Re - Solutions

OK. You made it though the holidaze. Congratulations. Now what? Now comes that nagging feeling that you've overindulged and have to repent. This usually centers on creating some sort of austere diet and exercise plan that your "Super Self" will coerce your "Evil Twin" into following for "your own good".  Aahh... and here is where it all goes down the drain before you even get started.

DIET is a Four Letter Word. Back when I was a kid, a "four letter word" was a "bad word". The word "diet" has all the negative connotations that are associated with punishment and deprivation. It is based on willpower and internal motivational strength. It is a period of time that is book-ended and taken out of a person's "normal" life during which they force themselves into a very tight small box of behaviors and usually without any internal or external support. Put simply: IF YOU DIET YOU ARE DESTINED TO FAIL unless you happen to have the will of an automaton, the emotional range of a barbell, and live in a bunker with no temptations to stray from the tight-rope thin path to your goal weight.

The reality is that we humans are complicated, have stressful lives that overlap and interact with other complicated and stressful lives. We are continuously bombarded with advertisements for weight loss miracle pills/shakes/frozen meals/supplements/medications/surgeries at the same time we are assaulted with advertising for the "return of the McRib", "I-dare-you-to-eat-just-one" chips, 2-for-1 large so-there's-no-need-to-share pizzas, and super-sized fries for the same price as regular. Mixed messages? Yup. One set appeals to your inner parent and the other to the inner child. You are being set up. Who benefits? The pharmaceutical industry, the food industry and the diet industry. You read that right. The Diet Industry. There are huge amounts of money to be made on you. This industry is there to help your wallet lose weight, not you.

Don't count calories. Count blessings. Get REAL. Take back your power and live your life with the passion, verve and vitality you were meant to have! How, you ask? Simple really. Focus on these five things with gentleness towards yourself and gratitude:
1 - Eat REAL foods. Give up processed foods, anything that you only have to microwave and serve, excess sugars (not all sugars!), damaged fats and poisoned proteins. Eat a rainbow of veggies, fruits, healthy meats/fish/poultry (if you aren't vegetarian of course), organic whole dairy products, whole grains and healthy fats. YES FATS. Fats are what triggers the sense of satiety and tells your body you can stop eating. Without fat in your meal you will be hungry again very quickly. And yes, the occasional dessert! But eat it right up next to your meal. And by the way, occasional means just that, not after (or instead of) every meal as we've been told by the marketing agencies we can do...
2 - Move. It's what you were built to do. You weren't built to run marathons weekly or to swim the English Channel. You were built to trudge. You were built to move all day every day. You were not built to sit. Move your body through space under your own power for at least 60 minutes per day at a pace that suggests you might have just been hung up on AGAIN by AT&T after being on hold for 45 minutes. Grrr!
3 - Drink water. Just water. Clean water. Cool, not iced, water. Drink one ounce for every half-pound of you. If you weigh 200 pounds, your daily intake should be 100 ounces. If you must, have herbal tea or a squeeze of lemon in your water. If you have caffeine or alcohol, remember it sets you back and you have to drink that much more to get back to square one.
4 - Eliminate as much added sugar as possible. Naturally occurring sweetness in fruits and veggies are fine. Artificial sweeteners offer you nothing but health problems and a continuing addiction to extreme sweetness. Cut it back. Use sugar if you must but do so knowing that's what you're using and be sensible. No agave is not the answer. This is another case of "natural" does not equal "healthy".
5 - Breathe. Yup, you read that right. Breathe. We forget that one of THE most important things we can do is change the air. Clear your head. Oxygenate your brain. Wake up your muscles. Crank up your metabolism. Expel toxins that are released in the breath. Consciously taking a few breaths reduces your stress levels instantly. Try it. It's something you can literally do any time. Important times to implement taking a few conscious breaths are: before beginning a meal, before a potentially stressful meeting, while sitting in traffic, before going to bed at night, and before engaging in your day in the morning.

You can do these things! If you focus on these 5 things rather than trying to make unsustainable and doomed resolutions, you can change the course of your history from this day forward. I dare you to try it. Take pictures, take measurements, then put the scale in the garage, keep a journal and let me know how you feel this time next year. Thumb your nose at the expensive diet plans and gym memberships. Laugh at the ridiculous advertising that makes no rational sense. Take your power and money back from Big Pharma and Big Agra. Get Sensible. Get Healthy. Get REAL.

