You are what you Eat, Part 1
“Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart.”
― Erma Bombeck
“The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook.”
― Julia Child
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
A quick Google search of "quotes about food" yielded over a million hits. Those are a lot of words about something so fundamental. Something we really can't live without. The first two mentioned above are favorites of mine. The next two are a precursor of what my next few "lectures" are really about.
During peri-menopause and menopause itself, a woman's metabolism slows down and body weight is much harder to lose and easier to gain. Many researchers estimate that a woman gains one pound for every year they are in this cycle. Lovely. And the weight grows and shows up in weird places it rarely did before, like the back, neck and belly. Even those 100 sit-ups a day that you've religiously performed every morning for years has no effect on this middle spread.Conventional wisdom states to "eat less and exercise more." That may have worked 10 or 15 years ago when you could still rule over your metabolism. But with peri- and menopause states all bets are, unfortunately, off. Many women gain weight during this time even though their diets have always been good and sound and their exercise levels high. Does this seem fair? Hell-to-the-NO!
You may notice the weight creep up on you to where one day you can't button your slacks without feeling as if the skin above the waist band is going to burst the button. Or, if you are a life long dieter like me, you may notice that even though you are consuming about 1000-1200 calories religiously every day and do your normal amount of exercise, all of a sudden clothing starts to look a little funny on you, and you can't move as freely in your clothes any longer. That's when I knew categorically I was in full blown menopause. That middle age spread that I had been trying to prevent suddenly grew, like a tumor, around my belly. No amount of sit-ups, leg-ups, or waist bends helped. I thought, since I knew so much about dieting, that all I needed to do was vamp up the exercise or cut a few more calories. But after a week of 800 calories a day, and the headaches and mood shifts that went along with them, the scale hadn't move even a tenth of a pound. That's when my research went into hyper-drive.
I'll admit, I'm not the best eater of all time. Fruit is tolerable, but I still have an antagonistic relationship with most vegetables. I know that even a little bit of extra weight ( or a lot) can lead to diabetes, heart disease, sleeping problems, high blood pressure and even strokes, just to mention a few. And going by all those height/weight/bmi charts, my weight and height definitely puts me in the overweight category. Trying to get this weight off without being in menopause has been difficult enough k my entire adult life. Now it was severely problematic.
So what to do.
First, I went back and reread all my nursing books about nutrition. My biggest concern at first was the amount of fat in my diet. I've been restricting fats for a while, but what I read made me reconsider the types of fats I was playing around with. Basically, like everything else in life, fats come in either Bad varieties or Good varieties.
The Bad fats are the saturated and trans fats. Remember a few years ago when the FDA started clamping down on foods that had trans fats added and wanted to make the food manufacturers own up to and list those fats? Well, turns out this was a good educational tool. Trans fats are created in a lab during the process of making cooking oil, shortening and margarine. They are unnatural and bad for you. Saturated fats come from animal fat, dairy and some plant foods like coconut and palm oil. Processed foods like luncheon meats are loaded with saturated fats. Now your body has two kinds of cholesterol: LDL and HDL. I love mnemonics, so LDL is the bad kind, or what I call Lousy Cholesterol. HDL, or the good kind, I like to refer to as Happy HDL. Bad fats increase your LDL levels and can lead to clogged arteries, a plethora of cardiac problems, and diabetes. Good fats are called monounsaturated fats and they are present in good foods like olive and peanut oil and avacados. Good fats increase HDL and cut down on all the crummy cardiac diseases.
After going through a diagnostic of my food intake, particularly my fat consumption, I realized I was eating way too many Bad fats, so I cut them out. No more cooking in corn oil, for instance. Now I use Extra virgin oil oil. The luncheon meats went into the garbage. I replaced my usual yogurt with Greek yogurt and switched to skim milk full time. Thinking I was on the right track after making all my changes, I kept checking the scale.
No movement at all. And my clothes kept getting more and more uncomfortable.
Back to the research board.
Next item was overall caloric intake on a daily level. According to my calculations of the amt of calories I'm supposed to have every day based on my BMI ( Body Mass index) and this long calculation you have to do, I should eat about 1800 calories a day. The last time I ate that many calories I was eating for two. If I took in that much regularly I would continue to gain weight and blow up like a hot air balloon! But MY BMI number also tells me I'm in the overweight range so I did need to modify my number of calories somewhat so that I could move from fat storing into fat burning. There are loads of charts available on line and in books that can help, but conventional wisdom proves that if you eat 3500 calories less you will loose an actual pound. Math NEVER lies! That is one solid truth. Now I knew I didn't want to starve or eat foods that I knew I wouldn't enjoy, so back to the research board. I did find one book that actually has helped me with eating better and choosing foods that would also fight the symptoms of menopause. It's called: Healthy Eating During Menopause By Dr Marilyn Glenville PhD and Lewis Esson. The first part of the book details the kinds of food you need to eat during menopause, the second, actual recipes you can use. For the next several blogs I'll be talking about this book and what I've learned from it. It has a huge wealth of good info to impart.
“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
― Kate Moss
I'm pretty sure that eating chocolate keeps wrinkles away because I have never seen a 10 year old with a Hershey bar and crows feet.”
― Amy Neftzger
― Erma Bombeck
“The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook.”
― Julia Child
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Man seeks to change the foods available in nature to suit his tastes, thereby putting an end to the very essence of life contained in them.
– Sai Baba
A quick Google search of "quotes about food" yielded over a million hits. Those are a lot of words about something so fundamental. Something we really can't live without. The first two mentioned above are favorites of mine. The next two are a precursor of what my next few "lectures" are really about.
During peri-menopause and menopause itself, a woman's metabolism slows down and body weight is much harder to lose and easier to gain. Many researchers estimate that a woman gains one pound for every year they are in this cycle. Lovely. And the weight grows and shows up in weird places it rarely did before, like the back, neck and belly. Even those 100 sit-ups a day that you've religiously performed every morning for years has no effect on this middle spread.Conventional wisdom states to "eat less and exercise more." That may have worked 10 or 15 years ago when you could still rule over your metabolism. But with peri- and menopause states all bets are, unfortunately, off. Many women gain weight during this time even though their diets have always been good and sound and their exercise levels high. Does this seem fair? Hell-to-the-NO!
You may notice the weight creep up on you to where one day you can't button your slacks without feeling as if the skin above the waist band is going to burst the button. Or, if you are a life long dieter like me, you may notice that even though you are consuming about 1000-1200 calories religiously every day and do your normal amount of exercise, all of a sudden clothing starts to look a little funny on you, and you can't move as freely in your clothes any longer. That's when I knew categorically I was in full blown menopause. That middle age spread that I had been trying to prevent suddenly grew, like a tumor, around my belly. No amount of sit-ups, leg-ups, or waist bends helped. I thought, since I knew so much about dieting, that all I needed to do was vamp up the exercise or cut a few more calories. But after a week of 800 calories a day, and the headaches and mood shifts that went along with them, the scale hadn't move even a tenth of a pound. That's when my research went into hyper-drive.
I'll admit, I'm not the best eater of all time. Fruit is tolerable, but I still have an antagonistic relationship with most vegetables. I know that even a little bit of extra weight ( or a lot) can lead to diabetes, heart disease, sleeping problems, high blood pressure and even strokes, just to mention a few. And going by all those height/weight/bmi charts, my weight and height definitely puts me in the overweight category. Trying to get this weight off without being in menopause has been difficult enough k my entire adult life. Now it was severely problematic.
So what to do.
First, I went back and reread all my nursing books about nutrition. My biggest concern at first was the amount of fat in my diet. I've been restricting fats for a while, but what I read made me reconsider the types of fats I was playing around with. Basically, like everything else in life, fats come in either Bad varieties or Good varieties.
The Bad fats are the saturated and trans fats. Remember a few years ago when the FDA started clamping down on foods that had trans fats added and wanted to make the food manufacturers own up to and list those fats? Well, turns out this was a good educational tool. Trans fats are created in a lab during the process of making cooking oil, shortening and margarine. They are unnatural and bad for you. Saturated fats come from animal fat, dairy and some plant foods like coconut and palm oil. Processed foods like luncheon meats are loaded with saturated fats. Now your body has two kinds of cholesterol: LDL and HDL. I love mnemonics, so LDL is the bad kind, or what I call Lousy Cholesterol. HDL, or the good kind, I like to refer to as Happy HDL. Bad fats increase your LDL levels and can lead to clogged arteries, a plethora of cardiac problems, and diabetes. Good fats are called monounsaturated fats and they are present in good foods like olive and peanut oil and avacados. Good fats increase HDL and cut down on all the crummy cardiac diseases.
After going through a diagnostic of my food intake, particularly my fat consumption, I realized I was eating way too many Bad fats, so I cut them out. No more cooking in corn oil, for instance. Now I use Extra virgin oil oil. The luncheon meats went into the garbage. I replaced my usual yogurt with Greek yogurt and switched to skim milk full time. Thinking I was on the right track after making all my changes, I kept checking the scale.
No movement at all. And my clothes kept getting more and more uncomfortable.
Back to the research board.
Next item was overall caloric intake on a daily level. According to my calculations of the amt of calories I'm supposed to have every day based on my BMI ( Body Mass index) and this long calculation you have to do, I should eat about 1800 calories a day. The last time I ate that many calories I was eating for two. If I took in that much regularly I would continue to gain weight and blow up like a hot air balloon! But MY BMI number also tells me I'm in the overweight range so I did need to modify my number of calories somewhat so that I could move from fat storing into fat burning. There are loads of charts available on line and in books that can help, but conventional wisdom proves that if you eat 3500 calories less you will loose an actual pound. Math NEVER lies! That is one solid truth. Now I knew I didn't want to starve or eat foods that I knew I wouldn't enjoy, so back to the research board. I did find one book that actually has helped me with eating better and choosing foods that would also fight the symptoms of menopause. It's called: Healthy Eating During Menopause By Dr Marilyn Glenville PhD and Lewis Esson. The first part of the book details the kinds of food you need to eat during menopause, the second, actual recipes you can use. For the next several blogs I'll be talking about this book and what I've learned from it. It has a huge wealth of good info to impart.
“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
― Kate Moss
I'm pretty sure that eating chocolate keeps wrinkles away because I have never seen a 10 year old with a Hershey bar and crows feet.”
― Amy Neftzger
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