Eating away from home is challenging when you try to eat clean.
While food courts are loaded with places serving fast food, there also places for healthier options. Not
all the food in the food court is as bad as we often think it is.
To survive the mall food court I check out all the food offerings and choose the healthiest options.
I am happy to share that I avoided high-calorie, unhealthy food court temptations and found two healthy options for eating at the mall I go to frequently. This food is consistent with the Eat Like Me approach and expands the variety of food I eat. On the left are delicious veggie fries. Spinach salad with grilled chicken on the right. Will take a picture of the second option soon.
Monday, July 20, 2015
Sunday, July 12, 2015
We don't eat enough fruits and vegetables
Fruits and vegetables have been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, and some cancers.
They are also a key part of weight management, and hold many key nutrients that keep the human body running efficiently.
Only 13 percent of Americans are eating the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. What's your excuse?
I eat lots of fruits and veggies every day. Together with lean protein (chicken breast, fish or turkey white meat) they are part of all of my meals. I select fresh low-sugar fruits and fresh non-starchy vegetables.
Eating large amount of the right food is my key to success. Vegetables and fruits provide me with fiber, which in combination with lean proteins practically assures that I don’t feel any hunger.
Certain fruits like pineapple, watermelon and bananas are high in sugar, and they don't promote weight loss. I don’ t eat starchy vegetables - potatoes and corn, either.
They are also a key part of weight management, and hold many key nutrients that keep the human body running efficiently.
Only 13 percent of Americans are eating the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. What's your excuse?
I eat lots of fruits and veggies every day. Together with lean protein (chicken breast, fish or turkey white meat) they are part of all of my meals. I select fresh low-sugar fruits and fresh non-starchy vegetables.
Eating large amount of the right food is my key to success. Vegetables and fruits provide me with fiber, which in combination with lean proteins practically assures that I don’t feel any hunger.
Certain fruits like pineapple, watermelon and bananas are high in sugar, and they don't promote weight loss. I don’ t eat starchy vegetables - potatoes and corn, either.
Monday, July 6, 2015
Misconceptions about weight loss
Widely popular assumption that in order to lose weight
you must eat less and exercise more has been the foundation of many weight-loss
programs. Unfortunately, it also reinforces the incorrect opinion that that
weight loss has to be a struggle and a painful experience.
The first part, portion control, is not the most effective way to lose weight. Reducing your portions to the point that you feel hungry at the end of a meal will not work. It is hard to force yourself to eat less. It is hard to stop eating when you are still hungry. It goes against human nature. In my opinion hunger is the most significant problem with weight loss and a diet that results in hunger will never be successful. Unless you are super-human, and hunger does not bother you. For the rest of us, when we are hungry, the feeling of an empty stomach is very difficult, if not impossible, to tolerate.
The second part, exercise more to lose weight, is simply not realistic. Some find it hard to accept but exercise isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. Even if you exercised every day, in order to achieve any noticeable weight reduction, you would have to do it for hours each day. Exercise is great for our physical health and state of mind, and for preventing weight gain in the first place, but it has a disappointingly small effect on weight loss.
The first part, portion control, is not the most effective way to lose weight. Reducing your portions to the point that you feel hungry at the end of a meal will not work. It is hard to force yourself to eat less. It is hard to stop eating when you are still hungry. It goes against human nature. In my opinion hunger is the most significant problem with weight loss and a diet that results in hunger will never be successful. Unless you are super-human, and hunger does not bother you. For the rest of us, when we are hungry, the feeling of an empty stomach is very difficult, if not impossible, to tolerate.
The second part, exercise more to lose weight, is simply not realistic. Some find it hard to accept but exercise isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. Even if you exercised every day, in order to achieve any noticeable weight reduction, you would have to do it for hours each day. Exercise is great for our physical health and state of mind, and for preventing weight gain in the first place, but it has a disappointingly small effect on weight loss.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Developing routines
Battling excess weight is one of the most frustrating, challenging and emotionally draining experience. Many people struggle with a never ending battle to lose weight and get healthy. If you make appropriate changes for a period of time you will lose weight, but when you go back to your previous eating you will gain all the weight back.
You have to realize that losing weight involves a major lifestyle change. If no changes are made to your lifestyle, the moment you stop eating healthy (your diet), you are likely to return to your previous eating, which leads to the Yo-Yo phenomenon. When you go back to your previous eating you will gain all the weight back.
