|
|
|
|
 |
|||
Colorado
Authors of New Book, Longevity Made Simple,
One of the most popular New Year’s resolutions is to lose weight, which comes on the heels of overeating and extra pounds gained during the holiday season. Colorado physicians Richard Flanigan, MD, and Kate Flanigan Sawyer, MD, MPH, authors of Longevity Made Simple: How to Add 20 Good Years to Your Life, suggest that a few simple changes in your holiday eating habits could prevent that holiday weight gain in the first place.
The key to preventing yourself from overeating is to eat enough to satisfy yourself without consuming more calories than you will burn in the course of the day. Hunger is one of the most powerful drives we have; just starving yourself is a very difficult way to lose weight and rarely works. If you can satisfy yourself without overeating, you can keep from putting on those holiday pounds.
Satisfying your hunger without overeating depends on two facts about food and your body. One is that your brain is about 20 minutes behind your stomach; your stomach may be full but your brain doesn’t get the message for about 20 minutes. The other idea is that your body uses both the volume of the food and the calorie content to determine when you have eaten enough. Avoid dense, high-calorie foods and fill up on bulky, low calorie fare to prevent overeating.
Hara hachi bu! People on the island of Okinawa are some of the longest-lived people in the world. They have a saying, “hara hachi bu,” which means eat until you are only about 80 percent full. When you first feel 80 percent full, your stomach actually is completely full; in about 20 minutes your brain will catch up with your stomach and realize it is full, and you will not have overeaten.
Spoil your dinner. Your mother was right. If you eat food shortly before dinner you will not be as hungry at dinnertime and will eat less as a result. A recent study showed that people who ate an apple 15 minutes before dinner ate almost 200 calories less food at dinner. So, put out healthful snacks such as apples, carrots, celery and rice cakes to take the edge off your appetite and reduce the amount you eat at dinner. Another strategy is to eat a mid-morning or mid-afternoon snack to keep away the hungry horrors and temper your consumption at mealtime.
Soup it up. If you drink a couple of glasses of water, your stomach will not be fooled into thinking you have eaten any food. But food that contain lots of water can fill you up without piling on the calories. This can include rice, vegetables, and soup. In fact, soup is an excellent way to eat a satisfying meal that does not overload you on calories. You can eat a bowl of soup at the start of your meal or make a whole meal out of it.
Drs. Flanigan and Sawyer offer these tips and many other strategies for maintaining a healthy lifestyle in their new book Longevity Made Simple. They also offer numerous strategies for preventing the most common diseases and greatest threats to your health. Longevity Made Simple is available online and at most bookstores. For more information visit www.LongevityMadeSimple.com.
Longevity Made Simple is published by Williams Clark Publishing, LLC of Denver, Colorado.
*************************
|
||||