Nutrition for Health

A Brand New Life

Keys to Weight Loss

• Drink water• Don’t skip breakfast• Portion control• Mindset - This is not a diet but a lifestyle change to get your

weight into the healthy BMI range and keep it there• Get yourself into happy place – sort out any problems or issues

– unhappy people turn to food for comfort• Will power needs to be strong• Exercise for an hour a day• Eat the balance of healthy food your body needs each day• Do this with a friend – for support and accountability• Plan what you will eat and when• Plan your balanced recipes for the week

Reduce the size of your plate of food and it should be comprised of ½ vegies, ¼ protein, ¼ carbohydrate.

Cancer Fighting Foods

• Most fruits and vegetables contain vitamin C and antioxidants which are powerful anticancer agents. Some essential foods to include in your diet are: berries especially blueberries, cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage, avocadoes, carrots, figs, chilli peppers and jalapenos, garlic, red grapes and citrus, rosemary, papayas nuts and mushrooms. All things purple!

Reading Food Labels

• per 100g - fat should be 3g or less, aim for 200mg of salt or less, sugar 5g or less, trans fats <1g.

White Death

• White rice/flour/bread, white sugar, salt. Basically this means processed food with all nutrition stripped out. These are what are known as empty kilojoule foods. They digest quickly and become sugars in your system which are stored as fat. Due to digesting quickly leave you hungry not long after you have eaten. Salt of course causes hardening of the arteries.

Wholemeal versus White

What can your body do with a piece of white bread – well it contains carbohydrate, and carbohydrate and well more carbohydrate! Use a little for energy and store the rest as fat for later. Wholemeal bread – is also very processed but a slightly better option as is grain bread, containing some protein, vitamins, fibre and carbohydrate. Use carbohydrate for energy, protein for muscle and tissue repair, fibre for cleaning the digestive tract, vitamins for fighting disease and essential bodily processes. However due to processing these breads also digest relatively quickly also and leave you hungry. The best carbohydrate to eat is wholegrain: wholegrain rice crackers, 9 grain vitaweats, cooked barley, brown rice and quinoa.

Skin!

• SKIN ON FRUIT AND VEG CONTAINS PECTIN WHICH REMOVES CHOLESTEROL FROM THE BODY

Eat Iron rich food with Vit C

Vitamin c helps the body absorb iron from animal and vegetable sources.

Value of nuts and seeds

Eat unroasted and unsalted. Nuts contain good fats and oils and many vitamins and minerals that our bodies simply cannot do without. Do not fear the fats in oils and nuts when eaten in the right quantities as the body uses the oils, without storing them, in various processes for daily living.

Nuts cont….

• All nuts are good for you but some important ones are walnuts, almonds, peanuts, linseeds, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds. LSA is a crushed mix of linseed, sunflower seeds and almonds. Very nice on fruit salad. Nuts are good for heart health.

Quick/Slow Exercise

The best weight loss method is 1 hour per day of moderate to intense exercise (moderate being a fast walk and intense being a mild jog) with a quick slow method. An example is walk one block jog one block. But check with your doctor first.

Our bodies were designed

to move!

Importance of fish

• Oily fish contain omega-3 fats. These are essential for brain development, cognitive function and healthy cells. Also good for joints. Tinned fish with bones contained are an excellent source of calcium and vitamin D (of which Australians are now lacking!) Sprats and Sardines are high in iron. Oily fish like salmon and tuna are good sources of omega-3.

Look out for Palm Oil

• (saturated fat disguised as vegetable oil.) If the ingredients have vegetable oil but the nutrition panel still has saturated fat you can be reasonably sure it is palm oil. It works in the body like saturated fat, creating cholesterol. Not to mention all the deforestation it is causing.

Exercise Fights Cancer

Exercise is now used in cancer treatment. It releases endorphins (the feel good hormone) which promotes healing in the body and exercise also helps reduce cholesterol. (Just ask Rod!) Not to mention helping to keep weight in balance, your mind in a sound state and the body in working order. (use it or lose it!) Exercise fills the body with life-giving oxygen and builds new neurons (pathways) in the brain for learning.

The connection between sugar and cholesterol

• The connection goes like this:

Carbohydrate sugar saturated fat cholesterol

In your body carbohydrate is digested and turned into sugar, which if not used immediately in turn is converted to saturated fat which we all know is dangerous as it metabolises to cholesterol! White carbohydrates are the worst enemy for this as you tend to eat more of them because they do not satisfy due to their high GI content or quick absorption into the bloodstream leaving you hungry not long after you eat. Hence much of the carbohydrate converts to fat as you cannot burn it off quickly enough.

A brand New Life

• THIS IS NOT A QUICK PROCESS WITH AN END GOAL BUT A LIFESTYLE CHANGE THAT YOU NEED TO MAINTAIN FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE – Your goal needs to be how to keep your weight in the healthy BMI range. (18.5 – 25)

Think COLOUR!

• Think colour when you are buying fruit and vegetables. Each colour contains different vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that our bodies need. The great thing is there are plenty of different foods within the colours. So if you don’t like mandarins then perhaps you do like oranges. So choose as many varieties as you can within all the colours.

