Week 6 of Simple Lifestyle Changes

Well everyone! It is the end of the 6 weeks of Lifestyle Changes. I hope that you have all incorporated a few of these simple changes! I would advise you to create a Journal Roadmap sheet using the information you have garnered from the previous weeks. You should have identified your helpful and unhelpful behaviors, activities, situations, and times that are hardest for you, and your triggers and feelings that are difficult. Fill out a cheat sheet for all of the ideas and helps that most apply to you.

Also, include on your cheat sheet the main changes that you hope to make in the coming months. Even if you are only working consistently on a few of these changes, you should see success as you are more aware of your choices, habits and patterns. Remember a great idea is to work on three habits per month as it takes a month to create a new habit. If you do this for a year, you will have 36 new habits incorporated into your life fairly easily.

I will share my personal cheat sheet with you tomorrow to give you an idea of how to do this!

Blessings!

Kerry

Week 5 of Simple Lifestyle Changes

Another Happy Monday Everyone,
The goal of this 6 week mini tutorial is to help you make some simple lifestyle changes and to help you to see that a total diet redo might not be necessary. It is all about keeping the really great foods in your life that you love on a limited basis and looking for those triggers in your life that cause you to look to food. Keep working on being aware of what triggers you to eat. Develop some great strategies to use when you are in a situation that triggers are bombarding you!
Some other Diet Advice would be:

• Add more fish into your diet and lower-fat protein sources.
• Limit fat to between 20% to 30% of your foods. (Basically cut way down on the processed foods and add more veggies. We eat by volume which is great because veggie dishes and salads take up a lot of room on your plate. Your visual brain will be happy!)
• Continue to decrease eating fried foods. Never a good idea!
• Do not fall prey to deceptive advertising. Remember that low fat does not mean low calorie. A bag of fat free licorice is very pricey calorie wise and will start the cravings. Skip entire aisles of the market and shop the outer edge where the healthy foods are placed. 
• Continue to work on seeing processed foods as poison. They literally poison your body and cause you to experience severe cravings for sugar.
• Eat smaller meals to keep your blood sugar under control. This will keep you full longer and help with cravings.
• Continue to experiment with meatless meals, soups, healthy bean chilies, and new veggie type salads or Mediterranean dishes.
• Choose low or non fat milk, yogurts and cheeses. Non fat cheese is not great but the lower fat versions are fairly good. Watch yogurts. Some are very caloric. There are some great Greek yogurts with 100 calories a serving. Many of the yogurts are very high sugar. Try other milk sources also. The Soy light Milks and Almond Milks are great choices.
• Buy ready made or prepared fruits and veggies rather than junk food or chips. Many people tell me eating healthy is too pricey. But have you priced out some of the specialty chips per pound that we all load up on. You could be eating steak!
• Review previous weeks as a reminder and make sure you are incorporating some of these changes into your life.

If you have any questions, contact me through facebook and I will be happy to answer them. 

http://www.facebook.com/lifestylesoln

Have a great week everyone! Kerry

A New Mindset

Happy Friday Everyone,
When we think of losing weight, we think about what we need to eat. That is important. I have found that the most important aspect of weight loss is our thinking. Lets face it, our thoughts get us into trouble. They seem to sabotage us daily.  Who has not thought, I think I will eat that because I am celebrating something, I can start over tomorrow, all my friends are eating that, I deserve it, just a bit won't matter. On and on our thoughts lead us to where we did not want to go. What can we do? We have got to develop ways to counteract these sabotaging thoughts.

All of us face many triggers daily relating to food. These triggers cause sabotaging thoughts. Many of us do not even recognize the triggers or the thoughts that lead us to eat. The first step is to learn to recognize the triggers that cause you to eat. Any thing that triggers you to eat can be a trigger. It could be a type of food, place, time, craving, hunger, day of the week, smell, friend, really anything. If you are journaling you will begin to see these triggers fairly easily. Once you see the trigger watch what your thoughts are telling you. As you learn to recognize these sabotaging thoughts, you can then begin to develop some helpful responses that you can tell yourself. The trick is to develop positive self talk that leads you to make better choices. It is something that you must practice over time.

I believe that long term success with weight control is dependent on whether you can learn to recognize your triggers and thoughts and feelings and then develop ways to make positive choices. This is a learning process and you will improve the more you practice!

Have a great weekend!

Week 3 of Simple Lifestyle Changes

This is the start of week 3 of making some simple lifestyle changes that can have a big payoff.

