// This post was sponsored by Nabisco as part of an Integrated Activation for Influence Central and all opinions expressed in my post are my own. //
I know that I'm not alone when I say that finding individual time with each of my kids is tricky. Right, fellow parents? I mean, I'm not super concerned about it. After all, we knew from the beginning that we wanted more than one child and that means lots of group time but, I do like to sneak a little one-on-one time when and where I can. With Finn, it's first thing in the morning. He still sleeps in our room and I usually start each day by nursing him in my bed and then enjoying baby snuggles (complete with smelling his head). For Melanie, I'm a little luckier. Once Finn goes down for his afternoon nap, I finish up whatever I'm working on and hang with my girl. We play one of her many board games and have a little snack. Nothing complex, just something easy and fun that makes our few minutes together special. Really, my afternoon snack time with Melanie has become one of my favorite parts of my day.
Right now, Melanie is WAY into drinking ice cold milk (with a striped straw!) and eating a TEDDY SOFT BAKED Filled Snacks. TEDDY SOFT BAKED Filled Snacks are an adorable bear-shaped snack made with quality ingredients like milk, eggs, and chocolate and are both kid and mom approved! The vanilla filled ones are currently a big favorite around here! Melanie makes a big show of eating the ears off first – so “he can't hear me eating the rest of his body”. Creepy or cute… I'm going with cute because, as a parent, that easier for my brain to handle right now. I love that I can easily snag a box of TEDDY SOFT BAKED Filled Snacks at Walmart in the Cookie/Cracker aisle and that they contain no high fructose corn syrup, no artificial flavors, and no artificial colors. They are perfect for our one-on-one game time since we can snack on them with ease while we have a Battle Royale over a game of Memory!
Do you want to make your snack time fun? Pick up some TEDDY SOFT BAKED Filled Snacks at Walmart in the Cookie/Cracker aisle today. AND, because I know y'all love a giveaway – between September 11- 29th, 2017, you can win one (1) of 12 prizes ($50 Walmart gift card each)or two grand prizes ($200 Walmart gift card each)! WHAAAATTTT?!?! I know, right! Enter below:
These rings are made in Bali of 925 Silver and say "I know the plans... Jer. 29:11." We partner with two safe houses and outreach teams in Bali and West Java to offer help to exploited women working in brothels and street corners. Your purchase of this ring will provide a ring to a woman in a brothel, as a reminder that God has plans for them that are beyond the reality that they're living.
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Fats shouldn’t be scary. I went on Yahoo today, and saw an article about butter and margarine. Which is healthier? How do you decide? If saturated fats and trans fats are both unhealthy, what do you choose?
Let’s go back a bit in history. Butter has been eaten for centuries. Saturated fats are found in many foods, including some vegetable fats (basically, saturated fats are solid at room temperature in a cooler climate – here in the UK it’s a hot day when butter melts in the kitchen). These foods have been an important part of diets around the world for ages. Are they really so bad?
When did trans-fats appear? Well, the sort that are causing concern are those man-made ones that occur when we process liquid vegetable oils into hard fats. These appeared in the early part of the twentieth century when people worked out how to extract oil from seeds and turn it into hard fat (margarines and shortening). These trans fats are very new in the history of mankind.
More than ten years ago, my friend who worked in the office of our local doctors told me that all the doctors families used butter and olive oil. ‘They don’t use margarines and vegetable oils’ she said. It has taken me a long time to get round to investigating why.
You have to make up your mind. My money is on the foods that people in my part of the world have been eating for centuries – in moderation of course. In my blog, I explore how to put a healthy, varied diet on the family table on a sensible budget. And I am particularly interested in fats, which cause such a lot of concern these days.
There’s no doubt about it, mind-set makes a difference. There are times when I know I need to cut myself a bit of slack, because sustained or big stress pushes us to eat.
Boredom is easier to deal with – if you have a ‘to do’ list which has fun things as well as dull things. My favourite is to do a job outdoors, or go for a quick walk to re-focus. Don’t eat, do something!
Misery and worry are difficult. There’s strength in numbers, so making some thoughtful, bite-size (sorry!) goals with a friend is a good way to start.
Starting is hard. My Dad took a few years to give up smoking, but he did it in the end and stayed off. He learned from every attempt. Write down things you have learned about your eating habits and what works for you. Knowing for example that you need to clear out the food you don’t want to eat (I used to keep croissants in the freezer, now I buy one on very rare occasions for a treat).
Dropping off the wagon is also hard. DON’T beat yourself up. Stop, plan tomorrow. It happens to so many of us, don’t let it do bigger damage by giving up.
I think the main foundation for sustaining a good diet is to know that your eating plan is healthy and works for you, while knowing your strengths and challenges. To know yourself is to help yourself, while being disappointed with yourself is no place to dwell.
Get knowledgeable about both how your body deals with food, and your mind with eating choices, and you are in a strong position to do well in the long-term, and remember we all have blips.
