5 Ways to Stay Motivated
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Make a goal – It’s much easier to stay motivated and focused when working towards a specific goal. If you’re trying to start a running program, why not choose a 5K race to train for? You can set up a focused plan for each day that will help you achieve your goals. It’s sometimes easier to stick to a program when it’s broken down and taken day by day. Also, it’s feels great to make and achieve goals, so you may find yourself looking for another race after you’ve finished the first. Goals can be set for any activity – running, swimming, or cycling a certain distance, or in a certain time, or gaining the ability to lift a certain amount of weight in the gym.
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Keep a log Not only will it allow you to keep track of your exercise program, but keeping a log is a great way to stay motivated. Sometimes having stay accountable in a written log will make you less likely to skip a workout. No one likes to see a whole week of blank days! Keeping a log is also a great way to keep track of how exercise affects your moods, your appetite, and more.
BMI - Fact or Fiction?
Body Mass Index (BMI) is a measurement of body fat calculated using height and weight. It is used as an indicator of body “fatness”, or the amount of body fat versus lean mass. People are advised to keep their BMI within the normal range for maximum health.
Over recent years, the BMI concept has been criticized for being oversimplified. Because it only takes two factors into consideration – weight and height – it can be highly inaccurate in certain individuals. It allows no variations for different builds or body compositions.
For example, Continue reading…
Super Foods - Avocados
This is the first post in a new series, Super Foods. This series will highlight great nutrient-dense foods that should be incoroporated into a healthy diet.
Avocaodos used to get a bad rap because of their high fat and calorie content. Yes, they are calorie-dense and contain lots of fat. But these delicious green fruits contain heart-healthy monostaurated fats, along with many other beneficial nutrients. They do provide a lot of calories, so weight-watches need to watch portion sizes. But rest assured that your calories will be put to good use and your taste buds will rejoice!
Along with heart-healthy monosaturated fats, avocados provide a good dose of folate, potassium, Vitamin K, Vitamin B6, Vitamin C, and fiber. Avocados may be beneficial in lowering bad cholesterol, improving blood pressure, promoting hearth health, and possibly fighting cancer. All this, and they taste great too!
Suggested Uses:
- Toss sliced or cubed avocado in green salads
- Mix with olive oil, red onion, cilantro, and mango to make a salsa to put over baked fish or chicken
- Mash with garlic, onion, jalapeno, and a dash of lime juice to make guacamole dip for carrot and celery sticks
- Top wheat bread with jam, cheese, and avocado slices
- Mix avocado cubes with diced fresh tomotoes, olive oil, and fresh basil and serve as bruchetta on top of toasted baguettes
- Add slices to lean turkey and roast beef sandwiches for an extra flavor boost
For more information about avocados, click here.
How to Figure Out Serving Sizes
One reason that so many Americans struggle with their weight is that serving sizes have dramatically increased over the years. It’s easy overestimate what makes an individual serving. You may be surprised to see that many times it’s only a fraction of what we typically allow ourselves to eat. It can be easy to overindulge when we don’t look at this information carefully.
For example, some larger soda and juice bottles have 1.5 or 2 serving in a single bottle. Many people would assume that a bottle is a single serving. If you only glance at the calorie content, you’ll only see half or ¾ of what the total calories are for the entire bottle. This is why it’s so important to take this information into consideration. There’s no reason you can’t have two servings, but you should know that you’re then taking in twice the calories as listed in the nutritional info, and plan the rest of your food intake accordingly (check out How to Read Nutritional Information for more info).
It can be harder figure out portion size for cooked foods, especially those that don’t have nutritional information readily available, like fresh meats and produce. This is when a site like fitday.com can be very useful.
Even so, it can be hard to approximate what a cup of pasta or rice looks like when cooked. The chart below can be helpful. Don’t worry – although this information can be overwhelming at first, after practicing it for awhile it will become second nature. You won’t have to look up calorie content forever.
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Food Group: |
Serving Size: |
Imagine size as: |
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Meat, Poultry, or Fish |
3-4 ounces |
Deck of cards |
|
Pasta, Rice, Potatoes |
½ cup |
Tennis ball |
|
Cheese |
1.5 ounce |
4 dice |
|
Nuts |
1/3 cup |
2 C batteries |
|
Fruit |
1 medium fruit |
Tennis ball |
|
Leafy Vegetables |
1 cup |
Tennis Ball |
|
Chopped Vegetables |
½ cup |
Ice Cream scoop |
|
Peanut Butter |
1 Tablespoon |
Ping Pong Ball |
Ways to Lower Miscarriage Risks
A recent article on CNN lists some ways that women can lower their risk of miscarriage.