Since you will be making some huge changes to your diet, you need to condition your brain so that eventually, making better food choices will be automatic. To change your lifestyle you must take psychological and behavioral actions. Your attitude and perspective are essential. Your thoughts will guide you to success or to failure. If you are in the wrong state of mind, you will not follow the eating approach.
Do whatever it takes to make eating healthy a positive experience. An early win helps enormously for anyone trying to achieve a difficult task. The new behavior starts to feel normal. It will take less discipline to repeat the action. Developing routines and making it your lifestyle is the key. Once you have created new routines and stick with them, those routines will eventually turn into habits and become your new lifestyle. When your decisions, food choices, and lifestyle become an energizing routine you will be setting yourself up for weight loss success.
Losing weight and sustaining that healthy lifestyle is a process and journey. It is never over.
Monday, May 25, 2015
It is not that easy
First it took me a while to start doing
something about my surprising weight gain. I kept delaying action time, because
I “knew” that I would be easy. I lost 91 pounds before, so I thought I would
lose the recently gained 20 pounds as soon as I start my efforts.
And, as expected,
when I stopped allowing myself to relax healthy eating on week-ends and was
strong while watching TV in the evenings (no unhealthy snacks), the weight
started to come down. I got to 180 pounds relatively quickly. Losing 10 pounds felt
good. It confirmed that when I made efforts I lost weight.
Something else also
happened. Since I was successful again, I did not keep going to get to my healthy
weight of 170 pounds. I relaxed my eating
and I stayed at the 180-182 level. My arrogant thinking that “I can lose weight
easily any time I want” prevailed and I am remaining at the 180 pounds point.
I
am weak.
Monday, April 6, 2015
I gained weight while training for marathon
I avoided writing about running on my blog, because I did
not want anybody to think that you must exercise to lose weight. I am
mentioning it now, because I want to share something strange I experienced.
Something that is related to weight loss and running.
I tried to start running when I was obese. I weighed 261
pounds then and it was very hard. It felt terrible. I pushed myself to run for 20
to 30 seconds and got tired quickly. Few weeks later I injured my knee and had
to have a surgery. After the knee surgery I had to wait several month to try to
start running again. I was already eating healthy and managed to lose
significant amount of weight. After I lost weight and started running again, it
was so different. Running was much easier. It felt like if I were another
person. I fell in love with running, and according to many, who successfully lost
weight, it helped with maintenance.
Last year learned something that enhanced my knowledge and understanding of weight loss and running.
I learned that nutrition for marathon running and nutrition for health do not
go together. The energy gels that I started to eat on the long run days during
the two last months of marathon training are among the least beneficial for
overall health. They contain simple sugars like sucrose and glucose. I now know
why I gained 10 pounds while training for marathon.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Real food diet
The secret of successful weight loss is not
about forcing yourself to eat less and exercise more. It is about finding what works
best for you, what you can follow, and continuing to follow it until you lose
weight, improve your health, and stay that way. Changing what I eat to real
food was what worked for me.
If you switch from a processed food diet to a real-food diet, you will lose weight. Once you rid your diet of addictive fake foods, and eat the right combination of real food your weight loss will be much easier. When you make the switch to a real-food diet, you avoid the pitfalls that make fake factory foods addictive, fattening, and unhealthy.
When you stop eating processed foods, you remove from your diet added sugar, refined curbs, and harmful additives and preservatives that contribute to weight gain and stand in the way of weight loss. And for an added bonus, removing the above ingredients from your diet will result in better overall health.
I used this strategy for my weight loss and I firmly believe that this is the easiest and healthiest way to shed pounds and keep them off for life. The first step is to become informed what is, and what is not, real food.
If you switch from a processed food diet to a real-food diet, you will lose weight. Once you rid your diet of addictive fake foods, and eat the right combination of real food your weight loss will be much easier. When you make the switch to a real-food diet, you avoid the pitfalls that make fake factory foods addictive, fattening, and unhealthy.
When you stop eating processed foods, you remove from your diet added sugar, refined curbs, and harmful additives and preservatives that contribute to weight gain and stand in the way of weight loss. And for an added bonus, removing the above ingredients from your diet will result in better overall health.