Tags: diet willpower, healthy diet long-haul, healthy eating, sustaining a healthy diet, sustaining healthy eating
Have you felt the floor tilting under your feet lately? There are always stories popping up about what we should and shouldn’t eat, little shockwaves most of us have learnt to be skeptical about. But could this be something bigger?
Is sugar worse for you than fat? I watched a television documentary on this not long ago, but it was inconclusive. This is interesting, because when the presenters, a pair of identical twin doctors, ate two very different diets over a month, their results were very different to longer, bigger and more controlled studies.
I had already made my mind up on this one, having read what Mr Gary Taubes has to say on the subject after a minute dissection of pretty much any reputable information and data he could get hold of.
Prof. John Yudkin’s book ‘Pure White and Deadly’ was re-published recently with a foreword by Dr Robert Lustig (his research has led to the opening of a clinic to treat obesity in children and infants) . It is a more old-fashioned read, but short (and sweet!) and more pertinent than ever.
I recommend these books and those by Lustig if you need to read up on this – it is harder to find supportive science for the all-pervasive ‘fat is bad’ hypothesis because it’s been around for so long, the original data being rather old (and flawed, according to a growing number of doctors and scientists).
Remember, there are libraries if you can’t afford all these books! Or share them with friends. I don’t worry about ‘super foods’ and minor adjustments in my diet too much, I think this is far more important, because these are big food groups, which involve the biggest changes to human diets in recent history. Sugar, and sugar-producing foods (carbohydrates) are a novelty in the human diet. Fats have been eaten and relished for millenia – go figure.
I’ve been away from this blog for QUITE some time, but have been learning and doing in the time between. Healthy eating for families is my starting point, I really want everyone to set down at the table together eating the same food.
I have made a breakthrough (one of these days I’m going to photograph all those weighing-machine tickets that show the gradual change and backsliding!) and that was that the root of weight control is carbohydrate control. We vary in how much carbohydrate we can take, and as we gain years we have also to gain some insight into this to keep trim. My little Kindle book explains this simply – go look for Waistline by Anne Smith. The ‘skinny’ version is only $0.99 but the bigger one is more detailed.
Unless we have type one diabetes, our bodies can produce insulin, and they do this in response to our blood sugar going up, to return it to normal. Modern, refined carbohydrates (flour and sugar products primarily) raise the blood sugar very fast (they have a high Glycaemic Index or GI), which pushes our bodies to make lots of insulin. A big rush of insulin then overdoes the lowering of blood sugar and we get a bit low and feel hungry again. We know about this yo-yo effect, but what does it have to do with weight gain?
From what I understand, our bodies can only store calories (energy both from fat and from carbohydrates) if insulin is present in high enough quantities. The body is in effect saying ‘ too much blood sugar, store that energy for later and make the blood sugar level safe’. Over the thousands of years we have lived on earth, fattening carbohydrates were not abundant, and most of the time our blood sugar would have been much more stable, not rising and falling as dramatically as it does on the modern ‘western’ diet. We had lean times and times of abundance, but we didn’t have constant access to high GI foods.
If we can get our blood sugar back where it was before the rise of high GI foods, we can fight weight-gain much more effectively than by semi-starvation (low calorie diets which make our bodies more efficient at hanging on to calories) or exercise.
I always make nettle soup at least once in spring. The nettle, like other plants credited with being a good spring tonic, has long roots that bring up minerals that may have been washed out of soil nearer the surface. I get my gloves on, find some young nettle shoots somewhere I am sure they have not been sprayed with weedkiller or polluted and get picking. My soup this year was all green and white -spring onions (scallions), garlic, leek, a little florence fennel, courgette (not very seasonal but it was there) and a few early chives. I used some ground almonds to thicken it, left over from Christmas. Other times I’d make a simpler, more nettly soup with a pint jug of nettles, some onion and a little oatmeal to thicken. Vegetarian or chicken stock, the choice is yours.
A few winter pounds have shifted, I am delighted to say. Five less than the January high. My sister and I have got second hand copies of a couple of GL books recently and she is glad that her son (primary school age) is happy to eat beans in stews and other forms. I like chickpeas myself – as hoummous and whole in salads and hot dishes. Butter beans too I find very palatable in winter dishes. There are so many more – aduki, black-eye, mung, cannelini – that adding a few in the course of the week is not dull. I’m not a great fan of the bean, but it is very good for lowering the glycaemic load and keeping blood sugar levels steady.
I sowed some salad in my vegetable bed and harvested a few leaves of lamb’s lettuce. A few young dandelion leaves will find their way into my salads, before they become too bitter. People have been known to blanch them (keep them tender by putting an upside-down pot over the top to deprive them of light) but I just get them in season and then move on to other things.
Delighted! Examining my winter waistline, (I did manage four walks over the Christmas week) I resolved to attend to my waist/hip ratio.
