Love Your Heart

 
February is National Heart Health month, so why not celebrate talking about foods your heart will love. Heart disease is one of America’s leading causes of death and is often the result of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, poor diet, stress, physical inactivity, and overweight and obesity(1). The foods we choose to eat can have a significant impact on our heart health. So love your heart and try to choose foods that will keep it healthy.
 
Fruits and vegetables offer lots of nutrients that help fight against heart disease (1). The American Heart Association recommends making half of your plate fruits and vegetables (1). Try eating a variety of fruits and vegetables of different colors to make sure you are getting all the necessary nutrients.
 
Beans and Legumes are a great source of protein without the saturated fat. They contain fiber and many vitamins and minerals that help with lowering blood cholesterol levels (1). Substituting plant protein with animal protein can help reduce your overall fat and cholesterol intake. Try adding beans to soups, salads, and pasta dishes or make a dip and spread it on sandwiches!
 
Healthy Fats: It is best to replace bad fats (saturated and trans fats) with healthier (mono and polyunsaturated fats) for optimal heart health. Olive, peanut, safflower, soybean, and avocado oil are great alternatives for cooking instead of butter. Do not forget about the essential omega 3-fatty acids, which have shown to lower LDL (bad cholesterol) and total cholesterol levels (1). Try consuming fish two times a week or add flaxseeds to your smoothies!
 
Whole grains such as whole wheat, oatmeal, brown rice, popcorn, and barley are great because they contain so many nutrients such as the B vitamins, iron, magnesium, selenium, and FIBER (1). Fiber helps improve blood cholesterol levels and lowers risk for stroke and obesity (1).
 
Don’t forget about exercise! Staying active is one of the most important things to do to prevent heart disease. The American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week (2). An activity can be in the form of walking, running, cycling, swimming, or even shoveling snow. It is also recommended that adults do muscle strength training about two times a week (2). Physical activity has been shown to decrease the incidence of heart disease and mortality, reduce blood pressure and prevalence of hypertension, weight loss, reduced rate of type 2 diabetes, and decrease in blood lipid levels (3).

1.    Heart Check Foods. American Heart Association. https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/heart-check-foods. Accessed February 17, 2020 2.
2.    Fitness Basics. American Heart Association. https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/fitness/fitness-basics. Accessed Febrary 17, 2020
3.    Piercy KL., Troiano RP, Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans from the US Department of Health and Human Services. Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. 2018;11:3005263.

-------------------

Post written by Hanna Stringer, a graduate student of Christine Clark in the MS in Applied Nutrition program through the College of Professional Studies at Northeastern University.

Read More

Mindful and Intuitive Eating

Being a mindful eater is slowing down and enjoying your food. Being mindful also means paying attention to color, taste, and texture. It also means putting down the phone and moving away from the computer to avoid distracted eating. Distracted eating often results in eating more than intended or not even tasting the food, therefore not enjoying it as you should!

Being an intuitive eater means paying attention to feelings of hunger and fullness. Although this sounds a little simplistic, it is a fact that many people lose the sense of hunger while dieting, restricting, or from medications they are taking. If this is the case, then work on paying attention versus ignoring those sensations. Some people will say they “don’t feel hungry.” Some people may override the feeling of hunger when the stomach is rumbling, if you do this, you may still have a headache and feel grumpy or tired. Because you have gone too long without eating. You want to keep in mind that you should have something to eat (meal or snack). About every 3-4 hours is a helpful rule of thumb.  Your body will enjoy the idea of eating when you are hungry, as it can help you function well in class or during a workout. The feeling of fullness can also be ignored. It’s a good idea to check in with yourself during a meal. Slow down as it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to register with your brain that you are full. If you eat in a rush, then in about 30 minutes, you may feel over full, which can result in feeling a bit sick, tired, and sluggish.

Intuitive eating is not a diet or a new concept. “Intuitive eating is an evidenced-based, mind-body health approach, comprised of 10 principles and created by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch in 1995. It is a weight-neutral model with a validated assessment scale and over 90 studies to date (Tribole 2017).” Please see below for the 10 principles of intuitive eating. As mentioned above, this is a non-diet approach that allows you to develop and maintain a healthy relationship with food. It will enable you to get back to basics and become in tune with your body’s internal cues and honoring them instead of ignoring them!

10 Principles of Intuitive Eating.

1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating. 
2. Honor Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food. 
3. Make Peace with Food Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing When you finally “give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt. 
4. Challenge the Food Police .Scream a loud “NO” to thoughts in your head that declare you’re “good” for eating minimal calories or “bad” because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating. 
5. Respect Your Fullness Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level? 
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence–the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you’ve had “enough”. 
7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, & anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating. 
8. Respect Your Body Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It’s hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape. 
9. Exercise–Feel the Difference Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it’s usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time. 
10. Honor Your Health–Gentle Nutrition Make food choices that honor your health and tastebuds while making you feel well. Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters, progress not perfection is what counts.

For more information on Intuitive eating check out the website listed below.
 
Copyright 2007-2017. IntuitiveEating.org. All rights reserved.
Information from https://www.intuitiveeating.org/ Accessed January 10, 2020

Read More

#OurHearts

Did you know that people who have close relationships at home, work, or in their community tend to be healthier and live longer? One reason, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), is that we’re more successful meeting our health goals when we join forces with others. To underscore this point, NHLBI launched the #OurHearts movement, to inspire people to protect and strengthen their hearts with the support of others. Making the following heart healthy lifestyle changes will be easier and more successful if you work with other motivated people:

GET PHYSICALLY ACTIVE
Ask a colleague to walk with you on a regular basis, put the date on both your calendars, and text or call to make sure you both show up. Join an exercise class at your local community center and bring a neighbor along. Grab your kids, put on some music, and do jumping jacks, skip rope, or just dance. Make your social time active and encourage everyone—family and friends alike— to think of fun things that get you off the couch and moving.

EAT HEART HEALTHY FOODS
We tend to eat like our friends and family, so ask others close to you to join you in your effort to eat healthier. Need healthy eating ideas? Try NHLBI’s Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) eating plan. It’s free and scientifically proven to lower blood pressure and improve blood cholesterol levels.

QUIT SMOKING
To help you quit, ask others for support or join a support group. Research has shown that people are much more likely to quit if their spouse, friend, or sibling does.

Visit #OurHearts for inspiration on what others around the country are doing together for their heart health. Then join the movement by tagging #OurHearts to share how you're being heart healthy with friends, family, or others.

Reference:
1. Join the #OurHearts Movement. National Heart, Lung and Blood Insitute. Available at: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/education-and-awareness/heart-truth/our-hearts

Written by Jennifer M. Roberts, MS, RDN
FEBRUARY 2020
weeatlivedowell.com

Read More