There are a lot of reasons to eat right

There are not many reasons why people need eating help, and the most common by far is they feel like they can't control their eating habits. Whether they're eating too much, too fast, or simply cannot bring themselves to eat the foods they know they should, people who can't control their basic food habits aren't lacking self-control: they're lacking knowledge. They need to learn how to eat food in the way that their body intends them to. That level of eating help is too much for one small article, but I'll lay out the basics.

Listen to your Gut

Unlike modern psycho-medicinal logic would have us believe, eating is not a conscious decision made by strong- or weak-willed people, who then eat correctly or in- respectively. One need only watch a baby eat to understand: eating is a response to internal needs, not a deliberate choice. Like other involuntary responses, we can sometimes tame our eating reflex - just like we can sometimes tame our fight-or-flight response when confronted with a scare. But unlike being startled by an unexpected motion, when your body needs a nutrient, the stimulus doesn't go away just because you recognize what it is.

The knowledge you need to overcome uncontrolled eating is easy in concept, but harder in execution: you need to understand what your body is lacking, so you can find it and start eating. Help fully, our bodies come equipped with a mechanism that tells you when you are shy on a nutrient, whether it's a vitamin like tocopherol (Vitamin E) or a mineral like iron, or an enzyme like trypsin. If you find yourself hankering for something, and the hankering doesn't go away when you eat - you're eating the wrong thing. So listening to your body is part one.

Might as Well Face It, You're Addicted to Carbs

Part two is not letting your body get confused. There are thousands of addictive substances out there, from heroin to cheese, but the number one most common and hardest to overcome addiction in America is...sugar. If you are addicted to sugar - and most people are - than your uncontrollable eating may be due to that addiction rather than any actual nutritional needs. There are other foods that share this property - flour, including any and every baked good, being the second most common addiction in America.

Overcoming carbohydrate addiction is like overcoming any other addiction: it involves a period of suffering. When I went through it, it was too miserable weeks of waking up feeling tired and irritable, and literally getting the shakes whenever I thought about a doughnut or a plate of linguini. I had violent reactions at just the thought of eating. Help came in the form of a supportive wife (who had already gone through the same process) and a house devoid of sugar and floury foods. Two weeks later, I was over it, and life got much, much better.

Unless and until you break your food addictions, you won't be able to listen to your body and understand what you need. So maybe, really, part 2 should be part 1 if you look at it chronologically. Most people, once they accomplish that difficult task (on par with breaking heroin addiction according to some studies), won't need any further eating help to control their dietary habits. For the worst-case scenario, however, a significantly more in-depth form of eating help is required.

The depression/addiction cycle.

A scenario exists that requires special attention, and that is the depression/binge eating cycle. When you consume certain foods like cheese, chocolate, and highly processed floury and sugary foods, you get a kind of high. It's akin to a drug high, but less noticeable, especially if you're depressed. But like a drug high, when you crash, your body compels you to find more of what made you feel better. You need serious eating help.

This kind of scenario is usually short-lived relative to the lifespan of a human being, but it can have serious health repercussions including, on the extreme end, diabetes and heart problems. To break the cycle, you have to break the carb addiction, which can be damaging to someone who is already suffering. The same kind of dietary restriction must be applied - no sugary foods, no floury foods - but the pain can be lessened with other less addictive but still somewhat helpful foods, specifically cheese and dark chocolate.

If you are in this scenario, you need to have someone else control your access to chocolate. No more than 12 ounces per day of 60% dark (no lighter) - spread out across the day. The caffeine and the hormones in chocolate will give you a boost, but too much will make you hyper, which will result in a dangerous crash. Cheese you can snack on all day long with only one restriction - get a variety. The reason is simple: with different kinds of cheese, you will naturally eat more than if you try to binge on a single kind. You want lots, because the high from cheese isn't nearly as potent as the high from chocolate or sugar - and the protein and fat content will help you keep your energy levels stable across the day.

There are a lot of reasons to eat right - and uncontrollable eating is near the bottom of the list. (Avoiding cancer, diabetes, dementia, and other major scares of aging is toward the top.) But it's something that people really notice - and it's something that can totally be helped. If you can't stop eating, help yourself.

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Fire Your Doctor is an information-packed, fluff-free report custom crafted to show you exactly how your health is affected, positively and negatively, by what you eat.

