Go for Slow Food

If fast foods help you put on the pounds, can slow food help you shed the same? Yes, say diet experts Patricia Marx and Susan Sistrom -- and they claim their appetite-suppressing trick really works.

Marx and Sistrom, authors of "The Skinny: What Every Skinny Woman Knows About Dieting and Won't Tell You" (Delacorte, $16), define slow food as something that is hard to find, tricky to prepare and, with luck, hard to eat. And calories don't matter -- it's important only in terms of Calories Per Minute (CPM), they say.

Take, for instance, roasted cashew nuts and pistachios, both loaded with calories -- but pistachios are the slow food of choice. Marx and Sistrom say the average person can down about 20 cashews a minute, but only eight pistachios because of the time it takes to open them (plus you could get stuck on a particularly tough nut or even break a nail). Weight is lost in all that time spent not eating.

Cereal is another case in point. It takes only seconds to gulp down two or three bowls of your favorite corn flakes -- but if it's a raisin-complemented cereal and you hate raisins, that makes it a slow food that could take lots of time to get down. Other slow foods include ribs (it takes ages to nibble off the meat), mussels (all those shells) and pomegranates (hundreds of pips).

For more insight into proper nutrition take our Third Age Healthy Nutrition Quiz