This is an important health marker and a poor ratio is a risk factor for both diabetes and heart disease. In my case creeping middle-age spread has got the better of me – having stayed stable for some months I have put on a few pounds over the winter holidays. Anyone else?
I was on a quick visit to the library and picked up a couple of useful books; one on self-help for diabetics (diet and exercise largely) and one on Glycaemic Load (GL). There was a fair bit of overlap between the two. I reasoned that a diet good for diabetes control would also function for diabetes prevention.
Imagine my delight when both books recommended dark (70% cocoa solids or above) chocolate as a good snack!
Both books were emphasising low glycaemic foods. I had to learn the difference between GL and GI here – both indices give you a number that tells you how fast that particular food raises your blood sugar levels. Carrots get quite a high GI because this index is based on enough food to supply 50 grammes of sugar. As carrots are very high in water, you need to eat over a pound and a half of carrots to get so much sugar! GL is based on portions, so the humble carrot doesn’t get demonised. It is much easier to follow when planning meals.
There are demons of course, because sugary and refined starch foods (even wholemeal grain can be high GL if it is very finely milled and highly processed) raise blood sugar rapidly, which ends up with energy being converted to fat for storage. We often forget that sugar and starch can be turned into fat by the body.
The heavenly part of this way of eating is that there is plenty of filling food, delicious food and no calorie counting.
For families, the biggest plus is that it is a healthy way of eating for the whole family. Growing kids need plenty of energy, so your teenager will need bigger portions than you if you are not taking masses of exercise. Your dinner plate still has vegetables, protein and carbohydrate, but the carbohydrate portion is smaller and it is low or medium GL.
Following the 80:20 rule I have had Friday night off and had some leeky mash and sausages tonight. Lots more leeks and less potato would have lowered the GL of the meal, but as long as my indulgent meals are not more than 20% of total, then I am in check if not making progress as fast as I could if I were stricter.
Well, here we are, all eating heartily in our house, and the kids are growing. Luckily, I’m not growing, but on the other hand I would like to lose a few pounds…
The odd thing is, I haven’t put on any either. Having put on a fair few pounds in the last couple of years, I now seem to have stabilised. Am I dieting? Making systematic efforts to restrict my calorie intake? Nope.
So how come after this fairly rapid weight-gain I’ve not carried on growing outwards? The power of my mind is not enough to get me shedding the pounds and moving towards my desired dress-size. But is will-power still operating on another level?
When I got to 154lbs, I said to myself “Enough”. I had a really strong idea that I didn’t want to go over 11 stones, and I really wanted a few pounds between me and the ‘overweight’ line on the BMI chart. I’d feel a lot more comfortable carrying 1/2 stone less, but I’m really glad my weight is not increasing.
I hate the idea of calorie-counting, and serious planning of food intake, so I just don’t do dieting, (especially not nutrient-poor crash-dieting). I have some time for balancing food groups, and for ensuring that the vegetable, fruit and water intake is taken care of, but elaborate food-control is not me. Where’s the pleasure? I’m just left wondering…
Perhaps at some level I am being effective in keeping my eating sensible, on a weekly if not on a daily (oops, 2oz chocolate!) basis.
I just read my post for 21 February, and have realised that my waist/hip ratio then was .77! If I do it now in centimetres, I get 0.79, rather than the 0.8 I get in inches, but this is a bit depressing all the same. Easter did become a bit of an excuse to stray from my usual treat of 85% cocoa-solids chocolate! The difference between 70% and 85% is basically sugar content.
Despite this, I am still going to focus on healthy food for all the family, because I feel strongly that even if crash diets worked ( I don’t believe they do long-term) children need to see their parents eating family meals. Some people find that they get good results relying on nutritious shakes for the first few days or even a week, but I am going to stick to a food diet!
Days start well, with all of us getting a breakfast with a protein component. I have read that our bodies don’t store protein, and also that too much at one time is hard on the metabolism. Sounds as if little and often might work. We don’t pay any heed to tradition here – I like kippers, but the children prefer fish fingers, and that’s fine by me – I choose the fat they are cooked in (and use very little). My favourite at the moment is to gently fry some courgette (zucchini) cut to rather chunky matchsticks, and as soon as they are beginning to colour slightly, add beaten egg, to make a scrambe/omelette. Soy sauce instead of sea salt on this goes well. Any greens can be used, but leafy ones I add when the egg has just started to cook.
Other kids’ breakfasts include: cheese on toast, bagel with cream cheese and a smoked salmon (a little goes a long way, and it is quite often found on special offer), bacon on a bagel. All simple stuff, which is necessary seeing it all has to be done in short order before the school bus comes.
If smoked salmon is about, I’ll have a bit of that beside scrambled egg – I just love eggs for breakfast, and eggs with fish is great.
I just have to keep up the good work and not reach for the biscuits at work or when I get home late afternoon. Wish me luck!