Tips on Diet and Nutrition

What follows is what I have learned about diet and nutrition, and have put to use successfully in my own life.
 
The Greek word for diet means lifestyle. The real definition of diet means how one develops a lifestyle or pattern of eating. When I say “diets” don’t work, I’m referring to the American definition of diet or “fad-diets”. These diets pull us out of “normal” eating patterns and will not work for that very reason.
 
When it comes to changing eating habits to lose weight, I have two hard and fast rules; (1) no counting and (2) no special foods! Remember, any change you make must be permanent to bring permanent change.
 
One of my favorite quotes related to diet is, “Food fuels the furnace of metabolism – exercise stokes the fire.” If you eat properly and exercise with regularity, your body will sufficiently burn the fuel (food), giving you energy and keeping you at a healthy weight.
 
Once food is broken down into its basic components (glucose, amino acids and fatty acids) and sent into the blood stream, it has a more powerful impact on your body and your health than any drug your doctor could ever prescribe. Every time you eat, you are taking very strong medicine, which can have a good, bad or indifferent effect on your body for the next 4-6 hours.
 
Hippocrates, the father of medicine said, “Let natural forces be the healers of disease. Let food be your medicine.” Most people (especially those overweight) are malnourished. They eat empty calories only to find themselves hungry again. This is because their body is crying out for real food!
 
Do you realize you have an appestat? It is an organ located in the base of the brain. Think of your appestat as your thermostat. The appestat is responsible for you’re appetite. It constantly monitors the blood stream for nutrients. When they are not present it signals hunger. The body is tricked into thinking it needs more food, when it is actually crying out for nutrients.

The recent emphasis on “low carbs” - popularized by Barry Sears in his book, “The Zone”, and most recently “The South Beach Diet – is, in my opinion, a very balanced and factual approach to a proper diet. The reason these books have been so successful is because they attack one of the biggest problems with Americans and how they eat. Most Americans are addicted to unhealthy carbohydrates!

Unfortunately, however, many who jump into the lower-carb lifestyle of eating, do so not having ever read the science behind it. They hear a few sound-bites and jump on the band wagon but ultimately fail because they put their motivation ahead of their education.
 
By now you’ve heard that there are good carbohydrates and bad carbohydrates, good fat and bad fat, etc. To keep this complex subject as simple as possible, let me break it down to this; primarily, bad carbs are “man-made” carbohydrates. Bad fats are also man-made fats (artificial or manipulated), as well as animal fat. Good fats are natural fats from olive oils, nuts and fish. It’s not that one should never eat bad carbs or bad fat; rather, one should keep them to a minimum in their diet.
 

It's really all about balancing your glycemic index. Your body performs best when your blood sugar is kept relatively constant. If your blood sugar drops too low, you become lethargic and/or experience increased hunger. And if it goes too high, your brain signals your pancreas to secrete more insulin. Insulin brings your blood sugar back down, but primarily by converting the excess sugar to stored fat. Also, the greater the rate of increase in your blood sugar, the more chance that your body will release an excess amount of insulin, and drive your blood sugar back down too low. Therefore, when you eat foods that cause a large and rapid glycemic response, you may feel an initial elevation in energy and mood as your blood sugar rises, but this is followed by a cycle of increased fat storage, lethargy, and more hunger!

 

 

 



1. Get Real

Here is one of the simplest and most important changes you can make, which will revolutionize your health and nutrition, ultimately getting you where you want to be. Start and continue to eat primarily “real food”, verses “fake food”. By fake foods I mean man-made processed foods that are full of preservatives. By real food I mean food that God has made, full of enzymes and nutrients. People originally ate living (real food) right after picking. Even 20-30 years ago, people obtained much of their food from their own gardens and livestock. Not today!

The simplest way to begin this process of change from fake food to real food is to stay away from the middle section of the typical grocery store. Think about it … the middle section of the store is mostly filled with man-made, man-manipulated food. It’s where you find virtually all the bad-carbohydrates, bad-fats and empty calories.


