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Dining Out and Eating Healthfully: Not An Oxymoron
Tweet Share on Facebook July 12, 2012 CommentOne of the hardest challenges dieters face is dining out and being social—without sabotaging their weight loss. Believe it or not, you can eat out 365 days a year and still maintain a healthy body weight. It all comes down to the choices you make—like watching portion sizes and ordering a piece of fish grilled, not fried. Try these 15 simple suggestions to make dining out a healthier, yet still fun, experience:
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Grilling Without Overfilling
Tweet Share on Facebook July 12, 2012 CommentFor many households, an outdoor barbecue could resemble an all-you-can-eat buffet. Like it or not, some seasonal dishes can cause you to want to reach for your cover-up. Here's how to help ensure your barbecue has a lasting impact on your palate and not on your pant size.
• If you're the griller, don't eat what's on the grill until it's on your plate. Dip veggies into hummus or salsa or pick on cut-up fruit as a pre-dinner bite. Even the calories eaten while standing up count.
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Opinion: Why Does the American Heart Association Want You to Eat Out?
Tweet Share on Facebook July 11, 2012 CommentIf you've been to a Subway restaurant recently, you may have noticed that beside some menu items there's a heart-shaped symbol called a "Heart-Check." It means the choice "meets criteria for heart-healthy" as determined by the American Heart Association (AHA).
These AHA-approved, "heart-healthy" choices are allowed to contain up to 700 calories (nearly half a day's worth) and up to 900 milligrams of sodium (more than half a day's worth). What aren't they allowed to contain? The good stuff. No mayo, mustard, dressings, cheese, pickles, avocado, or olives. You can also forget about ordering a $5 foot-long, cookies, or chips. As for drinks, if you're an adult, only water is allowed; kids can have low-fat milk.
The AHA's position is that since we're all eating out a great deal anyway, it's important to steer people to "healthier" choices. But are people really going to order condiment-free sandwiches with water and skip the cookies and chips when eating at Subway?
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Fathoming the Calorie
Tweet Share on Facebook July 11, 2012 CommentI have some trouble fathoming our constant questioning of the calorie: Is a calorie really a calorie? Do calories really count? These and related questions have been queued up of late, repeatedly, in such rarefied terrain as National Public Radio and the New York Times.
After all, a calorie is a precise and specific unit of energy, or heat. Namely, it is the heat required to raise the temperature of 1 cubic centimeter of water at sea level 1 degree Celsius. The measure we more routinely apply to food, the kilocalorie, is exactly 1,000 times as much. This is not up for debate, yet we seem bogged down in debating it—which is what I can't fathom.
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Eating Mistakes Busy Moms Make
Tweet Share on Facebook July 10, 2012 CommentLike many of you, I'm a very busy mom. I have three energetic kids whom I taxi around to play dates and activities, I work full time for my own nutrition consulting firm, and let's not forget my darling husband who needs my attention, too. So when it comes eating balanced and nutritious meals, I need to make sure I don't put my health and well-being on the back burner. And neither should you.
Many of my clients and friends toss good eating habits out the window because they believe healthy eating can't be achieved while running a hectic lifestyle. Not true. Eating healthfully during your childbearing years is imperative—it helps decrease the risk of diseases such as obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, and diabetes.
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Healthy Foods That Aren't on Your Plate—But Should Be
Tweet Share on Facebook July 10, 2012 CommentStuck in a food rut? If you're looking to liven up your diet to satisfy both your taste buds and nutritional needs, you don't want to miss this list of healthy-but-often-overlooked foods.
1. Swiss Chard
Why it's good for you: With red and yellow stems, and dark green leaves, Swiss chard is both beautiful to look at and a nutritional powerhouse. A true "super food," 1 cup of Swiss chard has just 35 calories, and meets 300 percent of your daily vitamin K needs and 109 percent of your daily vitamin A requirements. Packed with disease-fighting carotenoids, Swiss chard may protect aging eyes.
How to eat it: Sautee with a little chopped garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice, as you would spinach.
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The Most Effective Diet: Listening to Your Body
Tweet Share on Facebook July 9, 2012 CommentIf I gave you $100 for every time you thought about dieting, would you be rich by now? You might very well be, but whether you'd be healthy, let alone enjoying your food, is another question entirely.
If you have tried diet after diet, then you may already know from experience what I'm about to tell you. Diets don't work. Diets have never worked. Not in the long term, when you look at a person's weight change over a period longer than 5 years.
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Why I Learned to Grow My Own Food, and 4 Tips for Starting Your Garden
Tweet Share on Facebook July 9, 2012 CommentYou look at me now and you see a 36-year-old green business owner with a wife and new baby in metro Atlanta who’s known as Farmer D. What you don’t see is the clueless-about-food college student I used to be, who sat there one day in the cafeteria holding a sandwich and wondered why he knew so little about how that sandwich came to be. That pivotal moment changed the course of my life and set me on a path to learn how to grow my own food. Now, I show others how to do this, whether they want to grow a few veggies at home, teach children about healthy food at school or camp or even a hospital, or plan a city green space where citizens can grow not just food but community.
What I’ve learned over the years, besides how to grow that sandwich, is that getting started on a new garden is sometimes the hardest step of all for many people, especially since most of us have simply never done it before. So I’m going to help you get started through this blog. Check back every Monday, and I’ll give you new tips for growing your own food and maybe one day, you, too, will grow a sandwich. (This actually eventually requires growing grains and raising a turkey, so I’m not sure we’ll get that far, but who knows?)
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Welcome to Eat+Run
Tweet Share on Facebook July 9, 2012 CommentLike an archeologist excavating for clues or a kid shaking his Magic 8 ball to see what turns up, we countlessly click our cursors, rummaging for answers to real questions about our health and well-being: the best treatment for our ailments, how to eat well on a budget, or whether our kids will consume more than mac 'n cheese.
And yet, at a time when we can access more information than ever before, we struggle to find the right information, to separate the facts from the fads. That's where U.S. News comes in.
