Dieting For Dummies
Overview
Does the world really need another book on dieting? More important, do you? Plenty of diet books make promises that this one doesn't. Lots tell you that losing weight and keeping it off is easy when you know their secrets. Well, here's a secret that the other books won't tell you: Dieting gimmicks, like banning pasta, don't work. And that's precisely why you need this book. It's not about fad plans or take-it-off-quick schemes. It's about balancing healthful eating and exercise for a lifetime. This second edition of Dieting For Dummies is for anyone who has eaten too much and wants to lose weight. The information presented here is appropriate for someone wanting to lose 10 pounds or 100 pounds. You can use it as a guide for eating healthfully, and not only a way to lose weight. Because, when you discover how to eat the healthy way, you will lose weight. The material in Dieting For Dummies is grouped so that you don't have to start at the beginning – although that's a nice place to start. If you'd rather, you can flip right to the chapter that contains the information you need. You'll discover information on
- Understanding what a healthy weight is and how to find yours
- Getting over overeating
- Formulating a plan for healthy eating
- Shopping, cooking, and dining out to make eating healthy easier
- Finding and working with health-care professionals you can trust, for when you can't seem to go it alone
People come in a wide range of heights, weights, and girths. One is not better than another. But staying within your healthiest weight range can help you achieve optimal health and well-being. Let this book help you see through the fog of fads and myths. Then read on and find out how you can stop dieting and start living healthfully.
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About The Author
Jane Kirby, RD is a registered dietitian and member of the American Dietetic Association. She is the food and nutrition editor of Real Simple magazine and owner of The Vermont Cooking School, IncTMin Charlotte, Vermont. Jane is the former editor of Eating Well magazine and the food and nuitrition editor for Glamour. She served on the dietetics staff of the Massachusettes General Hospital in Boston, where she completed graduate work in nutrition. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Marymount College.
The American Dietetic Association is the world’s largest group of nutrition and health professionals. As an advocate of the profession, the ADA serves the public by promoting optimal nutrition, health, and well-being.
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dieting for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
A diet can be successful or disastrous, depending on your dieting approach. Start by finding your healthy weight range to establish a goal for your diet. Study some facts about calories and fat, and follow a few simple tips to make your eating habits healthier and your diet will become a lifestyle — which will lead to weight loss.
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General Diet & Nutrition
Living and eating well involves more than just counting calories, reducing carbs, or watching fat. Remember these eight easy guidelines for healthy eating. If you are overweight and start following these tips, you should start losing weight naturally.
Eat a minimum of three servings of vegetables and two servings of fruit each day.
Fruits and vegetables provide vitamins, minerals, and fiber necessary for proper nutrition. They’re also naturally low in fat with few exceptions. Breakfast is a good place to begin adding fruit servings to your diet.
You may already start your day with a glass of juice. Add a midmorning snack of fruit and have some for dessert at lunch or dinner, and you’ve made your goal of three to four servings a day.
General Diet & Nutrition
After you consider the different types of diet programs and find one that you think may work for you, make an appointment to visit one of that program’s centers for a personal interview. Take along the following list of questions and demand satisfying answers.
What data proves that the program actually works?
General Diet & Nutrition
Eating too much and not exercising enough are the fundamental reasons people gain weight. But genetics, metabolism, and environmental factors explain how large your appetite is and how efficiently your body uses the food you eat.
It’s true that some of the reasons that you gain weight are beyond your control, but that doesn’t mean that you can resign yourself to life in the fat lane — slurping up soda pop and inhaling the chips while channel-surfing for your fave TV reruns.
General Diet & Nutrition
To quickly estimate your healthy weight, you can use the following method. First, figure the median weight for your height by using the appropriate formula:
Men: 106 pounds for 5 feet, plus 6 pounds per inch over 5 feet or minus 6 pounds per inch under 5 feet.
Women: 100 pounds for 5 feet, plus 5 pounds per inch over 5 feet or minus 5 pounds per inch under 5 feet.
General Diet & Nutrition
Athletes come in many shapes, which impacts their dietary needs. If you lined up a marathon runner, a jockey, a speed skater, a weightlifter, a pole-vaulter, a linebacker, a gymnast, and a sumo wrestler right next to each other, the variation of heights and weights would be vast. The amount of fat on their bodies varies tremendously, too.
General Diet & Nutrition
Dieters face pitfalls, some of which have to do with emotions, habits, or feelings of self-worth. But eating is not a moral issue. Your body requires nutrients to live. Sticking to a diet does not define you as a good or bad person. Eating and hunger are part of the human condition.
Here are some healthy diet stumbles you can step around if you give them careful consideration:
Do you always clean your plate?
General Diet & Nutrition
Dieting may mean changing your cooking habits. Standard cooking methods need some reworking to make them lowfat and low calorie, and some foods can be used as substitutes, making them great, nutritious and healthy stand-ins for others.
Sauté onion and garlic in water: When a recipe calls onion and garlic cooked in oil, use a nonstick pan and 2 tablespoons of water.
General Diet & Nutrition
A healthy weight is a range that relates statistically to good health. Being overweight or obese is statistically related to weight-related health problems, such as heart disease and hypertension.
Healthcare professionals use three key measurements to determine whether a person is at a healthy weight:
Body Mass Index (BMI): A measure that correlates to how much fat is on your body.
General Diet & Nutrition
When you lose weight, you lose more muscle than fat. So, you need to engage in activities that help build muscle. Strength or resistance training, such as lifting weights or working out on exercise equipment, builds muscle.
