Small Changes in Your Diet can Make a Huge Difference

by | May 27, 2012 | Cravings, Fat Loss, Food Choices, How Your Body Works, Metabolism, Sensible Eating, Snacks | 0 comments

Each day we make as many as 200 food choices.

These are influenced by many things, even the folk we’re eating with.Even though each of those choices may only represent a small contribution to our final health – they all add up to making an
immense difference.

You’ll probably notice that many of our reader’s questions are about small things. They are about the details in diet. Sometimes people ask me “surely, if I just take care of the big things then I don’t really need to worry about the small things?”

But when you analyse anything, the big things are made up of lots of small things. If you take care of the detail in your diet, then each of those things that you take care of will add up and make the big things far more effective. Here are a couple of those small things that you might like to consider:

Firstly, when you go to the supermarket or your local shop to stock up, look down the ingredients list to make sure you avoid eating foods that have got artificial sweeteners, MSG and a whole range of additives and colorants. These are the things that many manufacturers have to put into their food in order to put back the flavour and vitamin content that their processing has processed out.
Try as much as you can to use organically sourced and grown produce. By sticking to
organic (from a reputable producer), you know that you are not going to be eating and digesting pesticides, phosphates, all kinds of hormones and all the other things that commercial food producers use in order to overcome the problems that their fast-food production line cause.

It’s making those healthy choices, the small ones, that all add up to a much healthier lifestyle.

And it’s not just what you eat!

A small choice you can make every day is just to take the elevator to get up two floors, or take the stairs. Taking two flights of stairs briskly will do far more for your heart than taking the elevator, that’s for sure.

Doing that five or six times a day, is just like jogging to the top of a ten-storey building!

It’s those type of small changes that I’m talking about, those small changes can make a really big difference.

The reason for making those choices is clear.

In Europe, the U.S.. Australia and in fact most of what would be considered the western world, its poor lifestyle choices that (e.g. what we choose to eat, to exercise, etc) account for the leading causes of death. Things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes and the rest.

In fact, the WHO (World Health Organization), in it’s recent World Cancer Report, have said that the rates of cancer would increase by 50 percent over the next 15 years. Statistics like that are cause for concern.

However, all is not doom and gloom as WHO also intimates that at least a third of the cases could be prevented by folk making better lifestyle choices.

Some folk think that in order to make these changes they have to make a lot of sacrifices. But in reality, this is just not so.

If you think about it, it won’t cost you much at all to take the stairs (often times it’s quicker than taking the lift). In fact just 20 or so miniutes of
exercise a day can make the difference .

And to eat organic may cost you a few more
dollars a month, but these are all a small price to pay in exchange for a long, healthy, active and
sickness free life.

Four Questions to Successful Fat Lose

by | May 26, 2012 | Fat Loss, Questions about low carb, Sensible Eating | 0 comments

Here’s four things to take care of which will further guarantee your successful fat lose.

1. Questions

Many folk fail to ask themselves why they want to lose fat. By not asking detailed enough questions, you fall victim to only giving yourself vague reasons and vague goals. If you don’t know exactly where the goal is you will find it almost impossible to score.

2. Quantity

Make sure you absolutely know how much you should be eating for your activity level, and body size. (Height and frame type). Eating too little can be as self-defeating as eating too much.

The other quantities you absolutely must know are the size and weight you want to be when you reach your target. Notice that was size and weight. The most important of these is actually the size you want to be, as your weight can be influenced by the type of exercise you do to help achieve your goal.

3. Quality

You really are what you eat. People who eat junk and processed food on a consistent basis really do have lower health levels than those who take full responsibility for what they put into their bodies.

Just have a look at the long list of preservative and taste enhancers that you find on the ingredients list of commercially produced food.

The only way you can almost guarantee not to be slowly poisoned by them is to prepare your food from quality, fresh and preferably organically sourced ingredients. Which for the most part need not cost any more if you do you shopping wisely.

4. Quitting

In a word… Don’t

Churchill’s admonition to never, never, never give up was spot on particularly for those in the battle against the bulge.

That seemingly weeks going by with no movement in the scales does not mean your overall condition is not improving either.