In the discussion of “real food”, the question that needs to be asked is, "Has this food been altered from its original state, and if so, how?" The biggest difference, as it pertains to one’s health – between real food, and what I’m calling “fake food” – is enzymes and nutrients.


Obviously, many of the foods I am calling “fake” are not totally man-made. They are simply man-manipulated to the point that they become nutritionally impotent. And then there are those foods, or, rather, pseudo-foods, that are completely man-made from chemicals. These are not made from real foods at all.


Once a food is altered from its original state, nutrients are lost. The more a food is manipulated or processed the less enzymes and nutrients are present. Enzymes are extremely important because they assist in the digestion and absorption of food. If you eat food that is enzyme-less, your body will not get maximum utilization of the food. This causes toxicity in the body. The nutrients in real food contain a wide range of vital life force essentials (i.e. vitamins, minerals, amino acids, oxygen) and live enzymes. Their nutritional properties are essential to the proper maintenance of human bodily functions.   


One way foods are altered is through processing. Processed foods are often cooked at very high temperatures which destroy nutrients by completely wiping out many vitamins and denaturing minerals. These cooked foods are then canned or frozen and often cooked again in home kitchens. Sugar, salt, preservatives, stabilizers, and/or color enhancers are usually added.


Fresh (“real”) unaltered foods, like fresh fruits and vegetables, are without question a thousand times better for you than processed, canned or frozen fruits and vegetables and other canned products.


Another way foods are altered is through refining. Most bread is the end product of pulverizing wheat berries through processing and refining. Uncle Ben's white rice is a refined food. Instant oats are refined foods. White sugar in any form is refined food. Refined foods are stripped of many, if not all, of their original nutrients. They fill you up with calories but not with the enzymes and nutrients your body needs.  


To give one example, imitation strawberry flavoring, found in ice cream, jello, juice drinks, candy, popsicles, desserts, cakes and pastries, can be created from over a dozen different man-made chemicals. That is not food. That is a chemical cocktail completely void of any nutrition whatsoever.


Fake foods, as I am calling them, are also preserved. In today's world, the preservers of choice are chemicals, and especially salt. Salt is pumped into almost all processed foods. Salt is one of those chemicals that we accept as part of our daily diet, but it is known to be hard on the body and detrimental to good health if consumed in high quantities. Most people today are consuming way too much salt!  


In summary let’s look at it this way …  


Is a fresh apple better for you than a piece of apple pie? Of course it is. And to take it one step further, is an apple better for you than applesauce? Let's put it this way. Do you suppose a fresh apple has more nutrients than a product made from an apple that has been peeled, cooked and canned?


Is corn on the cob better for you than canned corn? Once the corn is removed from the cob, cooked, processed, and preserved, then reheated in your kitchen, how many nutrients do you suppose are left in that corn? And what about the corn chip that is created from the original corn on the cob? How good are these processed and packaged and often fried and salted foods?


Are fresh homemade juices better for you than orange juice made from orange concentrate or V8 juice which is not only cooked (cooking kills nutrients), but is canned and loaded with salt and chemicals. You bet.


Finally, I am a realist … I know that most people cannot and will not totally eliminate fake food from their diet. I haven’t. My message to you is simply this; the further you can turn the dial of what you eat, towards the real food side verses the fake food side, the healthier, thinner and fitter you will be. 

 

 



2. Get Smart

The following is a myth: “A calorie is a calorie is a calorie … weight gain or loss is simply a matter of the number of calories taken in verses the number of calories used up as energy.” The truth is that most doctors, dietitians and health professionals know very little about the complicated interplay of carbohydrates, proteins and fats in the body.
 
In your effort to get and keep unwanted pounds off, it is critically important that you eat smart. The science of “smart-eating” has been validated by micro-biologists studying what happens hormonally in your body based on what, when and how often you eat. The key hormone in your body determining whether you are overfat or overweight is insulin. 
 