Muscle weighs more, so if you are doing your job, the way your clothes fit might be a better indicator of your progress than that number on the scale.
General Diet & Nutrition
Full of essential nutrition, whole grains are the cornerstone of a healthy diet. But too often, shoppers are offered fat- and sugar-laden choices, devoid of nutrition and high in empty calories.
Thick-sliced, thin-sliced, with sugar or without, whole-grain or white, this category has grown to one of the most confusing and calorie dense in the store.
General Diet & Nutrition
On a gram-by-gram basis, fat has more calories than carbohydrates or protein. Therefore, eliminating fat or cutting down on the amount you eat helps you lose weight. However, if fat is replaced with carbohydrates, as it is in many fat-reduced and fat-free products, the total number of calories in a serving may not be reduced.
General Diet & Nutrition
All fat has the same number of calories, but a diet that contains unsaturated fat instead of foods that contain saturated fats can help reduce your blood cholesterol level.
Unsaturated fat is classified as either monounsaturated or polyunsaturated. Monounsaturated fats reduce the harmful low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) and leave the protective high-density lipoproteins (HDLs) in place.
General Diet & Nutrition
Weight-loss programs based on meal plans can be good options for people who have trouble sticking to a diet plan on their own. The Journal of the American Medical Association has concluded that the structure of commercial programs gives some dieters an advantage that resulted in more weight loss than dieters who attended self-help programs.
General Diet & Nutrition
Many foods naturally contain sodium, albeit usually in tiny amounts. Although some people add salt to their food at the table, most sodium in the U.S. diet comes from foods to which salt has been added during preparation or processing. Many foods that are high in sodium don’t taste salty, so beware.
Salt is chemically known as sodium chloride.
One of the first foods to be cut from many dieters’ shopping lists and menus is dairy. What a shame! Dairy foods are rich in essential nutrients. Most people, women in particular, need to increase their dairy consumption, because they don’t get enough precious bone-building calcium.
Incorporating more dairy products can actually enhance weight loss according to accumulating research.
General Diet & Nutrition
True delicatessens provide challenges for dieters, but menus are flexible, so this is one type of restaurant where you can exercise your calorie-smart creativity. If you are on a diet, go to lunch with a friend, split a sandwich, and order an extra roll or bread to make two sandwiches out of the meat in one.
If you’re by yourself, order half a sandwich and extra bread and create two sandwiches for the price of one — taking one home for later, of course.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you are on a diet, your fridge will be stocked with many nutritious fresh fruits and vegetables and plain frozen ones, which are a lot lower in calories than the frozen ones packaged in sauce or butter. But leave room for these diet helpers, too:
Good extra-virgin olive oil: You should use less oil on a reduced-calorie diet, so flavor counts.
General Diet & Nutrition
Published in 2000 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the following list contains the ten Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
The 2000 edition of the Dietary Guidelines is a big departure from earlier versions. The updated guidelines are broader in tone and content and reflect a more international perspective.
A diet can be successful or disastrous, depending on your dieting approach. Start by finding your healthy weight range to establish a goal for your diet. Study some facts about calories and fat, and follow a few simple tips to make your eating habits healthier and your diet will become a lifestyle — which will lead to weight loss.
General Diet & Nutrition
Over-the-counter liquid and bar meal replacement products contain nutrients that your body needs, but these manufactured meals aren’t a good choice for long-term weight loss.
Meal replacement drinks and bars eliminate the need to count calories or worry about portion sizes, so they would seem to simplify a person’s life.
General Diet & Nutrition
The thinking behind these high-fiber, low-calorie diets is that because fiber can’t be digested, it doesn’t have calories. This is true. And because it takes up so much room in the stomach, it’s filling, too. Also true. Therefore, if a diet is really high in fiber, weight loss should be easy.
Here are two diets that focus on fiber:
Eat More, Weigh Less, by Dean Ornish, MD: By keeping fat to no more than 10 percent of daily calories and eating basically a high-fiber vegetarian diet, you can reverse heart disease and lose weight.
General Diet & Nutrition
Research shows that a diet high in saturated fatty acids causes blood cholesterol levels to rise even more than eating large amounts of dietary cholesterol does. Fats are made up of both saturated and unsaturated fatty acids and are categorized by the predominate kind of fatty acid that they contain.
The fats from meat, milk products, and tropical oils are the main sources of saturated fats in most American diets.
Can you stick to your diet in an Italian restaurant? Most Americans think of heavy southern Italian food when they think of high-calorie items: meatballs, eggplant Parmigiana, veal Parmigiana, and lasagna. However, the food of northern Italy, while it may appear less caloric, also has its detractors: butter, olive oil, and cream.
General Diet & Nutrition
Eating out can pose special problems for dieters. Serving sizes are too large, and many professional kitchens don’t use low-calorie cooking methods necessary for dieters.
As a rule, the less expensive the restaurant, the more likely it is that the kitchen uses generous amounts of fat and high-fat cooking techniques — inexpensive and easy ways to add flavor to food.
General Diet & Nutrition
The human body needs nutrition every 3 to 4 hours to prevent energy dips, metabolism slowdowns, crankiness, and cravings from interfering with life. Eating based on time rather than hunger is one of the problems with the three-meals-a-day tradition.
Sure, it’s practical, but consider that on the three-squares plan, a body is expected to run for 5 hours between breakfast and lunch, 6 to 7 hours between lunch and dinner, and then 11 to 12 hours until breakfast.
From the time your mother handed you a cookie to quiet your crying, food may have become more than a way to provide nutrition. It’s a way to nourish your soul as well. Dieting to lose weight can bring up emotional issues for many people.
