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told a funny story about herself a few days ago. She was about two blocks away from her stop when she saw her bus coming. “I sprinted down the sidewalk,” she said. “Luckily I had my old lady rubber-soled shoes on because I felt as if I was breaking the 4-minute mile. I got to the bus just as last person at the stop was boarding. I hauled myself up the steps breathing heavily and proudly waved my senior citizen pass at the driver. He looked at it, looked at me, looked at it again and then said, ‘You run pretty fast for an old lady.’”
We laughed but then started to talk seriously about the number of people we knew who were just barely able to hobble around. Age, orthopedic or neurological problems and chronic illness were responsible for some of their physical impairments. But sometimes the inability to walk fast, climb stairs, lift only moderately heavy objects or even carry groceries was due to years of physical inactivity that left these individuals with reduced stamina, poor balance and fading muscle strength. I recalled a client who came to see me for a weight-loss consultation who told me quite emphatically that she was simply too old to exercise. Her age? Forty-eight. I remember asking her how she planned to move about when she was forty years older if she stopped exercising now. “But I am almost menopausal.” she informed me. “Once I go through menopause, my body will be too old to exercise.” Fortunately she was receptive to my short talk on the importance of physical activity for cardiovascular, bone and even mental health. Or maybe it was because I told her I could not help her lose weight unless she committed herself to a regular exercise regimen. My words came back to me after a recent visit as a volunteer visitor to residents at a local old age home. I saw two women, one 90 and the other 91. Both were extremely articulate. Their memories were intact and they related wonderful stories of their lives. Unfortunately, both were confined to wheelchairs and, because their upper body strength was so weak, they could not wheel the chairs themselves. Thus they spent most of the day in their rooms alone because the home had too few staff to move them except to the dining room for meals. Their families lived in other cities and their distress at the physical isolation due to their physical disability was great. There is a common expression one hears around gyms: Use it or lose it. Although this expression usually applies to people who are training to acquire a competitive edge in a particular sport, develop well-defined muscles or the ability to engage in difficult yoga postures, it really applies to all of us. Aging will take its toll on our physical strength; this is why there are age categories in competitive events and why Olympic contenders are usually in their mid-twenties or younger. But we can slow the progression of age-related deterioration on our bodies by making sure that every day we engage in some physical activity, even if it is as little as lugging laundry up a couple of flights of stairs, carrying home groceries or walking a frisky puppy. To make the exercise even more protective against spending elder years in a wheelchair, try to do the following: 1. Increase your heart rate. Walk fast enough so that window-shopping is not an option but talking (and gossiping with a friend) still is. 2. Increase your muscle mass. Use lightweights, resistance cords, or gym equipment to strength muscles. Focus on your back muscles, as this will compensate for computer screen slouch and strengthen posture. 3. Work on your core; this is jargon for your mid–section. Your abdominal muscles and back muscles hold your body up and keep you balanced. Yoga and Pilates are very effective ways of strengthening is part of your body. 4. Practice balancing exercises such as standing on one leg, barefoot. Aging takes its toll on balance pretty early on. Just watch people wobbling on one foot in a beginning yoga class. When you can balance with your eyes open, try doing it with your eyes closed. Make sure you can grab onto something if you feel yourself tilting. 5. Find a recreational activity that forces you to move. If you have fun, you will be more likely to continue. Think dancing, bowling, bird watching, gardening, outdoor photography, walking tours, or walks for charity, and ping pong in addition to the obvious ones like hiking, biking, tennis, golf (without the cart) and jogging. You may never need to run for a bus. But as long as running or any other type of exercise is part of your life, it is more likely to be a healthy one. | permalink | related link |   ( 3.1 / 36 )Hi SPD blog subscribers and fans: Beginning March 15th, we will be transferring our community forum completely to our Facebook fan page! If you are not yet a fan, click here to join us: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Boston-MA ... 