Posted by Melanie Beach on January 19, 2012 under Balanced Eating, Healthy Living, Making choices, Nutrition
Each new year brings people to well-intentioned resolutions to eat better, lose weight, get more active, cleanse and more. These resolutions can keep us motivated for weeks, but many are tossed by the wayside within days or even hours. How many of us have joined a gym in January and worked out regularly for a week or two, then don’t make it back for months? Or promise ourselves to stop eating our favorite junk foods only to gorge on them a few days later? Making these sorts of resolutions can be very motivating for a while, but they’re often too big or restrictive to be true goals for lasting change.
This year, how about resolving to eat more healthfully, so that you can nourish your body and life and not just feed it?
This concept of nourishing vs. feeding popped up recently when the U.S. Congress debated whether or not the nutritional content of tomato paste counts as a serving of vegetable. Sure, on paper the nutritional content of 1/8 cup of tomato paste seems to be equal to the content of a whole piece (1 cup) of fruit; but does that mean that eating foods that contain tomato paste are more healthful than an apple or orange?
Not necessarily.
Many times we think of foods only by the numbers – how many calories, how many grams of fat, how much fiber, or how much sugar they contain – without really looking at the deeper nutritional value of the food. Instead of focusing purely on the numbers, maybe it’s time that we take a look at the whole food. Is pizza a healthful choice just because it has tomato paste on it?
Probably not.
Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture has recognized this distinction by changing the focus of their nutrition guide from MyPyramid – with its confusing charts of numbers of servings, cups and ounces – to the more streamlined MyPlate, with its focus instead on the proportions of foods on your plate at each meal. This draws the focus away from counting servings of food and brings it to – How balanced is this meal? Am I eating too much starch? Not enough protein?
Nourishing meals are foundational to health and wellness.
My thought is that good nutrition doesn’t come from meticulously counting numbers all day. It comes from making healthful, nutrient-rich choices on a daily basis that work together to nourish your mind and body. It’s a much more holistic and humane way to care for yourself and those you love. I think it’s time for us to forget those typical stringent New Year’s resolutions and instead resolve to do our best to nourish our lives by eating smarter. Nourishing choices do more than fill your belly, they help you build the body and life you want – one plate, movement and day at a time.
Posted by Joe Wheeler on November 30, 2011 under Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Making choices
Life goes on for us day to day. We get caught up in work, family, friends and another year flows by like water. As time passes we assume our health will be there until one day – an emergency. At iBeamforLife we know the vast majority of chronic health issues are due to lifestyle choices – not genetics. A fair portion of our clients confront health that breaks down after years of neglect.
This is a complex form of self abuse that’s sadly synonymous with American culture and no-one is to blame, yet as adults we are all responsible for making choices about self care each day. If we don’t make the choices that embrace prevention in an effective way – someone else will, often at a hospital during a stressful emergency situation and at a cost much higher than simpler preventive methods. That’s why a periodic reality check-up is so important. The private client stories we regularly hear are poignant, frightening, filled with drama and sadly – preventable.
Can you see yourself or someone you love in what follows?
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Posted by Lynn Polmanteer on November 7, 2011 under Balanced Eating, Fitness, Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Making choices, Nutrition
We all have different holiday traditions. I’ll bet that despite any differences your traditions, like mine growing up, were centered on cooking and eating. As a teen, after seeing my Grandmother’s challenges with Type 2 Diabetes, I became an MS, RD, CDN, CDE – ultimately specializing in patients with diabetes at the Friedman Diabetes Institute. That alphabet of acronyms that usually follows my name these days simply means that I know a lot about diabetes and can help you, with diabetes or not, to ride the holiday train and navigate those fast-approaching plates of food, healthfully.
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Posted by Caitlin Quinn on October 5, 2011 under Making choices, Nutrition
Increase your Energy!
Improve your Memory!
Strengthen your Immune System!
All it takes is this… pill?