12 pearls of wisdom from a nutritionist

We all take the word of doctors and the government when it comes to our diets. Seriously, who is better to trust? The answer is simple: nutritionists. They may be hard to find, and they may same expensive at first, but the benefits of talking to someone who actually understands the science of food is amazing.

Here are a dozen pearls of wisdom from Michael Danielson, Nutrition Researcher.

1) Food cannot be made in a lab. Substances that look, smell, and even taste a lot like food can be made in a laboratory, but the more processed a food is - the more lab-time it has before it goes into your mouth - the less nutritious it becomes. This is true even if the lab time is spend "fortifying" and "enhancing" your food, because they "fortify" with synthetic vitamins, which just don't work like natural vitamins do.

2) The Food Pyramid is upside-down. Mostly. The part about avoiding sweets and sugary foods, that's true. But the real food pyramid needs to be based solidly in meats and veggies, then fruit and dairy, with grains - whole grains - at the top, as a totally optional food. There also needs to be a special place for oils and butter - a vital source of essential fatty acids, which many Americans are horribly lacking.

3) If you can't buy it, don't eat it. That means if your candy bar has an ingredient that you can't find in the shelves, in it's own package, ready to take home and add to your home cooking - it's toxic. The food companies add toxins in amounts small enough that the FDA believes there is no long-term effect, but the fact is, no one knows how much hydrodypropylmethelcellulose you get in a day - and there's no safety net in place to make sure you don't get too much by getting a tiny amount from several dozen sources.

4) Eating fat doesn't make you fat. Think about it. If you eat fat (and you don't eat carbs at the same time), your body has to burn fat in order to survive (cause there's no carbs to burn). So eating fat doesn't make you store fat away - it makes you burn it. Unless, that is, you eat carbs at the same time. Then your body can burn the carbs for energy, and happily slap the fat onto your posterior.

5) Eating carbs makes you fat. Even if you don't eat fat and carbs - even if you just eat carbs, but you eat a lot of them - your body will burn what it can, pack away a little bit for emergency stress-response food, and then turn the rest into fat and slap it onto your posterior.

6) There are six things you have to get out of your food to survive. Those things are essential fatty acids, essential amino acids (proteins), water, calories, vitamins, and minerals. Notice that there are no carbohydrates anywhere on that list. That's important.

7) Vitamins and minerals don't work without other substances. They're called co-factors, and without the right co-factors, your body can't use vitamins and minerals correctly. In nature, vitamins and minerals almost always come 'pre-packaged' with the correct co-factors. That's the problem with synthetic vitamins - they don't.

8) Cooking food destroys some vitamins and essential acids. I'm not saying "go eat raw chicken", but keep in mind that the less cooked your food is, the more nutrition you get out of it. Raw beef, fresh veggies, etc, are all better for you than their cooked counterparts - and cooked food is better for you the less it's cooked. That means that pasteurized milk, almonds, juices, etc. lose a lot of their value.

9) Some foods have estrogen in them that can really screw up your body. Soybeans and flax seed are the big ones - every 100 grams of soy protein you consume is the equivalent of eating a birth control pill! Don't eat soy unless it's fermented first, like in real Chinese-style tofu and tamari soy sauce.

10) Local food is healthier. Strawberries from Chile, apples from Argentina - there are very few rules about these foods that our government can actually enforce; and that means that you have no idea what happened to those foods before they got to your market. You're way better off eating local food, in the season that it was grown in. Less chemical preservatives, less transportation costs...better all around.

11) Irradiating food kills vitamins, too. That means both irradiated beef and ANY MICROWAVED FOOD is significantly less valuable to your body than normal food. The only thing it's safe to microwave is water.

12) Eating right prevents a lot of diseases. Not just the ones you know about, like scurvy and beriberi - the big ones, like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, and more. All of these diseases are your body's responses to long-term stresses, the most major of which is a bad diet.

Read more about how to live healthy through understanding your food. Don't you deserve to know the facts about nutrition for yourself?

4 Simple Steps to Healthy Eating Practices

Most doctors and nutritionists today have a laundry list of foods they want you to avoid, making it impossible to choose the right food. Healthy eating is not something they really believe in, and the information is so contradictory that it's impossible to fully obey their orders. You just can't avoid fat, carbs, and protein at the same time - there's no sources of calories left! You also can't eat whole foods and eat low-fat versions of normal foods at the same time. By definition, a food that's been made low-fat isn't whole anymore.

