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Some Really Sensible and Easy To Follow Dietary Guidelines
The nutrition world seems to be filled with guidelines on what to eat, what not to eat, where to eat it, and at what time. That’s all well and good – except when the advice is contradictory or close to impossible to accomplish.
Want some straight-forward, sensible guidelines that focus more of how to eat rather that precisely what to eat?
According to Marion Nestle’s blog, Food Politics, Brazil has designed dietary guidelines to help protect against undernutrition and to prevent the health consequences of overweight and obesity. (You can find the guidelines here, but if you don’t read Portuguese, you’ll have a bit of trouble.) Fortunately, Food Politics provides us with a translation of the guidelines.
There are three “golden rules:”
- “Make foods and freshly prepared dishes and meals the basis of your diet.
- Be sure oils, fats, sugar and salt are used in moderation in culinary preparations.
- Limit the intake of ready-to-consume products and avoid those that are ultra-processed.”
The ten guidelines:
- “Prepare meals from staple and fresh foods.
- Use oils, fats, sugar and salt in moderation.
- Limit consumption of ready-to-consume food and drink products
- Eat regular meals, paying attention, and in appropriate environments.
- Eat in company whenever possible.
- Buy food at places that offer varieties of fresh foods. Avoid those that mainly sell products ready for consumption.
- Develop, practice, share and enjoy your skills in food preparation and cooking.
- Plan your time to give meals and eating proper time and space.
- When you eat out, choose restaurants that serve freshly made dishes and meals. Avoid fast food chains.
- Be critical of the commercial advertisement of food products.”
It’s not always easy or affordable to find the freshest foods and to take the time to make them. But for the majority of the time, the guidelines sound downright sensible and pretty doable, don’t you think?
The Key Thing To Do To Develop A New Habit
It’s the second week of the New Year. Maybe you’ve decided to work on some new habits – Lose weight (how are you going to do that?), cook at home more (when are you going to do that?), eat less bread, butter, ice cream, candy, you name it (how much less?).
Specificity and baby steps help move you toward your new habit – but something else is key, too: practice. Your brain needs to decide that this new habit, the new behavior, is its default. How does your brain get the message? By you performing – doing – that behavior over and over again.
Remember this: What gets you to Carnegie Hall (or to the podium, or to the awards ceremony)? Practice. Think about this: What makes your new healthy habit stick? Practice.
If you’ve resolved to form new healthy habits, habits you want to keep and that fit in with your lifestyle, you need to keep repeating the new behaviors for that habit over and over again. It’s like learning a language or a new game. You need to keep practicing.
Why? Our brains are lazy. They like to default to what’s easy for them – and usually that’s an old habit (both good ones and bad ones). That default behavior is easy, nice, comfortable, and doesn’t require the extra energy necessary to do something unfamiliar. Doing something that’s very familiar can be done without much thinking or energy — like eating a certain thing everyday at the same time or going for a daily run at the same time and on the same route.
The way to create a new habit and to make it “stick” is to create a new “default” pattern to replace an old one. That requires the repetitive practice of doing the same behavior over and over again – like creating a path through grass or weeds by walking on it day after day.
Some Additional Tips For Forming New Habits
- Try one change at a time. Create one new habit and then begin to work on another. Since our brains are, in a sense, kind of lazy, they don’t like too much disruption or change at a time. They’re used to doing something one way, so pick one change at a time and create a habit around it.
- Be committed and willing to work on your habit (goal). Decide if you’re really willing to make change(s) in your life. Are you serious or half-hearted about what you want to do? “Kinda,” “sorta” goals give you “kinda,” “sorta” results. Realistic, achievable goals produce realistic results.
- Start small and specific. So many of us are guilty of all-or-nothing thinking and overly ambitious goals. Guess what happens? We shoot ourselves in our collective feet and call ourselves failures. Do it often enough and a “no can do” attitude gets solidly embedded. Aim for what you think you can do and keep doing it. That doesn’t mean not trying, it just means scale it to what you think you can accomplish with some effort. If, for example, your aim is to exercise more frequently, schedule three or four days a week at the gym instead of seven. If you would like to eat healthier, try replacing dessert with something else you enjoy, like fruit or yogurt or a very small portion of a favorite indulgence — instead of saying you’re going cold turkey and will never eat a dessert again.
