Smart Bytes™
Feeling nutrition info overload? I will help you sort through to find what’s important to you. Read more. . .
Video Interview: The Blue Zones Recipe for a Long Life
If you were writing a recipe for a healthy lifestyle, what do you think the key ingredients would be? Dan Buettner traveled the world for National Geographic, exploring the people and places where healthy longevity is most common. Dan’s best-selling book, The Blue Zones, gives you his recipe for a healthy lifestyle based on what he found. When he was presenting the keynote address at a recent professional conference I was attending, Dan graciously agreed to an interview for me to share with all my blog readers. Here’s Part One of our conversation…
A Good Kind of Binge
You know that most binges – whether potato chips, booze or chocolate – lead to trouble and leave you no happier in the end. So what’s a good kind of binge? The kind I’ve been on for the last few days: what branding expert Teresa Pangan calls a Gratitude Binge. I was just honored with SCAN’s award for Excellence in Practice in Wellness Nutrition.
Receiving SCAN award for Excellence in Practice in Wellness Nutrition from Carol Lapin, MS, RD, CSSD
Receiving an honor like this from my peers, and listening to the heartwarming tribute given by Carol Lapin, MS, RD, CSSD, has been truly humbling. It’s an occasion for gratitude to the many people who have supported, taught and mentored me throughout my career and personal life. Continue reading
Does Smoking Cessation Mean Weight Gain?
What one change has prevented more than 795,000 cancer deaths in the U.S. between 1975 and 2000?
The National Cancer Institute has declared April as Cancer Control Month, so it’s a good time to remind ourselves of the obvious: tobacco avoidance saves lives. That good news about cancer deaths prevented compared to expectations based on prior statistics is due to a decline in smoking. The researchers’ calculations that quantified the cumulative impact of changes in smoking produced a bittersweet note: if all tobacco smoking had ceased, 1.7 million American lung cancer deaths that did occur during this time would have been avoided.
One obstacle: some people don’t quit because they’re afraid of gaining weight. That’s a valid concern, since modest weight gain is not unusual when someone quits smoking. However, weight gain is not universal. Reaching and maintaining a healthy weight is a key step in reducing risk of cancer. First things first, however: the multiple health benefits of getting away from tobacco outweigh the small gain that may occur, and researchers are studying what people might do to avoid or limit weight gain related to smoking cessation.
Here’s what research has uncovered so far. Please pass this along to smokers you know. Continue reading
Chocolate and Health: Looking past the headlines
A person could have whiplash following nutrition in the news recently. In less than one week’s time, hundreds of news stories and Twitter posts have been careening back and forth between discussion of a study linking chocolate with a healthier weight and a television broadcast linking sweets with a wide array of health problems.
- Chocolate: Forbidden fruit? Weight loss wonder?
Coupled with reports from presentations at a major cancer research conference reminding us that weight control is one of the most important steps we can take to reduce our cancer risk, you may be wondering what on earth to make of all this.
Is chocolate a help or a hindrance to health? Does it really pose no barrier to a healthy weight? For me, the answers lie in the study details that you don’t get from looking only at the headlines. Continue reading
Nutrition Distraction Disorder: Fight it with Sloppy Success
Nutrition Distraction Disorder: If it were a real diagnosable condition, a lot of people would have it. Do you? Whether I’m at a speaking engagement or simply watching the headlines, I’ve noticed lately how many people are dipping a toe in the pool of a healthier lifestyle, and then jumping out and running to something else. They never stick with a change long enough to feel the benefits, and are frazzled from trying to keep up with the latest “sure-fire” nutrition strategy.
On a conference call recently, my valued colleague Bridget Swinney, MS, RD shared one of the take-home messages from a writers’ conference she recently attended: “Sloppy Success is better than Perfect Procrastination.” That may have been said regarding writing, but I think it’s relevant to much more. Let’s look at how some imperfect changes to your eating habits and lifestyle might be the answer to replace “Nutrition Distraction Disorder”. Continue reading
Drainers & Fillers
How often do you get to the end of a day and feel totally spent….as if your inner “well” has run completely dry?
Drainers & Fillers out of balance make it hard to live a healthy lifestyle
Many kind and wonderful clients over the years have described feeling that way often. They came to me seeking help in addressing a weight or health problem. Yet as we talked, it didn’t take long to see that they were involved in a chicken-or-the-egg scenario: They weren’t eating well or exercising because they were burned out, lacking the time and physical or mental energy to do so. And because they pushed so hard in life without taking care of themselves, they became more and more zapped of energy.
What I learned in working with these clients is that we probably all benefit from stopping now and then to look at the balance in our lives of Drainers and Fillers.
Nuances in weight control: Are you flexible or rigid (in mindset)?
Our mindset plays a huge role in eating behavior and weight. If we don’t tune in to body hunger signals and make what we eat a conscious choice, today’s 24/7 availability of large portions of high-calorie food makes weight control very challenging for most of us. Yet when we impose on ourselves rigid rules about what and how much we can eat, benefits are often short-lived. Studies show that women, especially, tend to rebound, overeating on the “forbidden fruit” and gaining back more weight than they lost. For some, this can begin a pattern that leads down a disastrous road.
Everyday eating impulses, not special occasions, as biggest culprit
Two studies of weight gain and loss in middle-aged women provide examples of conclusions reached by a growing body of research on eating behavior and psychology. In both studies, unplanned overeating in response to various circumstances and the way in which people tried to control it were strongly linked to weight changes.