Tag Archives: eating

Simple Ways to Improve Your Eating Habits

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Diet culture or societal beliefs that encourage restriction of food to get a leaner body are some of the ways people approach eating. Research shows that restrictive diet rarely results in long-term weight loss. Experts say that if you are in good health, you don’t necessarily need to severely  restrict your food choices.

According to the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 85% of your food should be focused on helping your body and leaving the rest for things you enjoy. It’s important to consult a doctor if you have restrictions on your diet related to health conditions.

If you’re trying to rethink your approach to food in the new year, experts suggest using the following three strategies to do it better.

It’s important to listen to your cravings and think about what you haven’t had in a while that will make you feel good. Allow yourself to have a little–remember you get that 15% indulgence!

The human body can tell you when to eat and when to stop, but diet culture has messed with those signals. Slow down, take your time with your meal, listen to the cues your body is giving and don’t over eat. Body-signal driven portion control can help reduce caloric intake.

Restricting what and how much you eat, like telling yourself you can’t have that burger or ice cream instead of allowing yourself to enjoy a treat, is behavior that can lead to eating more than you’re comfortable with later to make up for it.

Use all of your senses to appreciate what you’re eating. Much like listening your body for when to stop eating, use your senses to fully appreciate everything about the food you are eating–this will likely lead to your eating healthy and better prepared food. It will slow down your eating.

Tips to Avoid Mindless Snacking in Your Home Office

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While the pandemic has been a mixed bag for people and their relationship with food (some people have cooked more at home while others have relied more heavily on take-out and fast food), one thing is for certain the temptation to snack has been enabled by close access to our own pantries and refrigerators.

Some of us may even be working in our kitchens making all our favorite snacks just steps away.

So, how do we avoid mindless snacking in our home office? Here are a few tips.

Try to start the habit of asking yourself things like, “do I really want this now?” “am I just bored or stressed?” If you honestly want a snack, it is probably OK to have one, but if not you’ve just avoided consuming unneeded calories.

Maybe you really want something else, you might try talking a walk, calling or texting a friend, taking a nap or maybe try doing some light stretching or exercising.

You can also try keep high density, high fiber foods in the house. These foods will fill you up quickly. And if you keep high density, high fiber fruits and vegetables around the calories are better for you than chips and cookies.

The best way to avoid eating something is simply not to bring it home in the first place. Just don’t buy it.

Portion control can also help. Don’t bring the family sized bag of chips to your desk. Make yourself a reasonable portion. You can also pre-portion your snacks or buy the single serving kind. It is also good to schedule your meals. Make sure you eat breakfast and take a break to eat lunch.

 

Picking the Right Apple for the Job

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It is apple season (eat your heart out pumpkin spice!). With so many varieties how do we choose the right variety for baking, sauce/jelly/butter making or just plain eating?

For applesauce, apple butter and apple jelly the softer apples with a thin skin tend to cook down best and most smoothly. Some believe the that the York variety yields the most per pound when creating these kinds of apple recipes. However, if you can’t find York Gala, Golden Delicious, Lodi, Cortland and McIntosh are all common varieties that will also work well.

The best apples for just eating, putting into salads, coleslaws or other fresh sides are, some believe, the more modern varieties that have been bred to have a lot of juicy crunch, that aren’t too tart nor too sweet. Honeycrisp, Braeburn, Jazz, SnapDragon and Cosmic Crisp are all good bets.

For those baked desserts when one wants somebody of the apple left in the filling many prefer the elder, more established varieties as they have a firm body, are tarter and don’t fall apart so much when cooked. For many, Granny Smith is the ultimate pie apple, though Northern Spy, Rome and Jonathan or eve the more modern Jonagold.

If you can’t decide on a certain variety combining two varieties in which one is sweeter, one tarter, one firmer and one softer is a great way to get

 

 

What’s So Great About Garlic?

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Let’s talk about garlic. It can be pungent, it can be sweet. They grow in a bulb comprised of cloves. A bulb can contain about 10-20 cloves. It grows all overthe world. At one time, it was used mostly for medicinal uses.

Garlic is healthy in many ways. It can help combat the common cold. A study found that it reduced colds by 70% and also reduced the number of days of the cold. It can help reduce LDL cholesterol. It has antioxidants. Some people use garlic supplements.

There are many ways people prepare garlic. Peel off the cloves and remove the peel. Even that has a few different ways to accomplish it. You can just peel it off – sometimes it is difficult to remove them. One trick I like to use is to lightly smash it with a knife and sometimes it peels right off. Another way is to put the cloves between two a couple of bowls and or some kind of closed container and shake it.

After you have the peels removed from the cloves, you can do several things. Some people may put whole cloves in their dishes, you can slice them, mince them, crush them.

 

New Study Finds A Single Hotdog Could Shave 36 Minutes Off Your Life

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While no single study is definitive, new research from the University of Michigan may have many of us rethinking what we eat. The study developed a formula and found that eating a single hotdog could shave 36 minutes off your life span.

The researchers looked at almost 6,000 foods in the US diet and measured their effects in minutes on the lifespan of the eater. The goal of the study was to make more visceral the impact individual foods have on our health.

Researchers developed an index that calculates the net benefit or determent to health according to minutes of life by consuming a single food. It is based in part on the Global Burden of Disease study that measures morbidity by a person’s food choices.

Some other examples from the index include: 0.45 minutes are lost per gram of processed meat a person consumes. Don’t worry, the index works both ways. 0.1 minutes are gained per gram of fruit consumed.

As stated, one food researched was a standard beef hot dog on a bun. With 61 grams of processed meat, one would lose 27 minutes of life. But when other ingredients like sodium or trans fatty acids were factored by the index, the final value was 36 minutes of life lost.

Unsurprisingly the study found that eating things like legumes, nuts, seafood, non-starchy vegetables and fruit had positive effects on health and longevity.

Consumption of foods such as nuts, legumes, seafood, fruits and non-starchy vegetables, on the other hand, have positive effects on health, the study found.

Study authors warned that the point of the study is not to say if you eat this bad food, eating that good food will end in a zero sum. But rather to make the choosing the best calories to consume. The point isn’t even to say never eat a hot dog, but it is certainly a food you want to limit in your diet. The study is not intended to tell us exactly what to eat day to day, but just one metric to help make better choices.