Health 24 City Center

Avoid the Winter Weight Gain

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:50:28 +0000

When the mercury starts to drop outside, many of us move ourselves inside to where it’s warm. Early morning exercise sessions are replaced with more time under the sheets and Saturday nights out with friends are instead spent curled up in front of the heater and telly. It’s not until we go to strut our stuff at the beach in summer that we realise the damage to our shape these winter wonders have caused. But the good news is this doesn’t have to happen to you this winter. Simply follow my tips to avoiding the winter weight gain:

1. Keep moving: Kill two birds with the one stone by warming yourself up while you get your daily exercise. Make sure you fit in an hour, particularly if you spend most of the day sitting down at a desk. I’ve found that registering for a sporting event that requires training such as a fun run or long ride or regularly training with a friend are both great ways to help you stick to your winter training schedule.

2. Wear tight clothes: How uncomfortable is it wearing your skinny jeans with a little bit of extra weight on your hips or around your waist? Use your tight clothes as motivation to keep the kilos off in winter and wear them once a week. Avoid lazing about in loose trackie pants all the time.

3. Fill up with vegetables: Steamed vegetables or vegetable soup are both fantastic choices for filling up on during the cooler months. They will keep you feeling fuller for longer, without the need to consume large amounts of unnecessary kilojoules.

4. Track it: Tracking the food and drink you consume is a great way of creating awareness and accountability for what you’re putting in to your mouth. My clients who keep a food record are more successful in their weight loss attempts than others who aren’t motivated to record. Which makes sense seeing the research says people who keep food diaries lose twice as much weight as those who don’t write it down. If you’d prefer an electronic version of recording an iPhone app such as “Lose it” is also fantastic for tracking your daily intake and setting yourself goals. Whichever your preferred method, just make sure you keep tabs and you’ll be more likely to succeed with weight and fitness management.

5. Don’t get too cocky: Being confident in your ability to resist temptations is not always a good thing. New research published in Psychological Science found that people who felt most confident in their self-control were in fact most likely to give into temptation as they were more likely to expose themselves to more indulgent food situations. Avoid keeping too many tempting foods in the house, and if you do make sure you buy the portion-controlled variety and keep them in a difficult to access place.

6. Make it one or the other: Plan your indulgences ahead of time so that you avoid eating unnecessarily. If you’re like me and occasionally enjoy your red wine with dark chocolate, make a choice and enjoy one or the other. Then, eat perfectly for the rest of the day.

The Ultimate in Healthy Eating: Eating Uncooked Fruits and Vegetables

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:48:11 +0000

When asked what eating healthy means, people come up with different ideas. For some, it could just be staying away from fried food or cutting out the fat. For others, it could mean going vegetarian. However, what I’ve observed over the years of looking for the perfect diet is that people need time to transition to a healthier lifestyle. People who quit cold turkey (literally and figuratively) sometimes end up feeling so deprived that they quickly abandon their healthy lifestyle, writing it off as another fad diet, never to be tried again.

I recently attended a seminar on raw food preparation and what I saw there made me realize that transitioning to the ultimate in healthy eating – eating raw fruits and veggies – is easier than it seems. As a matter of fact, the food they prepared in that seminar was so good that I didn’t get the feeling that I was sacrificing taste and presentation for the sake of good health. Imagine eating pasta, burgers, cake, and chocolate – all vegan – and you can see that eating healthy need not ever mean eating tasteless food.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the stuff we ate over the weekend:

Regular fettucine would, of course, require wheat pasta and heavy cream. It’s a dieter’s nightmare – being high on fat and carbs. But this one is not. The noodles were made from uncooked vegetables, and the cream was made from cashew nuts. There is nothing in this dish that will give you a heart attack.

The fast food variety of burgers would naturally come with grease, charred protein which is cancerous, fat, and the antibiotics that were given to the cows. Who would have thought that you could actually make burger patties from dehydrated vegetables? This one was served with teriyaki sauce made from Bragg’s liquid aminos and raw honey from Palawan.

