Say goodbye to calories counting with celebrity nutritionist Keri Glassman's new solution for dieting.
 • Here’s an awesome idea: If your diet is made up of whole, healthy, nutritious foods, you can stop focusing on eating too much, kiss calorie counting goodbye, and just enjoy your food. “The weight will come off naturally,” nutritionist Keri Glassman tells Well + Good NYC. It’s one of the rules of Glassman’s new diet, which isn’t so much a diet in the traditional sense—watch portions, restrict calories, etc.—but a sensible new approach to eating healthfully. In her new book, The New You (and Improved!) Diet, she outlines eight rules to reforming your eating habits. The idea is that by focusing on what you can eat—and pretty much eating high-antioxidant, low-sugar, and high-fiber foods to your heart’s content—weight loss just … follows suit. I think I’m loving this. Check out Glassman’s interview with Well + Good here, and read more about her book here.
• Hey you—ya with me? If you caught yourself zoning out just now, check out these 10 tricks for keeping your brain focused over at ABCNews.com. (I can’t think of anything more perfect for a Monday morning, can you?)
• Guess where Philly falls on a new list of the top 50 bed-bug-infested cities? No where! That’s right—we didn’t make the list. Among the cities that did make it into Orkin’s rankings are Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Denver and Cincinnati.
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If you look at pictures of skinny models for diet inspiration, you might be doing more harm than good.
 Gisele Bündchen • If you’ve got a photo of Gisele Bündchen taped to your fridge, throw it away immediately—she ain’t helping you lose weight. New research found that, rather than motivating you to stick with your diet, looking at images of skinny models might actually compromise dieting efforts. NPR reports on a study, in which female volunteers involved in a weight-loss program were asked to keep track of what they ate in food journals. Half of the subjects were given journals with pictures of a skinny model on the cover and on every page; the other half got journals printed with a neutral logo. At the end of the study, the women with the neutral journals lost weight, while the ones with the model journals ended up gaining weight. Yikes. To confirm the results, the researchers repeated the experiment but modified it slightly: In the second go round, half the subjects got journals with skinny models, while the other half received journals showing the same model who’d been Photoshopped to look like she was of average weight. And siiiigh: the ones with the skinny models gained weight again. Writes NPR: “Researchers said repeated exposure to models with unrealistic body sizes ‘changes the dieter’s belief about the very attainability of a thinner self. Our findings reveal that the perception that a goal is unattainable demotivates dieters from investing effort in achieving the goal and causes them to disengage from the goal.’” (Need help setting a realistic goal? Check out our tips here.)
• Ladies, if you feel super confused about when to get screened or tested for this cancer or that, don’t worry—we all are. A deluge of recent reports has muddied the water, but experts have finally come to an agreement on at least one issue: when—and how often—to get screened for cervical cancer. HealthDay has all the details.
• Get ready to squee, Internet. Here’s a story about identical twins who gave birth two hours apart on New Year’s Eve. Awwwww.
Photo: Anton Oparin / Shutterstock.com
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Ever.
 That's me, in an empire-waist dress. Nope. Not pregnant. Hi, Be Wellers! I know we haven’t officially met, but I wanted to interrupt your regularly scheduled program to pass along a little friendly advice. Think of it as a public-service announcement as we venture ever further into the Season of Eating, a time when all of us are trying our damnedest (hello, enormous sweater) to hide a few extra gingerbread-induced pounds.
Okay, here goes: Never, ever (EVER!) ask a woman if she is pregnant. You run the risk of looking like an idiot and causing copious amounts of embarrassment (and, probably, tears. In that order.) in the highly plausible scenario that she’s not actually pregnant and just maybe, you know, not looking her very best at that particular moment in time.
I always figured this little nugget of wisdom was obvious enough on its own that it didn’t need to be stated aloud. You know, sort of like, “Don’t stick your hand in the fire, moron.” But apparently I was mistaken. Here’s why: In the past year, five people (5!) have stopped me and congratulated me on my pregnancy. Before you shout “Mazel tov!” at your computer screen and crack open a bottle of champagne, there’s more: I AM NOT PREGNANT.
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Maybe, according to results of a small new study.
 • I’ll say from the outset that more research is needed here, but this study was too interesting to pass up. Setting out to explore the impact of satiety, or fullness, on diet, Israeli researchers wanted to see if having carbs later in the day could help you feel fuller longer, so that when when you wake up the next morning you’re less hungry. The theory here was that it could keep you from over-eating the next day. After a few months of dieting, the obese subjects who followed the diet did see changes in their weight and waist circumference compared to the controls, but experts say it’s too soon to draw actionable conclusions from the research: the test pool was small (only 63 subjects), and the study didn’t go on long enough to judge the long-term results. Still, it might warrant further investigation. Read more about the research here. (Oh and since we just covered it earlier this week, read about how carbs turn to fat here.)
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Google ranks its top searches and trending topics of 2012. Here's what took the diet world by storm.
If you were flabbergasted this year by Olympic swimmer Michael Phelp’s reported 12,000-calories-a-day diet—so flabbergasted, in fact, that you Googled it to read more—you’re not alone. Google just released it’s annual Zeitgeist List, showing the top trending topics and searches on its search engine in the past 12 months. On its Trending Diets list, “Michael Phelps diet” takes the cake.
To refresh your memory, the Internet went bananas in July when it learned about the kind of diet Phelps maintained prior to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. To fuel his grueling six-days-a-week, five-hours-a-day practice schedule, he downed three egg sandwiches, an omelet, a bowl of grits, French toast and pancakes—and that was just for breakfast. Lunch meant a pound of pasta, one whole pizza (!), energy drinks and shakes; rinse and repeat for dinner. Dieticians grimaced, of course, and someone finally calculated that he was consuming in calories each day what some of us eat in a week. Yikes. But at least he was burning it off almost faster than he was putting it in. The lucky duck.
