Tag Archives: health

8 grain swaps that help support optimal health

December 24, 2015 By in Nutrition that works Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
  1. Swap brown rice for barley
  2. Swap pasta for wholemeal pasta
  3. Swap basmati rice for quinoa 
  4. Swap wholemeal bread for mixed grain bread
  5. Swap sourdough bread for rye bread
  6. Swap instant porridge for rolled oats
  7. Swap wholegrain cereal for muesli
  8. Swap wheat biscuits for bran cereal.

Yes, the first options are excellent choices when compared to refined cereals like most white breads, white rices, low-fibre cereals, rice crackers and noodles.

But you can still go one better if you choose.

Research suggests that slowly digested, fibrous grains are the healthiest of them all.

Eating foods that tick each of these 2 criteria will likely help to:

  • feed your gut bacteria and make you feel fuller, within hours,
  • improve markers of your heart and metabolic health, within weeks, and
  • substantially lower your risk of heart disease, diabetes, bowel cancer and weight gain, over the coming months and years.

When deciding which grain to eat, it is important to remember that both slowly digested grains and higher fibre grains provide health benefits that are unique and equally important.

An optimal diet, therefore, is one that consistently contains both.

4 natural ways to lower your cholesterol

December 8, 2015 By in Nutrition that works Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

High cholesterol increases your chances of developing heart disease, the leading cause of death in Australia.

Whilst new research finds 1 in every 3 Australian adults has high cholesterol, it can be reduced significantly with simple dietary changes:

1. Eating more viscous fibre, by:

  • Taking a psyllium supplement (with water) daily,
  • Switching to oats at breakfast,
  • Learning to use barley instead of rice, and
  • Ensuring you eat plenty of legumes, fruits or vegetables by incorporating more of them into every meal. Okra and eggplant are particularly rich sources.

2. Increasing your intake of soy protein, by:

  • Having soy milk or soy yoghurt instead of cows milk or cows yoghurt,
  • Switching from regular bread to soy & linseed bread,
  • Incorporating 1/2 cup soy beans into main meals a few times each week, and
  • Using tofu instead of meat a few times each week.

3. Incorporating plant-sterols into your diet, by:

  • Switching from butter to a plant-sterol enriched margarine, and
  • Enjoying plant-based oils and green leafy vegetables daily, such as spinach, kale and cabbage.

4. Eating nuts daily, by:

  • Replacing one of your current snacks with a handful of unsalted nuts (particularly almonds), and
  • Adding nuts to your main meals, such as salads and stir-fries.

The interesting thing is that standard dietary advice, such as reducing saturated fats or cholesterol from the diet, has little impact on heart disease risk alone.

Yet these 4 dietary changes reduce cholesterol by up to 30% within weeks, and lower heart disease risk significantly. This is an effect comparable to taking cholesterol-lowering medication.

And if you have high cholesterol and all of these changes are overwhelming you, don’t despair.

Start instead by asking the question: which of these changes can I do?

Cultivating authentic gratitude

December 4, 2015 By in Boost your happiness Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Scientific research says that one of the key ingredients to your well-being is your ability to cultivate gratitude.

Being thankful for the experiences and people that give your life value and meaning is associated with an abundance of benefits, which include:

  1. positive emotions such as joy, enthusiasm and love,
  2. increased optimism,
  3. increased acts of helpfulness, generosity and co-operation,
  4. a reduced risk of depression and anxiety,
  5. the healing of old hurts and emotional suffering,
  6. improved immune function and recovery from illness,
  7. lower blood pressure and better physical health,
  8. resilience and an enhanced ability to cope with stress,
  9. protection from destructive impulses such as envy, resentment and greed, and
  10. greatly enhanced life satisfaction.

But here’s the irony of this post. If you decide to practice gratitude simply for self-improvements sake, or the act of practising gratitude feels like it’s a chore, then the effects will most likely not be as strong.

The real benefits come when our appreciation of the world we live in, and the people that we share it with, is genuine, deep and authentic.

If you want to cultivate authentic gratitude, I suggest you start with thinking, writing about or expressing with another, your admiration for:

  • the small, everyday things in life that bring us richness, love or joy,
  • the miraculous universe we live in,
  • the deep connectedness that we share with others and have with all living things,
  • the kindness, thoughtfulness and warmth experienced from someone around us, or
  • the inspiration we receive from others to share and spread this kindness.

