What's for dinner?

Most of us could use a little help choosing wisely when it comes to food.  Here are four questions to ask ourselves about food.

 

1.     Have I had enough water today?  (Hint:  the answer is probably no.  Most of us don’t drink nearly enough water.)  If we aren’t going to the bathroom every hour or so, we need to drink more.  And yes, water is the best choice, but I’m not going to get between anybody and their morning coffee or tea.

2.     When was the last time I had a vegetable or fruit?  Most of us would do well to focus a bit more on the produce and a bit less on the meats and starches.  We all get plenty of protein and fat; what we need are vitamins, minerals, and fiber, which come, in many cases, from colorful fruits and veggies.

3.     Am I actually hungry?  We eat for lots of reasons besides hunger.  We eat for comfort.  We eat when we are bored.  We eat because other people are eating.  We eat because Mom made dinner.

4.     How much food do I want?  Sometimes we decide based on the size of the plate, or the portion someone dished out to us rather than the amount that we need or want.

 

Choose wisely! 

Only Two

Today’s list is short, but not sweet.  Here in the holiday season, I would like to remind everyone of my two favorite nutritional guidelines:

 

1.     Eat vegetables.  Lots of them.  Lots of different kinds.  Lots of different colors.  They add vitamins, minerals, micronutrients, and fiber to our diets.  They taste good.

2.     Drink water.  A lot of us go around slightly dehydrated all the time.  This makes us cranky, sore, headachy, and inefficient.  Water helps a lot of our bodily processes work.  Some of us find that it helps us control our appetites.  We know if we are drinking enough water if we have to go to the bathroom every hour or so.

Gravy-Palooza is not a word...

It shouldn’t surprise anybody that I believe in holidays.  I like decorations and food and odd traditions and even my family (ha!).  This year is a weird one.  We’ll have the turkey and all the other good things, but we will only be three of us—no parents, no other kid and kid-in-law, no siblings, nothing.  It’s the right decision and one that I hope lots of people make so that we all continue healthy and we are eventually able to gather safely.

 

I often post about choosing wisely at holiday meals.  Not this time.  For several reasons.

 

One:  Not one of us needs something else to stress out about.  You want all pie for Thanksgiving dinner?  Go for it.  If it makes you happy, be thankful you have pie and knock yourself out.

 

Two:  It’s one day.  The occasional gravy-palooza is good for the soul.  We don’t want to make it a habit, but once in a while?  No worries.

 

Three:  We probably don’t want to indulge as much as we think we do.  If we have been feeding ourselves healthy food on a regular basis, we may find that our bodies are not quite sure what to do with so much butter and sugar and all.  We have learned what makes us feel good and overeating ourselves into a coma is not usually it.

 

I will, however, suggest that a nice socially distant walk/run/bike/whatever outside would be a good thing at some point during the day.  It’ll feel good, I promise.

Love is first...

A lot of people I talk to lately have weight loss on their minds.  Maybe it is because the weather is starting to change and we’re all putting on clothes we haven’t worn in a while.  Before I talk about weight loss, I need to get one thing out of the way:  YOU ARE FABULOUS JUST THE WAY YOU ARE.  You will not be a better person or more loveable or more intelligent or more capable if you lose weight; you will just be less weighty.  Pardon me for the yelling, but the fitness industrial complex and our capitalist overlords are very loud on the subject of thinness equating to virtue, spice, and everything nice, and they are not right.

 

Now, fabulous people, if any of us in our fabulousness want to lose weight, we need to approach the process with love.  I am not here to take away anyone’s cookies or to chase anyone around a track with a whip.  Shame and humiliation do not work to motivate people.  Deprivation is not a way of life.  So, how do we do it?

 

First, we give our bodies good food.  This might take some experimenting and we might have to remember some stuff about the long term when our short term brain is screaming for Twinkies.  (I don’t happen to like Twinkies, but we all have cravings for things that pretend to be food, like Twinkies, Jack-in-the-Box tacos, movie popcorn…)  Good food does taste good, but it also makes us feel good, not sluggish or hung over.  After a whole chunk of time spent studying fitness nutrition, I will only say with certainty that we should all eat our veggies and drink lots of water.  The rest of our consumption really depends on personal chemistry and preferences.

 

Then we give our bodies good movement.  Good movement means we burn some calories with cardio and we change our body composition with weights.  We toss in some flexibility, some core and balance stuff, and a touch of relaxation, and we call it a day.  Unless we are professional athletes, we should be able to get our movement done in an hour or less a day, on average.  Good movement will sometimes leave us a little sore, but we will know it is good movement because we will find our energy levels rising, our brains working better, and our bodies working better.