…while most women will go on to have a successful pregnancy, about 5 percent are likely to lose another baby. And the use of assisted reproductive technology such as in vitro fertilization (common among women 35-plus) seems to boost miscarriage risks even more.
The articles mentions considering any health issues, like high blood pressure or diabetes, that can cause problems with pregnancy. It also says that eliminating stress can reduce risk by 60%. In addition to these, there are some medical tests available that can uncover hidden issues and provide some answers. And remember, the majority of women who have had a miscarriage go on to have normal pregnancies.
New Pregnancy Weight Gain Guidelines Considered
Doctors are considering changing the recommendations for healthy weight gain during pregnancy. The changes come after many doctors feel that too many women are gaining too much weight during their pregnancies. The current guidelines suggest gaining 25-35 pounds, 15 pounds for the most obese women and 40 pounds for women with below normal BMIs. Doctors complain that these guidelines don’t take the nation’s obesity epidemic into consideration.
Carrying too much weight while pregnant increases the risk of complications for mother and baby, including birth defects, labor and delivery problems, fetal death and delivery of large babies, according to the March of Dimes.
A revision is long overdue, said Dr. Raul Artal of the Saint Louis University School of Medicine.
“The reality is for too long we are telling pregnant women to take it easy during pregnancy, be confined and to eat for two,” he said. “This has been one factor in causing the epidemic of overweight and obesity that we see in our country.”
What do you think? Are the guidelines too lax? Do women these days let pregnancy eliminate healthy eating habits and exercise? Do the guidelines have a big effect on women’s weight gain, or does the body do what it feels best? How hard is it to control weight gain while pregnant?
Shrinking Women
In a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, an author discusses the phenomenon of shrinking women, literally and figuratively. Women are encouraged to be physically smaller than ever before, and along with this comes a disturbing new trend of decreased aspirations.
It’s bad enough that our dress sizes are shrinking to 0, but so too is our common sense and our understanding of health, wellness and lasting beauty. Most distressingly, our ambitions are shrinking as well.
It sometimes seems that we like our women small, literally and figuratively.
Is it possible that society keeps us so focused on staying small that we have little time or energy for anything else? Could the obsession with thinness be a way to keep women under control and limit our power? I’ve wondered about this topic before and the author brings up some interesting points.
How to Read Nutritional Information
One of the first steps in learning to eat healthy is to understand which foods are good choices and which aren’t. We’ve already learned about Carbohydrates, Protein, and Fat in the Nutrition 101 series. Most foods have more than one, or all three components present in some amount. So how do you know exactly what makes up your food?
This is where nutritional information comes in handy. You can find nutritional information on practically every packaged food. For those foods that aren’t packaged, like vegetables and meats, you can use a resource like Fitday.com to look up the nutritional info. Many chain restaurants also have nutritional information available on their websites. It can be a dose of reality to see how many calories what you thought was a healthy sandwich from Panara contains! But denial won’t get us to our healthy eating goals.
When you’re first learning how to eat healthy, it’s a good idea to look at the nutritional information of everything you eat. You may be surprised at the calorie or fat content of some foods! After awhile, you’ll begin to understand which foods are very calorie-dense, high in fat, or loaded with fiber. By knowing what’s in your food, you can make smart choices about food for your healthy eating goals.
Before you can utilize the nutritional information on the chart, you have to understand how to read it. Some charts will be much more extensive than others, but all American foods are required to have at least a minimum of some information included. Take a look at the picture of the nutritional information of a banana for an example.
How to read nutritional information:
5 Breastfeeding Mistakes
A recent article at CNN details 5 breast-feeding mistakes new moms make, and how to fix them. The article follows a recent study that finds that although 75% of women begin breast-feeding their infants, by three months only 30% are still nursing exclusively. That number drops to only 11% at six months. This is troublesome to some health experts, since it is recommended that new moms breast-feed for at least six months to get all the benefits of breast milk.
The article makes some suggestions for new moms struggling to master breast feeding. Some women can be surprised to find that breast feeding is much harder than they had anticipated, and not automatic. Some of the suggestions include getting support from experienced friends, not assuming you don’t have enough milk, and not panicking in the beginning when milk doesn’t rush out.
…many women have a hard time nursing and don’t know where to turn for help. She says one common reason for quitting is that women mistakenly think they don’t have enough milk and decide to give the baby formula. Other women quit nursing when they go back to work, and others stop because family members encourage them to give bottles instead of breast milk.