So, I'm here to give you the positive side of all of their negative rules. 4 simple steps you can take to find the right food and engage in healthy eating practices without a whole lot of drama or confusion. These rules prescribe a diet that is tough to follow, especially if you're accustomed to lots of floury or sugary foods, because those foods don't appear anywhere on the list of healthy foods.

Here's the long and short of it:

1) Eat plants that haven't been ground, polished, overheated, or bleached. That means fruits, vegetable, seeds, nuts, beans, legumes, and unpasteurized juices.

2) Eat animals that haven't been irradiated (including being microwaved), mechanically separated (not including being ground), chemically treated, or overcooked. That means fowl, seafood, red meat, pork, and sausages.

3) Eat milk products that haven't been overheated (including being pasteurized) unless it's cultured. That means raw milk, raw cream, butter, cheese, sour cream, cottage cheese, cream cheese, and yogurt.

4) Eat oils that haven't been bleached, hydrogenated, fractionated, heated to the smoking point, or made from soybeans. That means basically any oil that actually names the plant it comes from (except soybean oil). It would help anyone to pay attention to the Omega-X content of their food and work to achieve a 1:1 ratio of Omega-3 oils to Omega-6 oils, but that's not strictly necessary - you just feel better (less lower back pain, headaches, and fatigue) if you do.

And it's really that simple. If you think about it, this is basically the diet that our far ancestors ate - the diet that the human body was designed to consume. It happens to be the diet that best supports health in human bodies. (Imagine that!) Following these simple, positive rules about what to eat may be hard for a week or two as your body gets over it's addiction to floury and sugary foods, but the health results will be evident within a month.

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Fire Your Doctor is an information-packed, fluff-free report custom crafted to show you exactly how your health is affected, positively and negatively, by what you eat.

Tomato: Fruit or Veggie - It Doesn’t Matter!

The tomato is a popular vegetable. Even though technically it is a fruit because of the seeds, it has been officially classified as a vegetable to avoid confusion with import duties on those coming from other countries. So, whether you’re on the fruit or vegetable side of the fence, one thing remains the same; for those who love tomatoes, it doesn’t matter how you classify it. Instead, the only thing of importance is how you eat tomatoes.

Tomatoes have been around for centuries but only eaten in this country for less than two. People were once afraid of them, thinking they were poisonous. When they overcame that, tomatoes were not just grown to add color to the garden but for consumption.

Where to Find Tomatoes

These red veggies are found at farmer’s markets, grocery stores, farms, and at roadside stands. You can find a tomato almost anywhere if you look. Climates on both coasts of the United States are favorable for growing tomatoes all year round.

In the South, tomatoes are used as a sandwich topper or as the sandwich. I’ve never been much for soggy bread or the things that make them soggy, so I won’t be eating a tomato sandwich any time soon, but I know plenty of people that do especially in the summer when tomatoes are at their peak. They don’t seem to mind that the bread turns to mush as they bite and chew.

Keeping Your Tomatoes Fresh

Tomato consumption has risen mostly due to the sources of use for them. When you purchase fresh vegetables, preparing them as soon as possible keeps them from spoiling and you from wasting money. Tomatoes ripen best on the counter. Putting them in the fridge is a no-no because they won’t ripen and the taste is not as good.

Preserving Tomatoes

If you have more tomatoes than you can eat, there are several ways to preserve them for later use. Speaking of preserves, canning tomatoes is one option. There was a time when all people did in the summer on the farm was can fruits and vegetables for the winter months. You don’t see that much if at all anymore but with the rising price of crude oil, it may be back in fashion real soon.

While you’re at it can some tomato sauce for Italian dishes like spaghetti and lasagna. Tomatoes are great for salads especially the grape, cherry, and Roma tomatoes. The primary dish for tomatoes is salsa. Salsa is great for chips, dip, and as a sauce for chicken and fish.

However you enjoy tomatoes, they are a documented source of antioxidants. They fight the aging process which is great news for us thirty and forty-something folks.

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What’s For Dinner? Menu Planning Tips for Busy Moms

Dinner is the last meal of the day and a time when families can get together and discuss their day. It is also a hectic meal for busy moms who are just getting off of work or who have been busy with other activities all day. If you are a busy mom or you know a busy mom, here are some menu planning tips to help make dinner meals easy and even fun.