Regardless of your weight and whether you realize it — you eat for different reasons.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you are on a diet, eating out can mean trouble, but you can be sure that you’re getting a low-calorie meal when you order one. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ruled that all restaurants (including airlines) must demonstrate that special menus comply with the same federal regulations as those used on the labels of packaged foods.
Weight gain doesn’t always depend on diet, genes, or lack of exercise. Other factors like quitting smoking and taking medications can cause you to gain unwanted pounds no matter how closely you follow a diet.
You may gain up to 10 pounds when you quit smoking, but most people return to their normal weights at the end of a year.
General Diet & Nutrition
Eating out frequently, especially in fast-food restaurants, means that you’re probably missing out on many nutrients and eating more fat and calories than you want or need. A diet of fast food has several problems.
Particularly when it comes to fast-food chains, people tend to eat in response to outside cues, such as advertising, bargain prices, convenience, and speed — rarely for health or pleasure.
The problem with eating high-fat foods is that fat doesn’t immediately satisfy hunger the way that sugary carbohydrates do. Therefore, eating too many fat calories before realizing that you’ve had enough is easy to do. (Think about how easy it is to eat a whole bag of French fries or chips and still feel hungry.
General Diet & Nutrition
At the very top of the Food Guide Pyramid is the tiny triangle of fats and sweets. These foods add calories without contributing much in the way of other nutrients to your diet.
Fats provide important vitamins such as vitamin E, add flavor, and make foods more appealing. Use them sparingly. When you plan carefully, you can make room for these fun foods in your diet.
General Diet & Nutrition
Yes, you do need some fat in your diet for good health. Fat supplies essential fatty acids and helps your body absorb the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. But a diet high in saturated fat and, to a lesser degree, dietary cholesterol is linked to increased risk of heart disease.
Because fat has more calories than protein or carbohydrate, cutting down on fat is also the easiest way to cut calories.
General Diet & Nutrition
Keeping a food journal calls for recording what and when you eat and how you're feeling when you eat. Look back at your journal now and then: How many times did you record words that signal stress, sadness, anger, loneliness, or exhaustion?
Try one of these nonfood coping strategies if emotion, not hunger, triggered you to eat:
Talk with a friend.
Ever wonder what your ideal weight would be? You can quickly estimate your healthy weight range, with these simple formulas. They take your height and gender into account.
Men 106 pounds for 5 feet, plus 6 pounds per inch over 5 feet or minus 6 pounds per inch under 5 feet; plus and minus 10 percent.
Women 100 pounds for 5 feet, plus 5 pounds per inch over 5 feet or minus 5 pounds per inch under 5 feet; plus and minus 10 percent.
General Diet & Nutrition
All the nutrients that a food contains are important; however, to achieve weight loss, the total fat and calories are the most important to track from nutrition information on a food label. Cholesterol and sodium (salt) don’t add calories, but eating too much sodium can contribute to water retention and therefore water weight.
General Diet & Nutrition
The premise of food-specific diets is that some foods have special properties that can cause weight loss, other foods cause weight gain, and combinations of specific foods cause you to lose or gain.
Nutritionists call the human appetite for a variety of foods food-specific satiety. It’s nature’s way of assuring that you eat a diverse diet and, therefore, get the full spectrum of nutrients.
General Diet & Nutrition
For every excuse not to exercise, a better reason exists to make the effort to get in shape and grow stronger, healthier, and happier with your body. Here are some common excuses to avoid exercise — and some ways to work around your hesitation.
I don’t have time. This is the No. 1 reason most people give for not exercising.
General Diet & Nutrition
Chinese food may seem like a nutritious low-calorie choice if you are on a diet, but depending on your order, you can get a healthy low-cal meal or a calorie nightmare.
If you are on a diet, eat the way the Chinese do. Rice is the centerpiece of the meal, and diners eat from their small rice bowls, not from big dinner plates.
General Diet & Nutrition
Grains are low in fat and provide essential vitamins, minerals, and fiber. They are the source of complex carbohydrates in your diet. But the wrong kinds of grain products can lead you to eat too many calories without getting beneficial nutrients.
The grains group has been the source of the greatest controversy among health professionals.
General Diet & Nutrition
You may intend to eat healthy nutritious meals and snacks, but if diet-friendly foods aren’t within reach, you’ll have trouble shedding pounds and reaching your dietary goals. Shoppers who use lists spend slightly more money per trip to the grocery store than nonlist users, but they don’t have to run back to the market as frequently to pick up forgotten items.
General Diet & Nutrition
Research shows that women — especially those on a diet — in the United States determine their ideal body size and shape from the way models in television ads and fashion magazines look, not from the way women look in real life.
The Kellogg’s survey (published by the Opinion Research Corporation) found that women tend to focus on the specific body parts they don’t like, not on their bodies as a whole.
General Diet & Nutrition
If someone you know has an eating disorder, you can help. The problem is that the person who has the eating disorder may deny having a problem. That denial may leave you, the supporter, feeling powerless, confused, frightened, or even angry.
It helps to understand that people with anorexia refuse to believe that their eating patterns are abnormal.
General Diet & Nutrition
Body Mass Index (BMI) and waist size allow you to quickly compare your weight to the healthy weight range for your height and judge your relative “fatness.”
But other, high-tech ways are available to determine how much fat you have, which is often referred to as your percent body fat. They’re not the methods of choice because they're impractical, imprecise, or both.
