Weight loss

For anyone serious about loosing a few pounds or kilos to improve your health, there are a few basic things I find work very well for my clients:

• Prepare before you start making changes. Have a reasonable idea as to what you are trying to achieve and write your target down. Bear in mind that a 5 - 10% loss of weight improves your health if you are overweight; so although your ideal weight may seem like a tough target, you are going to benefit from even a relatively small weight loss
  
• Keep a food diary and use a pedometer for a week so that you have a clear assessment of what you eat and how active you really are
  
• Don't do anthing drastic that you won't make a part of your daily life. Look honestly at where you can make changes to the amounts of food, your way of cooking and your food choices and substitute a smaller serving or a 'lighter' option next time
• Eat regularly- don't skip meals and don't cut out groups of foods (dairy, starches etc) or you'll be hungry and you'll miss out on nutrients. Go easy on the low nourishment/ high kcal usual suspects - sugary drinks, fried foods, sweets, savory snacks and alcohol.
  
• Get some activity into your daily routine...anything! Just decide never to take the lift again, but move more and use your pedometer to check what you're doing. We suggest that people should be taking 10,000 steps a day minimum.
• Drink plenty...it doesn't burn calories or melt fat, but most people are dehydrated a lot of the time, and a lot of people mistake thirst for hunger.
  

Basic stuff, but it does work. Trust me - I'm a dietitian.

Food for thought?

I had a wonderful home cooked lunch today in London with Sarah and Adam....(a mixed bean and veg soup, spelt bread and a truly delicious red winter salad -thanks Adam!)....it sparked a discussion about how out of touch a lot of us are with shopping for, cooking and really tasting food. Stuff doen't always have to be as wholesome as what we had today, and rarely needs to be complicated or expensive, but I think a lot of us have forgotten that it can at least be tasty.

Apparently, in a lot of countries we've gotten so used to the artificial taste of processed foods that we no longer recognise the real thing...in some cases, we don't even like it. Pastuerised apple juice from concentrate tastes nothing like the real thing, but it's what we've come to expect.

The SlowFood movement, founded in Italy (where else) promotes a sustainable attitude to the production, cooking and enjoyment of food. Some frightening statistics from their site are food for thought..........

• 75% of European food product diversity has been lost since 1900
• 93% of American food product diversity has been lost in the same time period
• 33% of livestock varieties have disappeared or are near disappearing
• 30,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct in the last century, and one more is lost every six hours

Collaboration with schools, teachers and parents in taste education has extended to adult education projects for food industry professionals and food writers as well as enthusiasts.

Now, world hunger is a terrible and terrifying issue and being concerned that we don't enjoy our food enough might appear relatively unimportant, but by looking at the production issues, it's apparent that our move away from seasonal and local produce has a profound implication for developing countries too.

I would dearly love to see more parents both cooking more often themselves and encouraging their children to cook and take an interest in food. We're at risk of loosing so much.

And coming at things from a different perspective, for anyone who can, make a donation to suppport the worthwhile work of the United Nations World Food Program..........

Fetal Nutrition

A very interesting article in the Guardian magazine supplement on exercise/ nutrition for kids...

The current focus on the obesity epidemic is producing a lot of opportunistic dross (of the I'm a Big Fat Celebrity who Needs the Cash and Lets Make the Disgusting Fatties Eat Grass with the Skinny 'Doctor' variety) so it's good to see informed and well written stuff on nutrition in the news-media.

The Guardian carries articles on 2 topics close to my heart- maternal/ fetal nutrition and it's impact on the baby for life and the benefits of breastfeeding in preventing childhood overweight.

Good advice

For anyone interested, there are some good sites where the info on diet and nutrition is moderated by qualified professionals without a book or snake oil 'fat busting' product to flog .

The Food Standards Agency in the UK is one of my favourites for answers to all sorts of food related questions, but the INDI is the professional body representing properly qualified dietitians in Ireland. They provide a listing of dietitians by area and by speciality.

And while they have their own stuff to sell, both the VHI and Irish Health sites have good information too.

Dieting in Pregnancy?

There's been interest in the potential for 'programming' of the fetus to be prone to obesity since the publication of Barker's research into birth weights and the incidence of heart disease in adults, but to my mind women are really not getting the message about what a healthy diet in pregnancy can help to achieve- or what the aims of a healthy diet should be.

While the old 'eating for 2' still prevails, with some women abandoning all attempts to balance their food intake since they'll be getting 'fat' during pregnancy anyway, a more sinister and apparently increasingly common practice is for women to restrict their food intakes to minimise their weight gain and to have a smaller baby.The thinking seems to be to minimise the difficulty of labour - which is misguided, but understandable- but also not to loose their figure.

Coupled with an attitude to breastfeeding that focuses on the down sides in terms of inconvenience and cosmetic changes to the breasts, it makes me want to shake perfectly intelligent women for the superficiality of their decision making but even more so makes me question what in god's name those of us working in health care are doing to redress the balance.

I do see the majority of women trying their best and am impressed time and again by the changes a pregnant woman will make to improve her diet and lifestyle for her baby- stuff we all should do all the time but never seem to focus on...........ask me how my so-called exercise program is going for instance.....erm...maybe don't.

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