Shannon Costello

The FDA pyramid site has just made me grumpy.
They list all those fine dairy products that will provide calcium to keep my bones from becoming dangerously brittle.  Fine.  They recommend using low-fat yogurt, cheese, etc.  Fine.
About the cheese and yogurt.  If you don’t use low-fat, the extra fat calories come out of your daily discretionary [...]

I’m not sure if this is too gross to share or too silly to keep.
The last time we had a serious problem with sand in our lettuce I purchased a salad spinner, which seemed to work well.
Our home-grown lettuce of course requires heavy-duty rinsing.  I ran water over it for what I thought was plenty [...]

According to Ellyn Satter in Chapter 2 (”You and Your Eating”) of her book, Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family, good motivators for eating well are “optimism, pleasure, and self-trust”, while poor ones are “fear, control, and dreariness.” She feels that the emphasis on dietary guidelines falls too much on rules and on what [...]

I recently read a book in which a character confesses that she is so obsessed with food that she thinks about dinner while she is eating lunch.  
I do that kind of thing all the time.  Doesn’t everybody?  

I think I’ve gained a pound since school started. It is a big adjustment moving from weeks of meandering unstructured time to being energetically on the move most of the day. I have gradually run less and less and no doubt eaten more. I feel too tired to want to consider [...]

Obesity is a private issue and we do not need Big Brother wagging his finger at us every time somebody wants to eat a doughnut.  If someone wants to be a little heavier because they enjoy eating food that tastes good, that’s a person’s personal right.      
—-Justin Wilson, The Center for Consumer Freedom

“It’s mine but you can have some-with you I’d like to share it!
‘Cause if I share it with you-you’ll have some too!”
After a week of listening to high-quality kids’ music and various dining out experiences (one of which I promised not to blog about- does this count, Tara?), I offer the following dessert [...]

Today wasn’t pretty.
I had some sort of orange creme drink at Starbucks (300 calories) and a milkshake at Johnny Rocket’s (1000 calories- compare to 400 in a Frosty… this site provides details) Ouch.
I went to an 11 AM movie today, which interfered with lunch. Meal-time changes problematic in that they often [...]