Strength for Her

A recently published study claims that obesity can be spread from person to person, to friends and family like a virus.

 The study, involving more than 12,000 people tracked over 32 years, found that “social networks” play a surprisingly powerful role in determining an individual’s chances of gaining weight, transmitting an increased risk of becoming obese from wives to husbands, from brothers to brothers and from friends to friends.

The study suggests that eating habits and weight are more closely tied to our social contructs than previously thought. It makes sense that our eating and exercise habits may mimic those close to us. These new findings offer interesting insight on the current obesity epidemic in America. Read the whole article here.

• » Comments (0)

Nobody enjoys counting calories. Not only is it tedious, but many times it can be difficult to estimate how many calories are in certain foods. Still, learning to understand the caloric content of food plays an important role in weight management.

By now, you should have a general idea of how many calories your body needs per day to sustain its weight (see Estimating Daily Calorie Needs). The next step is figuring out how many calories you’re actually eating. The best way to get an idea of your calorie intake and evaluate your diet is to keep a daily food log.

I don’t recommend tracking your calories indefinitely. It can become an unhealthy obsession if you’re constantly thinking about every bite you eat. But when you’re first learning how to adopt a healthy diet into your lifestyle, it’s necessary to learn the effects of your food choices.

With a little practice, calorie counting eventually becomes second nature. You’ll quickly learn which foods are the best choices and what portion sizes look like. You won’t have to record your diet forever. But by writing down everything you eat in a day, you’ll start to understand how to fine tune your diet. Sometimes we don’t realize how much we eat or how many calories some foods have until we start recording it.

There are several web sites and resources that list the nutritional information of foods. One I like is Fitday. It allows you to create an account and track your daily food intake. This is a great alternative to writing it all down, and the benefit is that it calculates your daily intakes for you. Not only will you see how many calories you’re taking in, but you’ll also see your fat, sugar, carb, and protein intake, as well as many vitamins and minerals. You can log your exercise and your fitness goals, and it’s free.  Pretty cool.

How to Keep a Daily Food Log: Continue reading…

• » Comments (6)

The key to weight maintenance is making sure you take in the same amount of calories that you burn. If your goal is weight loss, you must burn more calories than you consume. Conversely, if you need to gain weight, you’ll need to eat more calories than you burn off.

It takes an excess of 3,500 calories to add a pound of weight. Although that sounds like a lot, it’s only an extra 500 calories every day for a week! It’s not that hard to eat those extra calories - it could be one indulgent dessert every night. Of course, it’s ok to indulge from time to time. If you’d like to eat a sinful dessert, you can cut back on calories elsewhere in the day so you’re not going over your recommended allowance. It’s all about balance. But before you can understand how to maintain a caloric balance, you first need to know how many calories your body needs each day.

The body burns calories in the following ways:

• Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) - the amount of calories burned by our involuntary body processes while at rest. This is the energy required to operate our organs and body functions and keep us alive. This accounts for about 70% of our body’s energy expenditure.
• Thermogenic Rate – the amount of calories required for the digestions of food. This accounts for about 10% of our body’s energy expenditure.
• Physical Activity – the amount calories burned by doing any sort of voluntary physical movements. This can be normal daily movements like walking or moving your arms, as well as more intense exercise. The longer and more intense the activity, the more calories burned.  This accounts for about 20% of our body’s energy expenditure.

Many people are surprised to learn that the large majority of our calories are used to just keep the body running and are burned by doing absolutely nothing!

How Many Calories Do I Need?

When looking at nutritional information, Continue reading…

• » Comments (4)

I’ve been accused of being a very slower eater. Both my husband and my friends have laughed at how I can drag a meal out for hours. Since I’m passionate about food, I enjoy lingering over every bite and savoring the flavors. I despise the popular American concept of ‘eating on the go’. Now, I’m finding out I’m not alone in my opinion with this recently published article at Zen Habits:

 One of the problems in our daily lives is that many of us rush through the day, with no time for anything … and when we have time to get a bite to eat, we gobble it down.

That leads to stressful, unhealthy living.

I couldn’t agree more. Read the complete article here.

• » Comments (0)

Dieting is a huge industry in America. Everyone wants to know the secrets of losing weight, and fast! Although some fad diets will help you lose weight, they aren’t sustainable. No matter how much weight you lose, once you go back to your old eating habits it will quickly pile right back on, and then some. Studies suggest that yo-yo dieting, quickly losing and gaining weight back again and again, is detrimental to one’s health and makes weight-loss efforts even harder.

No matter what the current fad, all diets work the same way - by depriving the body of precious calories to cause weight loss. Creating a calorie deficit is the only way to lose weight. However, this process needs to be done gradually and maintained to be effective. If you cut back severely on food, the body will lose weight. But the metabolism may slow down, because the body will switch into starvation mode and try to hold onto every precious calorie it gets. Metabolism slows down to adjust to the lack of food. Once you start eating normally again, the combination of the slower metabolism and the extra calories will pile the weight back on quickly.