I used this strategy for my weight loss and I firmly believe that this is the easiest and healthiest way to shed pounds and keep them off for life. The first step is to become informed what is, and what is not, real food.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
New Year's’ resolutions rarely bring the lasting change
New Years’ resolutions rarely
bring the lasting change that you hope for. The number one resolution - losing
weight - makes sense considering the epidemic of obesity and related diseases,
and our genuine desire to look and feel better.
But since only 8% of people who
make resolutions actually stick to them, the question remains why do we keep
making resolutions, especially if we know we are probably not going to keep
them?
Anyone who has ever made and
broken a New Year’s Resolution can appreciate the difficulty of behavior change.
When we think of behavior change, we usually are at one the following three stages.
Not Ready - You are not
intending to take action in the near future, and can be unaware that your behavior
is a problem.
Getting Ready - You are
beginning to recognize that your behavior is problematic, and you start to
reflect on the pros and cons of your continued habits.
Ready - You are intending to
take action in the immediate future, and may begin taking small steps toward behavior
change.
Action - You have made specific
actions in modifying your problem behavior or you have begun acquiring new
healthy behaviors.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Easy strategy for keeping junk food out of your life
Knowing that junk food is bad - or even knowing how it’s bad - doesn't make it any less tempting.
Since we know the negative outcomes of eating sugary foods, one could wonder what makes us come back for more. Is it that we have selective memory when sugary foods are placed right in front of us? No. I think we experience different levels of pleasure depending on what we eat.
Dopamine is one of the feel good chemicals produced in our brain and when it’s released, it makes us feel damn good. It’s our own brain crafted happy drug. When we eat, our brain releases dopamine as a little reward for doing something that is helping us stay alive. The higher in calories the food, the more dopamine is released in the brain. This is why most people would grab fries over a carrot stick in a hot second.
Eating processed foods and foods that are full of salt, sugar and fat give us a super high amount of pleasure because more dopamine is released. And it’s not that healthy food doesn't release dopamine, it does. It just doesn't release nearly as much as processed and caloric dense foods that are high in fat, sugar, and salt.
Here is my easy strategy for keeping junk food out of your life - for good. Don't buy junk food. If you don't have junk food in the house or office, you can't reach for it.
Since we know the negative outcomes of eating sugary foods, one could wonder what makes us come back for more. Is it that we have selective memory when sugary foods are placed right in front of us? No. I think we experience different levels of pleasure depending on what we eat.
Dopamine is one of the feel good chemicals produced in our brain and when it’s released, it makes us feel damn good. It’s our own brain crafted happy drug. When we eat, our brain releases dopamine as a little reward for doing something that is helping us stay alive. The higher in calories the food, the more dopamine is released in the brain. This is why most people would grab fries over a carrot stick in a hot second.
Eating processed foods and foods that are full of salt, sugar and fat give us a super high amount of pleasure because more dopamine is released. And it’s not that healthy food doesn't release dopamine, it does. It just doesn't release nearly as much as processed and caloric dense foods that are high in fat, sugar, and salt.
Here is my easy strategy for keeping junk food out of your life - for good. Don't buy junk food. If you don't have junk food in the house or office, you can't reach for it.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Guest Post: The Addictive Properties of Junk Food
We can all relate to this feeling: you’re
sitting casually watching TV and all of a sudden you have an urge for a
late-night junk food snack. It starts small and you tell yourself that you’re
not really hungry, that you really don’t need anything else to eat tonight.
Then it gets stronger, almost as if the potato chips are screaming at you from
the pantry. Ultimately you give in, finish the bag of chips and promise
yourself that this won’t happen tomorrow. You may attribute this behavior to a
lack of self-control… but did you know that these cravings have an evolutionary
component and, in some cases, junk food manufacturers have actually exploited
these properties to make them more addictive?
Before we go into the science of junk food
addiction, let’s define what I’m talking about when I say “junk food.”
Basically, junk food is a food that is high in fat or sugar and low in other
nutrients like vitamins, minerals and fiber. Examples could be potato chips,
ice cream, pastries, etc.