If you’re a woman, even if you diet, you gain weight more easily than a man for several inherent reasons. Menopause, pregnancy, and the age you are when you reach puberty all impact your weight.
Early puberty: The earlier a girl reaches menarche (her first period), the heavier she’s apt to be as an adult. Research indicates that if you had your first period at age 11 or younger, by age 30 you’ll weigh between 9 and 11 pounds more than a woman who started after age 14.
Protein, carbohydrate, and fat make up the calorie content of all foods. Although not considered a nutrient, alcohol also provides calories. Take a quick look at what various foods add up to calorie-wise:
1 gram of protein contains 4 calories.
1 gram of carbohydrate contains 4 calories.
1 gram of fat contains 9 calories.
General Diet & Nutrition
Although more research is needed to fully understand the relationship between nutrition during gestation and birth weight to the onset of obesity later in life, several studies suggest a connection.
Studies show that 80 percent of children born to two obese parents become obese. Contrast that with the fact that only 14 percent of children born to normal-weight parents become obese.
General Diet & Nutrition
In childhood, as in adulthood, the more fat that people in your diet, the more calories. That’s because, bite for bite, a gram of fat delivers more than twice the number of calories than a gram of protein or carbohydrate does.
Research performed at Brigham Young University measured the amount of fat consumed by 262 children aged 9 and 10.
Dieting researchers have found that people with a long history of dieting lose their ability to recognize when they are full after a nutritionally complete meal. Chronic dieters eat or don’t eat based only on outside influences such as time of day, thoughts, and beliefs . . . not on what their bodies are actually telling them.
General Diet & Nutrition
Although the exact mechanism isn’t clear, many health experts believe that each person is born with a genetically predetermined weight range that the body strives to maintain. Human bodies used this system to protect them from starvation when access to food wasn’t as easy as a trip to the drive-through or a dash to the corner mini-mart.
General Diet & Nutrition
High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) — linked to the obesity crisis and a staple in American diets — is metabolized just like the fructose in fruit, but with some significant differences. The first is that fruit is packed with additional nutrients, such as vitamins, minerals, and fiber, which regulate digestion and metabolism.
General Diet & Nutrition
Combining exercise with a diet is the best way to lose weight. But how do you know if you are exercising enough to reach your dieting goals?
The current guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Sports Medicine recommend 30 minutes or more of moderate-intensity physical activity on most — and preferably all — days of the week.
General Diet & Nutrition
You may think that hunger is all in your stomach and that dieting is all in your head. But nutrition experts know that hunger is regulated by a complex system of chemicals that send signals between your brain and your body.
The cells in the hypothalamus communicate with cells in other parts of the brain to coordinate the release and uptake of chemicals that help regulate how much and what you eat.
Fiber doesn’t contain nutrients, but it is essential to a healthy diet. A high-fiber low-fat diet is healthful for your heart and digestive system. Looking for quick and easy ways to add fiber to your diet? Try some of these delicious tips:
For a side dish, have 1/2 cup of any one of the following: lentils (5 grams), cooked dried beans (7 grams), cooked whole grains, such as wheat berries (2 grams) or cracked wheat (3 grams).
General Diet & Nutrition
You can’t use your waist size to get an absolute percentage of body fat, but measuring your waistline does provide information about the location of your body fat. And knowing where your fat is located, along with your BMI, enables you to determine whether you’re overweight and at risk for health problems.
Fat that accumulates around your stomach area makes you more susceptible to a variety of health problems.
General Diet & Nutrition
About 95 percent of females and 30 percent of males have issues about the way their bodies look. You may never look like a supermodel, but that’s okay — virtually no one will. However, everybody can be healthy. When you start taking care of your body, you’ll feel better about your body and about yourself.
Check out some techniques to try if your body image needs improving:
Remember that your perception of your body is a thought (“I hate my jelly belly”), but you feel it like an emotion (“I’m unlovable”).
General Diet & Nutrition
Body Mass Index (BMI) is the standard used to measure a child’s weight-related health risk. However, you must use charts specifically designed for children.
Children’s BMI charts, unlike those for adults, are based on age and gender. Ask the staff at the pediatrician’s office to show you your child’s charts. Or you can use the formulas and charts that follow to do the calculations yourself.
Determining your body’s total dietary energy needs takes a bit of math — so grab a calculator. This method of determining your calorie needs is easier and almost as accurate as checking into a research lab and submitting yourself to scientific scrutiny by a white-coated nerd with a clipboard and a stopwatch.
Estimate your basic energy needs.
General Diet & Nutrition
Eating healthy, nutritious food and sticking to a diet are especially hard when you are away from home — for business or pleasure. You’re at the mercy of the food service industry, which offers foods high in fat and low in nutrients.
The job of restaurants is to get you to buy, and eat, more than you planned.
General Diet & Nutrition
Just like adults, children should aim for five servings of nutritious fruits or vegetables a day. They’re good sources of fiber, they’re packed with vitamins and minerals, they’re low in fat, and they’re important for good health and development. Even if your child isn’t crazy about vegetables, you can get her to eat them — and happily — by using these tips:
Offer to cut raw veggies as snacks.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you are a dieting athlete, simply cutting your calories will impact your performance. Your focus should be lowering the percentage of body fat you carry. If you know what your weight-loss goal is, you can calculate your total daily calories and the ideal amounts of carbohydrate, protein, and fat.
Cutting calories drastically impairs your performance.
General Diet & Nutrition
Calculating dietary carbohydrate requirements (and protein and fat for that matter) is based on a percentage of your total calories. Most athletes should get at least 60 percent of their calories in their diets from carbohydrates — the same as the general public. Some elite athletes, who have more specific energy needs, should base their requirements on their body weight.