The only way to lose weight and keep it off is to modify your lifestyle to include a healthy, balanced diet and regular exercise. In order to see the results of a healthy diet, it has to be a change that you make permanently. Now, of course you can still indulge from time to time on your favorite vices. If we don’t give in to an occasional craving, they will become stronger and will inevitably result in a binge (which is another reason diets often fail, they’re too restrictive). But overall, your normal routine should consist of healthy eating, with an occasional treat every now and then.

The word ‘diet’ means food habitually eaten. Somewhere along the way, it became associated with the deprivation of food for weight-loss purposes. Let’s get used to using the word in its intended fashion, to describe a regular routine of eating healthy and balanced meals. Throw out the idea of temporarily restricting yourself and embrace a long road of loving your body by giving it the food it needs. This is the key to long lasting success.

• » Comments (2)

Could eating grapefruit regularly increase the risk of breast cancer? It seems surprising, but new research indicates there could be a link between the citrus fruit and the cancer that affects one in eight American women in their lifetime.

In a study of 50,000 post-menopausal women, it was shown that eating a quarter of grapefruit or more a day increased the risk of breast cancer by up to 30%. Dr Joanne Lunn, a nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation says:

“Although we are beginning to get a better awareness of how our diets can modify the risk of diseases such as cancer, we are still a long way from identifying particular foods that might specifically increase or decrease risk.”

However, she said that some dietary patterns are associated with a reduced risk of certain cancers and that a diet rich in a variety of different fruits and vegetables could help reduce the risk of heart disease and some cancers.

Read the rest of the story here.

• » Comments (0)

With so many fad diets out there, it can be tough to figure out which ones really work and which ones are a waste of time. It becomes easier to see through the gimmicks once you understand a universal fact about weight and diet. When it comes to losing weight, it doesn’t matter WHAT you eat. There is only one trick to losing weight: burn more calories than you consume.

Food is an energy source, and calories are a measure of that energy. We consume calories through food, and our body uses this energy in several ways:

• Involuntary body functions - The human body is a complex system and it needs energy to operate all of the organ systems in the body. These functions include digesting food, filtering urine, processing thoughts, blinking our eyes, breathing, and keeping our heart beating. There are thousands of vital processes going on inside the body at all times that we don’t even think about, and they’re all powered by the energy from food. The amount of calories burned by our involuntary body processes while at rest is referred to as our basal metabolic rate (BMR).
• Voluntary body movements - It takes energy to move any of our muscles. We spend all day using our muscles to get us from place to place. Every time you walk across the living room, raise your arm, or do any movement at all, it’s powered by the food you’ve eaten.
• Exercise – Exercising is an extension of voluntary movements. It’s more intense than ordinary movement and is typically done in short intervals. Because of the intensity, it burns many more calories than ordinary routine movements. If you exercise or live an active lifestyle, you’ll need more calories to power those movements.

After using calories to power the three items listed above, our body will store any remaining calories away to use at another time. This is what fat is – the body’s energy stores lying in wait for when they’ll be needed. Our bodies are evolved from a time when food wasn’t so readily available. Like other animals, humans ate when they could and whatever energy the body didn’t need was stored away for times of famine. Our current society is no longer faced with these problems, so instead of starvation we have to worry about the woes of excess weight storage.

To lose weight, we need to create an energy deficit. We need to burn more energy (or calories) than our body has ready, so it will be forced to tap into those fat stores and use them up. That’s the secret of how to lose weight Continue reading…

• » Comments (1)

• » Comments (1)

Protein is the building block for all matter in the human body. Our tissues, organs, and muscles are composed of protein, and protein plays an important role in running all cellular processes in the body. The body needs protein to create new cells and tissues and to function as a whole. Protein can be found in both animal and plant sources. Examples of protein rich foods include meats, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese, milk, yogurt, soy, beans, seeds and nuts.

Proteins are composed of chains of small molecular building blocks, called amino acids. Although there are thousands of different proteins in the body, they are all made up of combinations of only 20 different amino acids. When we consume proteins, the body breaks them down to into their amino acid components by digestion. It then reassembles those amino acids to form whichever other proteins the body needs at the time.

The body can not only build proteins, but it can also make some of the amino acids. It can manufacture 11 of them 20 amino acids. These are referred to as non-essential amino acids. This name can be somewhat confusing – the amino acids are essential for the body itself, but because the body can make them it isn’t essential that they be consumed in the diet. The other 9 amino acids cannot be produced by the human body, and are referred to as the essential amino acids. This is because it is essential to get these amino acids from protein sources in the diet.

If a protein source contains all of the essential amino acids, it is called a complete protein source. Otherwise, it’s an incomplete protein source. Complete proteins are found in animal sources like meats, fish, eggs, and milk, and also soy protein. Plant sources of protein are incomplete, lacking at least one of the essential amino acids.

Is it necessary to worry about complete versus incomplete proteins? Continue reading…

• » Comments (1)