Archive for Weight Loss
Weight loss strategies
Posted by: | CommentsThe following information from Johns Hopkins University regarding strategies for weight loss is extremely useful. However, I think it’s missing one crucial component. Read on and see if you can spot the “missing link.” I’ll put in my two cents worth towards the end, so keep reading…
“An ability to alter lifelong attitudes toward diet and exercise may ultimately be the key to successful weight management: You must be motivated enough to change habits not for a few weeks or months, but for a lifetime. The importance of this resolve cannot be underestimated.
The desire to lose weight must come from within. A person who wants to shed 20 lbs. to please a spouse is not likely to be as motivated, or as successful, as someone whose goal is to improve health or increase self-esteem. Choosing the right time to start a weight-loss program is also important. People under stress or pressure may not be able to devote the considerable attention and effort required to make lifestyle changes that lead to weight loss.
Culled from medical research, the following weight-loss guidelines incorporate strategies employed by people who have lost weight and kept it off. Use them in constructing a weight-loss program on your own or as an adjunct to medical or surgical treatments.
1. Set realistic goals. Remember that weight tables give estimates of ideal weights; you can probably be healthy at weights above “ideal” if you have a nutritious diet and exercise. Instead of attempting to lose a specific number of pounds, make it your goal to adopt healthier eating and exercise habits.
If you are obese and feel compelled to set a weight-loss goal, losing 10% to 15% of your current body weight is a realistic objective. The good news is that evidence shows that weight loss of as little as 5% to 10% of body weight can significantly improve heart disease risk factors such as pressure and glucose. The safest rate of weight loss is 1/2 to 2 lbs. a week.
2. Seek support from family and friends. People who receive social support are more successful in changing their behaviors. Ask family and friends for help, whether this means keeping high-fat foods out of the house or relieving you of some chores so that you have time to exercise. It will be easier to stick to your new eating plan if everyone in the household eats the same types of foods. (A low-fat diet that includes plenty of fruits, vegetables, and grains will benefit your family’s health even if they do not need to lose weight.) You may be more motivated to exercise if you work out with a friend or family member.
3. Make changes gradually. Trying to make many changes quickly can leave you feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. Instead, ease into exercise; do not overdo it. Incorporate low-fat eating in stages. For example, if you typically drink whole milk, switch to reduced-fat (2%) milk, then to low-fat (1%), and then to fat-free milk.
4. Eat slowly. Many people consume more calories than needed to satisfy their hunger because they eat too quickly. Since it takes about 20 minutes for the brain to recognize that the stomach is full, slowing down helps you feel satisfied on less food. Moreover, eating slowly allows you to better appreciate the flavors and textures of your food.
5. Eat three meals a day, plus snacks. Skipping meals is counterproductive, as is severely reducing food intake, since such strict changes are impossible to maintain and are ultimately unhealthy. In addition, eating the bulk of your calories at one sitting may impair metabolism. You will be more successful in the long run if you allow yourself to eat when you are hungry, eat enough nutritious low-fat food to satisfy that hunger, and spread your calorie intake over the course of the day.
6. Plan for exercise. Choose activities that are convenient and enjoyable for you to do on a regular basis, and then treat exercise like any other appointment—set a time and jot it down in your date book. Many people find it easier to exercise first thing in the morning, before the demands of the day interfere, but others find lunchtime or right after work more convenient.
7. Record your progress. Start a food diary and exercise log to keep track of your accomplishments. Keeping such detailed diaries may seem cumbersome, but they can help you stay motivated, and reviewing the entries can reveal any problem areas. In addition, the information can help facilitate treatment by your nutritionist or doctor.
8. Evaluate your relationship to food. Behavioral and emotional cues frequently trigger an inappropriate desire to eat. The most common cues are habit, stress, boredom, sadness, anxiety, loneliness, and the use of food as a reward. Many people also relate food to love or care and derive comfort from it. Although eating may appear to soothe uncomfortable feelings, its effect is temporary at best and ultimately does not solve any problems. In fact, it may distract you from focusing on the real issues.
9. Recall your accomplishments. Over your lifetime you have probably been successful in tackling many difficult tasks—quitting a bad habit, learning a new skill, or advancing in the workplace, for example. Reminding yourself of past achievements can help you feel more confident about making the changes that will lead to weight loss.
10. Don’t try to be perfect. While losing weight requires significant changes in eating and exercise habits, not every high-calorie food must be banished forever, and you need not exercise vigorously every day.
Nice but no cigar. Understanding the intrinsic role of “nutritional excellence” in maintaining a lean and healthy lifestyle is the key. WHAT one eats can very strongly affect behavior (and of course vice-versa). The overall nutrient density profile of what one eats will largely determine how hard it is to maintain sane and healthy eating habits.
Food volume, appetite, and weight loss
Posted by: | CommentsDrinking water before or with your meals doesn’t really help one eat less or induce satiety, although of course eating water-rich foods (e.g., pasta dishes with additional vegetables, smoothies, soup, fruits and vegetables) can lower calorie intake. This is because the body processes hunger and thirst through different mechanisms.
Previous research by the Penn State’s Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior has also shown that consuming water-rich foods allow dieters to eat their typical size serving of food (i.e., not limit their portion size), reduce calorie intake and still be satisfied.
What this means is that feeling full depends on the volume of what we eat. Eating small portions tend to make us feel more deprived, which in the long run cannot be sustained. Hence the phenomenon of yo-yo dieting. I think that low caloric density (high volume, high water foods) and high nutritional density (phytochemicals such as minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants) go hand in hand quite easily when we choose an eating style that is based on leafy greens, other vegetables and legumes, and fresh fruit. Foods with a high energy density (such as meat, cake, dried fruit, candy) have lots of calories in a small serving and are lower in water content and volume. From an appetite control perspective, we have a positive interaction effect: high volume, high water-volume food that is highly nutritious and low calorie at the same time will curb our tendency to overeat over the long haul.
Eating strategy for weight loss
Posted by: | CommentsMore from Helen Nearing’s book Simple Food:
“Why go to a lot of trouble, and use a lot of time and energy, just feeding the body? By keeping foods and meals simple and easy, the tasks may be so shortened that there is little labor involved. Keep frills and fanciness to a minimum. Keep fundamentals in the foreground. Try to get the most nourishment for the least effort. Learn what foods the body requires – the vitamins, minerals and proteins for good functioning. Find the natural right diet and stick to it.”
“I believe the work of feeding people could be simplified to such a point that it would take less time to prepare a meal than to eat it, whereas now it is usually the other way around. Perhaps that might be the test for rational eating. If you eat for half an hour, or an hour, put only that much (or less) time into preparation; no more. Then you would be closer to living simply on simple food.”
“. . . Eat with one dish or bowl. Eliminate all nonessentials in tools and utensils as well as elaboration in food preparation.”
“Nutritional value should come before taste value: so should economy and ease of preparation. Our menus are simple, but vary within the daily pattern; some fruit or fruit juice and our own herb tea for breakfast; a hearty vegetable soup, with boiled grains, peanut butter, honey and apples for lunch; a big salad, some cooked vegetable from the garden and a fruit dessert for supper. Every day the soup can be different. The grain can be millet, buckwheat, oats, wheat or rye. The salad need never be the same. The vegetables vary with the season. Our dessert can be any of many fruits, raw or cooked. But the general pattern remains, so that the diet is uninvolved and the preparation uncomplicated.”
I really like this approach to eating, food choices, and food preparation. It’s all about simplification of process and minimizing our attachment to sensory stimulation. Its really about developing habits that limit and simplify the strategies and activities for nutritional excellence.
I believe that an effective strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. One can develop a working pattern (e.g., a “daily menu” that one sticks to) and still have the variation within that system to prevent boredom (which can backfire) and to ensure micronutrient diversity and coverage.
How to manage overeating: weight loss, satiety, and the “fullness factor”
Posted by: | CommentsThe table below from Nutritiondata.com (ND) shows values of the “Fullness Factor” (FF) for a few common foods. Notice that low FF’s are the typical culprits that sabotage most people’s weight loss efforts.
| Fullness Factors for Common Foods | |||||
| Food | FF | ||||
| Bean sprouts | 4.6 |
|
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| Watermelon | 4.5 | ||||
| Grapefruit | 4.0 | ||||
| Carrots | 3.8 | ||||
| Oranges | 3.5 | ||||
| Fish, broiled | 3.4 | ||||
| Roasted chicken breast | 3.3 | ||||
| Apples | 3.3 | ||||
| Sirloin steak, broiled | 3.2 | ||||
| Oatmeal | 3.0 | ||||
| Popcorn | 2.9 | ||||
| Baked potato | 2.5 | ||||
| Lowfat yogurt | 2.5 | ||||
| Banana | 2.5 | ||||
| Macaroni and cheese | 2.5 | ||||
| Brown rice | 2.3 | ||||
| Spaghetti | 2.2 | ||||
| White rice | 2.1 | ||||
| Pizza | 2.1 | ||||
| Peanuts | 2.0 | ||||
| Ice cream | 1.8 | ||||
| White bread | 1.8 | ||||
| Raisins | 1.6 | ||||
| Snickers Bar | 1.5 | ||||
| Honey | 1.4 | ||||
| Sugar (sucrose) | 1.3 | ||||
| Glucose | 1.3 | ||||
| Potato chips | 1.2 | ||||
| Butter | 0.5 | ||||
FF values fall within the range of 0 to 5. Foods with high FF’s are more likely to satisfy your hunger with fewer calories. Foods with low FF’s are less likely to satisfy your hunger.
