Beating The Freshman Fifteen :: !

Beating the Freshman Fifteen

Thanks for your interest in living your life to its fullest. I put this together to provide a meaningful set of principles that can support you in feeling healthy and fabulous about yourself.

This report is divided into six sections, and is based on six principles:

1.    Emotional eating
2.    Quality of food
3.    Quantity of food
4.    Top Five Worst Foods
5.    Top Five Best Foods
6.    My # 1 Meal To Avoid

As a Certified Holistic Health Counselor, I help my clients sort through the many conflicting dietary theories to find what works best for them. What I am offering you here are General Guidelines for a healthy diet that can contribute to maintaining your optimal weight. Ultimately, you need to continue to study good health and nutrition principles and find what works for you. Here are the Six Principles to get you started. For ongoing support and additional information you can sign up for my newsletter at www.healthyfastandcheap.com/newsletter.

Principle #1.  Emotional Eating

•    Stress
•    New situations
•    Social pressure

Emotional eating is basically a way to satisfy a need for nourishment. Strong feelings are experienced and food becomes a comfort for those feelings. This is not bad or wrong, but may not be the best way to get nourishment and comfort.

Causes of emotional eating:
1.    Stress. There are four F’s in the fight or flight response of stress: FLEE, FIGHT, FEED and FORNICATE. Eating temporarily overrides other low level stress by switching your nervous system out of one state to another. However, it does not address the cause of the previous stress and therefore it returns once you are done; only now you feel lousy from over eating too.
2.    New situations. Being at school - possibly the first time you are away from home - might be overwhelming and you may be longing for comfort. You might turn to comfort foods.
3.    Social Pressure. Ironically, the pressure to fit into a new social situation - often associated with how you look - can drive you to overeat as a way to escape the pressure to be thin or look sexy. There is nothing inherently wrong with looking good, but obsessing about it can lead you to rebel against any firm commitments you made about food.

Principle #2. Quality of Food

•    Processed foods
•    Whole foods
•    Freshness
•    Life force

The quality of the food that you eat can have a significant impact on your health. One unfortunate oversight in some mainstream nutritional theories is that little emphasis is given to quality. This is particularly significant when discussing the student diet because the quality of food often decreases in your first year in college. This can be attributed to limited availability of quality foods, dependence on the food plan, adjusting to personal responsibility and a full schedule. Here are four tips to keep in mind when looking for the best foods.

1.    Limit your intake of processed foods. Many of the college students that I interviewed were in dormitory / cafeteria food plans where the fare commonly included corn dogs, pizza and iceberg lettuce as staples. Processed foods tend to be devoid of essential nutrients and are actually taxing on the body.

2.    Increase Your Consumption of Whole Foods. Science is catching up with traditional wisdom with the discovery of phytochemicals, glyconutrients, antioxidants, co-factors, and other factors that complement the macronutrients (i.e., fats, proteins, carbohydrates).

3.    Freshness. This is an essential element of quality that is becoming undervalued in modern America. The emphasis on freshness is maintained in many cultures around the globe, and in all gourmet cooking. Simply put: fresh foods are more nutritious foods. Surprisingly, many frozen vegetables and fruits retain a high nutrient density because they are packed at the peak of freshness. If any food is designed to sit on a shelf for a year, be suspicious.

4.    Life Force. All food has a life force. This is the combination of many elements, including: freshness, growing method, whole or unprocessed, type of food, and shipping and handling. Food with a vibrant life force is clearly more energizing to our bodies. We are systems, as is our food and we take on the quality of the system that we consume.

Principle #3. Quantity of Food

•    Portion sizes
•    Glycemic load
•    High glycemic load foods
•    Low glycemic load foods

The quantity of food is certainly an issue with respect to maintaining a healthy weight. But I tend to dig deeper than calorie counting when working with clients on sustaining health and a healthy weight. I have interviewed hundreds of people about what works, or not, when attempting to maintain a healthy weight, and calorie counting is not always useful.

1.    Portion size is important. Most restaurants serve up huge plates of food that are (much) more than you need. Portion size is even more critical when combined with time of day. I work with clients to find the optimal time of day to eat larger meals, and it is generally not in the evening.

2.    Glycemic Load. Consideration of the glycemic index of foods is all the rage these days. This is a good piece of nutritional information, but it fails to take into consideration the caloric density. Those two variables are combined to create the glycemic load. The glycemic index indicates how fast food metabolizes into glucose, and the caloric density shows how much glucose will be created.

3.    High Glycemic Load Foods. These foods have a high caloric density, and turn into blood glucose rapidly. This causes excess glucose to be stored as fat and leads to hypoglycemic tendencies. Examples include: white rice, white potatoes, white sugar, fruit juice, white bread, pasta, most whole wheat breads, pastries, muffins, cookies, etc.

4.    Low Glycemic Foods. These are nutrient dense and either slow to metabolize into blood glucose, contain low carbohydrate calories, or are a combination of both. Green leafy vegetables (kale, collards, mustard greens, romaine, red leaf lettuce, etc.), turnips, carrots, parsnips (roots generally have a high glycemic index, but low glycemic load), papaya, apples, pears and grapefruit. Most water-rich fruits and vegetables are low glycemic load foods.