Desserts, anyone?

Diabetics think they’re doomed for life, but cakes and chocolates made from things like nuts, extra virgin coconut oil, raw cacao powder, and fruits could never harm anyone. (The desserts were made by Asha who runs a school where the kids are given a steady diet of nutritious food.)

Raw Food (Uncooked, Not heated above normal body temperature)

Cooking destroys the enzymes that are naturally found in fruits and vegetables. Most people think that veggies are just for fiber, but apparently, more than the fiber itself, what makes them good are the live enzymes. The seminar entitled “I Love it Raw” which is conducted by Daniw, usually in Bahay Kalipay in Palawan, was run in Greenhills so that made it easy for city dwellers like me to get a taste of Bahay Kalipay’s unique dishes.

The first thing that comes to mind when people hear “raw fruits and veggies” is a salad. But eating nothing but salads can get boring very quickly. I was therefore surprised when Daniw taught us how to make salads that looked like Japanese food.

Vegetables wrapped in nori sheets

Vegetables (and mango slices) wrapped in raw cucumber and drizzled with a creamy cashew-based sauce that tasted just like cheese

Veggies wrapped in lettuce

Miso soup with mushrooms

After tasting all of these, I see now that salads can be made to look more interesting. But considering that all of the recipes used raw veggies and fruits, virtually everything in here can be called a salad.

This is what we had for breakfast on Day 2 of the seminar: raw bananas, banana chews (bananas drizzled with coconut oil & cacao and placed in a dehydrator overnight), and papaya on top of banana pancakes, drizzled with coconut cream. Looks good, doesn’t it? It tasted even better than it looked.

Daniw shows the class how to make all-veggie lasagna (without wheat pasta)

And for people who must have rice and ulam, Daniw had the perfect solution:

Instead of beef with broccoli, how about mushrooms with broccoli?

Daniw shows the class how to make rice from turnips

And a salad on the side.

Green Smoothies, your own liquid sunshine!

Plants have the unique ability to harness the sun’s energy and turn it into food, and we know this from our biology class as photosynthesis. In a way, chlorophyll is liquid sunshine. Imagine taking in more quantities of this on a daily basis! Plant cells though are wrapped in tough cellulose, and you’d have to chew endlessly to get inside them. But thank God for blenders, we can just liquefy greens and drink them in the form of really delicious and refreshing smoothies.

These are the stuff that go into the blender. You’d be surprised – they don’t taste like greens. The smoothies taste more like fruit shakes.

Jessica lets the blender do the work of releasing the phytonutrients.

To know more about the benefits of making green smoothies, check out http://www.rawfamily.com/green-smoothie

And for posterity, this is our class picture. Judging from the smiles, the stuff we made tasted good!

If you would like to join Daniw’s “I Love it Raw” seminar in the future, email her at iamdaniw@gmail.com

Understanding of Concepts: Healthy Lifestyle and Successful Aging

anis — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:59:13 +0000

Changes in the growth and development in the world of demographic, age underscores the growing population, with an age of impending human presence, and this, coupled with the epidemic of obesity and the increasing emergence of chronic degenerative diseases, invites us to prevention and introduction of new practices in health care, designed to reflect a healthy lifestyle for loads of Successful Aging.

Will remain as a Successful aging ability, with a low risk of disease, with a high level of physical activity and mental uno, uno Highly regarded committed by the life of interpersonal caring relationships. First, this paradigm suggests that the function of the fears of loss superestimados SPESSO, secondly, that can be verified loss of function of many of the time can be avoided in the course, and thirdly, functional losses that many older adults can be restored. In this sense, success depends alternative actions on prevention and health promotion, especially as the misery of old age and physical deterioration associated intellectual is, under our control. The losses are, with this paradigm by factors such as lifestyle, diet, exercises. All “feasible control and changes” connected. Successful aging è then a matter of individual choice to be. get more information of Understanding of concepts: Healthy Lifestyle and Successful Aging in healthy and successful aging