Healthy For Life - Blog Roll

Memorial Day weekend is typically a festive holiday, as it kicks off the summer and gives us a chance to celebrate and spend time with our friends and loved ones. While this may mean parties with lots of opportunity to eat and imbibe, it doesn’t mean you have to toss your healthy lifestyle to the wind this weekend. All you need is a plan to stay on track with diets and weight management programs without depriving yourself.

Here are a few strategies that members of our nutrition counseling center shared with us for getting through Memorial Day festivities without packing on the pounds.

BYOD—as in Bring Your Own Dish. Bring a healthy yet tasty dish to the party. This ensures that there is a healthy choice at the party, while providing a little help to the host. Even something as simple as a healthy salad loaded with leafy greens and seasonal produce or a fresh fruit bowl will be a hit. Eat your own healthy dish and then just sample the other offerings. You’ll enjoy yourself and not feel deprived, without “cheating” on your healthy for life diet.

Go for the smaller plate. Nearly every nutrition counseling center recommends practicing portion control in order to lose weight or to maintain a diet that’s healthy for life. Keep this in mind, even at parties and barbecues. An easy way to do this is to opt for a smaller plate at the buffet table. This automatically reduces your consumption, and if you eat slowly, you’ll most likely be full after just one plate.

Limit the liquids. Beverages such as alcohol, sugary sodas and juices can quickly blow up our calorie counts for the day, which ultimately leads to weight gain and a bloated feeling. Drink lots of water to stay hydrated and choose the most low calorie drinks that you can find. If you choose to imbibe an alcoholic drink, avoid fattening mixers and opt to mix with seltzer or soda water instead.

Click here to learn more about safe and effective weight management programs.

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Incorporating lean protein sources into your diet provides a wide variety of health benefits, and helps you stay on track with weight loss management. When you’re striving to attain better health through nutrition, incorporating good sources of lean protein will help you lose weight, boost your energy levels and promote heart health. It’s an essential part of a healthy diet.

Basically, lean protein helps you avoid the high content of saturated fats that are found in many types of meat, and which raise LDL aka “bad” cholesterol levels in the blood. Some examples of choices that contain higher levels of saturated fat include fatty cuts of beef, pork and lamb, as well as ground beef, sausages, hot dogs, bacon and many processed luncheon meats. Instead opt for wild-caught fish such as salmon and tuna, skinless poultry, eggs, quinoa, and plant-based protein such as beans. Here are three reasons that these choices will benefit your health and help your with weight loss management.

1. Weight Loss. When members come to our nutrition counseling center to lose weight, we recommend lean protein because it helps individuals feel fuller longer, staving off cravings and preventing overeating. In addition, studies show that lean protein may boost metabolism.
2. Building muscle. Consuming lean protein helps build more muscle mass, which makes our bodies run more efficiently and burn more calories. A diet rich in lean protein helps us achieve better health through nutrition because all of our body’s building blocks are composed of protein. When we work out, we need protein to rebuild the muscles that we use. Consuming lean protein helps our muscles to recover faster, so we can work out again sooner.
3. Heart Health. Much research shows that diets featuring adequate amounts of lean protein provide significant benefits to our cardiovascular health, such as lowering both blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Ultimately, this helps prevent heart disease and promote overall health.

Click here to get more healthy tips from our nutrition counseling center.

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Research shows that the faster you eat, the more opportunity you have to overeat. We actually shouldn’t need studies to tell us this—it should be common sense for most of us. But when you factor in the timing it takes your stomach to signal your brain that it’s full—20 minutes—then it make even more sense. If you seek nutrition counseling at a weight management center, one of the basic tents that your physician or nutritionist will share is to slow down so that you only eat until you’re full.

Here are some tips that should help you slow down your eating habits so that you can stick to a meal plan that’s healthy for life.

Take small bites. When you take large bites of your meal, you’re going to finish your meal faster and most likely still feel hungry. This could lead to you taking a second serving and ultimately overeat. Take your time to cut small bites as you go—don’t cut it all in advance, as it’s much easier that way to down it all faster.