Unhealthy habits develop over time. Working on healthy habits to replace unhealthy ones also requires time. Be patient. And practice.
What Are Your Eating Triggers?
Is it almost a foregone conclusion that you’ll stuff yourself to the gills when you go home to your parents’ house for holidays or other events? Is it almost impossible for you to navigate your office without stopping at the snack room and the receptionist’s desk to sample the never-ending array of holiday specialties or someone’s birthday cake? What about the routine lunch for a not-so-good friend that makes you go home and eat a pint of ice cream?
Know Your Triggers
Most of us can name situations that make us want to eat. Sometimes it takes dedicated thought to precisely identify what it is that starts the cascade of events that leads to not just wanting to eat, but the feeling that you absolutely must have a particular food — sometimes in large quantities. Keeping a food journal where you record not only what you ate but the environment and what was going on while you were eating can help you identify the causative factors.
Sometimes those triggers are big red flags – for instance you know that having a piece of pecan pie — or any other sweet food for dessert at lunch will trigger nibbling on candy at the office the rest of the afternoon. But do you eat it anyway?
Or, do you intentionally go to store A instead of store B for a cup of coffee because you know store A always has lots of free samples of freshly baked cake and cookies? Do you know that if cookies are in the cupboard and ice cream is in the freezer that you will sooner, rather than later, eat it?
Which Foods And Environments Are Your Red Flags?
Be honest with yourself and admit that certain foods and environments are red flags for you. I know that I can’t have cookies in my house and I also know that I tend to overeat at family events.
There’s no reason to psychoanalyze why certain foods or situations act as your triggers. Just know which particular things serve as your red flags — your triggers — and have strategies in place to deal with them.
Take A Cue From Athletes: Rehearse Your Party Eating Behavior
What happens when you’re invited to a “command performance” party or event with a long cocktail hour followed by a fancy multi-course sit down meal? Or maybe you’re going to a gourmet holiday lunch at a friend’s house where there will be lots of hot mulled wine, her special entree, and fantastic cookies accompanying mousse for dessert. You’ve been extremely conscious about eating well but you want to be both polite and eat some of the special foods and still be careful about overindulging on high calorie foods. How can you enjoy your food, be polite, eat what really appeals to you, and leave with your waistline intact?
What Do You Want the Result To Be?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer since we all have our own needs and preferences. You may swoon over ten- layer chocolate cake while I can ignore it but can never pass up cheese fondue.
Part of the answer lies in figuring out what you really want the end result to be. Then you can create your own individualized plan — your own foodMAP — that you can use as a template for what to do when you find yourself in the land of food temptation.
Visualize
Visualizing a situation that you might find yourself in and then rehearsing your actions in your mind ahead of time will help you successfully navigate a whole host of food landmines and eating challenges. That’s a technique coaches use to prepare their athletes. They’re taught to anticipate what might happen and to practice how to respond to a situation. Sports performance improves with visualization exercises—so can eating behavior.
To do this effectively you have to be clear on what you want the end result to be. Is it to enjoy every kind of food available but in limited quantities – or is it to skip dessert but have a full range of tastes of all of the hors d’oeuvres? Visualize what the environment will be like, where you’re going to be, and with whom. Think about what food is going to be available, how it will be served, how hungry you’re likely to be, what your usual eating pattern is like—and what you would like it to be.
Will your host insist you try her special dessert and refuse to take no for an answer? Will you be eating in a restaurant known for its homemade breads or phenomenal wine list? Are your dining companions picky eaters, foodies, or fast food junkies? Will your host be really annoyed if you don’t finish every course at the special sit-down dinner?
Proactive Not Reactive
Be proactive. Figure out your plan in advance — earlier in the day or the night before. Visualize the situation and if there’s temptation or anxiety, close your eyes and picture it. Imagine what people will say and how you will respond in a way that will make you proud of yourself without giving in to external pressures and food pushers.
Armed with your rehearsed plan, go out, use it, and stick to it as best you can. You assume control, not the circumstances and not the food. You are firmly in charge of what happens and what food and how much of it will go into your mouth.