Healthy Meal Diet

Do you know how to read a food label? I thought I did until I watched this video and saw how much I have been mislead into buying “fat free” or “low fat” products that were not more low fat than their fat version!  How can this be?

The guy in this video used to work for Kraft Foods and now is blowing the lid off of how food labels are manipulated to make consumers think they are getting healthy food, when really they are not. For example, a vegetable broth, whose label says it is 99% fat free, and actually.

I was blown away when I watched this. There are two different systems of measurement that allow for very confusing and contradictory information. This is a very interesting video that gets into details about how to read a food label and really understand what it is you are getting when you buy the product. Take the time to watch this, and let everyone you know have this information!

OK, I have been a long time Sesame Street admirer, dating back to when my brother was young and my heart was opened up by Kermit the Frog singing, “It isn’t easy being green.” Here is this 2011 Sesame Street song, Cookie Monster gives us a fun rendition of “Healthy Foods,” for us all to learn what a good foods to eat for a healthy diet. Enjoy!

Last March, he was a coronary waiting to happen. His poor eating habits and lack of exercise had caught up with him, his family was thinking of doing an intervention to wake him up to his health problems, and he knew he just had to make some changes. Now, five months later he is 55 pounds lighter and in the best shape of his life.

“It’s not a diet,” Chef Mark Stark, said, “It’s just about making healthy eating choices. You start cutting back a little at a time and after awhile, your body loses that craving.” Stark, who lost 55 pound over a six month period, is the owner of four restaurants, and had a pattern of eating at one of them late in the evening after finishing up work, then heading to bed a few hours later. “The food didn’t have a chance to digest in my stomach, it just sat there and turned to fat.” Now after slimming down by cutting out potatoes and bread, and making healthy choices for his meals, Stark says, “what’s better than losing the weight is that I have 10 times the energy as when I was carrying the excess weight.”

He also began a boxing program to keep him interested in moving around and getting fit. “I just couldn’t get motivated doing an exercise program on machines.” So he discovered a boxing program that keeps him interested with different routines and a great coach that keeps things interesting for him. Exercise should be fun and satisfying, and sometimes what works for one person doesn’t work for another. For Mark Stark, the boxing was the key. “I like to hear that pop of my glove hitting a target,” he said about the satisfaction of his choice of exercise.

While it’s not really a secret that eating healthy meals, making healthy food choices, and getting good heart pumping exercise is the best way to lose weight, sometimes we need to hear some weight loss success stories that really inspire us. Speaking for myself, when I read the article in my local paper about this chef, I was inspired and renewed in my own commitment to take on living a healthy life. What choices with I make today that lead me in a healthy direction? What new exercise can you put into your life today that will bring pleasure, vitality and health into your life? What can we do today to take a step closer to gaining more energy, lightening up our bodies and creating healthy vibrant lives? It all starts today. Thanks to: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110827/NEWS/110829561

Meal replacement bars are certainly handly for when you are on the go and need a meal quickly. But when you look closely are they healthy enough to replace a meal? With the advertisments that promote these quick fix meals, one would think that they are the best thing since sliced bread (which we all know may not actually be a great thing after all). But what are they really? Are they a good choice, or are they just a gimmick to get you to buy food you really are not benefitting from? With many brands on the market, it must be that there are different levels of healthy food in different bars. Let’s take a look and see.

Are they healthy or are they just another candy bar in disguise? A good helathy meal with have need to meet certain qualifications. We will look at them in terms of: calories, caloric density, saturated fats, trans fats, protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals.

Calories – There need to be enough calories, and fiber and caloric density to be satisfying, otherwise you will just find yourself grabbing something else shortly after eating it, so that you won’t be so hungry. Alos a bit of fat satisfies and is good, but not it they are trans fats and not if there are too many fats. Are there enough vitamins and minerals that we need to stay healthy in the bar to warrent replacing a meal?

These five bars are rated from better to wrost:

Of the ones that diet.com tested the better is the Balance Gold bar with a high calorie density, 4 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of fiber, not a wise choice.