Road Food

So I've been on a destination-free road trip through some of the southwest with a dear friend who proposed we "get outa Dodge" for about 10 days. We piled sleeping bags, pads, pillows and bags into her vehicle and set out from the foothills of California for points south along highway 395 and beyond. This posed a few challenges not the least of which was considering food both for the road and on the road. Eating while traveling in unfamiliar territory can be a daunting prospect and is a concern for many of my clients. Our journey offers the additional challenges of l-o-n-g distances between towns and cross-roads that pose as towns, sometimes with many miles between stops to even get ice for the cooler. So what's a foodie-nutritionist to do? Here are a few tips and tricks that have made our adventure work well so far, and a few additional ones that have worked for previous solo trips:

1 - Bring that cooler, yes, the big one. Get block ice and wrap it in a brown paper bag tightly this will help a little with slowing down the rate of melt. Have freezer strength zip-lock bags for storing things in the cooler that you don't want to get wet as the ice melts.

2 - Bring enough water for at least two days. How much is that? The rule of thumb is to take your body weight and divide that in half. That's the number of ounces you should be shooting for each day just for drinking. If you're going to be cooking, washing up, or doing a sponge-bath or two, be sure to add another two gallons per day.

3 - Don't just nosh your way through the day! Have set amounts of your snacks or food available and eat at intervals, not just because you're bored or need something to do with your hands. Good ways to regulate snacking is to pre-package your noshing items into serving sizes using half-size ziplock baggies. For a nut mix, that would be about 1/4-1/3 cup. For fruit, about 1/2-3/4 cup cut up or a medium apple or banana, or 1 cup veggies such as carrots, celery, jicama, or green beans.

4 - Have a thick dip or spread available for veggies. If it's too thin, I promise you'll end up wearing it as you drive... Humus or other bean dips work well for this purpose.

5 - Minimize the chips and pretzels, they won't do you any favors. They will actually make you hungry in the long run as well as increase the likelihood of creating edema (water retention) in your feet and ankles.

6 - When you need to stop for food, seek out a grocery store rather than a fast food place. You will save money and have a much higher quality meal, even if it's only an apple and cheese!

7 - The meal that seems to be the least likely to be made poorly is breakfast out. Go ahead and order the eggs, skip the potatoes in favor of a side of veggies or fruit. If you can get some salsa on those eggs you will get a little more vegetable matter in as well. Skip the juice and have water. If you have coffee, use real half-n-half, not the fake stuff. Same with sugar, use the real stuff, not the artificial sweeteners (your poor body doesn't know what to do with those chemicals - more on this topic soon). Skip the bready stuff and the cereal stuff. You'll be amazed at how much longer the meal lasts you!

8 - For dinners and lunches, split an entree and order an extra side of the vegetable or salad. Most places serve enough for a small army anyway! This has proven absolutely true on my current trip. We have saved a bunch of money at each meal this way and have never left a restaurant hungry.

9 - If you are in a new area and don't know the selections, put "best dinner Reno" into google (of course you'll put in the town where you are) and you can get some good ideas and reviews. Other ways to get good beta is to use cell phone applications like Yelp, Bing!, and Around Me to help locate restaurants nearby.

10 - Splurge! You're traveling afterall which means you are either away from home for business and need some comfort, or you are on vacation and celebrating. Allow yourself a couple of splurges on desserts or a meal or two that stray from your normal healthy eating habits (if you don't have healthy normal eating habits we need to talk). The catch? Be really picky! Don't settle for mediocre, get the best of whatever it is you are craving. Don't settle for M&Ms, stop by a local chocolate shop and get an amazing deep dark truffle. Don't grab a Dunkin Doughnut when you can find a fabulous french bakery and have a chocolate croissant. Go for the gusto!

Happy travels! Let me know what wonders you discover on the road!

The Disconnect

Something I see on a daily basis that still confounds me is the radical disconnect between health and the things we do (or don't do) every day. It still amazes me that the vast majority of those in conventional health care don't understand that what their patients eat and drink makes a difference in health trajectories and disease outcomes.

