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Carbs: The Good, the Bad, and the Debatable

Monday, January 30, 2012

From Fooducate Bloggood carbs?

A recent article in the Chicago Tribune, Good Carb, Bad Carb, caught our eye because of its title “Good Carbs, Bad Carbs”. Carbohydrates, to remind you are one of the three macronutrients making up almost all foods, alongside with fat and protein. Over the years both fats and carbs have been vilified and exonerated, to the point where it seems today there is no agreement in the scientific community on their health benefits.

So what are we to do with all this confusing information?

What you need to know:

The truth is that the majority of nutrition researchers today agree that fats as a group are not bad, only certain types are. And the same goes for carbs. While highly refined carbs such as sugars and enriched flours are “bad carbs”, there are certainly entire groups of good carbs, mostly fruits and non-starchy vegetables.

According to Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health,  there are 4 factors that determine if a carb is good or bad:

1. Dietary fiber (more is better)

2. Effect on blood sugar rise , also known as glycemic index (the slower the better)

3. Whole grain content, where relevant (more is better)

4. Carb structure (intact is better than liquid, milled, or pulverized)

So for example, soft drinks are bad because they contain no fiber, they spike blood sugar, and they are simple carbs in liquid form. A tomato, on the other hand, has fiber, low glycemic index, and is a complex carb in its natural state.

So now everything is clear, right?

Not so fast. Some carbs are still undecided because they may be good in some of the 4 criteria but bad in others.

The debatable carbs are:

  • Corn
  • Popcorn
  • White potatoes
  • Pasta
  • 100% fruit juice (limited quantities)

Take potatoes for example. Not in their french fried mode, but baked in the oven. They are a very cheap and good source of nutrients, including fiber. But they have a high glycemic index despite their carb structure which is why they are hotly argued. Interestingly enough, sweet potatoes don’t spike blood sugar as much as white potatoes, despite their name.

What to do at the supermarket:

1. Spend more money in the produce aisles than in the processed food aisles.

2. Buy whole grains and whole grain products (brown rice, 100% whole wheat bread, etc..)

3. When reading nutrition labels, do the carb ratio test: The total carbs to fiber ratio should range from 10 : 1 to  5 : 1 . That means around 10-20% of the carbs are fiber.

4. Some surprising sources for good carbs are beans and lentils (usually considered for their protein). Another reason to eat more…

4 Steps to Lasting Behavioral Change

Wednesday, January 25, 2012
  • Observing your own actions and their effects -- In the observation stage, the core skills are self-awareness and self-monitoring. 
  • Analyzing what you observe -- In the analysis stage, the core skill is critical thinking about yourself and your behavior. 
  • Strategizing an action plan -- In the strategy stage, the core skill is creative thinking. 
  • Taking action -- In the action stage, the core skill is process thinking, an often-neglected aspect of effective problem solving.

One good way to begin working on all these skills is by keeping a certain kind of journal, where you focus on simply observing your own reactions to, and the results you get from, different behaviors and strategies. The Before-During-After Journal, offers some suggestions on how to go about doing this.


How do you know if you are full when you eat so fast...

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Eating slowly is not only a good trick for weight loss, but it's also a way to savor your food, rather than just scarf it down. It's a good practice in mindfulness, can ease digestion, and could even be a personal statement against fast food culture. Eating slowly is however a habit that needs to be acquired and practiced, not a simple decision.

1.    Set aside time to eat. For many of us, eating is just a means to an end, to be over with as quickly and as conveniently as possible. It's not uncommon to multitask, eating while we talk, watch TV, do homework, and even drive. So designate a block of time to eat, and only eat. Avoid Multi-Tasking.

2.    Opt for meals with a variety of flavors and textures. Think of how easy it is to gorge yourself on a bowl of something homogeneous, like macaroni and cheese. A dish with variety, however, will be a little different in every bite. Example: Make Linguine with Clams and Tomatoes
Note that such dishes will be more expensive to buy, because they're more time-consuming to make, and it costs more to use a variety of ingredients. You can save money by making them yourself, or use the price tag as motivation to thoroughly, and slowly, enjoy what you paid for.

