Losing weight can be challenging and excess hunger is one of the biggest obstacles most of us encounter when we try to slim down. If you’re focused on losing a few pounds before heading out to the beach, check out this article for foods that will help manage appetite without sacrificing flavor.
Celebrate Heart Health Month!
A heart healthy diet can be delicious and simple to follow. The American Heart Association offers a number of free resources on their website (http://www.heart.org) to help you get started.
Eating healthy doesn’t mean dieting. Instead, it’s best to aim for making your diet part of an overall healthier lifestyle. A great way to begin is to become more aware of what you’re eating.
Read Nutrition Labels
Many of us think we know what we’re eating until we actually look at the nutritional information. Pay particular attention to portion size per serving, saturated fat, and sodium. Tread lightly when it comes to foods higher in saturated fat (above 7% of calories) and sodium. Most of us should consume less than 1500 mg of sodium eat day but sadly the typical American diet contains about 3 times that amount and not from excessive salt shaker use but rather from the ready prepared and restaurant foods that many of us rely so heavily upon.
Here’s a few more ideas to get you started:
Get Moving
If you’re currently sedentary and your doctor feels it’s safe for you to do so, slowly begin to incorporate more movement into your daily life. This doesn’t mean you have to hit the gym everyday but with a little regular physical activity, you’ll find it easier to control weight and reduce hunger while decreasing your risk of chronic disease.
Examine Your Plate
Aim to fill half your plate with fruit and vegetables. This will help fill you up on less calories and provide vital nutrients that play a role in blood pressure regulation.
Your Friend Fiber
Choose fiber rich foods including plenty of whole grains, fruits and veggies. Aim for breads and cereals that have a minimum of 3 or more grams of fiber per serving. Oat bran found in certain cereals and abundantly in old-fashioned oatmeal, is a wonderful addition to any breakfast lineup- as this particular fiber is has been found especially helpful to lower LDL (“bad cholesterol”) levels.
Get An Oil Change
The type of oil we consume can have a big impact on our health. Focus on the mono-unsaturated, heart-healthy oils such as olive and canola while aiming to incorporate those wonderful omega-3’s a couple times a week found in fatty fish such as salmon or tuna. You also find omega 3’s in non-animal sources as well such as walnuts and flaxseeds.
A heart healthy lifestyle doesn’t have to be complicated. With a bit of planning, you’ll not only reduce your risk of heart disease, but feel so much better knowing you’ve taken a few steps to improve the quality of your life.
November is American Diabetes Month, which is a time when the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and other organizations raise awareness of diabetes and communicate the seriousness of the disease.
What is Type 2 Diabetes?
About 95% of those diagnosed with diabetes are classified as Type 2. Type 2 diabetes is a chronic condition that affects the way your body metabolizes sugar (glucose), your body’s main source of fuel. With type 2 diabetes, your body either resists the effects of insulin — a hormone that regulates the movement of sugar into your cells — or doesn’t produce enough insulin to maintain a normal glucose level. If left untreated, type 2 diabetes can be life-threatening.
Prevalence
26 million Americans have diabetes with 2 million new cases diagnosed each year. An overwhelming 79 million Americans have higher than normal blood glucose levels but are not yet classified as diabetic and it’s expected that about 1 in 3 Americans will have diabetes in 2050 at the current rate of incidence.
Impact
Diabetes is costly financially as well as to your health and wellbeing. Fiscally, diabetes costs the U.S. alone $174 billion each year. This figure represents a 32% increase since 2007. Let’s put this into prospective, about one out of every 10 healthcare dollars are spent in direct diabetes care. The health impact is just as staggering with a risk for stroke and death from heart disease at 2-4 times higher among people with the disease. Diabetes is also the number one cause of kidney failure, lower limb amputations and new cases of blindness among adults.
What You Can Do
You can do a lot to prevent or delay Type 2 Diabetes.
1.) Watch Your Weight
If you are over ideal weight, there are a number of studies that indicate that losing only 5-7% of your current body weight will lower your risk of type 2 diabetes. For instance, if you weigh 200 lbs, a weight loss of only 10-14 lbs will lower your risk significantly.
2.) Controlling your Blood Pressure & Cholesterol
Get your blood pressure and cholesterol levels checked regularly and talk with your doctor about higher than normal readings.
3.) Eat Healthier
Consume plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Minimize the amount of take out and processed meals which typically have much higher levels of fat, calories and sodium and contribute to high cholesterol, blood pressure, and weight gain.
4.) Stay Active
Aim for a minimum of 25-30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise most days of the week. And remember, exercise doesn’t only happen at a gym. Staying active means taking advantage of opportunities to move more in our daily life. Examples may be walking for short errands like mailing a letter or going to the store, gardening, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, walking the dog, etc.
5.) Quit Smoking
Those who smoke are at higher risk for type 2 diabetes. So if you’re thinking about quitting, now is the time.
For more information on diabetes and prevention visit the American Diabetes Association.
About the author:
Gina M. Crome, M.S., M.P.H., R.D., is a Registered Dietitian and ACE Certified Personal Trainer based in Southern California. She is the owner of Lifestyle Management Solutions, a company that provides customized nutrition and fitness programs designed to fit an individual’s lifestyle. Become a fan of Gina on Facebook, follow her on Twitter, and visit her website Lifestyle Management Solutions.
Looking to drop some holiday weight? You’re not alone. This time of year marks the largest amount of people trying to shed those extra pounds that have crept on over the holiday season. One of the easiest and most effective ways to begin is to simply track what you eat. A 2008 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine indicated that those who maintained a daily food log lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records at all. Keeping a food journal seems to have a big impact on the amount of food consumed as people are much less likely to overeat when they commit to recording their intake.
To assist Americans in their effort to lose weight and make healthier choices, the USDA has developed a completely free online tool that provides a quick way to track your foods and physical activities. The program is called SuperTracker and it complements the already released MyPlate nutritional education program.
Whereas MyPlate was developed to help Americans put together appropriately balanced meals based on the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the new SuperTracker takes the concept one step further by offering users an opportunity to track their dietary intake and physical activity while providing feedback and analysis via reports to bring you closer to your goals.
Once you begin tracking food intake, you’ll not only see what you’re eating but gain insight as well into the relationship between what you eat, when you eat, and how it relates to your weight loss. Sometimes when we make New Year’s resolutions, we build a process that is so demanding we are doomed to fail. Keeping your weight loss efforts simple by monitoring what you eat and gaining an understanding of the role of food in your life, you will lose the weight not with a short term diet but with an effective lifestyle change.
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