What's On Your Plate?

 What's on Your Plate?  This year, the experts at the USDA who decide what makes a healthy diet, dumped the old food pyramid and introduced the fresh "MyPlate" as the guideline for Americans to use in planning healthy meals.
Visit Choose MyPlate.gov
This fresh approach  is simple to understand and remember. Basically, one half of your dinner plate should be fruits and vegetables (and you know I recommend favoring the veggies), 1/4 protein, and 1/4 whole grain.
With a serving of low-fat dairy on the side.
Here's what the graphic looks like:

And here's how it looks in practice, on my dinner plate:

 On my plate are roasted squash and potatoes, green salad with more vegetables and feta cheese, 4 ounces of grilled salmon with a mango and tomato salsa. I had a whole grain roll on the side.

With fresh vegetables in-season and plentiful now, you can fix many vegetable-rich dinners for very little expense.

Another night, I opted to eat meat-less, and chose beans for my protein:

For this dinner, I had a salad, steamed veggies, and black beans and Parmesan cheese mixed with whole brown rice.  Broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, avocado, tomato, green pepper and mushrooms - 7 different vegetables! The variations for this kind of dinner are endless and best of all: it's low-calorie and takes under 25 minutes to prepare.

So if you are wondering how to feed your family in a way that's healthy and meets the recommended daily nutritional requirements, check out the simple recommendations on http://www.choosemyplate.gov/ --then head to your garden or local farmer's market for the veggies to fill at least half your plate. And let us know -- what's on your plate?

Losing Weight - First steps

I've talked this week with three friends who are on a weight loss journey and having success. So naturally I asked each of them "how are you doing it? What are you doing different that is working?"

All three of them said that the most important change they made was to keep track of what they eat and write it down.

Now as a someone who wants to lose, you may be groaning, "I don't want to count calories! I don't want to write things down!"

But as a wellness educator, this is good news to me: because it confirms what I read in health promotion literature, have been taught and what our registered dietitian Jim Severino says too:  the most successful "losers" know what they are eating because they track it.

One of my friends who in just one week has lost five pounds, says that writing down her food choices has helped her stay away from soda and sweets because she doesn't want to write down the treats and their high calories. This technique can really help you budget your daily calorie allotment toward healthy choices.

I've recommended http://www.calorieking.com/ before as a website that lists the nutritional content of every food you can imagine, but there are fantastic websites that do even more  - like help you choose an eating plan and set up a food journal for you on-line, for free! You just type in the food you ate, and the website does all the calculations for you - even tells you how many calories you have left to spend during the day.

Check out http://www.fitclick.com/, http://www.livestrong.com/ and web.md for free interactive weight loss plans that include food trackers! And yes, there is an app for that! Iphone has many free ones, but you also may want to invest in an inexpensive paid app like that from Livestrong that has a few more bells and whistles....so whether you go online or keep track the old-fashioned way: with a pencil and little notebook - do write down what you eat. It can become the new habit that makes the difference in your weight, too!

You Are What You Eat

Problem is, most of us overestimate how healthy our food is and underestimate how much of it we eat.

This week, the CBS Evening News released a report from Consumer Reports Health, outlining some of the ways Americans demonstrate their confusion about healthy weight and healthy eating. It starts with how we approach weight in general: 79% of the adults interviewed said they never weigh themselves and 85% said they never count calories. 



Many people seem to believe that it's only sweet dessert-type foods that belong in the "unhealthy" category and that they will always be higher in calories and fat than a non-dessert item. In past blogs we've seen that's not always true: overload a green salad with meats, croutons, cheese and too much dressing and you have a meal that can top a Whopper in terms of fat and calories.  On a smaller scale, some containers of yogurt can be higher in calories and sugar than the same size portion of pudding or even ice cream. You really have to lose the assumptions, and  KNOW what you are putting in your mouth!

So if healthy eating and losing weight is on your New Year's list of things to accomplish, you have to start with facts: know what you are eating and know how much you should have as a serving size.  Know how much you should be consuming everyday in order to lose weight. In general, choose fresh, non-processed foods for most of your meals, and if you are wondering about the nutritional or caloric content of a specific food, websites like http://www.calorieking.com/ can give you the nutritional content of nearly every food choice you might want.

I'll be offering a workshop called Make 10 Changes to Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Weeks at Davis Memorial Hospital on January 15. In next week's blog and in the nine that follow, we'll be looking at those 10 changes. Tune in next week to start losing!