One of the most startling examples is in the field of oncology. There is a scan that is performed using radioactive sugar injected into the bloodstream so that areas of high metabolic activity "light up" on the screen. The reason these areas show up is because highly metabolic tissues suck up sugar at a much more rapid rate than surrounding cells and tissues in order to keep up their activity or growth. This is one way to find tumors which are rapidly growing self-cells that have lost their brakes. Sugar can therefore be clearly seen as cancer's favorite food, right? So why then do so many of my cancer patients come to me with instructions from their oncologists to "have milkshakes and any high calorie foods to be sure to keep weight on"? It boggles, really. Let's throw gasoline on the flame and then sit back scratching our heads as to why the cancer cells happily step up production!

Another brain bender is the recommendation for diabetics to eat a high-carb, low-fat diet. The pancreas is already stressed out and can't keep up production of insulin to deal with the carbohydrate that is already coming in! And yet, the idea is to reduce caloric intake rather than look at what those calories actually represent to the system as a whole. To control blood sugar, one needs dietary fats and proteins and fiber and minerals and vitamins and enzymes and MOVEMENT... It's basic biochemistry.

As consumers without degrees in biochem, we are bombarded at the grocery store checkout with magazine covers that exhort us to lose those pesky 15 pounds plastered over the top of a background picture of a 4 layer death-by-chocolate cake. We are told by food product manufacturers that we can have their "non-fat, sugar-free, low-carb, no cholesterol" food product and it will be just as good as the real thing. But our bodies know the difference even if the marketing agents can fool our brains. Bodies don't understand artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, artificial fats, gums, and fake proteins. Our bodies understand real food. The fake stuff has far more health consequences than the real stuff. Don't kid yourself into believing that we are smart enough to fool Mother Nature quite yet...

Food As Fuel

The concept of food merely as fuel is something that is foreign to me personally, but it is a common predicament for some of my clients. As a self-proclaimed foodie, I find it sad that someone gets to the point where they feel that eating is a nuisance activity that takes time away from the important things in life. I confess that I find myself believing that these folks just haven't had really good food before, or there must be some emotional trauma leftover from an early age around food and eating that has caused this aversion to the pleasures of savoring a good meal. Sometimes on closer examination it turns out that there is fear of doing something "wrong" when it comes to cooking. Sometimes there is an overwhelming sense of time urgency and stress that short circuits meal time and creates instead a series of grab-and-go snack times.

I think one of the great disservices we have created by way of the convenience driven food industry is the sacrifice of flavor for speed. Then, they to try to fix the mess that got created called a "food product", by adding all manner of flavorings, artificial sweeteners, gums and colorings to try to make up for this poor substitute for real food. Childhoods are spent training tastebuds to stop wishing for real food and forcing them to settle for "fake-tasting-just-add-water-and-wait-for-the-microwave-ding" food products. It's no wonder that the adult palate has given up and gone sour on food in general.

I spend time in my sessions with clients gently poking and prodding and encouraging them to try new things, new combinations, new flavors, and certainly real foods. There just is no substitute for a real vine ripened tomato, or butter from happy pastured cows, or if you're lucky enough to live in California, fresh sun-warmed Meyer lemons from the back yard. As a foodie, I can conjure in my mind the smell of that lemon, the smoothness of the rind, the tanginess of the juice and my mouth automatically starts to water. It doesn't have to be some crazy fancy french restaurant meal to get my eyes to glaze over with delight -- hand me a handful of fresh rosemary or a bunch of riotously colored rainbow chard. This is real food. The real cellular foundational food of human life. These are the ingredients you want to build yourself out of everyday, not the chemical laden, sauced-up cardboard cut-outs that pass for "food" in most grocery stores and fast food establishments.

If you want to reawaken your senses and enjoy one of the simple pleasures of being human, shop the perimeter of your grocery store. That's where all the real food is: the produce, meats, dairy, eggs and often the bulk sections. Make a mad dash down an aisle or two for the toilet paper and maybe the olives and tea. Challenge yourself to start simple. Explore your taste horizons and push your limits just a little. Get fresh. Get smart. Get REAL.