General Diet & Nutrition
For athletes, reducing percent body fat should be the focus of weight-loss efforts rather than reducing total body weight, otherwise optimum performance will be compromised. In some cases, total weight may not even change, when percent body fat goes down and muscle goes up. (Muscle weighs more than fat.) Therefore, assessing body composition is crucial as you determine your weight-loss goals.
General Diet & Nutrition
Athletes have special dietary needs, particularly when they want to lose weight. To maintain performance, athletes in training need extra calories in their diets — especially carbohydrates and protein.
Like your carbohydrate needs, your protein needs are calculated based on your weight and your level of physical activity.
You can use Body Mass Index (BMI) to determine whether you’re at a healthy weight or overweight and, therefore, at a greater risk of developing weight-related health problems. BMI strongly correlates to the total fat on your body, and best of all, it’s easy to determine and is applicable to all adults.
Follow these steps to calculate your BMI:
Convert your weight from pounds to kilograms.
If you are hoping to lose weight this year, you probably already know that one easy way to meet that goal is to increase the amount of fruits and vegetables you eat. Vegetables are low in calories and rich in nutrients. If you are looking for ways to up your veggie intake, try these delicious ideas:
Pile a sandwich high with lettuce, tomato, and vegetables.
Part of a healthy diet is making sure that the foods that you eat have retained their nutrients and won’t make you sick. You count on producers, packers, and shippers, and supermarkets to comply with sanitation requirements. You expect restaurants to be scrupulously clean. Yet did you know that most food-related illnesses can be traced back to home kitchens?
General Diet & Nutrition
Dieters must know how to translate menu descriptions to yield clues to the fat and calorie contents of a dish. Restaurant portion sizes have more to do with controlling operation expenses than with balancing nutrients. Most restaurants use standardized ladles, spoons, cups, and scoops, and their capacity is generally larger than what you would use at home.
General Diet & Nutrition
Are you craving is a high-calorie diet buster — a food devoid of nutrients? Dieters aren’t the only ones who experience cravings for foods. But dieters, especially those who frequently go on and off diets, tend to experience cravings most often. And their cravings tend to be the strongest at the beginning of their diets.
Japanese food is a nutritious, low-calorie choice for dieters. Japanese can be one of the most nutritional and healthy cuisines, with only a few fattening dishes, such as tempura, teriyaki, katso, and sukiyaki. If eaten in the balance that the Japanese apply — heavy on the vegetables and light on the fats and meats — Japanese food can be a dieter’s dream.
General Diet & Nutrition
To assess your diet — whether to determine if it includes essential nutrients in the correct amounts or to try to understand how you can lose weight — consider keeping a food journal. Most people don’t make the connection between how they feel and how much they eat until they keep a food journal, which is nothing more than a record of the foods you eat, when you eat them, and how you’re feeling when you eat.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you have decided to use diet and exercise to shed weight, try creating an exercise chart to put up on your fridge or tape to the bathroom mirror. An exercise log can help you see results and keep you on track toward your weight loss goal.
Make a grid on a piece of paper with space to record the date along the side and 10-minute time slots along the top, as shown here.
General Diet & Nutrition
Sugars, which are simple carbohydrates, are found naturally in many nutritious foods, including milk, fruits, some vegetables, breads, cereals, and grains. Many of these are a part of any healthy diet. But sugars are sometimes used as preservatives and thickeners; they’re also added to foods during preparation, during processing, and at the table.
General Diet & Nutrition
Women have higher percentages of body fat than men, because female reproductive hormones require more fat. Women with healthy weights are generally between 15 and 25 percent body fat and men fall into the 10 to 20 percent range. But for the athlete, optimal body fat may be 10 to 20 percent for women and 5 to 12 percent for men.
General Diet & Nutrition
Although people are born with a love of sugar and a predisposition to enjoy fat, those preferences can be replaced over time. If you’ve already made the switch from whole milk to lowfat or fat-free milk, you know that the full-fat version is almost unpleasantly rich after you’re accustomed to the way fat-free milk tastes and feels in your mouth.
General Diet & Nutrition
Proponents of low-carbohydrate diets claim that many people are “allergic” to carbohydrates or are insulin resistant and gain weight when they eat them. They say a diet that restricts carbohydrates forces your body to use stored fat for energy. The following diets are based on the low-carbohydrate premise.
The South Beach Diet by Agatston, MD: Weight-loss depends on eating good carbohydrates and fats.
General Diet & Nutrition
Many dieters think that if they cut out meat, they cut out calories. Unfortunately, they often substitute high-fat cheese, nuts, and nut butters for protein. Without meat, getting enough zinc and iron — two nutrients that help maintain your energy and performance — is tough.
Don’t shortchange yourself nutritionally by making sacrifices that don’t help.
General Diet & Nutrition
Eating disorders — particularly anorexia nervosa — can be deadly. The following lists explain the many medical consequences of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.
Five to 20 percent of anorexics will die.
Anorexia nervosa may cause the following problems:
The heart muscle changes, and its beat becomes irregular, potentially leading to cardiac arrest and death.
General Diet & Nutrition
Some diet plans require medical supervision because they involve rapid weight loss that can stress your body. For example, a complication of some of the very low calorie diet (VLCD) programs is gallbladder stones. The condition is caused by the very lowfat nature of the diets and the fact that the individuals who go on these programs tend to be obese and are predisposed to developing stones.
