Week 4 – Health & Fitness Blitz – Improve your relationship with food

Many of our participants have joined us in a 6 week Blitz – a program that focuses on behavioural change and goal setting for our team members who would like to get back on track and live a bit healthier.

There’s no cost, no meetings to attend, nothing asked of you other than to read the weekly newsletter every Friday and follow the goal setting for the coming week. Each week we’ll focus on a different area of health/fitness, making one change at a time. It will give you something to focus on, and encourage you to make healthy changes in a manageable way. My goal is that eventually these changes will become the new norm for you.

Week 3 Review
How did you go with your goal of 10,000 steps per day? Were you surprised to find you are less active than you thought? Could you reach the 10,000 step target without a workout session in your day? If you struggled to hit the target you’ll need to focus on how you can bring more activity into your days. Did you manage to stay “junk” food free again this week from Monday morning til this afternoon and eat 5 serves of veggies and 2 serves of fruit per day? Share your thoughts in the comments section below so everyone can benefit.

Week 4 – 6 Week Health & Fitness Blitz
Improving your relationship with food

Are you in a rocky relationship?
Most people could benefit from improving their relationship to food and eating. That might mean improving food choices, dealing with emotional eating, indulging less in overeating or ceasing feeling guilty about food. Dr Rick Kausman is an Australian pioneer in dealing with weight management through how we think about food. I have attended his lectures and thoroughly recommend his realistic and ‘do-able’ approach. You can visit his site at www.ifnotdieting.com.au and I enthusiastically recommend his book for anyone who has battled with their weight or their attitude to food.

Here are his top 10 tips… Dr. Rick Kausman’s Top 10 Tips

1. Focus on achievable, sustainable, behavioural goals
As with many areas of life, having the right goals is essential. Even if we are over our most healthy weight and our aim is to lose weight, it is vital to focus on goals to do with our attitudes, habits and behaviours.

2. Practice a positive attitude towards food
When people eat food they call ‘bad’ or ‘junk’, they often feel bad about themselves and guilty about what they have eaten. Often this guilty feeling can make people eat more of that type of food, even when they no longer feel like it. Do your best to look at food as being ‘morally neutral’, and when you can, think and talk about food as ‘everyday’ food (rather than ‘good’) and ‘sometimes’® food (rather than ‘bad’).

3. Do your best to eat slowly and enjoy
While this takes some practice, by slowing down our speed of eating, we often feel far more satisfied with significantly less food.

4. Non-hungry eating®
We can all eat food when we are not really feeling physically hungry. It is quite normal to do some non-hungry eating, but when we do too much, it can tip our eating out of balance. Do your best to check in with your body before you eat to see if you are really physically hungry or not.

5. Do your best to not get too hungry
It is so easy to get caught up in the busy-ness and the business of life, that we can ignore our body signals that are telling us that we are getting progressively more and more hungry. If this happens, it is very hard to eat slowly, and we can easily eat more food than we really want, and we can end up becoming overfull or completely stuffed full.

6. Plan ahead to have some food on hand
We sometimes don’t have access to a wide choice of foods. Because we are often very busy, we can leave decisions about what we are going to eat until the last minute. In this situation, it is easy to go for whatever food is most readily available (even when we don’t really feel like this type of food). If you regularly find yourself in this situation, plan ahead to have some food on hand. Before going out, put together a range of foods that you enjoy eating and take them with you for the day ahead.

7. Fine-tune fat content without deprivation
It is definitely healthy to consume some fat (particularly the ones found in fish and other seafood, olive oil, nuts, seeds and avocado), and it is healthy to have some fat on our bodies. However, many people consume more fat than their bodies need. If this is the case, it is helpful to find some ways of decreasing the overall fat content. You might like to think of this as fine-tuning the fat content in a non-deprivational way.

8. Nurture yourself
If we keep giving without looking after our own needs, we may become resentful, frustrated and depressed. As well as giving of ourselves to our families, our friends, our work etc., we need to make sure we are doing things for ourselves. It is very important to nurture ourselves.

9. Don’t confuse the thin ‘ideal’ message with healthy weight messages
Health and vitality come in all shapes and sizes, and it is important to be the healthiest weight we can achieve and maintain, rather than focus on being thin at any cost. By looking after ourselves and our bodies in the best way we can, our weight/size will evolve to the healthiest level that is possible.

