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Healthier food choices
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A daily regimen combining exercise and good nutrition will help you live longer, happier, and keep your body lean. I am always happy to provide tips on getting a few extra minutes of exercise into one's day, but I recently chatted with Debi Silber, MS, RD, WHC and got her take on how to make healthier food choices. This is what she had to say:
Some tips on making healthier food choices:
· When food shopping, shop the perimeter. The healthiest choices are found on the outer aisles as opposed to the inner aisles. Shop for fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meats, low fat/sugar soy products and low fat dairy. Fill in the inner aisles with high fiber whole grains, beans, frozen vegetables, nuts and leave just a little room for portion controlled snacks and sweets.
· When eating out, look for words like broiled, steamed, grilled, barbequed and poached versus fried, creamy, cheesy, sautéed and loaded!
· When reading labels, look for ingredients you’d either cook with, find in your favorite cook book or at least, ingredients you can pronounce. When something is added to extend the shelf life, make it more colorful or attractive, what does that do once it’s inside you?
Tips to curb portion distortion:
· Order an appetizer portion with a salad (dressing on the side)
· Have portion controlled snacks/desserts. When reaching into a bag or a box, we often continue until it’s gone. Either pre-portion ahead of time where you take snack sized baggies and if the bag says 10 servings for the bag, create 10 servings in baggies. When reaching into the bag, you take 1 portion instead of reaching in endlessly.
· Eat on a smaller plate. We want to see a full plate so just by eating on a lunch plate versus a dinner plate can spare us an enormous amount of excess calories.
· Share an entrée, take home half, eat a light snack before going out so your judgment is in tact and you make better choices.
Tips to become more mindful:
· Limit distractions when eating. Focus on the flavor, texture, aroma of your food. You’ll take in much less and enjoy what you’re eating.
· Become aware if you’re eating as you prepare food for others, while passing food to someone, walking by someone’s desk at work, when watching TV, etc. The more aware you are of what you’re doing, the more you can create a strategy to end “mindless munching.”
· Once you’re aware of when you’re mindlessly eating, put your strategy in place. If you find you’re eating when giving the kids a snack after school, you can chew gum, put on a coat of nail polish, brush your teeth (so you don’t want to ruin that minty taste), put on a strip of tooth whitener (you can’t eat for 30 minutes when they’re on) or wear rubber kitchen gloves! Once you’ve identified where the trouble is, these tricks are things to do which are incompatible to eating.