084583809. If you are a fan, post a question or discussion topic, by clicking the tab "discussions" at the top of the page. Then, click on the button "Start a new topic" and complete the fields on the following page. Once you are satisfied with your post, click "Post new topic." Please feel free to post your questions, stories, and responses here any time. We (Judy and Nina) will respond to your questions and comments as before and can't wait to hear from you! Caution to spammers: inappropriate posts and information will be deleted. Remember, after March 15th, this forum will no longer be available. As always, we wish you continued success on The Serotonin Power Diet and look forward to seeing you on Facebook! - Judy & Nina | permalink | related link |  ( 3 / 134 )Most women’s magazines advise the reader to use accessories to refresh a winter wardrobe or to update last year’s clothes. Given budgetary restraints, it is obviously much cheaper to buy a belt or necklace to liven up an old dress or boring sweater than to buy an entire set of work and leisure clothes every season (assuming that there are still readers out there who are even considering doing this). Perhaps we should take the same approach to perking up our meals since they can become monotonous even if we are not dieting. Although most of us have moved away from the “if it is Thursday, it must be meatloaf” approach to menu planning, many would likely admit that they rarely go beyond a limited culinary repertory. Week after week I stare at certain items in the produce section that I rarely buy, such as kale, and resolve that one of these days I will try to incorporate them into my meals. But then I go back to buying the same vegetables and fruits that I bought the previous week. Like many people I enjoy reading recipes in the newspaper and often cut them out. Then I stuff them in my recipe drawer and notice them only when the drawer becomes hard to close. I also go online to look up a recipe but sometimes the number of choices is so great that simply reading all the options takes longer than making the dish. A few days ago I was in a clothing store that also sells household items including cookbooks. A visiting relative was busy trying on clothes and, trying to mentally block out the loud music, I picked up a cookbook by a familiar author, Mollie Katzen. Years ago she made healthy vegetarian meals accessible and delicious in her Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. This book, Get Cooking, includes recipes for vegetarians and omnivores with pictures that make you want to run into your kitchen and start chopping and stirring. What was so appealing about the recipes is that the methods were simple. They used familiar ingredients and included suggestions for slightly altering the recipes for the second time you made the dish. Like adding a belt to a sweater or a great necklace to a dress to make them seem new and interesting, using these recipes allows us to still eat our weekly pasta or fish or chicken but in novel and easy-to-prepare ways. Moreover, many of the recipes fit comfortably into the dinner guidelines of The Serotonin Power Diet as they feature soups with salads as the main course or main course vegetables such Greek-style stuffed eggplant, chickpea and mango curry, or Portobello faux burgers. Just as we may be leery of some new fashion accessories and unwilling to try them out unless approved by friends or family, so too some of us may be leery of trying our recipes that seem a little too novel for our family’s tastes. One way of testing the approval and acceptability of some of the recipes is to eat them as a first course (soups are an obvious example) or as side dishes. For example, you can “accessorize” a plain piece of broiled chicken with a side dish of panko (Japanese bread crumb)-coated eggplant cutlets or skillet potatoes with fried onions. And if spicy, different foods are not your family’s eating style, the cookbook will tell you how to make simple vegetables, such as winter squash, that you may think is too much trouble to prepare. And to my great delight, Katzen has two pages devoted to dark leafy greens, including how to prevent them from taking over all the space in the refrigerator. Tomorrow it is kale for dinner! | permalink | related link | ( 3 / 170 )We have a friend who has been losing weight for the past year-and-a-half. He planned a diet and exercise program that would be compatible with the frequent trips and eating out with clients required by his work. Six months ago he was no longer fat; now he is beginning to look thin. But he is still losing weight because, as he told us, he was once thin and sees no reason why he can’t be again. “I don’t care how long it takes,” he said. “Eating healthy and exercising every day is such a part of my life that I cannot imagine not doing it.” His attitude is so sensible it is surprising more people do not share