Tag Archives: healthy eating

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Shopping Healthy

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You can’t eat what you don’t have in your refrigerator or pantry.  This obvious truth is the foundation for developing and using a meal plan that will help you attain your weight loss goal.  Since food shopping is so critical for your success, I have listed a few tips to help you when you head to the grocery:

  • Make A List & Stick To It – Shopping smart starts with planning. Before you go to the grocery, make a list of the foods you need to get. By sticking to the list you will avoid making poor food choices.
  • Don’t Shop Hungry – Another tip is to avoid going food shopping when you are hungry. You are more likely to impulsively buy high caloric, unhealthy “junk” foods then. So take your list after you’ve had a meal, and you’ll be more likely to make healthier food choices
  • Read Nutrition Labels – Comparing nutrition labels is most helpful in choosing between one or more similar products or among brands of the same food. If you have high blood pressure or heart failure, you should minimize your sodium intake, so you can use the information on the Nutrition Labels to choose foods with lower Sodium content. If you have a high level of cholesterol in your blood, use the information to choose those foods lower in Cholesterol, Saturated Fat and Trans Fat to lower your blood cholesterol as well as your risk for heart attack and stroke.

Since knowing how to read Nutrition Labels is so important to choosing the healthier foods, I’ll talk about that in the next post.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob

Barriers to Your Success

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Whenever you take steps to change your lifestyle behaviors, whether to stop smoking, eat healthier or begin an exercise plan, it pays to take some time and identify the barriers to your plan.  These are the roadblocks to your success.  They are usually easy to list since they are often related to your list of Cons.

So if we consider the healthy eating plan that must be followed to lose weight, barriers might include:

  • Not knowing what to eat and what to avoid
  • Not knowing what are proper portion sizes
  • Not understanding food labels
  • Having difficulty finding the time to do some research on proper nutrition
  • Being tempted by unhealthy snacks at work
  • Being a frequent snacker
  • Eating out frequently, possibly due to business travel

Barriers to starting an exercise program to help lose weight and for its other benefits often include:

  • Having difficulty finding the time to exercise
  • Not having access to a place to exercise
  • Being embarrassed to exercise in front of others due to self consciousness about being overweight
  • Physical limitations

These are the potential reasons why you may fail in your plan – if you don’t determine how you can overcome them.  So when you make your list of barriers, you need to list next to each barrier what you will do to counteract them.  This way, when you are faced with the barrier, you will know how to respond.  For instance, if you are unsure of what to eat and what to avoid as well as appropriate portion sizes, you need to do some research online or at the library.  To help with portion sizes, you may need to buy a scale and measure all your portions.  When you take the time to identify your barriers you can usually strategize how to eliminate them before you are faced with their challenges.  Including barriers and their solutions in your plan preparation can help assure your success.

Next time I’ll talk about a few more important parts of your healthy lifestyle behavior change plan.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob

 

Pros And Cons

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As you identify your motivations for changing your habits of eating and exercise in order to lose weight, listing the pros and cons of making the changes can be helpful. This process helps to validate your decision to make those lifestyle changes.

The actual process is simple. Just draw a vertical line down the middle of a sheet of paper. Then at the top of the left column write Pros and on the right, Cons. Take some time to list reasons for making the change on the left and the reasons not to make the change on the right. Most people easily come up with more reasons to change their behavior than reasons not to make the effort.

For weight loss, most people list the health benefits, improvements in appearance and increases in confidence as the main benefits they will obtain if they lose weight. The health benefits alone include decreasing the risk of heart disease, diabetes and certain kinds of cancer. In addition, weight loss decreases the stress on your knees and hips.

The negative aspects of changing one’s eating and exercise habits is that it isn’t easy and requires work. You need to take the effort to substitute your new healthier behaviors for your old unhealthy ones.

After my heart attack, finding motivation wasn’t very difficult. The pros of minimizing my chances of having a second heart attack or dying far outweighed the work necessary to change my habits. Ideally, you won’t have to have a heart attack before you change your lifestyle for the better.

Save your list of pros and cons. When you get discouraged as you work through your behavior changes, pull it out to remind yourself of the benefits you’ll get if you reach your goal.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob