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Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Get Confused By Reading The Package

Some of us can get confused very easily and some of us live in a state of confusion.  But some times I think that the makers of the food that we consume that is in a "package" are the ones really  responsible for most of the confusion.  Have you ever noticed that the package states one thing but the nutritional guide states something entirely different?

When buying any food item that is pre-packaged you must first read the label.  Every food in our grocery store today  has a nutritional label for our benefit.  Just because an item may show "Light" or "Low Fat" On the outside of the package does not make it so.  But there is one even trickier, when looking at peanut butter recently I saw 1/3 fewer calories than our regular brand.  What does this mean?  I then took a closer look and discovered that the "regular" version had
momre calories than their competition. So why are the manufacturers going to this length to get us to buy their product versus their competition? Well that is the million dollar question.

I believe on my journey to a new me that I have become more aware than ever about what I am putting into my body as food. In the years past when I would begin a diet the trips to the grocery store always resulted in the same type of food items thrown into my shopping cart.
"Low Fat" Mayonnaise, "Reduced Fat" Peanut Butter, the lowest calorie count on my margarine that I could find, the "Light" sandwich bread, and the list goes on and on.

What I failed to realize is that when the manufacturer advertises "low fat, reduced fat, lower calorie, etc" they had to substitute something in it's place and usually it is added sugar or other artificial ingredients to make it taste more like the regular version.

So next time you are tempted to grab the "lower fat" or "light" version of your favorite food item take an extra minute to check that label. You may be surprised at what you find on there! You may better off just enjoying a smaller amount of the real thing!

Sunday, November 20, 2011

The End of Dieting

Today I read a very interesting article / story on www. MSN.com regarding women who are no longer dieting but have found a different way to overcome their weight problems.  I was going to make reference to some of the information but decided that I wanted to share the entire article.  It is really interesting, and you may find a few ideas that will help you.  On my journey to a new me I am always interested in how other women are able to tackle their weight problems and win!

The End of Dieting
By Marjorie Ingall /Prevention Magazine
In a radical new approach, obese women are getting healthier precisely by not focusing on their weight. 

The pulse of tribal drumming fills the air. Jeannie Troy, 48 and 220 pounds, dances wildly, pogo-ing  like a punk rocker at a Green Day concert and shaking her sweaty hair. All around her, women—whose body sizes range from average to well over 300 pounds—grin as they get their groove on.
This is what fitness looks like at Green Mountain at Fox Run, a center in Vermont for women determined to end their weight struggles. As the class breaks up, applause erupts and Troy grabs a towel. Her face is bright red and her extralarge purple T-shirt is blotched with sweat, but she's beaming. "I've finally learned to take to heart that saying 'Dance like nobody's watching,' " she says.
Before coming to Green Mountain, Troy had spent countless days—and dollars—dieting. She isn't alone: At any given time, 53% of Americans are trying to slim down. So why, then, are so many women overweight? Many experts believe it's because diets simply don't work for keeping weight off long term. "If we had a 95% failure rate with a medication, it would never get approved by the FDA. Yet that's dieting's record," says Michelle May, MD, founder of Am I Hungry? Mindful Eating Workshops.

After decades of yo-yo dieting that only leaves them heavier than they were to start with, many women lose the will to work out and watch what they eat, and they begin dodging doctors who seem to blame all their problems on their weight. Some ultimately give up on dealing with health issues such as high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol, believing that without dramatic weight loss, it's useless.
But according to a controversial new movement, it is possible to break this cycle of failed diets and poor health, even if you never end up in a pair of skinny jeans or in the safety zone of the BMI chart. It's known as Health At Every Size (HAES), and its principles are so radically simple that they can be difficult to grasp after a lifetime of trying to follow complicated plans full of rules, stages, calories, grams of fat, points, scales, and math. (Related: Try the Eat This, Not That! No-Diet Diet)  
The basic premise is that healthy behaviors can improve your life regardless of whether they result in weight loss. You abandon diets in favor of "intuitive eating," which means paying close attention to what you crave and how the foods you eat make you feel, as well as gradually learning to distinguish emotional hunger from the physical kind. For exercise, you identify any activity that provides enough fun that you don't need to force yourself to do it regularly. HAES also demands that you love and respect your body just as it is, whatever size it is right now. At its core, HAES is about stripping away rigid ideas about food and fitness.
For most doctors, it's still hard to believe health improvements are possible without weight loss. Wahida Karmally, DrPH, RD, director of nutrition at the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Columbia University Medical Center, points out:
"The research is very compelling that as your weight increases, your risk for several diseases increases also."  
Yet a growing body of evidence suggests the HAES camp may have it right. (Search: Diets that work) One study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health randomly assigned 78 women to either a HAES program or a conventional diet program. The HAES women were coached in adopting healthy food, activity, and lifestyle choices but were given no rigid rules or restrictions. They also participated in support groups, in which they dealt with issues regarding body acceptance and feelings that tied self-worth to their size. The women in the HAES program saw improvements (based on measures of blood pressure, cholesterol levels, activity levels, and depression) both at 6 months and at 2 years. The women in the dieting group lost weight and had improvements initially but went back to their old behaviors, weight, and blood measures within 2 years.
Troy, who lives in Thornton, CO, is a stalwart disciple. She calls herself a "roundy girl." ("I'm not curvy," she says. "I don't go in and out. I just go out!") Before coming to Green Mountain, she hated her body. A culinary school graduate, she worked for years in the food industry and then in the family business—a candy store. And for more than 2 decades, she was bulimic. "I opened those bags of candy, and I stuffed down my feelings of resentment," she says quietly. Purging never caused her to lose weight--it was more about ridding herself of bad feelings than unwanted pounds.
She knew that bulimia could weaken the heart muscle, erode tooth enamel, damage the esophagus, foster stomach ulcers, and burst blood vessels in the eyes. "But I convinced myself those things wouldn't happen to me," she says. "Then I went to the eye doctor, and the exam was taking a little longer than usual. Finally he said, 'The retina is slightly detaching.'" It was a direct result of her habitual vomiting. Her eyes fill with tears at the memory. "I thought, Oh my God, I did this to myself."
Troy realized at that moment something had to change. Her therapist suggested she try Green Mountain; she's now on her third visit since 2008. By following the HAES practices, she's lost about 40 pounds and slashed her cholesterol by more than 100 points, from 254 in 2008 to 152 at her most recent blood test. Her triglycerides have gone from 123 to 78. She says her body composition has shifted, with more muscle and less flab. Despite her weight loss, she's still considered morbidly obese. But her cholesterol is now in the normal range, and her blood sugar indicates she isn't diabetic. (Find out how to eat to beat diabetes.) Even more important, she no longer lives with a life-threatening eating disorder.

For Troy, shifting the focus from weight to health has been transformative. She's now training to be a fitness instructor, catering to other overweight and obese women—something unimaginable before she encountered HAES. "When you're focused on weight, your whole life is consumed—pardon the pun—by what food is good or bad and what food is allowed," she says.
After her last visit to Green Mountain, she went white-water rafting for the first time, and to celebrate her upcoming 50th birthday, she's planning a tandem skydive. "I intend to do all the things I was waiting until I was thin to do," she says.
Food is now something she enjoys instead of worries about. "I still love to cook," she says. "I just made a lasagna chock-full of veggies and ground turkey." She's learned that she feels the most energized for her adventures when she eats meals made up of about half fresh vegetables, so generally that's what she has. "The more I move and the better I feel, the more I want to move and feel even better," she says. "I want to make healthy meals for myself." This cycle of positive reinforcement is the opposite of the guilt-and-shame feedback loop created by years of failed diets.
Some experts believe that the negative effects of yo-yo dieting go beyond the physical and emotional tolls of being overweight or obese. According to Linda Bacon, PhD, associate nutritionist at the University of California, Davis, nutrition professor at City College of San Francisco, and author of Health at Every Size (the bible of the HAES movement), many studies suggest that yo-yo dieting itself increases the risk of high blood pressure, insulin resistance, and high blood cholesterol. Studies also show that a vast majority of dieting ends up being yo-yo dieting: Up to two-thirds of people who lose weight regain it within 1 year, and nearly all the rest regain it within 5 years. 
Though most women understand that dieting can be destructive, it's hard to give up the dream of getting thin. Even at Green Mountain, some clients continue to calculate calories and fixate on the scale, which the staff keeps under lock and key to discourage the obsession. Some have histories of eating disorders, and many have trouble learning to respond to real hunger cues as a signal to eat, which is among the most important skills you'll need to develop if you want the HAES approach to produce results. "Intuitive eating tunes you in to your body so you know when you're really hungry and when you've had enough," says Marsha Hudnall, RD, the program director at Green Mountain. And it's not all candy, ice cream, cheese, chips, and fries. "Some do end up eating more of those foods initially," Hudnall says. "But as you truly give yourself permission to eat what you want, you naturally gravitate to healthier choices."
Green Mountain's program does encourage women to eat more whole foods by showing them how satisfying and delicious these foods can be. Its kitchen turns out meals like walnut-pesto–encrusted Vermont-raised chicken with roasted butternut squash and arugula salad, lemon-soy grilled flank steak with garlicky mashed potatoes and lemony asparagus, and bean-and-veggie wraps with chipotle-cucumber salad and carrot bisque. There are cooking classes to teach women the skills that they need to make food like this when they return home.

Other classes help women uncover the emotional basis for many food cravings. Part of intuitive eating is realizing that sometimes you're hungry for things besides food, and there are ways other than eating to satisfy those needs. 

At the end of one water aerobics class, while the other women are still panting from exertion, Rachel Peterson, 48, bellows, "I am going down that slide! Who's with me?" She quickly cheerleads several into lining up behind her. One by one they hurtle down the twisting blue chute, screaming. Peterson, an international development consultant from Leverett, MA, slides again and again and shoots up out of the turquoise water with a whoop! She has reclaimed her childhood love of the water through this program. 

Before coming to Green Mountain, Peterson had been sedentary for years. 
"I didn't want those wonderful-looking gym-goers to see me jiggling," she says. When she arrived at Green Mountain at 170 pounds, her knees ached—another disincentive to working out. While there, she made the connection that fitness isn't just about treadmills, weight machines, and gyms—it can be the kinds of outdoor walks and swims she truly enjoys. Today, Peterson can't believe how much better she feels, both in her bones and in her spirit. "For the past few years, I didn't want to put on a bathing suit," she says. But here, in the pool, that self-consciousness and body shame have evaporated: "I feel like I'm six again."

Though she hasn't focused on weight loss, Peterson has dropped from a size 14 to a size 10 since her 4-week stay at Green Mountain earlier this year. She can't say how many pounds she's lost because, thanks to the HAES training she got there, she has ditched the scale. "I have a few more inches to go before I feel like I'm in my ideal body," she says. If she does shed more weight, it won't be through dieting.

Many doctors fear that though HAES has helped women such as Troy and Peterson make important health improvements and lifestyle changes, other participants will take the movement's love-yourself-as-you-are mentality to mean it's okay to eat a half gallon of ice cream in one sitting or limit workouts to lifting the TV remote.

"We can't allow the effort to improve people's self-image to interfere with efforts to combat a serious medical concern," says David L. Katz, MD, MPH, director of Yale University's Prevention Research Center and Prevention advisory board member. "I agree that not everybody can be an underwear model. But when 65% of American adults are overweight or obese, a landslide majority is failing."

However, a growing number of professionals believe that a paradigm shift is overdue. Deb Burgard, PhD, a San Francisco Bay area–based psychologist specializing in eating disorders, agrees that it's time to stop the single-minded focus on diets. "Studies show that 'even losing a little weight helps,' but I think it's the things you do that help—the physical activity and nutrition intervention, not the weight loss itself," she says.

Even the detractors concede that if the message is articulated clearly and followed in good faith, HAES has its place for those who are determined to hop off the diet treadmill. "If we can talk people into pursuing health, especially people who have given up on it, HAES can do a lot more good than harm," says Dr. Katz. "Besides, most people who truly focus on eating well and exercising will find that the weight eventually takes care of itself."


I think my favorite quote from the entire message above is:  "Besides, most people who truly focus on eating well and exercising will find that the weight eventually takes care of itself."  I do  believe this to be true, but I also know that for many of us, me included, if I am not "aware" of what I am eating and the amounts that I am eating, it would be easy to over eat, and that is what got me to my all time biggest weight to begin with.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Weekend In The Great Smokey Mountains


The view from the Pigeon Forge - Gatlinburg, TN Mountain By-Pass
Last weekend my husband and I finally got to take a few days away and escaped to the Great Smokey Mountains and Pigeon Forge, TN.  With great anticipation we packed our bags, dropped off our puppies at the groomers for boarding and picked up my parents to begin our three day weekend.  Our number one goal for the weekend was to enjoy the beauty of the mountains and to get some much needed rest and relaxation.

This weekend trip was long overdue and we had no expectations but very high hopes of having the time of our lives!
The weather had turned off cooler than normal and we were lucky to have grabbed our heavier jackets.  On the four hour drive into the mountains we enjoyed the beautiful fall foilage.  When we arrived at our condo in Pigeon Forge, TN we were pleasantly surprised to find a cozy double fire place
in the family room and spacious accommodations including a fully equipped kitchen and dining room. 

We enjoyed two fantastic shows, some really good deals in the shopping category and let's not forget the yummy food.  My favorite meal was at my all time favorite restaurant on the outskirts of Pigeon Forge in it's sister city, Sevierville, TN.  All the locals and visitors alike know and love this family owned restaurant where they serve up everything homemade, like apple fritters, apple butter, and so many other favorites.  What is the name of this place with all the fancy fixin's you ask?  The Apple Barn Farmhouse.  I enjoyed two piping hot apple fritters with smooth apple butter, a cup of vegetable soup, grilled pork loin, a few spoons of creamy potatoes, and green beans.  I did my best to count those calories, but to be quite honest it was a little hard because my favorite weight loss tool had no  listing for the apple fritters.  To try to describe them would be hard but just know they are about the same size as a Dunkin Donuts donut hole and simply melt in your mouth.

Me and my hubby at the famous
Apple Barn Farmhouse Restaurant
Resturant


It was nice to have the long break to relax and enjoy some good quality time with my husband and the best news was that when I got home and weighed the next morning I had not gained any weight from enjoying those two apple fritters!

I guess what I took away from the weekend more than anything was that I could have a great time, and enjoy foods that I love without over doing it. I am learning on my journey to a new me it is not necessarily what I eat but how much I eat that can cause me the most problems.  Because you know at the Apple Barn they just keep bringing them apple fritters out by the basket full and in my old days I would have happily kept emptying that basket into my belly.   But two were enough for me and I did not feel deprived in the least.  We are looking forward to our next trip and who knows maybe it will be sooner than you think.


Dinner at the Texas Roadhouse in Pigeon Forge, TN

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Checking In With My Doctor

Last Saturday I made a call into my doctors office to try to get into to see my doctor to have my blood drawn for my A1C rating. As a diabetic type II it is very important to know what your number is. My last reading was 6.2 and anything under 7 is great!

The nurse stated that my doctor was not in the office but I could make an appointment for next Tuesday when he was back in the office. Well today was the day. I arrived a few minutes after nine, signed in and paid my insurance co-pay and took a seat in the waiting area for them to call my name.

The nurst poked her head out the door and called my name. I rose and met her and she greeted me with a "How are you today"? I responded "I'm Great!" I am sure that she wondered why I was there if I was so great but it only took me a minute to explain to her that I was there for a check-up and to have my blood drawn for my A1C. She then asked me a strange question, she said "Would you like for me to weigh you"? Before thinking about it I replied very excitedly, "Yes, Please Do!" You should have seen her face. She smiled and said "We now have to ask our patients if they would like to be weighed or not, and the choice is theirs." I said, "Well I would like to be weighed on your scale because I began My Journey To A New Me almost eleven months ago and according to my scale I have now lost 93 pounds and I want to see if the results are the same on your scale."

She was so excited for me. I then slid off my shoes, and stepped onto the scale. In years past, before I had begun my journey to a new me, the worst part about going to the doctors office was the scale, but now the scale had become my friend. I wanted so desperately to verify and confirm that the past ten and a half months was not a dream or something and that I had lost 93 pounds. BINGO! The scale reading was an exact match to my scale at home. The results were in and I had accomplished 93 pounds of weight loss in less than eleven months!!!

The nurse then took my temperature and my blood pressure. This was going to be a real test because as a diabetic type II there are other deseases and illnesses that can be attributed to it and high blood pressure was one of them. Over the past 5 - 7 years I had been taking a very low dose of blood pressure medication to help me fight off the complications associated with diabetes type II. The first thing that I noticed, but did not comment about, was that she used the "regular" arm cuff to take my blood pressure. This had not happened in more than fifteen years! I did not say anything but when she did it I wondered if it was going to blow off my arm when she began to pump it up. But to my amazement nothing happened. It stayed securely in place on my upper left arm. But the most amazing part was what she said afterward. I asked her what was my blood pressure reading? She responded rather normally, "122 over 58."

I just looked at her with my mouth wide open. "Did you just say, 122 over 58?" and she responded, Yes why? And I preceded to explain to her that I had lost 93 pounds in ten and a half months and this doctor was responsible for helping me to see that I could do it without surgery and by controlling how much I ate. She began asking me how I was losing the weight and I explained to her my visit to the doctor on December 11, 2010 and that he started me on a weight loss plan of 1400 calories per day. I told her about my blog and gave her the information to check it out for herself.

Next I was taken to the an examination room to wait for my doctor to see me. After a short wait he walked in and saw me sitting there. I can honestly say he was pleasantly surprised by what he saw. He smiled the entire time he was talking to me. I told him about my journey and that I was well on my way to reaching my 100 pound weight loss goal in one year. He shared with me that he had been reading my blog and had on many occasions printed out various post and had given them to his other patients who wanted to also lose weight and become healthy. This was the greatest compliment that he could have given me. To think that my doctor would think that something that I was doing or saying could help his other patients made me so happy.

He looked over my chart, and decided to do a complete annual physical on me. He said in the next couple of days my blood work would be back and they would call me and also mail me the results but he was only expecting a good report. I then told him that about two months earlier I had taken myself off of all of my medications! I no longer took my diabetes Metformin or my low dosage blood pressure pill. I explained that I was eating healthy and exercising and that I was still testing my blood sugar every day or every other day and the numbers had been average or low and that when I would take my medication it would drop me down too low. He was okay with this and this was the first time since becoming a diabetic type II that I went to the doctor and did not have to get a prescription for medication!

The doctor checked and said that according to his records I had lost over 50 pounds since my last visit this past March. I told him that I wanted to make my 100 pound goal by December 11th and then continue to lose another 50 pounds in 2012. He said he was confident that I could do it!

I took away so much from this doctors visit. No longer was I uptight, nervous or apprehensive about the outcome of having my blood pressure taken, my weight measured, or my blood drawn. Again my doctor has spoken words of encouragement to me that would enable me to continue my journey to a new me with confidence. And one of the best parts of my visit was the realization that I had verification that I no longer needed my diabetes or blood pressure medication to live a healthy life. Today, I left with such peace of mind knowing that I was well on my way to being the most healthy person that I can be. I can't wait to get the final results of all the test back to have something in writing that puts the final seal of approval on all the hard work that I have put into the last ten and a half months. Today I got a great report, and I am looking forward to many more in the future.