The Scoop On Coconut

For a long time, I have thought that I needed to stay away from coconuts, because of the fat content, but it turns out that some culture in the world have used coconuts for food AND medicine. It has some fairly incredible healing properties and helps you use the essential fatty acids in your food. We should be adding coconuts to our health food list because, among other things:

• Coconut oil is the lowest calorie fat source
• It softens your skin and helps prevent wrinkles
• It is good for your hair
• It has antioxidants

And there are so many other benefits, which you can see here: http://www.coconutresearchcenter.org/

I have figured out that when I am tempted to eat any kind of junk food, if I get started at all, I CANNOT stop. I think, well, I will just have a few, and a few turns into a lot, or what is left of the candy or chips or even pretzels.

So how do I handle this? I have decided that I should work harder not to eat the first one. This works sometimes, but of course, not always. My husband likes to bring me chocolate, which I adore, because  he equates sweets with love. I have asked him not to do this! But he does it anyway. SO I just ate about 6 malted milk balls. Ugh. They are delicious of course. Tomorrow, I am not going to eat any. I hope.

I found this great website, which lets you to find the amount of calories in a huge variety of foods, and allows you to create a free account and keep track of your weight, what activity you did during the day and the foods you have eaten. You also enter a diet start and end date and it tells you how many calories you can eat in a day as well as an overview of the fat, carbs and protein you have eaten and a graph of your weight.

My first problem with this site is that I think it is overstating the number of calories I need to lose the amount of weight I want to lose in the next six weeks. Other sites I have used to enter my weight, height, sex and daily activity level have suggested the amount of calories I need each day are less, like 500 calories less.

My second problem is that I had a hard time finding the amount of calories they suggest I burn in an average day, how much I should be eating to lose weight and how many calories I have left in a given day. Their “calorie balance equation”, which tells you the calories you burn minus the calorie restriction to lose the amount of weight in your desired amount of time, is here: go to the “Weight Goal” tab. At the bottom of the page are a set of 6 tabs. Go to the tab that says “Calorie Balance”.

Turning off the television is a useful dieting techniques on so many levels.

1. You have a much better chance of doing some moderate activity if you get off the couch.
2. You are not subject to the very bad ads for junk food that get into your head and make you crave junk food.
3. You can’t be watching TV and snacking if you are not watching TV.
4. People who watch 2 or more hours of TV per day eat 7% more calories, which is certainly enough for a steady weight gain.
5. If you are going to be sedentary, dive into a great book instead, it is good for your brain.

I read a good article on Yahoo. It suggests that you need to weigh yourself EVERY DAY. Personally, I hate doing this, especially because it is cold in my house at this time of year, it is winter after all, and I always weigh myself naked. I would hate for my weight to fluctuate because I have on different clothes in the morning. I have to weigh myself in the morning because I always feel the thinnest when I wake up. I wonder if I actually weigh less?

This article says weighing yourself every day is a key to long term weight loss, which means I am going to have to do this in spite of freezing to death while doing it. Maybe I could indulge in setting the thermostat higher, but I like to be cold when I sleep.

Fiber is actually less fattening and more filling at the same time. You won’t be as hungry, and you will be eating fewer calories. It’s a no brainer!

We have two kinds of finer to choose from. Fruits tend to have fiber that absorbs water on the way through your body and so helps with  softening stools. Nothing like constipation to wreck your day!

The other kind of fiber just adds bulk, and is present mostly in whole grain foods.

The British Journal of Psychology has reported that if you eat more fish, fruits and veggies, you are less susceptible to being depressed. They speculate that these healthy foods somehow protect you, and that all the junk we tend to eat is harmful to us beyond causing us to have bad hearts and diabetes, and all the usual reasons we shouldn’t eat all that bad food.

Maybe it is the antioxidants in health food? Researchers don’t know if the effects are cumulative, but lets start eating right now, and not wait to find out!

Parade Magazine had an article about exercising a few weeks ago. They spoke to a trainer in New York named Lacey Stone. She says that you can be in reasonable shape by doing three simple moves.

1. Jumping jacks – these get your heart rate up and burns some extra calories as well as helping you strengthen your bones. Alternately, you could go out for a brisk walk, walking is always good, and is less stress on your legs.
2. Push-ups – ugh, I always hated doing these when I was younger. But they are fast and simple and don’t require any equipment. They help increase your muscle mass in several muscle groups at once, which means you burn more calories at rest. Having stronger upper body strength also helps you do the normal things you have to do in life, like bringing in the groceries even. The bags won’t feel as heavy!
3. Improve your balance. You can do something as simple as the tree pose in Yoga. You can google this or here is one description of tree pose that I found: http://www.yogajournal.com/poses/496. As we age, our balance skills deteriorate, which means we are more at risk of falling, among other things. Balance is important in all areas of life.

I posted a while ago that lots of nutrition labels on food packages and in restaurants are misleading because they list the calories per serving, like the Uno Burger on the Uno Chicago Grill restaurant menu, and you think, hmmm, that’s not too bad, 540 calories (although 320 calories are FAT calories) but you probably didn’t notice that the amount being served to you is TWO servings, so if you eat the whole burger, it is actually 1080 calories, with 640 fat calories.

You can see this yourself by going to this page: http://www.unos.com/kiosk/nutritionUnos.html and clicking on the Burgers And Sandwiches link. Apparently on the Uno website, I can’t send you directly to the Burgers page.

One the other hand, if you purchase a bag of chips, and look at the calories in a serving size, it is pretty small, but it is a TINY amount of chips as well, like 7 or something.  Should this be changed? Should the government step in and make serving sizes larger? Should they make the whole Uno Burger be a serving, so the restaurant has to list ALL of the calories in it? The FDA is now reevaluating this mess, and the problem is that does it imply you should eat more if the serving size is bigger? That would encourage our overweight population to eat more, I would think.

We just have to stop eating such large portions, whether or not the FDA steps in.

Some food products in the grocery store are packaged to  look convincingly like  health food choices. This may just be  a marketing ploy, be sure you check the ingredient list for fat and nutrition content before you purchase anything that looks healthy. For example, even baked fat potato chips have a lot of calories, and not a lot of nutritional value. And some low-fat ice cream, or ice milk actually have more calories than regular ice cream. You have to be proactive about food choices!

This information comes from Prevention Magazine, the whole article is here: http://www.prevention.com/healthfoodimpostors/

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