when you are on a weight loss program because it adds a burst of flavor and gives your mouth something to do other than nibble when cooking or socializing.  Since Lite For Life recommends avoiding sugar and artificial sweeteners, what gum can you chew? 

Xylichew brand gum is sweetened with Xylitol, a natural sweetener derived from birch bark. Xylitol also naturally occurs in fruits like plums and berries.  It is low in calories, does not cause blood sugar fluctuations and actually helps fight cavities!  That’s because unlike regular sugar, which feeds the bacteria in your mouth that cause cavities, xylitol actually inhibits the growth of these bacteria. This is why so many dentists recommend Xylitol as a sweetener.  We recommend it for those times when chewing some gum helps you stick to your weight loss program.  Enjoy it in Cinnamon, Licorice, Spearmint, and Peppermint flavor.