1.    Schedule your meals a week in advance.  This is one of the most important planning tips for meals. Knowing what you are going to eat throughout the week means less chance that you will stop off at the closest fast food joint for a convenient, but unhealthy meal. Decide on the last day of the previous week (let’s say Saturday for the sake of argument) what the menu will be for the following week. Create your shopping list from the list of ingredients to avoid buying what you don’t need at the grocery store.

2.    Look for bargains. Clip coupons, read advertising circulars and the like to decide where the best grocery to shop is for your menu items. If one ingredient is a common denominator in many meals, consider buying in bulk to save money. Common staples like milk, eggs, bread and sugar can be bought in bulk as well. Some stores will have double or triple coupon days when you can save even more. 

3.    Search online. After a while your family will get tired of chicken and rice every Thursday. You can get into a menu rut sometimes. Use the Internet to search for new and exciting recipes. Learn to put a twist on old recipes for a new taste.

4.    Have a leftover night. After preparing meals for five or six days, there is bound to be some food left over. Designate one night to be leftover night and let everyone mix and match for dinner. It saves mom from having to throw away any food.

5.    Cook your meals in advance. After deciding on a menu plan for the week, go ahead and fix as many meals as you can. Choose a day when the entire family can help like Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. Each person can take one meal and fix it for the following week. Once everything has cooled, store it in sealed containers or casserole dishes to be frozen until the night it is needed.

6.    Do prep work in advance. All of the meals can’t be cooked at once. Some foods just taste better freshly prepared. For them, so as much prep work in advance as you can. Enlist your kids to help chop (give them the kitchen shears instead) vegetables, dice cooked meat and mix together dry ingredients. The night of the meal, all that is needed is to add the wet ingredients and bake.

Meal time doesn’t have to be all on mom. The entire family can help with dinner so it is a relaxing meal for everyone. 

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Menu Planning: Healthy Meal Plans
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Dinner with the Family: It’s More Important than you Might Think

When was the last time you had dinner with your family? It is the meal we often skip because we work late, the kids have sporting events or we get tired from daily activities. But, skipping dinner with the family is detrimental to the family dynamic.

Family dinners are more than just a meal. It is about the only time that families have to share time through the week. Whether you sit down to the dinner table or enjoy a meal on tray tables and a movie in the family room, the important thing is that you are together.

There are some interesting facts surrounding family dinner time. For instance, teens that spend dinner time eating with their family are less likely to get involved in drugs, alcohol or other illicit activity. This is a point many parents will find interesting. Out of all of the things you do to try to keep your kids away from bad influences, the one thing that is the greatest influence is still the event that we skip routinely.

Why is dinner so important? For one thing, it is a time to share thoughts and feelings. All day, kids are influenced by teachers, friends and the outside world. At the dinner table, they get a chance to connect with their parents on tough issues like schoolwork, peer pressure, friendships and other things. They can each share and help one another with helpful suggestions. Parents can even talk about work or family finances over a meal.

The main point is that conversation is taking place. The average parent talks to their child less than 40 minutes a week. It takes a second to say “Hi” when you come in at night, but that isn’t effective communication. When dinner is shared by the family, you spend at least 45 minutes to an hour talking about everything and anything that may be on your mind. Even if you are watching a television program, engaging questions can arise from topics addressed in the program.

Young children learn how to communicate with their siblings and parents. They are the center of attention with questions about their day and it makes them feel happy. You know that kids always want to be in the limelight when they are a certain age and this helps them learn to share the spot with others.

For teenage girls, body image is everything. Learning to prepare and eat healthy meals with their families is a sign that eating right will keep their bodies in shape and not avoiding food. Teen girls are less likely to become the victim of an eating disorder but develop a healthy view of food and their bodies when they eat dinner with their families.

There are many benefits to eating dinner with the family. It is a time for meaningful communication that leads to stronger self-images that resist the urge of drugs, alcohol and other destructive behaviors in your kids and teens.

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Menu Planning: Healthy Meal Plans
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Quick and Healthy Breakfast Ideas

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Unfortunately, many of us neglect breakfast.  And there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that your body and mind will suffer unless you have a healthy breakfast each morning. 

