Being obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or more, is bad for one’s health but a new study reported in the New York Times states that being a few pounds overweight could protect people, especially the elderly, from an early death.
Researchers found that while underweight and obese people die earlier than people of normal weight, those who are overweight actually live longer than people of normal weight.
From this study it looks like keeping a healthy lifestyle is more important than losing a few extra pounds. However, the researchers are keen to emphasise that they are not encouraging people to put on weight as there are many negative health consequences associated with being overweight and obese.
In order to enjoy better health it is important to choose a healthy lifestyle by making good food choices, taking regular exercise and keeping blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar under control.
Perhaps we should all stop beating ourselves up about being a few pounds overweight and concentrate more on achieving a healthy lifestyle if we want to improve our overall health rather than just concentrating on what the scales tell us we weigh.
Val’s recent blog post, Organization, schedules, sunscreen and lipstick in which she describes the organisation or lack of organisation in her life made me chuckle because she sounds so much like me.
The lack of organisation in my life drives me nuts and every time I spend hours searching for something I vow that I will be more organised in future. However, no matter how much I want things to be organised and no matter how much energy I put in to getting things more organised, my life is still in chaos and the more I try to organise things, the more chaotic I seem to make it!
However, when I was first diagnosed with diabetes I decided that I really needed to organise my diet much better than I had up until then. I decided that all processed and convenience foods would be eliminated from my diet and I would live on natural foods as much as possible.
I also had a family to look after which included two adult males and I was responsible for cooking the evening meal. I did not have time or the will to cook separate meals for them and separate meals for me so what was I going to do?
I explained to the men that the food I had to eat had to be what a normal person on a healthy diet would eat and fortunately, probably due to media influences around the time, they decided that it would be a good idea if they improved their diet too.
Now all I had to do was to get organised.
This is how I did it:
I found some healthy recipes to cook for our evening meal. There are lots of recipe books and websites full of healthy recipes available these days so it was not that difficult to find some easy to cook family recipes.
I made myself a weekly meal planner and jotted down the meals I planned to eat that week.
I bought myself a ring binder and put those recipes in plastic pockets inside of the binder.
I then made my shopping list by jotting down the ingredients I needed from each of the recipe pages.
It was easy and I was on my way to a much healthier way of eating.
I have kept this system up for almost three years and I could not live without it now. The best thing about it is that it frees up my time for more interesting things. I no longer have to spend hours thinking of things we can eat and no longer just pick up anything in the supermarket. Grocery shopping is now much quicker too.
Over the years I have added lots of new recipes to my recipe file and have a four week menu plan so we never have the same evening meal more than once a month. This makes sure our diet is varied and also helps us not to miss out on our favourite dishes. The ring binder is especially flexible as recipes can be added, taken out and rearranged as necessary.
Below are some Weekly Meal Planners I have created for you to use to set up your weekly menus. Click on the picture of the meal planner you would like. The meal planner will open as a PDF document for you to print. Alternatively, right click on the download link and save to your hard drive.
I hope these help you to organise your diet with very little hassle.
I watched Dr. Lisa Hark’s advice on YouTube today.
She is a registerd dietician and offers the following advice about a healthy diet (with some extra comments by me):
Exercise regularly. Aim to do 30 minutes of moderate activity at least three days a week. If you prefer you could split the 30 minutes into 3 lots of 10 minutes. Make exercise part of your daily routine by walking the dog or walking to the shops.
Watch for hidden sugar in drinks. Water has no calories. Neither has black tea or coffee. However, if you add milk to tea and coffee make sure it is skimmed milk which has less fat and do not add sugar.
Eat three portions of fruit and three portions of vegetables a day. Filling up on fruit and vegetables is much better than eating biscuits, cakes and other high fat, high calorie snacks. This is good health advice as well as a good dieting tip.
Eat lean meats, poultry and fish. They are low in fat but be careful about how you cook them. Do not add extra fat during the cooking process. Steaming, poaching, boiling, grilling, baking and microwaving are the best ways of cooking meat to keep the fat value and calories down.
Limit alcohol consumption. Alcohol is high in calories and has no nutritious value. Scientific research has shown that drinking red wine regularly is good for the heart but other research has linked alcohol consumption to breast cancer so while trying to lose weight it is probably a good idea to cut down on the alcohol.
I think these are very good tips. I must find the motivation to exercise more!
I was interested to read Why those oh-so-healthy diet foods make us eat even more in the Mail Online which tells us that people who are on diets to lose weight can eat just as many calories as they would if they were not on a diet even though they are eating healthier food.
It reminded me of a good friend of mine who, when on a diet, thought he could eat as many crispbreads as he wanted. Even though I tried to explain that it was not what he ate but the amount of calories he consumed that make him put on weight, he still could not understand. He had it in his head that chocolate, biscuits and cakes made him fat but crispbreads, apples and other so called diet food would not make him put on weight. Needless to say, he did not succeed in losing weight.
Unfortunately, the simple truth is, if you eat more calories than your body uses up in energy then you will put on weight. Your body does not care where those calories come from. If it cannot use the calories up then it stores them as fat. Eat just one more apple than you need each day and at the end of the year you could put on more than 7lbs of fat.
The lesson to be learned is to eat healthy food but not to eat too much of it!
To stay healthy it is important to follow a healthy lifestyle every day. This involves permanently changing our eating and exercising habits.
In her blog post, ‘Diet’ Is A Horrible Word, Darya Pino maintains that when one says they are going on a diet they mean they are intending to change their eating habits temporarily in order to lose weight. However, the biggest problem with dieting is that many people find they put on weight again when they finish their diet. In some cases, they even end up weighing more than they did before they began their diet.
This is why it is so important to make sure that any changes to one’s diet are permanent. This rules out fad diets like the banana diet, the baby food diet, the Atkins diet or any other short term change in eating habits. The diet one adopts must be something that can provide all the nutrients our body needs and must be something we can follow for the rest of our lives. Otherwise we will fall off the bandwagon and the weight will creep back on again.
Therefore, lets throw out the diet and concentrate more on filling our bodies with good food like whole grains, fruit, vegetables and lean meats and throw out the sugar and fat laden foods found in fizzy drinks, cakes, biscuits, crisps and fast food.
Make a permanent change in your eating habits and get fit this summer!
I am not a medical professional so the content on this website is my own personal opinions and beliefs. It consists of the things I do, or wish I could do, to improve my own health and lifestyle. Everyone is different and what works for me may not work for you. If you have any medical concerns you should talk to your doctor and not rely on anything you may read on this site.
June 26, 2009 4:32 pm | 
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