 

I will not lie:  weight loss is hard.  Our bodies have to work against centuries of evolution plus the pressures of agribusiness, modern life, and pandemic bonuses.  It can be done, but it is best done slowly and with love.

Five Tips for Less Sweetness

Yesterday I wrote about why we might want to get the sugar out.  Today, I offer some tips on the how.

 

1.     Taper.  Sugar is addictive.  We may find that we have headaches or we might be irritable as we cut down the sugar on our way to cutting it out.  Some of us can deal with cold turkey, but others of us might want to be a bit more gradual about it.  Maybe we start by making breakfast a sugar-free meal, or we cut out that after-dinner ice cream before we move on to more aggressive measures.

2.     Cook from scratch.  As I mentioned yesterday, almost all prepared foods have sugar hiding in them.  Making our own salad dressing can be easy and fun and cheap.  We can simmer our own spaghetti sauce.  Slow cooker oatmeal is better for us and cheaper than instant, sugary packets.

3.     Make the non-sugary beverage a treat.  Put a slice of lemon in the fizzy water.  How about some mint in that pitcher of water in the fridge?  Beware the fruit juice, though, because it has a lot more concentrated sugar than whole fruits.

4.     Cheat,  but carefully.  This will require some experimentation.  Some of us can manage a weekly dessert without falling headlong into the candy aisle, while others can’t.  Some of us can have a bite of our kid’s or partner’s or parent’s sweet thing without needing to get our own.  Maybe we can deal with a teaspoon of sugar in the morning tea, but anything more flips us into total sugar indulgence.

5.     Eat the fruit.  In general, the sugar that occurs naturally in food tends to be a reasonable amount.  When sugar accompanies the fiber, vitamins, and minerals in actual whole fruits, we get some nutritional bang for our caloric buck.  It is okay to enjoy food and eating.  What we want to do is eat a variety of foods.  So please do not take this as license to eat all watermelon all the time.

 

We can do this.

How Sweet It Isn't

My name is Janet and I’m a sugar addict.  I am not unique in this.  I think all of us have those foods that are our dietary downfalls, the things that we had better not have in the house or we will eat all of them, all at once.

 

There are a couple of things about sugar in particular that make it problematic.  One is that sugary foods often don’t have a lot of other nutritional value.  We get sweet calories and not much else.  On the whole, most of us don’t need any extra calories of any kind and we’d all do well to make the calories we do get serve multiple purposes.

 

Sugar is also pretty much ubiquitous in our food supply.  It’s in almost every processed food, from spaghetti sauce to crackers to salad dressing.  Notice that none of those foods are things we think of as sweets.  If we set out to purge the added sugar from our diets, we have a lot of work to do.  Unless we really love reading labels and we enjoy the process of discovering new synonyms for sugar (hint:  honey and agave nectar and corn syrup and a lot of others are still sugar), the fastest way to get the added sugar out is to cook and eat from whole foods.

 

Sugar contributes to one of the hot buzzword problems of our time:  inflammation.  Inflammation has been implicated in all kinds of stuff from diabetes to rheumatoid arthritis to cancer.  Basically, a chronic inflammatory response in the body leads the immune system to attack healthy tissues leading to nasty results.  There are all kinds of drugs that help with inflammation, including our old friend aspirin, but dietary intervention can be very effective.  Anecdotal evidence is not the same as actual proof, but in my personal bodily chemistry set, I have a lot less muscle ache when I cut the sugar.

 

Then there is sugar’s relationship to one of the big health issues that a lot of us face:  metabolic syndrome.  A growing number of folks suffer from multiple chronic diseases:  heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol/triglycerides.  Most of these have a high correlation with obesity.  While there are multiple factors that contribute to obesity, we can’t ignore that excess calories don’t help.

 

Now, I admit that all the good reasons in the world can’t always compete with say, chocolate chip cookies.  We have a built-in love for sweet stuff.  This is where we have to put on our big-person pants and deal.  I am not a fan of motivation by stick, so here are some positive things to focus on while we make adjustments:

 

We will feel better.  Our base-level sense of well-being will improve.  We’ll get up in the morning less stiff, less sore.  Stuff we haven’t been able to do (hi, bike!) may become available to us again.

 

We will look better.  Sure, it’s not the most important reason, but it would be all right if our beautiful insides were reflected in our beautiful outsides.

 

We will live longer.  We have good stuff to stick around for:  love, adventure, grandchildren, a real haircut…

 

Let’s do it.