Go Lean Chocolat Almond Toffee – the biggest bar no added vitamins or minerals, missing alot of nutrients that you should have 290 calories.

Powerbar energize- 240 calories, and 3 grams of fat. Came in last in a taste test and people reported being hungry shortly after eating.

Special K Protein Bar 190 calories, not satisfyling – 4.5 2 grams of fiber, not filling, no added vitamins.

Slim Fast Optima – 220 calories, big volume 6 grams of fat 4 sat

If you do fruit, vegtable, hadful of nuts or yogurt along with your bar to get all the nutrition you need.

I have been hearing about the paleo diet and wanted to check into it to learn more. What is the Paleo Diet?

The originator of this diet, Dr. Loren Cordain, is on the faculty Colorado State University in the dept. of Health and Exercise Science. He has been at work for 20 years looking at the effects of diet on human health and specifically working to examine links between modern day eating habits and disease. He is the author of the three books, The Paleo Diet, The Paleo Diet for Athletes, and The Dietary Cure for Acne.

Paleo Diet Basics:

The main premise of the Paleo Diet is to mimics the kinds of food that people ate before the Agricultural Revolution. Specifically , this consists of fresh fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and seafood. These healthy foods tend to be high in soluble fiber, antioxidant vitamins, phytochemicals, omega-3 and monounsaturated fats, and low-glycemic carbohydrates. These foods also promote good health by not having the refined sugars and grains, saturated and trans fats, salt, high-glycemic carbohydrates, and processed foods that frequently cause weight gain, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and many additional health problems that people suffer with today. In essence The Paleo Diet replaces dairy and grain products with nutrient rich fresh fruits and vegetables.

Weight Loss Diets

Let’s look at a couple of models for weight loss that are popular and have molded the way we think about losing weight.

Low Fat/High Carb

Burning more calories than we take in is a standard formula for weight loss as we all seem to know, but conventionally it has been assumed that the best way to accomplish this is to eat a plant-dominated, low-fat, and high-carbohydrate diet. Well, that calorie part of this is true, a net caloric decrease must take place in order to lose weigh. But when Cordain looked at the experience that most people have when they are on a low-calorie, high-carbohydrate diet he found that mostly it is unpleasant and unsatisfying. People on this type of diet experience being hungry all the time, and for most people, any weight they do lose they regain right away or within a few months of the initial loss.

Low Carb/ High Fat

On the other hand, diets that promote low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets also offer us a way to lose weight, but only for the short term, and in the long run they promote an unhealthy diet because of the reliance on fats (butter, fatty meats, bacon, cheeses, etc.) at the expense of healthful and nutrient rich fruits and vegetables.

In the end both of these ways of dieting have proven to be ineffective and unsatisfying, to say nothing of being unhealthy. Cordain’s premise is that when the agricultural revolution occurred about 10,000 years ago, a dramatic change took place in human nutrition. Now in our modern diet, cereal grains, legumes, dairy, vegetable oils, salt, alcohol, and refined sugars comprise 72% of the nutrition in western cultures. These foods contain harmful substances that are associated with many of the “diseases of civilization”, including diabetes, celiac disease and other autoimmune diseases, obesity, hypertension, certain cancers, acne, polycistic ovary syndrome, myopia, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular disease, and more.

The Paleo Diet offers an alternative. This is a diet that matches what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate. They ate a high-protein, high-fruit and veggie diet with moderate amounts of fat, that was bountiful in healthful omega-3 and monounsaturated fats. Why protein is good for you: It has two to three times the thermic effect of either fat or carbohydrate, meaning that it gets your metabolism going, which speeds up weight loss. Also protein fills you up more than either fats or carbohydrates, so it has the effect of more easily controlling your appetite. Lastly, according to Cordain, three recent clinical trials have concluded that high-protein diets are more effective than low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets in promoting weight loss.

Basically the Paleo diet is about eating lean meats, seafood, vegetables, fruits, and nuts and not eating grains and sugars.

http://thepaleodiet.com/

What is your idea of the shape you want to have?  What does she look like, this perfect image of you that you carry around in the back of your mind? Or how does he appear to you, this inner vision of perfection?