You spend six to eight hours sleeping.  After that time, your body needs fuel to keep going.  Without breakfast at home, your options for on the run nutrition may amount to too much fat, too much sugar and too many carbs.  And, that convenient run to the fast food joint is not as convenient and time saving as you think if everyone else has the same idea.  The fifteen or twenty minutes spent in line could have been used to fill your belly with something good at home. 

If you are the type to skip breakfast, here is a solution to starting the day with a good breakfast which will help you keep hunger in check as well as give you the natural energy boost to start your day.

1. Oatmeal – This food makes a good hot meal that contains lots of filling fiber to keep you from getting hungry later on in the morning.  Depending on your taste, you can take five minutes to fix it on the stove or use the microwave for instant oatmeal.  Kids tend to like the variety of flavors that come with instant oatmeal.  The night before, put together a container of add-ins like blueberries, strawberries and bananas that can be tossed on top for a bit of antioxidant power.

2. Fruit smoothies – These are good any morning but particularly on a hot day.  You’ll have to blend the ingredients together in the morning, but the prep work can be done at night.  Cube your fruit and place it into a container.  Instead of frozen yogurt in the morning, use a cup of plain yogurt.  Add ice cubes, a little water and blend.

3. Egg sandwich – The eggs can be cooked the night before and placed in a sealed container.  In the morning, warm up the eggs in the microwave.  If you want, add some chopped veggies or shredded cheese.  Serve on toasted wheat bread.  The night before, place two pieces of bread into a Ziploc bag for each family member.  They can toast their bread as they get up and place the sandwich in the bag for easy transport in the car to work or school.

4. Yogurt with granola and fruit – Some people like to eat yogurt.  But, yogurt by itself won’t keep you from being hungry.  Add some granola and a few blueberries to the mix.  This makes a great breakfast idea for those mornings when you are running late.  Keep small bags of granola and blueberries in the fridge next to the yogurt so you can grab them and run.

Are you fighting the breakfast battle?  To get a filling meal you don’t have to opt for too much fat, calories or carbs.  These quick and easy breakfast ideas can be made within minutes and are a much healthier alternative to skipping breakfast or grabbing a high fat alternative.

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Menu Planning: Healthy Meal Plans
http://www.healthybiz2000.com/menu-planning.htm

Getting your children to eat healthy is as simple as…

Getting kids to eat healthy is similar to trying to herd cats. There are so many reasons that kids can give as to why they don’t want to, should not and quite possibly will kill over if they even take a single bite of this “good” food. Spanning from not tasting good – even though they have never tried it – to the fact they think they may be allergic to the food in question, kids are masters at dodging the proverbial ball of health food. There are, however, a few ways to get your kids to try new foods. After all, they have an arsenal of reasons why not to eat it, why not keep your own stockpile of weaponry to get them to eat the food they don’t want to.

Be a Role Model

Children’s minds are like a piece of bread, soaking up all of the oil surrounding it. Being a role model and continually trying new foods in front of and with your child can help to shape their ideas about trying new things. It is important to let your kids see that it is ok, and even fun, to try new things from time to time. Demonstrating the adventure and intrigue of trying new foods will stick in your child’s memory for the rest of their life.

Meal Plan Together

Kids are more apt to eat something they made, or at least planned to make. Letting your kids design the weekly meal, and even help cook the meals increases the chance they will try and like foods you are preparing.

Children are stimulated and become completely engrossed when they have the opportunity to get into a hands-on position. By allowing them to help plan the meals and to prepare and cook the food, children see exactly what goes in to the pot and there are fewer surprises for them to come up with the excuse they don’t like what is in it.

Keep Healthy Options

Nothing is worse than watching your kid look for a snack, finding nothing healthy and heading right for the ice cream with chocolate sauce and whip cream. Children learn from, and rely heavily on the ability to make their own decisions, whether it is on what clothes they want to wear to the types of foods they want to eat. It is important to offer a wide variety of choices to your kids. Just remember to respect their likes and dislikes and change the different options up frequently so they don’t get bored.

Conclusion

Getting your children to eat healthy is as simple as letting them get involved. Interacting with all of their senses, suddenly trying new foods becomes fun and intriguing. Allowing children to help out in preparing the meal builds a sense of pride and accomplishment. If all else fails, throw some new fruits and veggies in the blender with a little honey and they will never know the delicious smoothie they are drinking is actually good for them. Hiding the foods they don’t like, inside of foods they love, is a great fail-safe weapon to keep locked and loaded.