…do it at your own pace and do it for real.

Are you fatalistic? All or none? In it to win it or you just couldn’t care less?

If you or a family member is like this, you are not going to go very far in the heart healthy arena.

Yes, you can psycho diet and hit your goal quickly. You’ll be down 20 pounds in 8 weeks and aren’t you fabulous? Where will you be 6 months from then, though? You could still be down in weight, but odds are you won’t be any healthier.

The AHA doesn’t want you thin, they want you healthy. Having you lose the weight and the bad habits is not about making you look good in your room. It’s about keeping you alive in your room. Nothing is worse than getting excited about your new body and possibly having a heart attack because of it. Let me clarify that statement, too, because I think it will be lost on many. When you lose weight without investing in the process, you run the risk of having a weak heart but a lighter, faster body. This is dangerous stuff and you see this with people who want to just “lose the weight first” and then bring in the good habits second. The thing is, you strengthening everything—including your heart—when you do it the right way and leave yourself weakened and vulnerable when doing it the wrong way. Commit to at least one good habit every 2 to 3 weeks and you will be more likely to keep them.

Here are 3 of the easiest changes that you can get your mom, aunt, cousin, friend or whomever to buy into without them feeling backed into a corner:

1) Movement attached to something enjoyable. Typically shopping. Go with them to a mall and make them move at least once a week. While you’re doing that, ask them their schedule and have them tell you when they have periods of downtime. Give them examples of how they can fit 10 min. of exercise into those spaces. Things that do not count as exercise: running late, giving you the run around, jumping to another topic, etc.

2) One colorful food per day: Tell them they must eat one colorful fruit or veggie per day and they cannot have the same one two days in a row or more than 2 times in a week. That’ll make them a bit mad but they’ll get over it and begin to change or they’ll eat red peppers every day and tell you to MYOB. Beware of the latter.

3) A glass of water at 3 meals/day: You’re not saying every meal. You’re not saying they can’t have their precious diet Coke. You’re saying I just need you to have 3 glasses of water every day. If you can do that for me, I will {fill in the blank here: mow the lawn, pay your taxes, stop growing hemp in the basement, whatever} and they will be more likely to adopt this habit as well.

They say it takes 21 days to make a habit (and 3 min. to locate the nearest Coldstone Creamery—keep the away from Google!) so stay close to them for a while and encourage.

You know someone who is worth it to you. Help them along wouldja?

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Dieting for beauty sounds a bit odd for most people.  When you think of dieting, you think of weight loss but you really do not equate the end result to something like ageless beauty.  And when you think of beauty, you think of creams and treatments instead of fruits and vegetables.  But as you go through this series with me you will hear me refer to beauty over and over again.  Why?  Because you are wasting your time just dieting to lose weight, diet to look good at the end! 

Dry hair, brittle nails, wrinkled, leathery skin and a less than bright smile all take away from the weeks of effort you just put in to make your body hot.  So how can we control how we look at the end of all this dieting?  Menu planning. 

Adding variety to the diet allows the body to flourish.  Hitting it fresh from all angles makes you look fresh, young and beautiful.  Instead of walking around with a list of vitamins and minerals in foods, let’s work on easy ways to remember how to get it all in.

Most of us eat many of the same foods day in and day out.  Protein does not change too much throughout the week (here’s a conversation you hardly hear: “I wanted squid today but they didn’t have any on sale so I swung over to the meat department and picked up tripe instead) with us depending on chicken, chicken and chicken for every meal with an occasional ground turkey and shrimp tossed in the mix.  Starches are the same old starches and fruits and veggies are just an afterthought for the most part (Oh look, berries.  I’ve never seen that on a menu.)    If we do not actively have some way to stay on top of our variety, we are just not going to do it.  Instead, we rely on the usual suspects (however healthy they are, they are not the only fruits and veggies in the world) like berries, broccoli and salad (really lettuce) to populate our plates.  Unless, we color code it!