• Use the Food Pyramid or the Mediterranean Food Pyramid (my preference) to guide your food choices by eating from each food group.
• Choose a variety of whole grains per day to increase fiber which will fill you up. (Most people eat about 10 g fiber a day and you need around 35g.) Choices include 100% whole wheat, brown rice, oats, whole wheat couscous, and quinoa. Check out Trader Joe's Brown Rice Medley and Harvest Grains Blend both of which are great! Decrease white flour and white rice.
• Eat a variety of fruits and vegetables of different types and colors daily. Try and follow the half plate rule. It may take a few weeks before you can really follow the half plate rule.
• Use olive oil when possible and decrease eating fried foods.
• Do not drink calories when possible, especially sugar laden ones. Limit sugar and if you must have it, eat it with a meal so it will not spike your blood sugar as much.
• Cut down on all processed foods. This will decrease the salt in your diet. Add in new spices like curry, cumin, cilantro and basil. Use an entire bunch of chopped cilantro and 2 to 3 T of spices not the 1 t like most of us use. Food should be really tasty not bland.
• Drink alcohol in moderation as it provides calories but not much nutritional value. Wine is used on the Med. diet chart.
• Keep preplating all of your food at the beginning of the meal and also snacks so you can see the quantity you are eating. Remember your brain is visual. Do not eat from the bag!
• Keep reading labels until you have a good grasp of the calorie counts of most of the foods that you eat. The more you know, the more you can eat!
• No foods are forbidden but knowing your calorie counts allows you to recognize lower calorie options for the foods that you can't live without.

Keep track of what is going on in your life when you want to eat, and also look for things that seem to trigger your eating. Is it emotional eating? Did you smell food? Did a situation like a movie bring on the candy craving? Did the Jack in the Box Advertised special lure you in? Pay attention to these triggers because there are strategies you can use to overcome them. Remember that most of us gain weight at the same times, places, days of the week with the same foods over and over. Figure these out and make a plan!

"Why do we Eat" and "How did we Gain Weight"?

Next week we are teaching a class on Emotional Eating at our local hospital. To prepare, I have tried to think globally about why we have ended up being a nation where 2/3 of our people are either overweight or obese! I am going to attempt to explain to you why I believe this is so. You will also be able to see why dieting has a long term success rate of 2%.

First question: Why do we eat?

Easy Answer: We are Hungry, right? Sort of right! Most of us eat only 20% of the time because we are actually hungry. The other 80% of the time, we eat for other reasons!

Now you know why diets fail. A diet usually says it is all about food. Change everything you know and love about food and do it this way and you will lose. Well, you box up your "80% reasons" for a time and lose the weight and then when the diet is over, you breath a sigh of relief and go back to your old ways. Voila!
Weight gain again, sometimes to a greater amount than you started at. Diets look at the "What". What are you eating wrong? Count your calories better and you should be successful. Do this by getting rid of carbs, or going low fat or whatever the lastest, greatest diet figures out to redo the calories. Not going to probably work!

Now for the rest of the story! This is your "How" or your "Personal History with Food". Have you ever started a diet and been asked to fill our your food history? I would highly doubt that. It would be like going to the doctor and leaving out your history. You would not get very far. I believe that diets do not work but each person must look at their personal history to find their answers. Most of us gain back the same weight with the same foods on the same days of the week at the same times over and over again! Enough!

What are some of the other 80% reasons that we eat?

Thoughts

All of Nothing Thinking (Perfection or Forget it)

Sabotaging Thoughts (Negative thinking)

Triggers (anything that triggers you to eat)

Biological-hunger, thirst, hormonally influenced cravings

Environmental-seeing or smelling food, food shows or ads

Mental-thinking about food, imagining food and the good and bad memories

Emotional-tension, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, boredom, happiness, excitement,.........

Social-offered food or being around others who are eating

Food-a particular food or type of food is your downfall

Situation

Time

Behavioral pattern

Habits

Mindless Eating

No Planning

Poor Nutrition

Your personal habits add here

Are you overwhelmed yet? Please do not be!

It is all about developing a unique set of great strategies that look at your particular food history and implementing them. Most of us are not doing that many things wrong. Most of us have not woken up today overweight, but have gained it slowly. We are not doing that much wrong. If you overeat by 100 calories per day you will gain 10 pounds this year. Let that go for 10 years and you would be 100 pounds overweight. By identifying your problem areas and cleaning them up, most of us can lose weight and feel better!