Depending on how and what you eat, insulin can be your best friend or your worst enemy. The human pancreas stores about 200 units of insulin. Normal people secrete about 25-30 units of insulin daily. Insulin is like a police officer directing the traffic of glucose (carbohydrate), amino acids (protein) and fatty acids into the cells.
 
One of its (insulin) primary jobs is to prevent sugar from rising to high. Carbohydrates, whether they are in the form of pasta or chocolate cake, turn into glucose (blood sugar) once they enter the blood stream. If any meal or snack is too high in carbohydrate it causes a rapid rise in blood sugar. To adjust to this rapid rise the body releases the hormone insulin. The insulin then lowers the blood glucose – that’s good!
 
However, insulin is essentially a storage hormone. In other words insulin’s job is to set aside excess carbohydrates (calories) in the form of fat – that’s bad!
 
It gets worse. The insulin well then not release any of the stored fat in your body. It becomes the fat-jailer from hell – that’s very, very bad!
 
Most people today are eating a high carbohydrate meal 3 times a day and a high carb snack at bedtime. This causes insulin levels to be elevated for 18 out of 24 hours. Imagine insulin changing carbohydrate to fat and hauling that fat off to jail 18 hours a day.
 
In the mean time, proteins are being neglected … this in spite of the fact that proteins are the basis of all life. In our bodies, protein is more plentiful than any other substance but water. As much as one-half of your dry body weight – including most of your muscle mass, skin, hair, eyes and nails – is made up of protein. Protein is the main structural ingredient of our cells and the enzymes that keep them running. Amino acids, the building blocks of protein, are the foundation of all life. Plus, protein stimulates (as does exercise) glucagons secretion.
 
Now fat. Most of our body fat comes from lack of proper exercise and ingested carbohydrates, not ingested fat. Like vitamins essential fatty acids are essential to good health. Low fat diets (useful for arteriolosclerosis) can kill you over the long term. 
 
Besides consistently doing the right kind of exercise, controlling insulin secretion through smart-eating, is the most important thing you can do to lose or control weight and body fat. It is the type of dietary fat, not the total amount that affects a person’s risk of heart disease.
 
The real fat enemy is trans-fat (Trans fatty acids or TFA for short). TFA is fat that has been altered through the man made process of hydrogenation (the process that turns liquid vegetable oil into margarine). What is high in TFA’s? Shortening, margarine, most deep fried foods, store bought cookies, doughnuts, potato chips, cakes, crackers … most of the food in the middle of the grocery store!
 
Beginning in 1960 a 15 year study was conducted in seven different countries on diet, to determine what country had the lowest levels of obesity, cancer and heart disease. The winner was Greece (actually the island of Crete). They had one half the cancer death rate and 20 times less coronary heart disease! Their diet consisted in 40% fat intake, but it was low saturated fat high in olive oil and an ideal ratio of omega-3 (fish fat). They consumed virtually no trans-fat.
 
Here’s a great tip: Take fat pills everyday – I do! Omega-3 consumption has decreased dramatically in America to a 20 to 1 ratio. Omega-3 actually helps you lose weight. A Czech study recently revealed that omega3’s stymie the body’s natural tendency to store fat.  Take one Omega-3 pill with every meal and watch what happens.



3. Get Practical

The definition of practical is: “Governed by, or acquired through practice or action, rather than theory, speculation, or ideals.” By now you have acquired a certain balance and rhythm to your day-to-day life. There are certain patterns and preferences that suit you personally. It’s critically important that you stay-within-yourself concerning whatever changes you make going forward.
 
One of the biggest mistakes many people make when attempting to change how and what they eat is they make radical and unpractical changes that will never last. Everyone is different. Some people are “morning” people (love to wake up early and are ready to go tackle the world), and some are “night” people (don’t really get going until around noon and love to stay up late). I have always been a morning person. I’ve never known a night person to successfully change their strips and become a morning person and vice versa. It seems to be a part of ones DNA.
 