General Diet & Nutrition
Dieting is one possible reason for eating disorders, some people argue, because the disorders share dieting as a common thread. They think that if dieting didn’t exist, there would be far fewer eating disorders and propose that people wouldn’t get caught in the following cycle:
Severe calorie restrictions make them ravenously hungry.
General Diet & Nutrition
Often, dieters must face why they eat the way that they do. If you could use some peer support while trying to lose weight — but don’t require a regimented diet plan or the services of program-provided weight loss professionals — one of the following organizations may be your best choice.
The Solution: The focus of the program is on developing internal skills of self-nurturing and setting limits to achieve balance and freedom from excess.
General Diet & Nutrition
Children pick up behaviors by watching grown-ups. If you show your children nutritious eating habits, they’re more likely to follow your example. If you’re constantly dieting and criticizing your body, they’ll begin to disrespect theirs, too.
A study conducted by Glamour magazine on 4,000 young women examined the effects that their mothers’ dieting had on their eating habits.
General Diet & Nutrition
The Food Guide Pyramid contains the building blocks for a healthy diet. If you follow the recommended servings listed for each food group in the pyramid each day and eat lowfat, low-sugar, and low-sodium choices within each group, you’re sure to get enough protein, vitamins, minerals, and dietary fiber without getting excessive amounts of calories, fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, added sugars, or alcohol.
General Diet & Nutrition
Fruits and vegetables are almost free foods for dieters. But eating healthfully means more than counting calories. Vitamins and mineral nutrients are important, too. Want to get more nutrition out of your fruits and vegetables? Follow these tips:
In general, the darker the color, the higher the nutrient content.
General Diet & Nutrition
Two kinds of sweeteners are widely used to replace sugar in your diet. Some are classified as nutritive, because they provide calories and nutrients; others are nonnutritive, because they don’t.
When artificial sweeteners were introduced, everyone thought that people would eat less sugar. But evidence now suggests that people simply add the sweeteners to their diets.
General Diet & Nutrition
The biggest news for diet help is online access to weight loss programs. Two studies (2001 and 2003) in the Journal of the American Medical Association report success with Web-based diet plans, especially if the plans incorporate e-mail with behavioral advice and support.
Keep in mind, plenty of junk science is out there, but the sites that follow are among the tried and true.
General Diet & Nutrition
The trend toward nutritious newfangled pizza is a real plus for dieters. You can add or subtract nutritious vegetable and meat ingredients to fit your particular tastes and to stick within diet boundaries.
Meat choices for pizzas have moved from high-calorie extra pepperoni, sausage, and bacon to low calorie grilled chicken and shrimp.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you just can’t say no to premenstrual cravings, even when you are dieting, you have a good reason: Your body doesn’t want you to. Your body wants extra calories and increased nutrition when you have ovulated.
A study at the University of British Columbia demonstrates what many women have suspected for some time: Women eat differently during the second half of their cycles — surprisingly, though, only if they’ve ovulated that month.
General Diet & Nutrition
The Food Guide Pyramid is a good place to start planning a nutritious diet for your family. When you plan a snack or meal, make sure that it includes protein, carbohydrate, and a little bit of fat. A carbohydrate-only meal or snack — such as noodles or an apple — satisfies quickly, but it doesn’t have the staying power that protein and fat do.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you learn its language, your body can tell you when your diet is well balanced. When a meal is heavy in one nutrient, such as fat, and light in the others such as protein or vitamins, you may not feel full. Your body has a feedback system that tells your brain when your diet includes enough carbohydrate, fat, and protein.
General Diet & Nutrition
Calories are simply a way to measure the energy in food and the energy released in the body. Although the technically correct name is kilocalorie, everyone, including dietitians, uses the shorter "calorie."
One calorie is the amount of energy necessary to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Centigrade.
General Diet & Nutrition
Healthcare professionals use more than Body Mass Index (BMI), your weight, or the size of your waist to determine whether you need to lose weight. They also look at weight-related risk factors before determining whether the weight you’re at is healthy.
A healthy weight is a range that relates statistically to good health.
General Diet & Nutrition
Dieters have to brave going into the kitchen and preparing nutritious foods to eat. Cooking and eating low-cal and lowfat, nutritious foods needn’t be difficult. The following table lists a few diet-friendly switches to consider.
Calorie-Shaving Switches in Your Food Preparation
Instead Of
Use
Calories Saved
1 medium white potato
1 medium sweet potato
100
3 ounces ground beef
3 ounces ground turkey meat*
100
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
1 tablespoon lowfat mayonnaise
65
10 fried tortilla chips
10 baked tortilla chips
20
1 cup whole milk cottage cheese
1 cup fat-free or 1% milk
64 (fat-free) or 48 (1%)
1 flour tortilla
1 corn tortilla
50
1 cup whole milk
1 cup 1% cottage cheese or ricotta cheese whirled in a
blender
268
1 whole egg
2 egg whites
46
1/2 cup cream
1/2 cup evaporated fat-free milk
145
1/2 cup premium ice cream
1/2 cup regular ice cream
100
3 1/2 ounces tuna in oil
1/2 ounces tuna in water
80
1/2 cup canned fruit in syrup
1/2 cup canned fruit in juice
25
*Make sure that you select ground turkey breast meat.
General Diet & Nutrition
Accepting weight loss that misses the mark by a few pounds is healthier than writing off your diet as a failure and then giving in and gaining the loss back. A healthier diet strategy is to maintain the loss for a few months and then reach for another 10 to 15 percent loss.
Think of weight loss as moving down a flight of stairs — not a ramp — with landings to stop and evaluate your progress.