Color adds variety and not just in fruits and veggies.  Meats and starches can be characterized through color, too.  Texture is important as well but that’s how you liven up a menu so just hold your horses will ya?  Jeez! J Here is a different way to think about the colors of protein in your diet:

From light to dark:

Protein may be categorized from light in color (shellfish, white meat chicken, dairy, white fish for example) to various medium tone shades (salmon, lentils, ground chicken for example) to darker shades (skinless chicken thighs, steak, buffalo just to name a few).  An easy way to look at your day is to think 3, 2, 1.  Three sources of light, 2 sources of med tone and 1 source of dark per day.  Do you have to be exact with that?  No.  But it gives you a starting place instead of aimlessly milling around the store picking up numerous forms of chicken!

So what does this really look like?

Light: 

Chicken breast, scallops, shrimp, cottage cheese (1%), egg whites, turkey breast (non deli), extra lean ground turkey, white fish of all kinds, greek yogurt, albacore tuna, lobster

Medium:

Salmon, chunk light tuna, chicken livers, sardines, lentils (yes they are a starch but I am using them as a protein here), egg yolks, protein powder, tempeh

Dark:

Eye of round, buffalo,bison, venison, skinless chicken thighs and legs, flank stank, beef liver (you knew it was coming), lamb, duck

Here are the rules:

1)       Try not repeat items on the list more than twice in a day, but you certainly can within the week.

2)       The items are not listed solely by fat content so you will have to catch the post on how to track your macronutrients. They are listed by color.  Don’t forget that.

3)       Lastly, this is just a fun way to remember how to spice it up a bit.  There is not any major scientific basis for this—yet.  First we learn to crawl…wink, wink.

Using this format, you could have egg whites, chicken breast, white fish, protein powder, salmon and buffalo in one day.  Holy mother of variety, batman!  I think you have covered just about every avenue with that winning combo.  Much more to come on how to put this together, but at least you’re getting the idea.

Why does this matter?  Mainly because if you choose all the same protein sources all the time, you’ll miss out on choline in egg yolks which supports cardiovascular and brain functioning or selenium which is more abundant in dark meat than in light meat.  And since selenium is an antioxidant and staves off certain cancers, I like to think you’ll be adding a bit more dark meat to your diet.

I hope you realize how much you will be learning in this series and you get to stick around for more.  Next we will tackle carbohydrates and give you great ways to think about adding more color to your plate!

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What a one hit wonder they were!   And when it comes to menu planning for an effective diet, you do not want to be a one hit wonder!  But you do want to C.O.L.O.R. yourself bad! 

Menu planning may seem incredibly daunting task at first if you think you are just going to write one up without a “plan”.  You know how much simpler life seems when you have a step by step guide that shows you how to do something.  So let’s quickly break down the process of making a menu and it’s as simple as adding some C.O.L.O.R.:

C             Color code it           How many colors do you have in the week?  Can you add more?

O             Order it        Your goal decides your menu format.  There are a few and we’ll cover as many as we can.

L              Liven it up     Too much seriousness in your menu is no good.  Let’s dress this puppy up!

O             Optimize it      Step back and look at all you have.  Can we improve anything anywhere? 

R             Repeat it all over again      Create your own “bank” of menus.

If your menu has COLOR, it has everything!  When I receive food diaries to check out (and in season I probably view over 50/week), I see many of the same eating patterns that we as busy people like to perpetuate:

Eating the same thing everyday

Limited choices of fruits and veggies

Focusing on only the “super” foods (how much broccoli can you eat?)

No “fun” in the diet

No rhyme or reason for food placement

If you do not know why you do something or are not sure how to do something, you will never really do it well.  You are just going through the motions faking it while in reality you hope you are “making” it.  But you know you really are not making it yet you are not quite sure why.  You are falling short somewhere and it is getting old to you.

There are hundreds of books out there with recipes in them and now there are even people selling ebooks of menu plans.  You are more than welcome to find one of those and follow them if you want.  But what’s going to happen?  You are going to become bored with the food choices or feel limited by the way they put the menus together.  What happens if all of the recipes are not clean enough for your goal?  What if they give you plans and their lowest cal level is 1400 and you are 4’10” and 95lbs?  That’s like Thanksgiving for you!  And because you do not know why they did what they did, you cannot adapt it to be what you like it to be.  How about just creating your own menus, with your own fun added to them? 

Let’s begin the process of creating our own menus and take it step by step—from color coding it all the way to repetition—because face it, no one really knows what you like but you.  And success depends upon you planning an effective menu and adhering to it as much as possible.   Next post:  Adding some COLOR!

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