After creating the FF formula using multivariate analysis, ND plotted its predicted values against the experimental data taken from Suzanna Holt’s 1995 study “The Satiety Index of Common Foods”, published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. In this study, the researchers fed human test subjects fixed-calorie portions of thirty-eight different foods, and then recorded the subjects’ perceived hunger following each feeding.
The results indicate that satiety is strongly related to the weight of the food consumed. Heavy foods tend to satisfy hunger best, regardless of their caloric level. Certain nutrients, such as protein and dietary fiber, also appear to induce satiety.
Below is a graph from NutritionData.com that shows this comparison. (The one data point worth noting is “potato,” which the Holt study categorizes as having a very high satiety factor. BTW, there are actually some sugar-addiction intervention approaches that utilize the potato as an effective dampener of sugar craving.)
Exercise guidelines and weight loss
Posted by: | CommentsGuidelines from the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine recommend that adults should: (a) engage in moderately intense exercise for at least 30 minutes five days a week or vigorous exercise at least 20 minutes three days each week, and (b) weightlifting exercise to work on muscular strength and endurance, with eight to 10 different exercises on two nonconsecutive days a week. The new guidelines urged people 65 and older to lift weights and work on flexibility exercises and balance training.
One of my new clients has been running 5 days a week for 45 minutes to an hour for about a year, before he approached me for help. He wanted to build more muscle, and control his blood sugar. In my initial meeting with him it appeared that his diet was a little bit off. We tweaked this a little bit. I also gave him a fifteen minute dumbell workout (20 lbs each) that he did 5 days a week.
Six weeks later, he called me and reported that he lost 16 pounds (he’s now 135 pounds on a 5′6” frame), and most importantly also lost two inches off his waist. He’s extremely excited because his six-pack abs is in sight. Most importantly, his blood sugar is now normal – with no medication — simply from the slight diet modification and weight training routine I gave him.
Moral of the story: A high nutrient diet, plus an intelligently designed weight training program can really turbo charge your health and weight loss goals.
Lose weight and save money by going veggie
Posted by: | CommentsHere are a few money saving tips from Scott McCreddie in MSN Money for people on a vegetarian or mostly vegetarian diet:
- If you include an occasional piece of flesh (of whatever kind) in your diet, try to limit yourself to four or five ounces, which is about the size of a deck of cards.
- If you want to buy private life insurance, wait until you’ve been on a vegetarian diet long enough to improve your key health indicators (body mass index, cholesterol, etc.). It could save you thousands of dollars when an insurer reviews the results of your physical.
- Buy vegetable protein in bulk. Dried beans, rice, oatmeal and other similar commodities last a long time if properly stored, and they are far cheaper in larger quantities.
- If you get discouraged by the blandness of a vegetarian diet, buy cookbooks that explore Indian, Malaysian, Chinese or South American cuisines. Mixing novel spices and ingredients may perk up your taste buds and make the transition easier.
- If you can’t afford or prefer not to buy organic produce, remember that most experts think the nutritional benefits of eating conventionally grown fruits and vegetables outweigh the possible negative effects of pesticide residues.
Personally, I think that the best way to save money is to prepare the food yourself, cook in big batches (and prepare serving-size portions for meals later in the week), and avoid eating out. I think that eating out has become a stress management tool of some sort, something to reward ourselves for a hard day at work.
I used to spend a lot of money eating in restaurants, but as I became more serious in eating healthily, I found it increasingly difficult to go to places that were not only expensive, but also didn’t have the kind of food that I like to eat. If one is seriously pursuing a healthy “eating practice,” I think it’s quite difficult to find cheap restaurants that do not use a lot of fat, sugar and salt on their foods.
Nutrition: best practices
Posted by: | CommentsNutrient density & weight loss
Posted by: | CommentsWeight gain and sleep
Posted by: | CommentsResearchers at the University of Warwick report that that sleep deprivation can cause a two-fold increased risk of being obese for both children and s. They also found that those who sleep less have a greater increase in body mass index and waist circumference over time and a greater chance of becoming obese over time. Sleep derivation can cause hormonal changes, which then increases appetite.
I also think that its a lot easier to use food as a “pick-me-up” tool when one is tired from lack of sleep. It’s also more likely that fast food alternatives would be the fuel of choice. There’s a high probability that those who are consistently sleep deprived are also people who don’t focus on healthy eating behaviors and exercise as priorities in their life, which if sustained over time, could lead to physiological and psychological stress on their system (i.e., their energy), which then affects the quality of sleep and rest, and so forth.
