With 2016 just a few days away, many of us are thinking about making resolutions for the New Year.  Well, resolutions are really behavior changes.  In the context of a weight loss plan, changing behaviors refers to changing what you have been routinely doing in regard to your eating and exercise routines.  You may also think of behaviors as habits.  Your weight is what it is because of your eating and exercise habits.  While your metabolism plays a significant role, your eating and exercise behaviors are the two areas that you can impact to change your weight.  You will either add new behaviors or substitute new, healthier behaviors for your current less healthy ones.  It is rare to just stop a behavior without replacing it.

Adding Behaviors

New behaviors involve adding something to your current activities, such as an exercise routine.  Often the main challenge is finding the time.  For some, it’s in the morning before the main activities of the day; for others, the evening makes more sense.

As far as exercise, the ultimate goal is spending at least 30 minutes most days of the week doing an activity of moderate intensity.  The more time you spend exercising, the more calories you will burn.  It has been recommended by the American Heart Association that from a cardiovascular health viewpoint, those 30 minutes can be expended all at once or in several blocks of at least 10 minutes each.    It makes sense to start slowly, so 10 minutes three days a week may be the perfect starting point for you.

Substituting Behaviors

These often revolve around eating behaviors.  For instance, instead of drinking sugary beverages, substitute water.  While this may sound simple, it takes planning to make sure you do it.  You’ll probably want to buy fewer sugary beverages and have them less accessible, too.  (Ideally, don’t buy any!)  You may need to put notes in your refrigerator on those sugary drinks that remind you to drink water instead.

As you create your weight loss plan, take some time and identify the behaviors you need to change and which ones you’ll tackle first.  Don’t try to change them all at once.  Make a list and change a few more every week or so.

Don’t forget to check out my website www.insightsforhealth.com where you can set up Health-e Texts to reinforce your new healthier behaviors.  To use some of these you must register as a member, but membership is free!

Your comments are welcome.

For Your Health! – Dr. Bob

Just as you anticipate and prepare for barriers and obstacles to your weight loss plan, you should build in some rewards for milestones you reach during your journey.

Milestones

Milestones can be thought of as mini-goals that you must attain on your way to your ultimate goal.  If your ultimate goal is a target weight loss of 75 pounds over a 6-month period, then you can set your milestones in terms of process measures and outcome measures towards that goal.

Process Measures

In order to succeed and reach your weight loss goal you need to change habits surrounding your eating and activity (exercise).  These habits, behaviors, processes must change.  For example, you can no longer buy any food just because it tastes good at the grocery.  You must read labels and evaluate your choices.  As far as activity, you need to get on a routine of scheduled exercise.  So a milestone for eating habits may be consistently keeping a food diary or consistently reading food labels at the grocery.  As far as exercise, a milestone could be exercising for at least 30 minutes a day at least 3 days a week for at least a month.  Where possible, you will want to increase certain aspects of your new behavior to set a new milestone for yourself.  This is often done with exercise.  After a month of 30 minutes a day 3 days a week, you may want to increase that to 4 times a week.  But reward yourself as you attain each milestone.

Outcome Measures

These are usually tied to getting to a specific portion of your goal.  So, when trying to lose 75 pounds, your first milestone may be losing 10 pounds.  The next may be 25 pounds.  These milestones help you track your progress and allow you to reward yourself for the work you’ve done.  Changing behaviors isn’t easy!

Rewards

The ideal reward should be tied to the new behaviors you are undertaking.  In the case of weight loss, they certainly shouldn’t be unhealthy or off-limits foods.  So, you may get yourself some new workout clothes or exercise equipment.  For more significant milestones, a weekend getaway might be appropriate but without indulging in foods that are not on your healthy eating plan.  When you hit your ultimate goal, you’ll probably want to treat yourself to some new clothes that fit the new you.

Next time I’ll talk a little more about changing behaviors.

For Your Health! – Dr. Bob

Just How Much Is A Serving?

The key to healthy eating is learning the size of a serving for each of the foods you eat and eating the recommended amounts each day. This next table gives you some examples for each Food Group.

So, if you are planning to have 4 servings of fruit today, you can attain that by eating 1.25 cups of dried fruit.  Since a serving of lean meat, poultry or fish is 3 ounces, you should eat no more than 6 ounces a day of any of them if your healthy meal plan is 2000 total calories a day.

 Portion vs. Serving

These terms are often used interchangeably, but I tend to use “portion” to refer to the amount of a Food Group that is served for a specific meal, and serving refers to the amount appropriate for the day.  So, the 6 oz. of meat for the day is the daily serving that can be eaten in one 6 oz. portion at dinner, two 3 oz. portions at lunch and dinner, three 2 oz. portions at breakfast, lunch and dinner or some other combination.  Most of us in the United States do not think in terms of these daily serving sizes or meal portion sizes.  Thanks to our experience eating out, we typically over-estimate what a portion should be.  Taking the time to weigh and measure your food until you can better judge the quantity you’re eating is an important step to eating healthy.

 What do you think?  Tell us about your experiences with portion control.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob

The Food Pyramid

Until recently, the National Institute of Health (NIH) had talked about a practical system to help Americans eat healthier which they called the Food Pyramid. They divided foods into six Food Groups and recommended the number of daily servings for each of the Food Groups. The macronutrients we described in previous posts, Carbohydrates, Fats & Proteins, are contained within these Food Groups. The following table was taken from the NIH website. It tells you how many servings of a specific Food Group you should eat per day.  The Food Pyramid approach has been replaced by the MyPlate concept which is explained below.

ChooseMyPlate.gov

Recently the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) replaced the Food Pyramid system with this easier approach to help people more easily focus on these tips for healthy eating:

• Make half your plate fruits and vegetables
• Make at least half your grains whole grains
• Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk
• Enjoy your food, but eat less
• Avoid over-sized portions
• Drink water instead of sugary drinks

While this is helpful, many people want to know from a nutritional viewpoint how large is a serving of a specific food.  That’s what I’ll cover in the next post.  Check out the Learning Center at www.InsightsForHealth.com for more information.  Meanwhile, please leave any comments for discussion.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob

Last time I wrote about Carbohydrates.  Today, I want to share some basic nutritional information about Fats & Proteins.

Fats are made up of glycerol and fatty acids and due to this complexity, take the longest time to release their energy. Since they hold the most energy per gram of any other macronutrient, the body stores most of its excess energy as fat. In addition, fats are important components of the walls of cells and other structures of the body.

Fats are classified by the degree of “saturation” of their chemical bonds. Those likely to raise levels of the bad cholesterol, LDL, are the saturated and trans fats. Therefore, you should try to eat more monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats and avoid trans-fats and saturated fats.

Proteins are made up of chains of amino acids and are literally the building blocks of the body and form the enzymes & hormones that control its chemical reactions. Proteins are found in meat, poultry, fish, meat substitutes, cheese, milk, legumes, nuts and in smaller quantities in starchy foods and vegetables. The body breaks proteins down into their amino acids to reuse them. The body can make most of the amino acids it needs from other substances, but there are some, the essential amino acids, that it must get from food. All the necessary essential amino acids can be obtained from meat protein. However, not all the essential amino acids can be found in plant protein. When a person increases their amount of exercise it is important that they have enough protein to build muscle and prevent its breakdown. Many people ordinarily eat inadequate amounts of protein, so they either need to eat more protein-rich foods or take protein supplements.

In the next post I’ll talk about portion size.  By the way, this information and more can be found at the Learning Center on www.InsightsForHealth.com.  Check it out sometime.  Meanwhile, please leave your comments.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob