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Regaining Lost Weight? Your Hormones May Be the Culprit
Tweet Share on Facebook August 14, 2012 CommentIf you're one of the many people struggling to maintain your weight loss after dieting, emerging research may help you understand your plight. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that dieters who regain weight are not simply backsliding into old eating habits: They're battling biology itself, which tends to fight to keep weight on.
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Rethinking The Kid-Veggie Relationship
Tweet Share on Facebook August 14, 2012 CommentOn days I'm not wearing my dietitian hat, I stay home to take care of my twin toddlers. In the course of playground banter with other moms, the topic of picky eating inevitably comes up. And by far, the number one complaint I hear is that their kids won't eat vegetables.
I can certainly sympathize. My being a dietitian doesn't mean my kids are genetically hard-wired to love vegetables. Weeks have gone by where green veggies remain untouched on one—or both—of my kids' plates, and the only vegetable matter they consume is a lone sweet potato fry, possibly by accident when they thought it was something else. But then, just as mysteriously, a broccoli binge may come from out of the blue, and they're furiously cramming florets in their little mouths, with little interest in the pile of macaroni and cheese on their plates.
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3 Ways to Get Fast Food From Your Garden
Tweet Share on Facebook August 13, 2012 CommentYou'd think if anyone were eating healthy meals every day, it would be me, the biodynamic farmer and green business owner, wouldn't you? My entire business day is spent showing individuals, communities, and companies how to grow their own food. Enjoying such bounty should be my standard operating procedure, right?
Complete honesty here. Just like many of you, my days require long hours, lots of travel, and many meals in restaurants or conference rooms where I often don't have a say as to what's available. Many days, I arrive home after dark, and those precious moments I like to spend in my garden or preparing fresh food don't always happen. Plus, now with a wife who has her own business as well—and did I mention our new baby?—we're pretty much stretched to the limit.
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Is an Organic Margarita Ruining Your Diet?
Tweet Share on Facebook August 10, 2012 CommentIf you were offered an organic margarita at a restaurant, would you order it? Would it make you feel like you were being just a little bit healthier, going for the organic version instead of the typical sugary margarita?
If you answered yes, you're not alone: Research shows that the term "organic" translates to "healthier" in many people's minds. But the truth is, organic is not the same as healthy, or even healthier.
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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.
