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The Best Non-Diet Diet
Tweet Share on Facebook August 9, 2012 CommentZone Diet? Atkin's Diet? Mediterranean Diet? Which one doesn't belong in this group? In my opinion, the Mediterranean Diet should have never even been called a diet; it's a lifestyle. It's not as if the Mediterraneans sat around a table thousands of years ago and said, "Hey, let's create a diet." Instead, families from that region—mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and children—sat around a table together, all sharing delicious meals and conversations. They ate food that was available and grown or raised locally.
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Making Exercise Fun
Tweet Share on Facebook August 9, 2012 CommentDo you love exercise? If you're like many people I know, maybe the answer is "not so much." Maybe you do it simply because you think you should to lose weight. But two recent studies concluded that exercise does not cause weight loss. So should you skip exercise and just focus on what you eat? Not so fast. Remember, exercise affords tremendous benefits to overall health and well–being, including heart health, bone health, and for me, personally, mental health.
Rarely do you ever hear a person say, "I wish I didn't work out." But how often do you hear "I feel guilty I didn't make it to the gym"? In reality exercise shouldn't be a chore, but instead something that makes you feel good before, during, and after. Some people I know really love going to the gym; for them, a workout of lifting weights and doing cardio machines is perfect. For others, the gym is boring or makes them uncomfortable.
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Stuffed or Satisfied? When to Stop Eating
Tweet Share on Facebook August 8, 2012 CommentWhen do you decide to put down the fork? Do you eat until your plate is clean, or do you leave a few bites? Many of us end up eating every last bite when we sit down to a delicious meal, even if we are stuffing ourselves beyond what our bodies really need, or what we even want.
The reality is that our bodies count on information from lots of different sources to determine when we should take our last bite. Feelings of fullness (or satiety) are the result of a complex communication process between your stomach, your brain, and your fat cells via different hormones. This intricate feedback system can take about 20 minutes to fully register in your brain. Because of that length of time, we continue to eat, even when we've passed the threshold of having just enough, and can end up over-stuffing ourselves. In other words, if you are speedily chowing down on that pizza, you may reach for another piece long before you realize that you've already had enough!
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Pre-Eat Before an Indulgent Night Out
Tweet Share on Facebook August 8, 2012 CommentHave you ever saved up your calories for an indulgent dinner out? It's a common strategy. Whether it's a wedding, an office party, or a date night in a decadent restaurant, intuition tells you that if you simply lay off the calories during the day, you'll have more wiggle room at night. Inevitably though, along with that extra wiggle room comes more hunger.
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Debunking Common Nutrition Myths
Tweet Share on Facebook August 7, 2012 CommentThe best thing about being a dietitian is talking about food with people from all different backgrounds as they parade in and out of my office. In addition to giving me a glimpse into their eating habits, my patients share their guiding beliefs about food and nutrition, assembled from a patchwork of sources: friends, family, magazines, the Internet, and popular lore.
As it turns out, many of these guiding beliefs are actually quite misguided. So, I'm setting the record straight on five of the most common, persistent, and inaccurate nutrition myths I regularly encounter.
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Hidden Cause of Overeating: Dietary Variety
Tweet Share on Facebook August 7, 2012 CommentFactors beyond hunger cause us to eat and overeat. Tuning in to what they are can help you eat the foods you love without overdoing it. This is the first post in a series on how to eat without sabotaging your weight and your health.
A client of mine attended a dinner party with the intention of only nibbling on a few things. But by the time her evening was over, she was stuffed, what she ate seemed a blur, and the food lingered in her stomach, like a rock. Her plan that evening was to eat conservatively: to taste just one of each hors d'oeuvre before dinner. What she hadn't counted on was for "one of each" to mean sampling five fattening hors d'oeuvres—all before sitting down to a four-course meal. Her experience is not unusual.
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Medal-Worthy Foods That Fuel Team USA
Tweet Share on Facebook August 7, 2012 CommentIf you've ever wondered what Olympians eat to perform their best—and sport the most magnificent physiques in the world—we've got the kitchen confidential from sports nutritionists who work with them. Research shows that with the right diet and hydration, athletes can train harder and recover more quickly. Overachievers on the court, field, or track are no longer junk-food junkies. The attention to detail used to perfect their sport is now being applied to their performance diets, too.
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How to Work Out Smarter, Not Harder
Tweet Share on Facebook August 7, 2012 CommentFor those in pursuit of body perfection, twice-a-day workouts are increasingly becoming the status quo, but doing too much can actually derail your training goals.
You've heard the expression,"You can achieve anything if you work hard enough at it." It's certainly true in some pursuits, but in the gym, too much sweat equity is more likely to leave you exhausted and uninspired. Rather than admiring your accomplishments in the mirror, you may find yourself smack in the middle of a physical and mental plateau. Just consider the person at the gym every day, panting and dripping as he talks about his killer workouts, all of which belie a body that looks exactly as it did three months ago. Chances are, after a while, you'll see him less and less.
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Finding Support For Your Health Goals
Tweet Share on Facebook August 6, 2012 CommentWhen this post goes live, I will celebrate my seventh wedding anniversary. My husband is likely my biggest supporter for everything in life. He has always been there for me, helping to boost my confidence and ease my anxieties, and encouraging me to stay positive and focused on my goals.
No matter how excited you are about creating healthy habits, you need supporters who will be there for you. When you have support, you have people who believe in you—even when you have a hard time believing in yourself. You have people who will be there for you, whether it is your workout buddy who says "sure, I'll meet you at 6 a.m.," or your spouse who offers to watch the kids while you shop for healthy foods.
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How Gardens Heal Your Body, Mind, and Spirit
Tweet Share on Facebook August 6, 2012 CommentAmidst my whirlwind workday, a sniff of an herb in the garden outside my store reminded me of my grandmother, Cissie, from South Africa, who passed recently. She is the one who started me on the path of becoming a professional urban farmer, gardener, educator, and entrepreneur, and random moments like this strike often. I stood still and allowed the fragrance to envelop me, and to bask in her memory. In that moment of reflection, a calm washed over me, and I knew that, once again, the garden was serving to heal.
The definition of healing is broad and touches many parts of our lives. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, healing means: 1a: to make sound or whole, b: to restore to health; 2a: to cause (an undesirable condition) to be overcome, b: to patch up (a breach or division); 3: to restore to original purity or integrity. Gardens heal in many surprising ways, and it is exciting to see the positive healing effects they are having in places as diverse as corporate headquarters, children's hospitals, senior centers, and city halls. Healing effects can be seen in many ways, including these:
