Rice: Friend or foe
 

Just wondering, what are all your thoughts about rice. I was reading online; so many mixed calorie counts - ranging from 130-400.
I ask, because i've been eating it alot; around 8pm after i get off work - just steamed white rice. i know there are alot of carbs, least i read, but it makes me full - i've stopped being hungry at night.

Do you think im doing more harm then good? I've lost 2lbs more than my ticker.

Just want some thoughts; thanks.

There's nothing wrong with it--but you might want to measure how much you eat of it. If you're trying to count calories, a lot of rice adds up. Try to stay between 1/2 to a full cup, dry measure, cooked.

Also, why not add some protein of some kind to the rice? make it a more well-rounded snack? Such as, diced chicken breast, strips of deli turkey... ?

Jay

If it works and it is part of your plan and you have no trouble with it, then don't worry about it. IF you are eating more and more and more and it triggers an insulin reaction in you and you are dousing it with salt and butter, you might want to rethink how you eat this item...

Kira

yep, what Kira said ;)

I eat it, but it is either plain with chicken breast, sometimes a Boca burger with gravy or with red & green peppers with chicken broth and baked chicken.

It has never seemed to hinder my weight loss. Sometimes I eat it twice a week. But I always measure and never add salt or butter. I do the low sodium chicken broth. Still enough sodium there to not add anything.

If it doesn't seem to slow your progress, I think it is fine.

Not trying to sound stereo-typical here, but my daughter attends a school which has many many Koreans. They all eat rice for lunch EVERYDAY (not a whole lot of it, maybe a cup or so at most) and I have yet to see one of them overweight. None of their parents are overweight. It's us pizza, hotdog and hamburger eating Americans who don't look so hot, haha. I tend to think some foods that a lot of us ban for various reasons are ok in moderation. Kind of like how I banned sweet tea. One glass every now and then is fine, but I had to ban it for now, maybe forever because I can't stop at one glass.

So to agree with the others; if it is in your plan, doesn't affect you and you have portion control, why not?

Like Niecy said about the Korean diet:

Rice is a staple of an asian diet. More noodles for the Japanese, but for the continental Asian population, rice is to them what bread is to the French. And they are some of the longest-living people on the planet. Some of the healthiest as a whole. Rice is a good carb. It's a wonderful thing to use as your carbohydrate allowance.

I eat rice 2 or 3 times a week. I just count the calories for it. Measuring it can be tricky for me because rice absorbs different amounts of water, yet it's hard to cook a single serving of rice. (Well, it is for ME at least.) So I use my food scale.

I measure the amount of dry rice that I put in my cooker, then add water and cook it, then I weigh the cooked rice and divide by however many servings I want there to be. Since I know EXACTLY what I put in the pot I can know exactly how many calories in rice I'm eating.

Anyway, I love rice and eat it a lot and it hasn't slowed my losses down any! Enjoy your rice!

I agree that if it fits in your plan, and you're not going overboard on your servings, than have at it.

I eat 6-8oz of brown rice almost every day for lunch. I use my measuring cups to make sure I'm not eating too much. I mix it with different things like veggies & beans, or roasted chicken, or ground turkey taco meat. It fills me up until after I get home from the gym and totally fits in my calorie plan so for me brown rice is a staple in my diet.

they also live very different lifestyles. Fishes, steam vegetables etc etc. Its not just rice they eat.


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i forgot about the insulin affect; i think i'll back off for a while and have it on occasion. I ate it 2 days in a row for dinner. tsk tsk

thanks

There's nothing wrong with rice, in my opinion. I do try to eat brown rice. I just don't think plain steamed white rice is a healthy, balanced dinner. White rice doesn't have a ton of good nutrients. Now, a nice veggie stir fry with a little chicken/shrimp/lean beef over a measured serving of rice - now that's a great dinner.

I was just talking about this recently with the owners of a thai restaurant (they're Hmong) that have become our friends. Kia (who has weight issues herself) was reminiscing about being a child in Thailand (her parents owned a meat market) and the food they would eat. She was talking about how cheap and good the food was, and that everyone ate so much more and more often than we do in the USA and yet no one was heavy there, but she laughed "we also walked down a mountain to get to the food, walk around all day and then walk back up the mountain afterward, and then the next day we'd do it again."

I think we often take exercise/work/activity level out of the equation. I think that in my own family, one of the reasons successive generations have been heavier than the prior, is not that we are eating far differently than previous generations (although sometimes that's true too), but also that we became much, much more sedentary. My parents were eating and cooking like they were taught to - as if they were still on the farm doing heavy manual labor all day.

I think everything in moderation is fine. I personally love eating rice and when I am eating healthy, I tend to do rice, veggies and some meat for dinner.