At its core, I think that cultivating authentic gratitude within our lives comes down to a choice.

A choice that has nothing to do with your actual life circumstances, and everything to do with how you choose to interpret both the world, and the people that you share it with.

How to create a healthy habit

December 1, 2015 By in Change your behaviour Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Step 1: Decide on a health goal that you would like to achieve.

Step 2: Choose 1 small and simple behaviour that will get you towards your goal. Make sure it is something that you are confident you can do on a daily basis.

Step 3: Plan when and where you will do this action. Be specific and choose both a time and a place that you will come across every day of the week.

Step 4: Each day you encounter that time and place, do the action. If it helps, keep a daily record you can mark off whilst you are forming the new habit.

Step 5: Continue until you are doing this new behaviour without even having to think about it. Research suggests that for most us of, it will be no more than 10 weeks.

The important thing to note is that getting healthier doesn’t require huge amounts of time, attention or motivation.

But it does require a desire to change, and a plan to actually make it happen.

The high-fat, high-calorie foods that you should be eating

November 23, 2015 By in Nutrition that works Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

The idea that we should limit the intake of all high-fat, high-calorie foods is now outdated and actually unhealthy.

Research conclusively tells us that most plant-based fats and oils should be promoted and encouraged, because adding them into our diet results in significantly better heart and metabolic health.

What’s more, this impressive health benefit is one that few other dietary changes can achieve.

From the literature, I think we can confidently conclude that even eating more fruits and vegetables or more whole grains, whilst still important, is unlikely to give us the same heart health benefits that eating more plant-based fats and oils does.

What are plant-based fats and oils?

Not all plant-based fats and oils are equal, but some examples I encourage are:

  • 30 grams (1 handful) of nuts or seeds,
  • 50mL of most vegetable oils (particularly extra-virgin olive oil or canola oil),
  • 50 grams (or 1/4) avocado,
  • 20 grams of nut spread,
  • If using salad dressings, to opt for full-fat salad dressings instead of low-fat salad dressings, and
  • If not using avocado or nut spreads, to opt for margarine instead of animal-fat or lower-fat alternatives, such as butter, honey or jam.

Will eating these foods make you put on weight?

Research now clearly tells us that the fat and calorie content of a food does not, surprisingly, predict its effect on our weight.

For example:

  • some high-fat, higher-calorie foods, such as nuts and cheese, are associated with less or no weight gain.
  • some low-fat, lower-calorie foods, such as soft drinks and refined grains (like white bread and white rice), are associated with significant weight gain.

Whilst there are a lot of factors at play here, fat is well-known to slow down digestion, and thus changes our hormonal response after eating.

This is thought to contribute to a foods impact on our weight in the long-term, and might be partly why skim-milk or low-fat milk does not appear to be any better for our weight than full-cream milk.

The bottom line

The healthiest way to manage your weight, I believe, is to mostly enjoy a wide variety of minimally processed plant foods, including the plant-based fats and oils listed above.

If your daily consumption of calories is something that needs to be addressed, the first step is eating less highly processed or “treat” foods, such as cakes, biscuits, soft drink, refined grains and confectionary.

The total calories that you consume every day is still important.

But the total calories (or total fat) found in a single food, is not.

6 myths we are told every time we watch The Biggest Loser

November 16, 2015 By in Love your body Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
  1. If I am overweight, there is something wrong and shameful about my body.
  2. If I am overweight, I need to lose weight to find confidence, happiness and self-worth.
  3. Weight loss is easy. If I can’t lose weight, there is something wrong with me.
  4. Extreme dieting and overtraining, even though they increase my risk of nutritional deficiencies and injury, are necessary practices because they result in weight loss.
  5. Weight loss is the most important outcome of exercise and eating.
  6. I am defined by the number I see on the scales.

Each of these assumptions are incorrect, ineffective and dangerous.

They do not just undermine why, and how, we should be striving to eat better and exercise more.

They also, very worryingly, reinforce the idea that changing who we are is a requirement for us to be self-accepting, confident and happy.

If you really think about it, why should this ever be true?