How The Body Gets Energy – And Why Knowing can Help You Lose Weight

by | May 25, 2012 | How Your Body Works, Metabolism, Sensible Eating | 0 comments

If your body is getting it’s energy from the food you eat – well thats OK. But if it is burning the excess fat for energy – well that’s even better especially if you want to lose weight.

Here a quick resume about the two most misunderstood hormones that every dieter should know about.
Glucose is a simple sugar that provides energy to all of the cells in your body. Your cells then take in glucose from your blood and break it down for energy.

For instance, brain cells and red blood cells rely solely on glucose for fuel. The glucose in your blood comes from the food you eat.

When you eat, food gets metabolised via your intestines and is distributed through the bloodstream to the cells in your body.  In all conditions your body tries to keep the supply of glucose constant, maintaining as consistent as possible glucose concentration in the blood.  If it did not do this (as in diabetes for example) your cells would have too much glucose right after a meal (particularly a high carb one) and starve in between meals and during sleep.

When you have an excess of glucose, your body stores this in your liver and muscles by making glycogen,  long chains of glucose. Conversely, when glucose is in short supply, your body mobilizes glucose from stored glycogen and/or stimulates you to eat food.

To maintain this constant blood-glucose level, your body uses two hormones, insulin and glucagon, that are produced in your pancreas and have opposite actions.
Your pancreas is formed from clusters (Islets) of alpha and beta endocrine cells. The beta cells secret insulin and the alpha cells secret glucagons. Both these secretions are protein hormones made up of amino acids.

What insulin does

Insulin is used by almost all of your body’s cells, but it’s most active in the liver, fat and muscle cells. Insulin has the following effect:-

  • Inhibits the liver and kidney cells from making glucose from intermediate compounds of metabolic pathways (gluconeogenesis)
  • Causes the liver and muscle cells to store glucose in glycogen
  • Stimulates fat cells to form fats from fatty acids and glycerol
  • Causes the liver and muscle cells to make proteins from amino acids
  • Insulin production is the signal for the body to store energy (as fat).  It does so by reducing the concentrations of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids in the bloodstream.

What Glucagon does

  • Now when you don’t eat or eat low carb, your pancreas releases glucagons instead which causes your body to produce glucose.. Glucagon acts on the same cells as insulin, but has the opposite effects:
  • Stimulates the liver and muscles to break down stored glycogen (glycogenolysis) and release the glucose
  • Stimulates gluconeogenesis in the liver and kidneys

The action of glucagon is opposite to insulin in that glucagon mobilizes glucose stored inside your body and increases the level of glucose in your blood, thus stopping your blood glucose levels from falling dangerously low.

How insulin and glucagons work as a tag team

Under normal circumstances, the levels of insulin and glucagon are effectively counter balanced. When you eat, your body metabolises the food quite rapidly and registers the presence of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids absorbed from the food. This causes the pancreatic beta cells to release insulin into your blood and inhibit the pancreatic alpha cells from secreting glucagon.

As the levels of insulin in your blood begin to rise they act on the liver, fat and muscle cells in particular causing them to absorb the incoming molecules of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids. The insulin acts to prevent the concentration of glucose, fatty and amino acids from increasing too greatly in the bloodstream.

In this way, your body maintains a steady blood-glucose concentration. This action occurs when you eat a properly balanced diet as opposed to the high carb diet of today. Unfortunately, where the diet is high in carbs (or there is just too much food) it has to go somewhere and inevitably, that somewhere is as fat, just where you don’t want it.

Between meals, or when you are sleeping, your body senses that it is effectively starving. However your cells still need a supply of glucose to keep going. So while in this condition, the slight drops in blood-sugar level stimulate glucagon secretion from the alpha cells in the pancreas and in turn inhibit the release of insulin. Glucagon levels in the blood rise and start acting on liver, muscle and kidney cells to mobilize glucose from glycogen or to make glucose that’s released into your blood. Such action prevents the blood-glucose levels from falling too much.

This change occurs many times throughout the day with the secretion of either insulin or glucagons helping to keep your blood-glucose level relatively constant, typically in the range of 90 mg per 100 ml of blood.

However, seeing as the secretion of the pancreas lag behind the blood glucose levels, the action of eating large quantities of high carb food will drastically disturb this. Simply put, when the blood glucose level is overly high more quantities of insulin will be produced than are needed as the glucose will have been dealt with. So more glucose will have been absorbed than was nessesary. This will cause a dip in the blood glucose level causing us to feel a lack of energy and trigger a production of glucagon.