Here are the other top diets everybody was talking about in 2012:
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Learn how to eat right without dieting.
 Local health counselor Ali Shapiro is bringing back her popular Truce with Food program, starting next Monday, October 1st. This seven-week program provides a combination of weight-loss, nutrition and lifestyle coaching to help women break “emotion-eating” habits and reconfigure their diets. The program is virtual, so participants interact with Shapiro and others in the program over the phone or through online sessions. It includes five group sessions and two one-on-one sessions. Participants also get a workbook and recipe book to keep. Shapiro draws lessons from her own 30-pound weight-loss success, three degrees, and over five years of client success. Learn more and sign up here.
$499, October 1 through November 13 from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
>> Have a health or fitness event you’d like to share with Be Well Philly readers? Email eleaman@phillymag.com with details.
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It's easy and cheap. What's not to love?
 Greek yogurt is all the rage right now. Even John Stamos (that’s Uncle Jesse to you) has jumped on board to endorse it. But we wondered: Is Greek yogurt any healthier than its traditional American counterpart?
Judy Matusky, nutrition program specialist at Bryn Mawr and Paoli hospitals, says both regular and Greek yogurts can be healthful options—as long as you choose wisely. ”With both kinds, the plain, fat-free or low-fat varieties are low in calories, low in saturated fat and good sources of protein, calcium and healthy bacteria,” Matusky explains.
The primary difference between the rivals is that Greek yogurt is strained, removing a ton of the liquid whey and therefore creating the more condensed, thicker consistency we see. And this process alters the health index of the food, too.
In fact, draining the whey reduces the lactose (natural milk sugar), slightly reduces the calcium content and increases the protein level, Matusky says. Greek yogurt has almost double the protein of regular yogurt, with a six-ounce carton containing as much protein as two to three ounces of lean meat!
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New research shows that women who react strongly to images of food are more likely to pack on pounds down the road.
 • Everyone knows the mark of a good food blog is good pictures. After all, who wants to sit around looking at unappetizing images of slop on a plate? Problem is, researchers recently realized that looking at—and reacting to—appealing images of food can be an indicator of future weight gain. A team at Dartmouth College used 58 college freshmen—all female—as guinea pigs for their experiment, which probed activity in the brain’s reward center. They showed them a variety of images, including ones depicting delicious food and some of sexual activity, and measured brain response. Six months later, they gathered the girls again, weighed them, and asked questions about their recent sexual activity. They found that those whose brains more strongly reacted to the food images six months earlier showed more weight gain than others in the study. And the ones whose brains reacted to the images of sexual activity reported more sexual behavior during the preceding six months than their peers. Reports TIME:
The big take-home message is that our responses to reward cues are automatic and happen without our even being aware they are influencing our behaviors. That’s where being mindful of self-regulation or willpower can come into play. ”Knowing certain cues are affecting you can make you more aware of them, and perhaps you can use your self-regulation system to keep things in check,” says study author Bill Kelley, an associate professor of psychological and brain science.
In other words, if food’s your weakness, lay off the food blogs. Or at least, limit yourself to pictures of vegetables, ok?
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Let's just drop the whole "diet" thing, okay?
 It’s unfortunate that the word “diet” was ever lodged behind of the phrase, “gluten-free.” I’d wager that eight times out of 10, a person reads the words “gluten-free diet” and thinks about weight loss. It’s only natural: The idea of diets has become so inextricably linked to that of losing weight (see: South Beach, Atkins, et al), that when most of us hear the word, we can’t help but imagine what we’d look like with smaller waistlines or without love handles or with a little less junk in our trunks.
The problem is, a diet is just a way of eating. Any way of eating. Period. For all you know, I live on a junk food diet (I don’t, really), replete with Pringles and Cheetos and oversize slices of chocolate cake. Obviously, there’s nothing inherently healthy or weight-loss-provoking in that. Same goes for diets that happen to be free of gluten.
Gluten-free diets as diets, in the way you’re thinking, popped up again in the news this week. Sigh. This time it’s in the context of Miley Cyrus, whose newly slimmed body quickly became fodder for internet speculation about the possibility of an eating disorder. Trying to nip the rumors in the bud, Cyrus tweeted yesterday: “For everyone calling me anorexic I have a gluten and lactose allergy. It’s not about weight it’s about health. Gluten is crapppp anyway!”
Of course, she didn’t explicitly say she cut out gluten to lose weight, but that’s the conclusion most everyone’s drawing, anyway. And it’s annoying.
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Redesign your eating habits with a local health coach.
 Health counselor, author and health contributor on the NBC 10! show, Ali Shapiro, is hosting her five-week Truce with Food program starting March 6th. This popular program will provide a combination of weight-loss, nutrition and lifestyle coaching to help women decipher “emotion-eating” and reconfigure their diets. Participants will learn to develop a different relationship with food by learning body functions essential to weight loss, foods that work for and against one’s body, how to resist cravings and curb self-judgment. Shapiro draws lessons from her own 30-pound weight-loss success, three degrees, and five years of client success—and if the testimonials are any indication, it’s the real deal. Learn more and sign up here.
$299 tuition, Tuesdays, March 6, 13, 20, 27, and April 3 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. The seminars are run over conference call, so you can dial in from home. Registrants receive call-in details ahead of the program.
>> Have a health or fitness event you’d like to share with Be Well Philly readers? Email eleaman@phillymag.com with details.
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