it. However, it isn’t. Years ago, when I was developing a weight-loss program for a hospital-based weight-loss clinic, our staff discussed the length of the program. We agreed, based in part by published reports, that weight-loss clients would not stay on a program for longer than 12 weeks and that estimate was optimistic. Ten weeks was probably more realistic. We discovered during the years of the clinic’s operation that we were right. Around the l0th week, clients would stop showing up for appointments, and even though they were given the opportunity to continue beyond 12 weeks with no extra charge, only a few did. Many said that they could diet on their own and this was indeed the case. But others, we knew, just didn’t want to be bothered dieting even though they had not reached their goal. They felt they had lost enough weight to improve their blood pressure or cholesterol or dress size and that was enough for them, even though they were not anywhere near their goal weight. Dieting for more than several weeks can be extremely hard. In our book, The Serotonin Power Diet, we use the analogy of a long road trip to describe what it is like to have one’s eating limited by a food plan and leisure time used up with exercise. Often a car trip is marked by long periods of boredom as the scenery of one interstate merges into another and even the rest stops become predictable and unexciting. Sometime it feels as if the destination will never be reached and due to speed limits, there is no way to race ahead and get there sooner. So too with a diet. The novelty of the first few weeks vanishes and the dieter settles into a routine of eating and (one hopes) exercise that is like driving with cruise control. The pounds drop off (like the miles going by) but the weight-goal destination still seems quite far away. Few people would give up a car trip before reaching their destination because of boredom and driving fatigue. But often their arrival is delayed by events over which they have no control such as accidents, detours, car trouble or bad weather. Occasionally a trip is lengthened because of a planned stop along the way for a few days of sightseeing. Eventually the destination is reached. People who must be on a diet for a very long period of time would do well to regard it as a long trip with built-in and/or unexpected delays along the way. Sometimes a diet gets sidetracked because of work, social or family obligations. Stress, holidays, mood changes or sickness can make the diet take a detour so that it takes much longer than anticipated to lose the weight. But a delay is not justification for a permanent stop to weight loss. It is like being stuck in traffic; you never think you will move again because eventually the car moves again. The same thing will happen with your weight loss. You may even find yourself gaining a couple of pounds but go back to the diet plan and the pounds will start to come off again. If you have a considerable amount of weight to lose, it might be useful to consider going on a diet rest stop. Pausing the diet for a few days or even a few weeks but with a definite date to return might increase your enthusiasm and commitment for staying on the program longer. Knowing that you are able to eat foods that are not on the diet (although portion-controlled) may be enough to increase your willingness to get back on the program a few days later. It is like leaving the highway to visit some tourist attraction. The respite may be enough to make you willing to go back to the boring highway again. The only caveat for going on a diet rest stop is to promise yourself you will start back on the diet at a specific time. This is crucial. After all, if you leave the highway to do some sightseeing, you don’t decide to stop your trip and live in the town you are visiting. So too, stopping the diet and even the exercise for a few days should not mean taking up residence in a non-weight-loss lifestyle. And just as the highway signs indicate that you are finally approaching your destination, you will be able to tell from your slimmer body, increased energy and fitness and improved health that you too are at the end of your weight-loss journey. You will have come far but the goal will be worth it. | permalink | related link | ( 3 / 201 )This winter has seen the typical array of gimmicky diets ranging from cookies to drinking green tea and puréed grass (the last just overheard in the gym). Thus, it was refreshing to come across some sensible advice about eating in a magazine devoted to physical fitness. In the January 2010 issue of Runner’s World, an article titled “Not Guilty” by Ashley Gartland looks at several foods that dieters and runners alike have been avoiding because of their bad nutritional reputation. Since runners, particularly those who tend to race, are extremely concerned about maintaining their nutritional health and fitness, it is worth looking