Finish swallowing before you re-load. Take the time to stop yourself from loading your fork with the next bite until you’re finished with the one you’re chewing. Simple, but effective. Take it a step further by doing what our nutrition counseling center recommends: put your utensils or sandwich down in between each bite. This may not feel organic at first, but with time, you will get used to it and will see the difference in the amount you eat.

Sip water while you eat. Take sips of water often throughout your meal. This will slow you down and fill you up. Hydrate before, during and after your meal if you truly want to be healthy for life.

Up your fiber intake. Foods with high fiber content are nutrient-rich, and also take longer to eat and digest. Think about how much longer it takes you to chew crunchy fruits and veggies and you’ll realize how easily you can slow your entire meal.

Click here to get healthy tips and learn more about our weight management center.

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Spring is a time of revitalization and rejuvenation—why not take this opportunity to make over your diet? When you’re striving to get healthy for life and lose weight, it makes sense to exercise more and consume less calories. With swimsuit season on the horizon, this seems like the perfect time to get motivated to reduce the number on the scale and work on attaining better health through nutrition. Here are some excellent tips shared by nutrition clients of our weight counseling center.

Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Physicians recommend that we drink six to eight glasses of water per day; this is even more important when you’re striving to lose weight and especially during hotter weather.

Be a savvy snacker. Snack time is the perfect opportunity to tap into the delicious array of seasonal fruits and veggies available this time of year. Don’t restrict yourself to the basics, such as carrot and celery sticks. There are many options that will help you attain better health through nutrition and taste amazing—try fiber-rich berries, apples, bananas, pears, peaches, plums and grapes.

Up your salad ante. Obviously, salads are healthy for life. Again, here’s your chance to take advantage of the season—hit up your local farmers’ market for fresh green vegetables to add to salads and soups. Green vegetables are packed with antioxidants, specifically chlorophyll, which is excellent for boosting your immune system and aiding digestion.

Boycott the process. One tip that we recommend for all nutrition clients of our weight counseling center is to avoid refined and processed food as much as possible, especially those containing white sugar or white flour, as well as other high-glycemic foods that lead to spikes in blood sugar, and ultimately, weight gain.

Mix up your workouts. Research shows that the most effective way to boost weight loss through exercise is to employ a combination of workouts in your routine. For example, perhaps do yoga or Pilates classes one day, then cardio the next, and strength training the following. Or go for a hike one day, jog the next and try a Zumba class on another day. Switching up your workouts will stimulate change by confusing your muscles and lead to greater caloric burn.

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When you work with a nutrition counseling center, you learn about fueling your body properly while achieving your weight loss goals. As a result, you’ll learn how essential it is to find nutrient-rich foods that taste good and satiate your appetite. So if you’re looking to fill your plate with delicious fare that will help you stay on track with programs for weight loss and management, below are some excellent choices that are healthy for life and will supercharge you for your day.

Artichokes. These spiky-leafed vegetables boost your energy and help you get your magnesium fix. Magnesium is a mineral that’s vital for more than 300 biochemical reactions in your body, and will keep your energy levels elevated. This is crucial simply for getting through your day, but especially for those who work out regularly.

Asparagus. This green veggie is one of the best veggie sources of folate, which is key to the synthesis of the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine—they’ll help boost your mood and stave off depression.

Walnuts. Walnuts are packed with omega 3 fatty acids, which elevate your mood, and tryptophan, an amino acid that’s responsible for the production of serotonin. They’re digested slowly, so will help keep you feel full longer, and are a rich source of many phytochemicals that may reduce the effects of aging and help prevent inflammation, neurological diseases and cancer—they’re definitely healthy for life.

Eggs. Many members of our nutrition counseling center swear by eggs, an excellent source of lean protein, which your body needs to build muscle mass and burn more calories. In addition, they are rich in choline, an important nutrient for boosting memory recall.

Spinach. This green leafy veggie is an excellent source of iron, which boosts the red blood cells that fuel our muscles with oxygen. They’re also packed with fiber, nutrients and antioxidants, making them an ideal food for those following programs for weight loss and management.

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