3.    Use smaller utensils. The less you can fit onto your fork and spoon, the slower you'll eat. Look for utensils that are designed for children. Or if you really want to ease your pace, eat with chopsticks!

4.    Put down your utensils between bites.  This will help to break the habit of stuffing a new chunk of food in your mouth shortly after swallowing the last one.

5.    Set a minimum number of chews for every bite; ancient, but nonetheless still wise advice. Start with a low number like 10, and over time work your way up to 20 or more. This slows you down, helps ease digestion, and even sets you up for the next step...

6.    Deliberately taste your food.  Make a conscious effort to pay attention to flavors and textures. You might even want to keep a journal. The more descriptive you are the better. Take an approach similar to what's described in How to Taste Wine and How to Taste Dark Chocolate. You'll probably find that you begin to appreciate well-prepared (and well-grown) food in ways you never would have otherwise!

Creating Healthy Habits - Dream It, Dance It, Do It!

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Creating Healthy Habits combines the joy of movement with cognitive work and emotional support to help us make healthy lifestyle changes.  The class employs a simple three-step process I call DREAM IT – DANCE IT – DO IT!
Dream it!
Imagination: The first step in making a change is visualizing where you would like to be.  We all have ideas about changes we could make to enhance health and wellbeing.  Maybe it’s sticking to our commitment to exercise regularly or practicing daily meditation.  Perhaps it’s a dietary change, such as reducing sugar consumption.  Letting go of an old habit that no longer serves us could also be a healthy change.  The first step is to dream it.
Dance it!
Dance can help transition ideas about what we would like to see from the mental realm into the physical.  (Kind of like labor, only way more fun!) The physical act of the dance gets us out of our heads and into our bodies, while the tone or energy of the music shifts our emotional state. By moving us physically, mentally, and emotionally, dance facilitates the release of stuck energy.  Nia class leaves participants feeling relaxed and energized.  You do not need to ‘be a dancer’ to participate, the class is easy to follow and you will discover your own dance as you continue.  Moving toward our goals together with focus and intention brings ease to the process.
Do it!
Sometimes we need a little extra support to make changes.  The class helps provide accountability for living our dreams.  We delve deeper into our own motivation and inspiration through the use of visualization, journaling, and other cognitive exercises. We learn from each other about strategies that have worked, and we’re buoyed on the journey by our own private cheerleading section.

If you are interested in participating in Creating Healthy Habits, we will meet on Sunday mornings starting January 8th.  The Dance it! part of the group takes place in the Nia class at 11:30am.  Creating Healthy Habits follows at 12:40pm for one hour.  Please email Leela at leeladevidancing@gmail.com, or call (541) 752-1784 to reserve a space.  The Nia class is free to TAC members and the Creating Healthy Habits part is $40.00 for the eight week session.  Would you like to share this experience with a friend who is not a TAC member?  The first Nia class on January 8 is free to nonmembers, with a special price of $40.00 for the rest of the session (seven more classes).  Creating Healthy Habits class is $50.00 for nonmembers of TAC.

Twelve resolutions for real health improvement

Friday, December 30, 2011

By Dr. James Beckerman, M.D.Providence St. Vincent Heart Clinic – Cardiology, part of Providence Heart and Vascular Institute

Forget crash diets, miracle supplements and infomercial exercise gizmos. If you are tired of feeling tired, sick of getting sick and over being overweight, here are 12 New Year’s resolutions that will help you make real, lasting improvements in your health.

I’m not suggesting that you tackle all 12 at once – on the contrary, you’ll have a lot more success if you take them one at a time. So make just one resolution in January and keep it. Once you’ve achieved that singular success, make another resolution in February and keep that one, too. Repeat in the following months until this time next year, when you’ll be able to look back on a series of accomplishments that have changed your health and life for the better.