General Diet & Nutrition
To lose weight, you have to cut calories, but if you cut too many from your diet, you may not lose any weight, and you probably won’t be able to stick to your diet for very long because you’ll lack essential nutrition and that will make you feel hungry all the time.
Don’t cut your calorie level drastically when trying to lose weight; this strategy will backfire.
General Diet & Nutrition
A person may have anorexia nervosa when she diets to the point of weighing only 85 percent of her normal, healthy weight (or a BMI of 17.5), fears gaining weight, is preoccupied with food, develops abnormal eating habits, stops menstruating, or, if male, experiences a decrease in sexual drive or interest in sex.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you are overweight and on a diet, expending 2,800 calories a week in exercise or committing to a chunk of time every day may sound like more than you can manage. The easiest way to make a workout part of your routine is to commit to exercise every day. That’s seven days a week! Start with 20 minutes of walking every day.
General Diet & Nutrition
Fast food restaurants are beginning to offer some choices for dieters or to those who want to eat nutritious food, but you have to use caution to stick to your diet. You can swear never to eat another burger, fry, or shake again, but get real.
Often, the one and only option on America’s interstates is fast food.
General Diet & Nutrition
Dieters beware! Some styles of Indian cooking are vegetarian, which is great for including proper nutrition, but don’t let that lull you into thinking that these foods are low-calorie diet dishes. Plenty of fat is used in Indian cooking — usually clarified butter called ghee.
Roasting tandoori style (in a clay oven called a tandoor) is a good lowfat cooking method, but other dishes are often stewed and fried.
General Diet & Nutrition
A flour tortilla is nutritionally sound, but roll it around a filling and deep-fry it, and you have a high calorie diet buster. The good news for dieters is that Mexican cuisine places minimal emphasis on meat protein.
The bad news is that most Mexican food is fried or cooked in abundant amounts of fat. Many of the national Mexican food chains don’t use lard or animal fat drippings, which is typical in many independent restaurants, but they do use plenty of vegetable oil.
General Diet & Nutrition
To cook low-calorie nutritious food, you don’t need to keep bottled salad dressings, canned cream soups, and oils in your kitchen. Instead, the diet-conscious cook stocks a pantry with canned tomatoes, a flavorful olive oil, vinegars, and herbs and spices.
You may have to dig a bit deeper into your pockets for these basics, but after you taste them, you’ll agree that paying more is worth the extra flavor they deliver.
If you have resolved to lose weight this year, you need to know what dieting strategies work. Many people will tell you not to eat late at night, or never eat between meals. This advice, is just plain wrong. Here are ten common myths dieting:
Eating late packs on the pounds: The kinds of foods you’re eating put on the weight, not the clock.
If losing weight is your goal for the New Year, dieting doesn’t have to mean eating terrible food. You can rework standard cooking methods to make them lowfat and low calorie, and some foods can be used as substitutes, making them great, healthy stand-ins for others. Every calorie-conscious cook should use the following tricks:
Sauté onion and garlic the lowfat way: When a recipe calls for onion and garlic to be cooked in oil, use a nonstick pan and 2 tablespoons of water in place of the oil.
If your goal this year is to lose weight, these rules for healthy eating are for you. Eating low-cal is definitely a healthy habit. But there’s more to good living than just counting calories. The nutrients in the foods you eat can make or break your efforts to live healthfully.
Eat vegetables and fruit daily: Eat at least three servings of vegetables and three servings of fruit every day.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you’re overweight, but feeling okay now, you may be indifferent to dieting to prevent health problems. But your extra weight strains all your body systems, putting you at risk for developing one or more of the following health problems:
Cancers: A postmenopausal woman doubles her risk for breast cancer if she gained as little as 20 pounds before menopause.
General Diet & Nutrition
Many parents allow their children to skip breakfast. Parents may reason that the children aren’t hungry in the morning, and by skipping breakfast they avoid a bunch of calories. However, eating breakfast is important because it shifts the body out of starvation mode and into action.
When a body thinks that it’s starving, it hoards energy by slowing down the burning of calories.
General Diet & Nutrition
A diet rich in vegetables contains beneficial antioxidants that help reduce your risk of cancer, stroke, and heart disease. These antioxidants are just some of the nutritional benefits of eating vegetables.
Vegetables contain vitamins, such as folate and B6, and carotinoids — such as lycopene in tomatoes, beta carotene in mangos and carrots, lutein in spinach and collard greens, and zeaxanthin in greens and corn.
General Diet & Nutrition
Eating a small meal two to three hours before a workout is ideal. Two to three hours is how long it takes for a meal to reach your muscles, but it’s not always practical. Not substituting exercise for eating is important; you can accommodate both.
Energy bars come in all kinds of formulations from the calorie, and sugar-packed cereal bars to the protein-dense energy bars.
Before you start dieting, it helps to determine how much you do eat. Unfortunately, a magic formula for figuring out how many calories you eat is unavailable as yet — you simply have to track it. If you’re keeping a food journal, dig it out now. If you didn’t, or can’t find it, you can catch up: Keep track of what you eat.
General Diet & Nutrition
Treatment works for at least 60 percent of people with eating disorders. They can return to and maintain healthy weights and eat normally. They can develop healthy relationships with people, raise families, and build careers.
But despite often-intense treatment, about 20 percent of people suffering from eating disorders don’t recover fully.
Eating less fat is one of the easiest ways to cut calories and lose weight. If you’re looking to cut some of the fat (and therefore calories) out of your diet, follow some of these helpful hints:
Use fats and oils sparingly.