Did you know that supplements and multivitamins will cure whatever ails you? What, you don’t believe in magic pills? When I was a kid, my parents would periodically decide that I should be taking a multivitamin. The chewables were chalky, and the pills were humongous. I thought surely no one but my parents would ever consider taking one of those things!
I was wrong.
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Posted by Tracy Ilene Miller on September 22, 2011 under Balanced Eating, Healthy Living, Lifestyle
Louisa Kasdon, a former economist, is also a former restaurant operator turned food writer and editor, most recently of Stuff magazine. And that’s only the short list. Kasdon is always busy, recrafting and reshaping her relationship with the topics she writes about and food — as much as it is changing in our culture.
A member of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Nutrition Round Table and founder and CEO of Boston’s Let’s Talk About Food Festival (in partnership with the Boston Museum of Science) , Kasdon has become a staunch advocate for public education around food and health. In conversation with iBeamforLife blogger Tracy Ilene Miller, Kasdon reveals how shifts in our culture are galvanizing forces in the restaurant world, departments of public health, the educational system and beyond, creating a movement worth watching — and joining.
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Posted by Tracy Ilene Miller on September 9, 2011 under Lifestyle, Making choices, Parenting
This summer, my daughter proudly crowed a phrase she picked up in first grade: “I’m a scientist, Mama!”
Scientists, she learned, observe, gather information (and specimens, which could account for the 20 different bugs she’s collected in her outside “workshop”), ask questions and then make decisions or come to conclusions.
For a mother continuously gearing up to shield her daughter from those forces that beckon her to develop poor eating habits, this proclamation was one key to my summer strategy for continuing to develop my daughter’s internal compass about food.
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Posted by Caitlin Quinn on August 11, 2011 under Balanced Eating, Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Making choices
People I meet are surprised to hear that, as a dietitian, I adore dining out. “Isn’t restaurant food bad for you?” is the question I often get.
Eating out is very American, and in my case nicely linked to my family. As a kid I spent summers with my grandmother who believed in a three-hour lunch at a good restaurant. And to this day, my mother and I do our catching up at our favorite restaurants. Dietitian or not, in my family a restaurant table is equivalent to a kitchen table.
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Posted by Melanie Beach on July 22, 2011 under Balanced Eating, Healthy Living, Making choices, Nutrition
The fast food industry continuously lands in the center of the debate on our country’s obesity epidemic. If you’ve seen Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me,” which skewers fast food, then you know what I’m talking about.
As if in answer to the criticism, fast food restaurants are developing new “healthier” options. McDonald’s has its salads, smoothies and oatmeal; Krispy Kreme is planning to include options such as oatmeal, yogurt and juice; Carl’s Jr is working with Men’s Health on a new turkey burger; and other restaurants, such as Red Robin and Fuddruckers, also offer turkey burgers.
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Posted by Joe Wheeler on July 12, 2011 under Budgeting, Healthy Living, Making choices
When I go to the grocery store and see the basic whole foods that are trending, I think of my father, who was born during the Great Depression. He and his seven siblings woke to a pot of beans on the wood stove and came home to a dinner of homemade bread, baked beans and collard greens, or vegetables easily found on the farms they lived and worked on.
As an adult, my father would talk about how poor his family was, and how the kids would tease him in school about his rustic lunch food, compared with his classmates who had peanut butter and jam sandwiches on sliced bread.
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Posted by Joe Wheeler on June 20, 2011 under Healthy Living, Making choices
I recently tried Kombucha, a fermented tea touting health properties, for the first time and decided that after 30 days of use and research I’d write about my experience. Kombucha goes back thousands of years in Eastern countries such as China and Japan, but I’m one of those Westerners to whom it was brand new. My intent was to find non-dairy, non-pill sources of probiotics (like the good bacteria found in yogurt that support digestion).
So, my question in trying something new in the way of food or drink is how to make an informed decision? It’s easy to get caught up in the hype about something trendy. Read More | Comment