1.    Find out where your starting line is.
You can’t run a race if you don’t know where the starting line is. Before you start making resolutions, make an appointment with your doctor to take stock of your current health status. Find out what your numbers are for blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, weight and body mass index, and get up-to-date on your screenings and immunizations.

2.    Live tobacco-free.
If you smoke, quit. It’s the single most important thing you can do to improve your health and to protect your family from secondhand smoke. A new study estimates that secondhand smoke kills more than 600,000 people worldwide every year, including 165,000 children. If you’ve tried to quit before, try again – most people try a few times before they succeed.

3.    Get up and March.
Walk, jump rope, dance, swim, ride a bike, kick box, play volleyball or engage in some other fun form of physical activity for a total of 30 minutes a day. Physical activity helps you maintain a healthy weight, lift your mood, reduce joint pain, sleep better, lower your risk of illness and diseases and feel great.

4.    Sleep at least seven hours every night. 
A good night’s sleep is crucial to heart health, energy, mental clarity and overall well-being. If you’re not getting enough sleep, or if you wake up every morning feeling exhausted, talk to your doctor about how to improve your sleep habits.

5.    Eat breakfast every morning.
People who eat a healthy, well-balanced breakfast every morning tend to eat less throughout the day, and weigh less as a result. Start every day with some high-fiber grains, a little protein and a piece of fresh fruit.

6.    Replace refined foods with whole foods. 
Most of us don’t get nearly enough fiber in our diets. Increase your vitamin, mineral and fiber intake by doing an inventory of your pantry. Replace most of the white foods (bread and bagels, pasta, rice, flour and sugary cereals) with healthier, high-fiber brown foods (whole-grain breads and bagels, whole-wheat or quinoa pasta, brown rice, whole-wheat pastry flour, oatmeal and high-fiber/low-sugar cereals).

7.    Eat a salad every day.
According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, fruits and vegetables should make up about half of what we eat, every time we eat. One easy way to increase the fruits and veggies in your diet is to make a vow to eat a salad every day. Don’t like salads? You haven’t tried hard enough. There are dozens of fruits and vegetables out there that can be combined in thousands of delicious ways. Go online and search for recipes that incorporate your favorite fresh ingredients.

8.    Make water your main beverage.
Sodas, coffee drinks, milkshakes, juices, energy drinks and cocktails account for about 21 percent of the average American’s total calories consumed each day. That’s too much, especially if you’re not cutting back on food to compensate for the added liquid calories. To keep your weight in check, cut back liquid calories to no more than 10 percent of your total daily calories, and stick with water (not diet drinks, which can increase sugar cravings) as your main drink.

9.    Walk, lift and stretch.
A balanced exercise program should include three types of activity: aerobic exercise (for heart health), weight training (for strong bones and muscles) and stretching (for flexibility and balance). If you’re doing well in only one of these areas, start working on adding the others to your weekly routine.

10. Pick better proteins.
Choose lean proteins – such as fish, chicken, turkey and beans – most of the time. Make fattier proteins – such as steaks and pork chops – a “once in a while” choice. And minimize processed meats, such as packaged deli meats, hot dogs, salamis and sausages. Look at the size of the protein portion on your plate, too – it shouldn’t take up more than a third of your meal. The rest should be vegetables, grains and other plant foods.

11. Use a smaller plate.
If your plates measure larger than nine inches across, and you’re filling them up at meals, you’re probably eating more than your body needs. Using a smaller plate is a great way to keep portions in check. There are lots of other things you can do to remind yourself to make better choices – I’ll share more ideas in future issues.

12. Manage your stress.
Stress is not only unpleasant in general – it can affect your health in all kinds of negative ways, from disrupting sleep to making you more susceptible to illness. If stress is affecting your health and happiness, make a concerted effort to relieve stress by exercising, spending time with people you love, spending relaxing time alone and adding more laughter to your life.