We now know that:

The Biggest Loser is now well over a decade behind the scientific world, which suggests that a better and healthier way to manage your weight in the long-term is, ironically, to stop making it all about your weight.

The desire to be the biggest loser undermines our ability to feel like, and be, a winner.

One of the easiest ways to get you to exercise more

November 9, 2015 By in Get motivated Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Is to stop saying “I will” and start asking “will I?”

“I will” implies requirement. You end up doing it only because you should do.

“Will I?” implies choice. You end up doing it only because you want to.

Research shows that simply asking ourselves “Will I go the gym?” is significantly more motivating than saying to ourselves “I will go to the gym”.

“Will I go to the gym?” engages the part of us that is motivated to go from within.

“I will go to gym” shuts the door on that very part from coming through.

If you want to change long-term, step 1 is to find the part inside of you that wants it.

Step 2, however, is all about giving it a choice to keep on coming back.

Why you shouldn’t eat like Elle Macpherson

November 2, 2015 By in Nutrition that works Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

One of the main reasons I see for all the confusion in nutrition today?

People seeing association as causation.

Association is 2 things that occur at the same time. This doesn’t mean that one causes another.

Causation is a description of cause and effect. One only happens directly because of the other.

Yes, it’s sunny when you’re at the beach, and raining when your umbrella is up. But going to the beach or reaching for your umbrella won’t change the weather, of course.

If we understand this, why believe that eating how Elle Macpherson eats is the right thing to do?

5 common myths about breakfast

October 26, 2015 By in Nutrition that works Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Myth 1. Eating breakfast boosts our metabolism.

The best scientific evidence we have shows our resting metabolic rate is not increased by eating breakfast. Indeed, research shows that even not eating anything prior to midday for 6 weeks straight does not impair our resting metabolism.

Myth 2. Eating breakfast means we eat less calories in total throughout the day.

This is not only unproven, we actually know the exact opposite is true: we eat more. This makes good sense, because when we skip breakfast, we are skipping the intake of a significant amount of calories.

Myth 3. Purposely skipping breakfast is a good strategy for weight loss.

The largest and longest study to compare the effectiveness of skipping vs. eating breakfast on weight found that skipping breakfast:

  • does not result in any significant weight loss, and
  • does not have any significant effect on our weight compared to eating breakfast.

Just because eating breakfast does not increase our metabolism, and can mean we eat more calories in total, does not mean that we should purposely skip it.

Myth 4. When we eat is more important than what we eat.

What and how much we eat is, in my view, what matters most:

  • Whilst breakfast eaters have higher nutrient intakes than breakfast skippers, high nutrient intake is (of course) dependant on eating more nutrient-rich foods.
  • Whilst breakfast eaters have better long-term health than breakfast skippers, good health is (of course) dependant on eating healthier foods.

Myth 5. There is a ‘correct’ time to eat for everybody.

Research shows that one of the most consistent predictors of body weight (outside of genetics!) is the driver of what makes us eat:

  • When we eat in reaction to our external environment and emotions, we are more likely to overeat.
  • When we eat in response to our internal hunger signals, we are less likely to overeat.

Being more conscious about eating according to hunger is one of the most effective strategies we have to prevent overeating.

For me, the biggest problem with advice about eating or skipping breakfast is that it gives the impression we must be eating at a certain time.

In general, we actually don’t.

For most of us, eating is best done by listening to the hunger signals of our body, and not by worrying about what the time is on our clock.

A simple tip for achieving your health goals

October 19, 2015 By in Change your behaviour Tags: , , , 1 Comment

When we say we’re going to make a health change, we typically only concentrate on the ‘what’. Exercise more, meditate more or eat more fruit and vegetables, are some of the many examples.

Of course, achieving the ‘what’ will soon become a constant struggle, a battle between our conscious and unconscious mind.

A better solution is to not only call out the what, but the where, the when and the how:

“I will exercise, at the gym, on Monday after work, on my drive home.”

“I will meditate, in my bedroom, at 6:40am on Tuesday and Thursday, by setting my alarm.”

“I will eat an apple, in the park, during my Friday afternoon walk, by placing a reminder in my calendar.”

We clearly state the where, when and how for our work, time with friends, extra-curriculum activities, and favourite TV shows.

Interesting that we so often forget to apply the same simple concept for our health goals, too.