Sunday Lunch Syndrome

This is something I call the “after Sunday lunch syndrome” as it is most often seen after a big meal. You will most likely have noticed that 30 – 60 minutes after eating far too much (as in a typical Sunday lunch) and then not moving a great deal either, you tend to feel really sleepy and quite soon many will also start to get the munchies and go looking for that last roast potato or piece of pie. In fact the body is wanting anything that will get the blood sugar up again – and so the cycle continues…

 

Protein is More Satisfying.

by | May 25, 2012 | Cravings, High Protein Diet, Sensible Eating, Snacks | 0 comments

Low carbers have known the simple truth for many years that a meal rich in protein will help you last between meals without getting an attack of the munchies.

Why have the scientists taken so long to catch up?

I’ve long maintained that higher protein foods are always going to be the most filling. Mainly because they take longer for the body to digest, therefore remain in the stomach and intestines that little bit longer, meaning our bodies aren’t signalling us saying “hey, we’re hungry – give us more food!”

And to a certain extent – now- science is starting to back that up.

I’ve long maintained that higher protein foods are always going to be the most filling. Mainly because they take longer for the body to digest, therefore remain in the stomach and intestines that little bit longer, meaning our bodies aren’t signalling us saying “hey, we’re hungry – give us more food!”

And to a certain extent, science does back that up.

If you look over the research papers that have been carried out, certainly over the last ten years, they clearly show that 8 out of 10 people ate less after a protein-rich meal than they did after a meal that was low in protein.

Some time ago, the BBC  carried out a test to prove whether this was so or not. What they did was to take 3 volunteers who worked long hours, and were used to snacking on the job.

What they wanted to do was to see if they could give them a meal that would set them up for the long day ahead, so that they wouldn’t need to snack whilst working on their shifts. They fed each of the volunteers a meal that had the same calorific value but whose contents varied in the proportion of fat, protein and carbohydrates – one being high in fat, one high in protein and one high in carbohydrates.

After the meal, they were kept under close observation, to make sure that they couldn’t sneak any crafty snacks. After a four hour period, they were each given pizza slices to eat, and carefully observed as they tucked into the richly-deserved reward.

The one who ate the most was the one who had the initial meal that was high in carbohydrates. The quantity he ate was closely matched by the one whose diet was high in fat. The person who ate the smallest amount during the lunch-break was the one who had had the protein rich meal.

It was a very simple test, but it did rather prove the fact that if you don’t want to get hunger pains between meals, then make sure your meals are high in protein.

It’s as simple as that.

Eyeing up Your Food

by | May 24, 2012 | Food Choices, Portion Sizes, Sensible Eating | 0 comments

Portion sizes seem to grow bigger each time you go to the restaurant.
Which makes me ask two basic Questions…
“Can keeping a track of what you eat change how hungry you think you are?”
And
“Does portion size mean anything”

In a simple test, two groups of 15 people were treated to a dinner of chicken drumsticks.  Two large plates of 150 chicken drumsticks each were put onto each table, they were checked beforehand to make sure they contained exactly the same quantity, both in terms of number and weight.

The first table was left to get on with their meal more-or-less unhindered.  However, the second group regularly had all the bones and other evidence of what they had consumed taken away from the table.  At the end of the meal, the amount of chicken that each table had eaten was then measured.

The result showed that the table who had their bones cleared away throughout the meal ate nearly 10% more chicken than the table who could see how much they had eaten by the bones and remains left on the table.  You could use this method for yourself, as a reminder of how much you’ve been eating.

It’s not as good as portion control to start with, but at least if you are faced with going to a buffet or something like that, make a mental note before you start to clear your plate of what’s on there to give yourself some sort of guidance.
Portion size.

I’ve long been an advocate of eating sensible portion sizes as it’s better to go back and take a bit more if your hungry than take too much and eat it just because it’s on your plate. Our next quick study illustrates that very nicely.

There was a study done two years ago in America, which showed that the size of the container can unknowingly and powerfully increase just how much food a person eats.