Six key steps to making change that lasts

Monday, December 26, 2011

1. Be Highly Precise and Specific. Imagine a typical New Year's resolution to "exercise regularly." It's a prescription for failure. You have a vastly higher chance for success if you decide in advance the days and times, and precisely what you're going to do on each of them.

Say instead that you commit to do a cardiovascular class (like Cycling) on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m., for 45 minutes. If something beyond your control forces you to miss one of those days, you automatically default to doing that workout instead on Saturday at 9:15 a.m.

Researchers call those "implementation intentions" and they dramatically increase your odds of success.

2. Take on one new challenge at a time. Over the years, I've established a broad range of routines and practices, ranging from ones for weight training and running, to doing the most important thing first every morning without interruption for 90 minutes. In each case, I gave the new practice I was launching my sole focus. Even then, in some cases, it's taken several tries before I was able to stay at the behavior long enough for it to become essentially automatic.

Computers can run several programs simultaneously. Human beings operate best when we take on one thing at a time, sequentially. 

3. Not too much, not too little. The most obvious mistake we make when we try to change something in our lives is that we bite off more than we can chew. Imagine that after doing no exercise at all for the past year, for example, you get inspired and launch a regimen of jogging for 30 minutes, five days a week. Chances are high that you'll find exercising that much so painful you'll quit after a few sessions.

It's also easy to go to the other extreme, and take on too little. So you launch a 10-minute walk at lunchtime three days a week and stay at it. The problem is that you don't feel any better for it after several weeks, and your motivation fades.

The only way to truly grow is to challenge your current comfort zone. The trick is finding a middle ground — pushing yourself hard enough that you get some real gain, but not too much that you find yourself unwilling to stay at it.

4. What we resist persists.

Think about sitting in front of a plate of fragrant chocolate chip cookies over an extended period of time. Diets fail the vast majority of time because they're typically built around regularly resisting food we enjoy eating. Eventually, we run up against our limited reservoir of self-control.

The same is true of trying to ignore the Pavlovian ping of incoming emails while you're working on an important project that deserves your full attention.

The only reasonable answer is to avoid the temptation. With email, the more effective practice is turn it off entirely at designated times, and then answer it in chunks at others. For dieters, it's to keep food you don't want to eat out of sight, and focus your diet instead on what you are going to eat, at which times, and in what portion sizes. The less you have to think about what to do when it is time to eat, the more successful you're likely to be.

5. Competing Commitments.

We all derive a sense of comfort and safety from doing what we've always done, even if it isn't ultimately serving us well. Researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this "immunity to change." Even the most passionate commitment to change, they've shown, is invariably counterbalanced by an equally powerful but often unseen "competing" commitment not to change.

Here's a very simple way to surface your competing commitment. Think about a change you really want to make. Now ask yourself what you're currently doing or not doing to undermine that primary commitment. If you are trying to get more focused on important priorities, for example, your competing commitment might be the desire to be highly responsive and available to those emailing you.

For any change effort you launch, it's key to surface your competing commitment and then ask yourself "How can I design this practice so I get the desired benefits but also minimize the costs I fear it will prompt?"

6. Keep the faith.

Change is hard. It is painful. And you will experience failure at times. The average person launches a change effort six separate times before it finally takes. But follow the steps above, and I can tell you from my own experience and that of thousands of clients that you will succeed, and probably without multiple failures.

What do you do to motivate yourself?

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The secret to staying consistent with your goals is to stay motivated. Makes sense doesn't it? That means finding ways to fire yourself up on a daily basis:  being inspired at a seminar, reading a book, or while talking to a dynamic speaker is easy. But what happens when you're on your own? To follow through on that burst of motivation and reach the finish line, you need regular booster shots. Give yourself those little positive reminders that you have an important job to do and a good reason for doing it. What's pushing you? Surround yourself with visual, verbal, and physical "pep talks" that trigger that motive. It doesn't take long for dust to gather on your momentum, making your goals turn stale. A daily dose of motivation kicks off the dust before it can settle and gives you a fresh, clean start.

