Dining on Man Food: Cooking with Kaye Newsletter

Cooking with Kaye recipe newsletter - online in our Archive and delivered free to subscribers Inboxes.  Enjoy this special issue featuring 11 great recipes and interesting topic - men vs. women in diet and health management strategies.

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Cooking with Kaye: Wings to Fly For page 94

Greeting Article:  A recent assignment lead to me to looking into gender difference when it comes to the foods we eat while dieting. Turns out there is a big difference in how men and women approach dieting. And ladies, it may be that the guys are onto something. While women tend to diet to extremes cutting fat, carbs, processed foods and filling the void left behind with sweet fakes, men go for the gusto and enjoy manly foods --think bar food-- making small healthy tweaks to ingredients and preparation methods while controlling portions. Women tend to feel hunger is necessary for weight loss while men rarely go hungry, even while dieting.  In other words, men continue to eat and enjoy the foods they love, indeed the foods that contributed to their obesity, but they do so in a new and improved way.

One more big difference became apparent: men are not emotionally attached to food nor do they assign food moral values the way women tend to do. A man will over eat too much of the wrong foods at times but he is not likely to belittle or punish himself for "being bad." He will chalk a score for the other team and move on to the next play. For women, a single event of unhealthy eating can turn into a downward spiral of self-loathing and punishment, often in continued poor food choices.

In Today's Cooking with Kaye I share some of the things I learned about the differences between men and women who are dieting. Keep in mind, these are generalizations and I understand that one size does not fit all when it comes to dieting. I know there are many different behaviors to match our personalities when it comes to managing our health and weight with diet. I hope these generalizations, whether familiar or completely foreign to you, provide new insight into weight management. At LivingAfterWLS we talk so often about the WLS experience being a journey full of opportunity to learn, grow, and improve. No matter how different we all, we are all in this together

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