I ask myself that sometimes and I am not really sure what my answer is.   One thing for certain is that I want to be more agile.  I want to be able to move around easily. I yearn to dance again, with grace and fluidity.  I want to feel my legs being like rubber bands, as I used to feel in those days of my fittest youth.

Today I am not agile nor feeling as if I have rubber bands for muscles.  I instead feel sore and achy and overweight.  I have hips that hurt.

I want to lose weight so that I can enjoy the rest of my life – moving around – being active – engaging in the joys of life.

Want to come along?

Ok, so here it is.  I am a serial eater.  I want to eat for the joy of eating, for the satisfaction of the chewing and swallowing and feeling that familiar sensation of  and empty need filled – if only for that brief moment.

I have been following what I believe is a good healthy diet to lose weight.  I have heard it referred to as the paleo diet, or the diet from the book, 4 hour body (with my own little twists).  I eat lean protein, vegetables and beans six days a week, and one day I eat anything (and everything) that I want.  So far for the last three weeks it has been satisfying to a profound level of experiencing newness- so much so that on my free days I haven’t wanted to eat that much.  Well, that first “free” day I went over the edge a bit, – with pasta, and pie and ribs…  I didn’t feel so good the next day, and felt better when I went back to this lean low carb diet.  I felt good for a few weeks, and though I haven’t lost much, I know I will lose weight soon.  But today, I felt like a gnawing hunger was creeping at my bones.  Perhaps that was because last night I snacked late at night for the first night (other than on my “free” day) and so today I felt blue, and on edge all day.  I really didn’t want to eat at all, until Dan came home and I realized I had let myself get too hungry.

I think this diet works if I eat enough during they day.  But if I let myself get too hungry, then I want lots of unhealthy food.

So now at this particular moment, I choose to not eat that cookie, and instead sit here and write to you.

Thanks for being here!

It is a pretty common statement that people make that eating fats makes you fat.  Seems logical, doesn’t it?  Well, it is not necessarily the truth. Fats alone do not make you gain body fat.

The other “common thought” about fats in your diet is that eating fats puts you in risk of having a heart attack. This too – is not true.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods when it comes to fats.  Fats are not the enemy.

Fats are actually essential for your body’s health.  They assist in hormone production, maintaining healthy skin, absorbing vitamins, and yes, even in burning body fat. There it is, as strange as that sounds, you need fats to burn fat!

Now, don’t take me the wrong way, having fats in your diet does not mean eating LOTS of fat in your meal.  And it also does not mean eating bad fats (highly processes fats, or margarine).

Here are some simple dietary fats guidelines:

1. Eat fats as they occur in nature.  And those fats should be at least 80% as they really do occur in nature.  What I mean here is that you should choose the foods closest to nature that you can find, like meat from grass-fed and free-range sources. There might be a higher cost, but trust me, it is wort it. For one thing, it tastes better and for another, your medical costs will certainly offset the few dollars more per pound you pay at the grocery store.

2. When you cook, use a combination of olive oil and coconut oil, and use each sparingly. If you are eating plenty of animal protein (which have fats as the occur in nature) you do not need other fats. This is not because of any ‘danger’ but because you don’t need to eat the needless calories, especially if you are trying to maintain a healthy shape and fitness level. But a bit of raw butter or olive oil can make bland veggies taste wonderful, so you should feel empowered to add a little.

3. In general fats that are very healthy are the omega 3-rich fats like olive oil and fish oil (and especially fish oil). They help lower inflammation, which is the real culprit behind heart disease for the most part.

4. Avoid a lot of fats at night. The night-time meals should be high in lean protein (tuna, tofu, turkey breast) with very limited fats if you are wanting to really get lean. If you are just trying to shed body weight slowly, it’s okay to have some fats at night.

Bottom line is that if you in the mindset that fats are unhealthy, please give that up now. We have been eating fat for countless thousands of years. Just keep in mind that you should eat fat the way we always have – naturally, not filled with hormones and additives and fillers, and you’ll be fine, and enjoy your healthy diet meal.