Now let’s go back to a time where there wasn’t
a fast food restaurant on every corner and humans spent most of their days
hunting and gathering food. In this era, there was a type of reward system that
developed in our brains when we did things to encourage survival. For instance,
a neurotransmitter called dopamine was released when we ate, creating a feeling
of pleasure throughout our bodies. This let us know that what we were doing was
good and encouraged us to keep doing it. Food that was high in fat provided
more calories and long-term energy storage and food high in sugar was dense in
short-term energy. These types of food were some of the most important for our
survival so they released even more dopamine and made us feel even more
pleasure.
Today, even though the average American is not
at a loss for calories we still have this reward system, causing us to choose
higher fat and higher sugar options. Unfortunately, we are no longer choosing
foods in their natural state that also have vitamins and minerals and fiber.
Instead we are choosing processed food that is actually manufactured to be
higher in fat and sugar so that it releases extreme amounts of dopamine in our
brain and creates an almost addictive state.
These junk foods cause a hormonal response in
our bodies, which causes us to gain fat and ultimately leads to diseases like
Type 2 diabetes. Moreover, although high in calories, most junk food is void of
other essential nutrients. So even though we may be eating more food than our
bodies need, we are starving our bodies of the important vitamins and minerals
that keep us healthy.
Remember, your love of junk food didn’t happen overnight so
don’t be too hard on yourself if it takes time to break. Focus on choosing
foods that make you feel good long-term rather than foods that just give you
the initial dopamine rush. You’re going to do great at making healthier choices
and quitting your junk food habit!Guest post provided by Tara Coleman. Tara is a nationally recognized nutrition expert, educator and spokesperson. Visit her website taracoleman.com
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Saturday, January 3, 2015
Confronting the reality
Recently I posted about overweight and obesity. I wrote what the
extra weight was doing to our overall health. I also pointed out that health
effects of obesity were real and they were dangerous, because the health
subject is often avoided by overweight people.
We prefer to avoid subject of what the extra weight is doing to our overall health. Many of us are reluctant to discuss our weight face to face with doctors. We
are ashamed of our weight and how we have let body get out of control.
I understand that confronting
obesity can be an embarrassing topic. We need to be kind, supportive and non-judgmental.
I know that when we are overweight or obese, the last thing we want to do is confront the reality of our size but it’s important that we do. It has to be done so we could break through denial and confront the reality of the present situation – the reality of our size and weight.
The issue will not go away and the longer we postpone, the greater damage our unhealthy food choices and unhealthy eating will cause.
Being overweight or obese is a major health emergency that requires your immediate action. Not surgery, not administration of weight loss drugs, but an immediate change in your diet.
No matter how bad your diet is, no matter how much excess weight you’re carrying around, no matter how many food related mistakes you've made in the past, you can start fresh now.
You can embark on a new way of living today.
How? By following healthy eating. Changes that you can start to make right this minute can turn your unhealthy diet to a health-boosting, life-saving gift that you give yourself.
Yes, you can do that, you can turn your life around. Tweet
We prefer to avoid subject of what the extra weight is doing to our overall health.
I know that when we are overweight or obese, the last thing we want to do is confront the reality of our size but it’s important that we do. It has to be done so we could break through denial and confront the reality of the present situation – the reality of our size and weight.
The issue will not go away and the longer we postpone, the greater damage our unhealthy food choices and unhealthy eating will cause.
Being overweight or obese is a major health emergency that requires your immediate action. Not surgery, not administration of weight loss drugs, but an immediate change in your diet.
No matter how bad your diet is, no matter how much excess weight you’re carrying around, no matter how many food related mistakes you've made in the past, you can start fresh now.
You can embark on a new way of living today.
How? By following healthy eating. Changes that you can start to make right this minute can turn your unhealthy diet to a health-boosting, life-saving gift that you give yourself.
Yes, you can do that, you can turn your life around. Tweet
Thursday, January 1, 2015
New life resolution
I am not setting goals for a New Year. I am
(and have been) setting goals for a new life. A healthier, happier, more
fulfilling life. It's about recognizing what I value, what a quality life means
to me, and how to align my daily activities to achieve these.
It is not about the New Year. It is about a
whole new life, a continuous journey.
Set new goals if you are motivated to do so,
but know that those goals will not be stopping points, but just resting spots
where you can enjoy your new place in life, reassess your plan and set off in a
new direction.
Happy
2015, and here's hoping it is the start (or continuation) for a whole new (or
even better) you!
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