A test was carried out using movie goers and popcorn.  Half of the movie-goers were given large size buckets of popcorn (120g); the other half were given extra large buckets of popcorn (240g).

Just to see if it was purely portion size that would determine how much people ate, half of both groups were given stale popcorn.

At the end of the film, the amount of popcorn left over by each group was collected up and measured.  Don’t forget, it was comparing how much each group was given to how much each group had left behind.

The difference between the two groups, those who had the smaller buckets and those who had the super-sized buckets, was quite dramatic.

The results showed that the people who had larger containers proportionally ate 45% more than those people who had the smaller containers.

The thing this shows, is that when we go “large” or “super-size” on our snacks, our understanding of what is an acceptable amount to eat goes up.  Quite simply put, the larger the portion you have on your plate (or in your bucket!) the more you will eat.

This means that there is a very simple way of avoiding eating too much.  If you don’t want to eat more than you need to, don’t take the super-sized portions.

In fact one very good tip, is to take half of what you think you need and eat that.

Once you have finished, leave it 5 to 10 minutes before you decide if you want to go back for more. That way you leave adequate time for your stomach to register if you’re satisfied or not.

Even if you do want a little more – you will be more able to guage just how much, as you already have a very good idea of how satisfying the meal is.

And it’s certain your host will be flattered by you liking it so much you that ‘just had to have a little bit more’

The Evolutionary Diet

by | May 24, 2012 | Evolutionary Diet, Fat Loss, Sensible Eating | 0 comments

Could it be that we really are eating too many processed foods?

I would say yes!

But what is the alternative?

Is getting back to nature one of them?

The results may surprise you.

For a long time the question has been posed that staying along the lines of “Can eating like Neanderthal or an ape improve our health?”

When we look at how many diseases there are connected to excessive weight gain and high blood pressure and we see the numbers of these diseases seem to be on the increase day by day, it does rather raise the issue about whether or not our current Western diet is actually the major factor, or cause, of these cardiovascular diseases, such as hypertension, stroke and diabetes.

Which leads us onto the second question: “Are we paying the price for eating all these processed foods?”

Dietician Lyn Garton was responsible for taking ten volunteers on a journey back to our culinary roots, where she took a leaf out of our ancestors’ cookbooks, just to see what impact a comparatively short few days of eating much healthier food would have on reducing the risk of fatal illnesses, as mentioned above.
At the end of the test, biological markers for cholesterol and hypertension were measured to see how successful this test was. After the twelve day test, the groups total cholesterol fell by over 23%, and there was a marked decrease in the amount of sodium levels. From all of this, we can conclude that simply by introducing changes into our diet, by moving away from processed foods towards more healthily organically based foods, our health can be dramatically improved.

All the volunteers used in this test were chosen because they had above-average levels of cholesterol, according to the doctors, ranging from between 5 and 6.8. Also the test group confessed that they were eating diets which had very few fruits and vegetables, and were probably very high in trans-fats and many of them were confessing a life of fast, processed food.

Now obviously, the dramatic results from this test were slightly skewed because the volunteers were following a diet that had 5kg of fruit and vegetables a day, which with a balanced controlled carbohydrate diet would prove unnecessary, and in fact the pressures of our modern lives would probably make this totally impractical.
However, what it does show is that if you want to lower your triglycerides levels then cutting down on processed foods and re-introducing vegetables, nuts and certain fruits into your diet would make that possible.

Perhaps you may not be familiar with the sort of foods that are common in the Evolutionary Diet, here is just a small sample:
Apples
Apricots
Asparagus
Avocado
Bananas
Blueberries
Broccoli
Cabbage
Carrots
Cashews
Cauliflower
Cherries
Courgettes
Dates
Figs
Grapes
Hazelnuts
Honey
Kiwi fruit
Mangetoutes
Mangoes
Melons
Mushrooms
Olives
Paw-paws
Peaches
Peanuts
Pears
Peas
Peppers
Plums
Radishes
Raspberries
Satsumas
Spring Onions
Strawberries
Sugar-snap peas
Summer Cabbage
Tomatoes
Walnuts
Watercress
To name but a few!

Many of these would be allowed on all but the strictest LowCarb regime and would add a tasty addition to what you may be eating already.

As we’ve said before, variety is something to aim for in any diet – the more the merrier.