10. Look for opportunities to move
Physical activity has long been known to produce beneficial effects. A number of recent research studies are now showing that small amounts of physical activity are cumulative throughout the day, and whatever physical activity we can do is worthwhile.

Non-hungry Eating – Appetite Awareness

It is common for all of us to eat when we are not feeling physically hungry. We call this kind of eating non-hungry eating. Non-hungry eating includes: overeating, grazing, picking, bingeing. Many people do a significant amount of this kind of eating – it is one of the main factors in causing weight gain. Think about the following scenarios. How many have you experienced and how often?
*        Nibbling at cooking ingredients while preparing a meal
*        Eating until you are uncomfortably full, and then even squeezing in some dessert (Especially at special occasions and Christmas!)
*        Snacking while watching TV after already having a full meal
*        Keep returning to the fridge or cupboard for little snacks and don’t seem to get full
*        Finishing everything on your plate despite being full
*        Eating chips, crackers, dips, nuts at a party when you have already had a meal and despite not being hungry

Most people will find that they have done many or all of the above. It is normal to do some non-hungry eating (as we are emotional beings) however when this habit becomes regular our eating pattern becomes out of balance. We then consume more energy than our body needs and as a result is stored as body fat.

Some people can even forget what being physically hungry feels like. Hunger signals can be felt as: empty or gnawing feeling in the stomach, a rumbling feeling in the stomach or a hollow feeling in the stomach. Listen to your body, and decide Am I really hungry? Or just bored, frustrated, tired, angry, sad, excited or depressed?

Common reasons for non-hungry eating include:
*        Not listening to our body signals (ie. Hunger or fullness)
*        We might be confusing hunger and thirst
*        We aren’t sure when to stop eating
*        We are filling up but not feeling satisfied
*        The clock says its mealtime, even though I’m not hungry
*        “Just in case I get hungry later”
*        The food tastes great or looks amazing
*        We’re bored or tired
*        We’re worried we might offend someone if we don’t eat
*        Eating as a reward
*        Eating out of habit
*        Simply because the food is there
*        It brings back nice memories
*        Eating to put off doing something else
*       Because everyone else is eating it

Before you eat anything this week ask yourself:

*        Do I really feel hungry? Listen to your body. Are you really hungry after dinner? Are you really hungry again 2 hours after lunch or just trying to get through the working day? Are you really hungry or just eating the dessert because it is there and looks good?
*        Do I really feel like this food? Often we eat without paying attention to whether we really feel like that particular food we are eating.
*       Will I really enjoy this food? There is no doubt that cake tastes great but if you are already full from dinner/lunch eating a piece of cake may not feel as enjoyable as it looks. We all know that horrible feeling of being overfull. Some oily foods (fish & chips, other takeaway meals) taste great at first but can leave you feeling a little ill. Ask yourself if you will really enjoy it during and after?

Eating slowly helps us not to overeat. Those who eat quickly often consume too much of the food before realising that they are full. Slow down and enjoy.

Stop when you aren’t hungry any more. Stop before you feel stuffed full.

Try to separate eating from other activities that might distract you. Eating in front of TV, at the movies, while reading or working will take your awareness away from how much you are eating, how fast and what you are eating. Try not to eat on the run.

Week 4 – Health & Fitness blitz – Your goals this week starting from Monday

* Focus on eating consciously - eat only when hungry, stop when you’re full, eat only sitting down, eat slowly and don’t read or watch tv while eating. You might be surprised by the difference!

* If you have a pedometer aim for an average of 10,000 steps per day at least

* Continue with your goal from week 2 – Eat 5 serves of vegetables and 2 serves of fruit every day (if you already easily meet this goal, think about minimising the processed foods you eat and maximising whole foods)

* Continue with your goal from week 1 – Do not consume cake, biscuits, lollies, chocolate, icecream, soft drink, chips, and greasy or fried foods Monday morning – Friday 5pm. Hopefully this goal will be even easier this week!

* Drink 1.5 – 2 litres of water per day

Share your thoughts below…

Posted in: Fitness, Goal Setting, Mind body, Nutrition, Uncategorized by Healthy Balance Fitness on 13th September 2010

Week 4 – Health & Fitness Blitz – Improve your relationship with food

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