Eat plenty of grain products, vegetables, and fruits.
Choose lean or extra-lean meats, fish, and poultry, and trim off any visible fat.
General Diet & Nutrition
To meet your nutritional needs, the USDA recommends two to three daily servings of dairy products. Including dairy foods in your diet provides you with protein and calcium and contributes vitamins A and D. The Milk, Yogurt, and Cheese group shares the third tier of the Food Pyramid with the Meat, Poultry, Fish, Dry Beans, Eggs, and Nuts group.
General Diet & Nutrition
The USDA recommends that you use fat and sugars sparingly in your diet. Most foods high in sugar and fat contribute many calories but few, if any, nutrients. However the USDA’s grouping of all fats with sugars riles some health groups.
There’s not much evidence to justify eating more sugar. However, critics say locking all fats and oils in the attic with sugar and sweets simply isn’t fair.
General Diet & Nutrition
The USDA Food Pyramid recommends that you include 2-3 servings of meat, poultry, eggs dried beans or nuts in your daily diet. Such foods contribute important nutrients, such as protein, calcium, iron, and zinc.
In the USDA view of the food world, meats, beans, nuts, and eggs are grouped together. They all do have higher amounts of protein than other foods in the pyramid, but that’s where critics say the similarities end.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you don’t eat meat, check out the USDA Vegetarian Pyramid for recommendations that will help you meet all your daily nutritional requirements. Because meat, poultry, and fish are not included in a vegetarian diet, the foundation of this pyramid is divided equally among fruits and vegetables, legumes — such as soybeans and peanuts, and whole grains.
General Diet & Nutrition
Contrary to popular belief, eating disorders aren’t just about being fat or thin, about dieting or weight. Instead, eating disorders are typically about self-esteem, depression, power, communication, or self-expression.
Many factors can contribute to an eating disorder, including society’s emphasis on being thin and physically beautiful; the prevalence of dieting in our culture; pressure by oneself or others that people should be perfect; and food and nutrition beliefs.
General Diet & Nutrition
After you have a general idea of which foods belong in which food groups and what their nutritional benefits are, you can start to plan your weight-loss diet. First, determine your calorie needs. Then, using the information in the following table, determine the number of servings from each food group that you’re allowed, based on your calorie level.
General Diet & Nutrition
Going on and off fad diets or quick weight-loss gimmicks is often the result of trying to lose weight for appearances more than health. If you repeatedly lose and gain, then changing your focus to maintaining a healthy weight may be the answer.
Your motivation for dieting should be your health, not just your appearance.
General Diet & Nutrition
Binge eating disorder can happen at any age, but it’s often not recognized until adulthood. It’s similar to bulimia nervosa, but without purging activities. Victims of binge eating disorder eat large amounts of food at least twice a week, often in a relatively short time.
Bingeing only at night isn’t uncommon and may not be an eating disorder.
General Diet & Nutrition
Bulimia nervosa is characterized by recurrent episodes of binge eating followed by purging behaviors, such as self-induced vomiting, misuse of laxatives or diuretics, fasting, or obsessive exercise, in an attempt to prevent weight gain.
Bulimia occurs in adolescents and young adult women but is relatively uncommon in men, and typically develops in the late teens or early 20s.
General Diet & Nutrition
Children become overweight due to genetic tendencies, lack of physical activity, unhealthy dietary habits, or a combination of these factors. In some rare cases, an endocrine disorder is to blame. Your pediatrician can perform an exam and blood test to rule out this possibility or to design a treatment program if needed.
General Diet & Nutrition
When considering your nutritional needs, the amount you eat is as important as what you eat. Because people have diets filled with restaurant and convenience store foods, it’s difficult to remember how large a serving should be.
Portions of takeout food are much larger than the standard portion sizes defined in the Food Guide Pyramid.
General Diet & Nutrition
Your dietary calorie needs depend on your age, sex, metabolism, activity level, and body size. To get an idea of the total calories you should include in your daily diet, multiply your current weight by 15 if you’re moderately active or by 13 if you’re not.
The following list looks at factors that affect your calorie needs.
Since 1990, when the Food and Drug Administration’s Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA), went into effect, all packaged food products (with a few exceptions) carry labeling that states the nutritional content in the package. The law also allows manufacturers to use certain food-and-health claims on the labels of their products too.
General Diet & Nutrition
Your degree of risk for developing weight-related health problems depends on how overweight you are and where you store your excess fat. Body fat that accumulates around the stomach area poses a greater health risk than fat stored in the lower body.
The benefits of trimming down aren’t just cosmetic. Even a small reduction in your weight can improve many of the health problems associated with being overweight — not to mention boosting your self-esteem.
General Diet & Nutrition
Eating disorders require professional treatment. Do some background research on treatment, referral centers, and support groups in your area (check with your local school system, university, medical center, or mental health center for recommendations and help).
If you or someone you know is suffering from an eating disorder, look to these sources:
American Dietetic Association 216 W.
General Diet & Nutrition
The one thing that all those who suffer from eating disorders have in common is a history of dieting. Generally speaking, bright, energetic, attractive, conscientious, hard-working people of all races and economic classes get eating disorders.
Ninety to 95 percent of those who develop an eating disorder are female.
Consuming fewer calories and including less fat in your diet is necessary to shed pounds. Adding exercise increases the number of calories you burn so that you speed up your weight loss. Plus, you build muscle, which keeps your metabolism in high gear to burn calories more readily.
If you have any medical conditions, see your doctor, especially if you’re over 40 years old.
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