• Blue – eggplant, red cabbage, blueberries• Yellow – yellow squash, yellow capsicum• Red – strawberries, tomatoes, apples• Green – spinach, broccoli, • Orange – carrots, sweet potato• White – onion, parsnip

Think RAW!

• Eat as many servings of your vegies as you can raw. In general with a few exceptions the cooking process destroys vitamins and nutritional content in vegetables. So the more raw the better. However some vegies such as carrots and tomatoes increase some parts of their nutritional content with cooking. If you are a cooked veg person try to eat salad with one of your meals and cooked veg with the other aiming for Al Dente cooking.

IMPORTANCE OF FIBRE

• Fibre is vital for our bodies as it acts like a cleaning brush for the digestive and circulatory system.

HOW TO REDUCE BLOOD PRESSURE, HEART DISEASE and CANCER

• exercise, fruit and vegetables with skin, water, lentils and beans, limited red meat with low levels of fat, fish, good fats, nuts, wholegrain carbohydrates, plenty of salad.

Eat food not food products

• The more food you can eat that has only one ingredient the healthier you will be. For example eating an apple (ingredients – apple!) is healthier than eating and apple and blueberry bar (ingredients -

IngredientsFruit Paste (40%) {Fruit [Concentrated Apple Puree (39%), Blueberry Puree (6%), Banana Puree (4%), Concentrated Elderberry Juice (0.5%)], Invert Sugar, Sugar, Glycerine, Pectin, Wheat Fibre, Calcium Lactate, Flavours}Wheat Flour (Thiamin Folate)WaterDextroseSugarButterOat FibreWhey Powder (From Milk)Inulin (Chicory)GlycerineVegetable OilRaising Agents (450, 500, 341, 339, Wheat Starch)Rolled OatsWhey Protein Concentrate (From Milk)Flavour Emulsifier (Soy Lecithin)Colour 160b

New American Food Pyramid

HUNGER IS MY FRIEND

• When you have eaten everything on the list and providing you are only doing the exercise on the list then let hunger be your friend. If you are still hungry it is possible your stomach needs to shrink so that it takes less to fill it. Thirst can be misinterpreted as hunger. Drinking enough water is essential.

WATER

• Ensure you are drinking adequate water as it boosts your metabolism (the rate at which you burn your food), keeps you hydrated, cleanses you from toxins and fills your stomach. Often hunger is confused with thirst. If you feel hungry try a glass of water. If after 10 or 15 minutes you are still hungry then hunger it is but remember hunger will do its job if you need to shrink your stomach.

• Beware fruit juice has just as much sugar as cordial and soft drink. You may think it is healthy but eating the actual fruit is healthier. It may take 5-6 oranges to get a glass of juice. But you have missed all the fibre and satisfaction of eating. Could you actually eat that many oranges? If not don’t drink the juice!

EXERCISE AND ENDORPHINS

• Exercise releases endorphins (happy, feel good hormones) which helps us to cope with life in general, not to mention filling us with oxygen and boosting your metabolism.

GLYCAEMIC INDEX (GI)

• Low GI foods are foods that take longer to digest leaving us feeling full for longer and giving us a slow release of energy, that can be used at a slow pace during the day as opposed to high GI foods which digest quickly releasing a bulk of energy all at once which the body cannot use quickly enough and therefore stores as fat for later use. You are then left feeling hungry again very quickly as your stomach is empty.

• LOW GI – wholegrains, unsweetened low fat yoghurt, skim milk and fat free cheeses, lean red meat, brown rice, lentils and beans, rolled oats, nuts

• HIGH GI – pastries, cakes, white rice, bread, pasta, lollies

PLATE SIZE

• Helps determine portion control. We tend to fill our plates. A meal only looks as if it will satisfy if our plate is full. By having a smaller plate it satisfies the psychology of needing to see a full plate.

PRESENTATION

• If you present things nicely you are more tempted to eat them.

• It takes a little more work, but is worth it.

DISTRACTION

• Go and do something else when you have the urge to go to the fridge.

• Have planned activities or hobbies so you are not caught off guard when you have nothing better to do or the urge to eat unnecessarily sets in.

SPICES

• If things are spicy (to your liking of course) you will be far more satisfied than if you eat bland food. You will find you can eat less and still be satisfied.

PURPOSEFUL EATING

• Small mouthfuls taste just as good as big ones and make your meal last longer. Use teaspoons, dessert forks and chop sticks to achieve the small mouthful. Try to chew each mouthful 20 times and put your knife and fork down between each mouthful, as chewing is part of the satisfaction of eating. It takes 20 minutes for your stomach to register that it is full. Wherever possible sit down to eat, don’t eat on the run, as you cannot concentrate on the joy of eating. You will suddenly realise the food is all gone and you are not satisfied because you didn’t taste it or enjoy it.

GO PREPARED

• If you are going to be out and about or near places where there are tempting unhealthy foods take along a prepacked healthy lunch or at least have some healthy snacks in the car.

• These might include: nuts and dried fruit, vitaweats (9 grains), fresh fruit, salad sticks or homemade muffins,wholemeal ricecakes.