Jenn's Losing It

There's no better time to enjoy them than at their peak! Going into the first week of August we talked about eating your veggies and fruits. But more than just "eat more veggies" and "eat more fruits". We discussed that even though fruits and veggies are zero point foods that doesn't mean that they're "free". During our meeting our leader brought up a great point- when you call something "free", most of us are programmed to go overboard, because it's free right?! Except it's not really free. Those fruits and veggies that some of us stopped counting (because they're zero) still have calories and sugar. But as we also discussed-grabbing that extra piece of fruit is better than that bag of chips or sleeve of cookies you may have been eating before.  Because if we're honest none of us joined Weight Watchers or any other weight loss program because we ate too much fruit or veggies. It's all about balance. If ...

iStock/Thinkstock You may have read in the past that eating mini meals throughout the day is a smart way to  lose weight . The thinking there is that by grazing every couple hours, you never get to that point where you're starving—meaning you're less likely to wolf down way too many calories in one sitting. But a new multi-university study, published in journal  Appetite  this month, claims that  all of the research thus far on eating small meals throughout the day is inconclusive —and as a result, mini meals should not be touted as a smart weight-loss strategy at this point. So how'd the researchers come to this conclusion? They analyzed all of the previous studies done about meal frequency and found that the majority of them used self-reported data—which, in the dieting world, is considered pretty unreliable. So we asked Keri Gans, R.D., author of The Small Change Diet , for her take on the results. "Most people don't understand what a small meal is—so the people...