The same applies to eating. Do you “eat to live”, or do you “live to eat”? In other words, is eating something you almost have to be reminded of doing and not a big part of your day? Or, is eating something you think about a lot and really look forward to? For me it’s always been the latter. I have always had a love affair with food, which I blame on my mom’s fabulous cooking growing up.
 
The key is to make small changes that are important and necessary to reaching your goal. Do not make big sweeping changes that are counter to your instinctive personal preferences. Let me give you two examples:
 
Example A
 
The issue: For whatever reason, of the three meals typically eaten per day, I prefer that the biggest of the three be my evening meal. Strictly speaking—from a science of the body and nutritional point of view—that is not the best way to eat. It is far better to eat your larger meal either at breakfast or midday. Could I change? Yes, I can and I have at times but I would prefer not to. That change then becomes this huge issue that I constantly and begrudgingly had to adjust to on a daily basis.
 
The Practical Solution: Stop fighting it and continue to eat the bigger meal in the evening. However, to offset the dietary negatives of that, I eat very small balanced and nutritional low calorie meals for breakfast and lunch. The trade off is that I can look forward all day, with great anticipation, to my bigger (but balanced and nutritional) evening meal. After all, everyone knows that anticipation is usually better than the actual event! If, on a given day, I have a business lunch meeting that turns out to be more of a big evening type meal, I simply adjust by having a light and balanced meal that evening for dinner.
 
Example B
 
The Issue: I grew up on a farm where we raised out own beef and made our own cheese, butter, etc. Therefore, I absolutely love red meat, cheese, butter, whipped cream, ice cream, etc. I know if I make steady diet of these foods I’m in big trouble as it relates to my weight, health and nutrition.
 
The Practical Solution: If would be insane for me to attempt to completely eliminate those foods from my diet because they are my favorites. What I did instead was assess which of those I could live without (or eat very seldom) and which I absolutely could not live without. I decided if I had to choose only one it would definitely be cheese. Number two would be meat, etc. I then changed my diet accordingly. I will usually eat a small portion of cheese everyday, red meat about once every two weeks, butter very seldom, whipped cream and ice cream very, very seldom (usually as part of a holiday meal or special treat). Once again, balance and anticipation rule!
 
Hopefully with these two examples you get my point. The “get practical” aspects of the changes you make are critical to your success. Again, remember, in order for the dietary successes you achieve to be permanent; you must only make changes that you are willing to live with permanently.
 
Small changes will ultimately make a huge difference but you must give it time. Our society has drilled into our brains the totally false idea that we can and should look for and expect instant results. That is, perhaps, the biggest lie of all. You must resist looking for quick results. Here’s a tip to prove my point; when you begin to implement changes in your eating and exercise habits do not weigh or measure yourself for at least one month (ideally wait 3 months). The reason for this is that when you are exercising (especially building muscle strength) you will actually gain weight because your increasing your muscle mass. However, because nothing burns fat and revs your metabolism better than muscle, over time you will begin to lose weight, especially if you combine exercise with smart, balanced, nutritional eating.


Finally ... I highly recommend KagomeTM Juices

Juicing is a great way to go, but quite frankly, in my opinion, it's way too much work! Just the clean up alone can be ominous. I finally found the solution: Kagome juices. Kagome juices are a fantastic, all natural, blend of both fruits and vegetables. Because it contains both fruits and vegetables it has a low Glycemic index. It is also low sodium! But best of all it tastes fantastic, and when you add up the cost, verses the juicing alternative, Kagome actually costs less!

Every morning, after my FIT10 ten minute workout, I have a big glass of Kagome juice, blending in some fiber and protein powder. With that meal alone, I have eaten my full days requirement of fruits and vegetables!

Kagome juices can be purchased in the health food section at most grocery stores. Visit the Kagome website to learn more.