Principle #4. The Top Five Worst Foods To Eat

•    Hydrogenated oils
•    Sugar, corn syrup, sucrose, dextrose, fructose etc.
•    White flour
•    Refined salt
•    Fast food

1.    The more a food is processed, the more chance it has of having a negative impact on your health. I don’t believe that there are bad foods, but hydrogenated oils are not food, they are molecular structures not found in nature. For more information, check out my website for people with diabetes, http://realdiabeticnutrition.com/book-excerpts.php, where you will find an excerpt of my manuscript on nutrition that addresses hydrogenated oils.

2.    Although I don’t believe that any foods are bad, I certainly think that there are better, higher quality options for satisfying a craving for sweet foods. Refined sweeteners, as I mentioned above, hit the bloodstream fast-and-furious and lead to stored fat and a cycle of cravings based on low blood sugar. (The body quickly makes massive amounts of insulin when you eat a lot of sugar, stores what it cannot immediately use, and then it is left with excess insulin. Because the body wants immediate fuel but has nothing in the bloodstream to serve this role, you crave more sugar.)

3.    White flour metabolizes like sugar.

4.    Salt is sodium chloride and sodium is an essential mineral. But sodium is only one of many important minerals and when consumed in excess, especially in the absence of other minerals, it causes an internal imbalance. A high quality, unrefined sea salt will contain trace minerals that work to maintain better balance in the body. Fast food usually combines hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, white flour and refined salt. This gives a meal lacking in life force, nutrient density, mineral profile and clean fuel. The meat in fast food, thought low quality, tends to carry the meal because even low quality meat is a source of minerals, vitamins and energy. In the documentary Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock demonstrates the dangers of excessive fast foods consumption by eating nothing but McDonald’s for a month. He gained nearly 30 pounds, his liver became very toxic, and he went through periods of depression.

Principle #5. The Top Five Foods to Include

•    Dark green leafy vegetables
•    Papaya
•    Avocado
•    Cold water fish
•    Blueberries

Foods to include are nutrient dense, full of life force, fresh when possible, offer a low glycemic load, contain a full spectrum of beneficial phytochemicals (plant-derived chemicals), and leave you feeling great after eating them.

1.    Dark Green Leafy Vegetables. This may be the number one food missing from the American diet. Look at these amazing plants and you can see the energy contained within them. Collard greens, kale and other dark green leaves are full of minerals, chlorophyll (an internal cleanser), vitamins, glyconutrients (long chain sugar molecules found in the fiber of plants), and are energetically open and expansive.

2.    Papaya. What a great food for beauty. The flesh of a papaya is soft and smooth and contributes to your own skin looking beautiful. Just see for yourself. One of the reasons may be that papaya is rich in papain, an enzyme that assists in digestion and assimilation. There is a direct correlation between your digestive health and your skin. This is mildly sweet food that has a low glycemic load and makes a great dessert.

3.    Avocado. All you need to do is eat avocado consistently for a month to see for yourself how great this food is. It contains wonderful raw, monounsaturated fat that actually helps keep the body clean and lubricated. Another AMAZING beauty food. The low fat scare has unfortunately led to a fear of avocados, but this is completely unfounded. Good, healthy fat from avocado is not only acceptable, it is essential.

4.    Cold Water Fish. These aquatic animals have the highest concentration of omega-3 fatty acids DHA and EPA. Also known as EFAs (essential fatty acids), these fats contribute to a variety of beneficial effects. Most significant is a reduction in internal inflammation in all body systems. This leads to better brain function, better digestion, improved immune response, better stress management and a reduced risk of chronic disease later in life.

5.    Blueberries. This is my favorite berry, but all berries are nutritional ROCK STARS. They are low glycemic load foods with super high nutrient density. They taste sweet and leave you feeling clear, clean, refreshed and energized. They are absolutely loaded with beneficial phytochemicals in the form of anti-oxidants, flavonoids and beneficial acids. Berries are a great replacement snack for other sweet foods.

Principle #6. The Worst Meal You Can Eat

Danish and Coffee
Pastry and coffee is a common breakfast, snack, and sometimes even a meal, for many college students. It is fast, easy to consume, and gives you an immediate lift. Part of that is due to the rapid assimilation of sugars into the blood stream, which gives the brain an uptake of feel-good chemicals. The other aspect of the immediate lift is the obvious effect of caffeine. The down side to this injection diet - referring to the way that we commonly use these foods as a boost or lift - is dramatic. I described earlier that pastry is a high glycemic load food that leads to a blood sugar surge, storage as fat and then a crash. The crash leads to further cravings for sugar and this leads to a chronic cycle that begins to disrupt the hormone balance in the body. The prolonged use of caffeine over-stimulates the adrenals, and over time, also contributes to hormone imbalances in the body. The long term cumulative effect can be thyroid problems, adrenal fatigue, lowered immune response, depression, menstrual irregularities and lowered sexual response in men and women.

This is just the beginning of the Integrative Nutrition approach to healthy weight. For more free information, sign up for weekly postings from my blog at www.healthyfastandcheap.com/blog