Read the previous Blog about writing and affirmation - http://timberhillac.com/_blog/TAC_Blog/post/Reach_Your_Fitness_Goals_Part_2/ 

Give stress the boot for 2012

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

By Dr. James Beckerman, M.D., Providence St. Vincent Heart Clinic - Cardiology, part of Providence Heart and Vascular Institute

Much has been written about the harmful effects of stress on the heart, the immune system, the digestive system, the reproductive system, the lungs, the muscles – even the skin. But if you ask me, the most devastating effect is the toll that stress takes on your mood and quality of life. Stress darkens the lens through which you view the world, which is the most important determinant of what makes you happy as a person.

Around the holidays, especially, you want that lens to be as merry and bright as possible. Even people who have normal stress levels most of the year can feel their spirits start to dim under the added stress of family responsibilities, financial challenges, dietary temptations, time management issues and the generally excessive expectations of what it takes to create a happy holiday. Managing your stress level at this time of year is an important goal, and it's the focus of our final resolution of the year.

Here are some effective tips to help you keep stress under wraps this holiday season. 

Avoid your stress triggers

The first step toward a less-stressful holiday is to understand what triggers your stress, and to develop strategies ahead of time to avoid those triggers. Does the financial strain of holiday expenses stress you out? Create a realistic budget and challenge yourself to get creative about sticking to it. Is the prospect of holiday weight gain stressful? Stock up on veggies and nonfat yogurt dips to snack on before stepping out, or to bring to the party. Do family gatherings often turn into confrontations? Find your Zen zone and change the subject around people who push your buttons. Are you stressed about too much to do and too little time? Get better at saying "no."




Practice your coping strategies

When you start to feel the signs of stress building up – the racing heart, the tension headache, the short temper, the gurgling gut or disrupted sleep – find a healthy way to blow off steam. Different things work for different people: some find it calming to take a walk, some write in a journal, and others practice forms of meditation and relaxation. Here are a few techniques to try:


Meaningful changes

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Remembering the good times, learning from the bad

Memory can be used for good or for evil. If you use your past as a source of learning, it's worth remembering. If, however, all you do is mull over your mistakes and punish yourself for your failures, it's a waste of time. Rehashing failure can paralyze you in mortal fear of making another mistake, which, of course, just makes the feeling worse and practically guarantees future letdowns. The key to making meaningful changes is to pay more attention to the future than to the past. Have you ever noticed that the best athletes also have the shortest and most selective memories? Instead of dwelling on a missed shot or a flawed dive, they concentrate on making corrections and getting the next one right. It's as if the failed attempt never happened. It's forgotten and they don't fear trying again. If you mess up, even in an epic, life-altering way, work hard to leave it behind and concentrate on the possibilities yet to come. Tomorrow is much brighter when it's not smeared with a fixation on yesterday.

Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch, and the more they recur automatically

Nia goes Bollywood

Monday, December 05, 2011


Check out this video

7:00pm Dec 6 & 8!

Join Leela this Tuesday and Thursday during the regular NIA class time for a special Bollywood Class.  Video pre-view above.

Bollywood dancing is derived from Classical forms of Indian dance such as Bharat Natyam, Kathak, and Odissi hence the use of facial expressions and emoting the lyrics of the song.  Today it also incorporates a mixture of Western and other Eastern influences. These influences include Hip-hop, African/ Tribal, Salsa, Bellydance, Ballet, Modern/ Contemporary, and Jazz.  Thus, as this exhilarating and beautiful world of Bollywood dance is gaining interest across the globe - you’ll too find that Bollywood dance is fun and energetic, as well as an excellent aerobic exercise. People of all ages, shapes, sizes, and fitness levels are welcome— join us and get prepared to have fun, shake your shoulders and swing your hips to this contagious fusion style of dance!

 



 
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