at what they are being told they can eat. Eggs in their entirety, not just the whites, are promoted as a rich source of nutrients. We have been told to avoid the yolk for so long it is hard to remember that the yellow center of the egg contains essential vitamins like A and D and the minerals zinc and iron. The protein quality of an egg is just about perfect for humans since the amino acids that make up the egg protein are very close to our amino acids needs. Eggs have been on the forbidden food list for years because of their cholesterol content; certainly people who have a genetic disposition to high cholesterol should avoid them and no one should eat them excessively. But if your cholesterol is normal and you do not consume more than three eggs a week, you can eat the entire egg without worry. Just stay away from desserts, like soufflés, that are extremely high in egg yolks. Also, don’t assume that because eggs are good for you, the sides that come with it, such as sausage or bacon, are also healthful. Next to eggs, red meat ranks on the “I don’t eat list.” To be sure, the expensive cuts of red meat are very high in fat. However, according to the article in Runner’s World, the leaner, less tender cuts—that are also the cheapest—contain about the same amount of saturated fat as a skinless chicken thigh. A friend who grew up during the Second World War when meat was rationed told me, “ I never knew that red meat could be tender until I was in my twenties. The only meat we were served had to be pounded into submission or stewed for hours so it could be chewed. On the other hand, we never had to worry about cholesterol.” Red meat is very high in iron and unlike the iron in vegetables it is absorbed rapidly and readily into the bloodstream. But be cautious about how much you eat. A three-ounce portion will give you 22 grams of protein, which is about half of a woman’s daily requirement and about a third of a man’s. Eight or 10 ounces of a tender, expensive filet or sirloin cut will be too high in fat and needlessly high in protein to make it a healthy choice. Then there are nuts and cheese, two favorite snack foods that many of us avoid because of their fat contents. The fat in nuts is unsaturated and thus good for your heart and the minerals such as manganese and potassium are food for muscle function. Do avoid nuts that are salted because they can make you retain water and be mindful of how many you are eating. A handful is fine (unless your hand resembles a baseball mitt). Cheese is also high in fat, which not heart friendly as it is saturated. On the other hand, cheese is rich in calcium, magnesium and good protein. Cheeses also contain a lot of flavor so sprinkling a small amount on pasta or finely shaving some aged Parmesan or Gruyere on a salad can turn an ordinary dish into a gourmet one. Keep quantities to one ounce and they will add flavor and nutrients without adding weight. White potatoes, like the other foods listed here, are considered toxic by many people trying to eat healthily. “I never eat white potatoes; they are poison,” my hairdresser told me. I said nothing because annoying someone cutting your hair is very dangerous but I did mention this article to her (after she was done). Potatoes, as we have been saying all along in The Serotonin Power Diet, are a wonderful food and this article confirms it. According to the sports nutrition writer Nancy Clark, one medium potato contains 4 grams of fiber, more than 25% of vitamin C needs, and 30% of daily requirement for potassium. Moreover, runners rapidly utilize the digested stored carbohydrate as fuel. What she did not say, but readers of our book know, is that potatoes, eaten as the main course for dinner, will soothe away stress and comfort you into a good night’s sleep. This happens because when potatoes are digested, serotonin is made. Runners are also given the good news that they should eat sugary breakfast cereal to satisfy their sweet cravings. Of course they should; we have been telling people to do this for more than 25 years. The very low-fat breakfast cereals will be easily digested and when that happens, the brain’s new store of serotonin, made as a result of eating these carbs, will take away the sugar craving. One caveat: This advice came from a magazine read by people who spend a great deal of time running. Their daily or almost daily running makes them fit with lower cholesterol and probably lower insulin levels than people who do not exercise. Following the nutritional advice in this article will not make you as healthy and fit as a runner unless you exercise, too. Brisk walking, biking, working out in the gym, dancing to a DVD, yoga, Pilates, swimming—anything that gets you moving several times week is good. And just think of what you can eat, without guilt, after your workout. | permalink | related link | ( 3 / 245 )Next |
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