Adventure Doc Diet

Food and eating are fun! Food tastes good and I am not saying to eat only healthy food. Just make sure that you are not filling up on bad food and never eating good food. I think 2 healthy meals per day are a great goal. That leaves you one meal to eat what you want!

Two healthy meals is actually not that hard. Most people I know skip breakfast. For breakfast, try having a piece of fruit and a granola bar. There you go, one healthy meal down! For lunch, a salad and a sandwich with some turkey or chicken is great. Have some more fruit for lunch, too. Just don’t take a healthy sandwich and load it up with mayonnaise and other fatty things. Cheese, potato chips, soda and 2 cigarettes ruin a healthy lunch. If you are having those types of meals for breakfast and lunch, you can pretty much eat what you want for dinner. Have fun with it you earned it.

One thing I have to say is that if you are taking vitamin pills or other supplements, make sure you are drinking plenty of water. These vitamin pills and supplements can accumulate in your kidneys, the body’s filters, and may lead to kidney stones. Drinking plenty of water helps this from happening. Vitamin supplements for kids are a great idea and helps build strong bodies. Vitamin supplements for older adults (over 65) is great too, but I advise 3-4 days per week and not everyday. The big thing with these supplements is that they contain calcium and help keep bones strong and healthy. Ideally, people will eat a very healthy diet filled with fruits and vegetables and get their vitamins and minerals from real food and not pills. Vitamins and minerals from real food are always better than pill vitamins. As with anything, check with your doctor about your individual body’s need before starting anything new or making changes.

Vitamin pills are another thing I am frequently asked about. I have mixed thoughts on vitamin pills. Most researchers say that adult males do not need vitamin pills on a daily basis. The reason they say males is that women loose blood, once per month as their “period”. This loss of blood can lead to decreased iron in the body. Iron is a component of blood and is found in most multivitamin pills. Now, I think vitamin pills are a good thing, if taken a few days per week and not everyday. I take vitamin pills 3 days per week and use a common multivitamin. Does my body need everything that is in the vitamin pill? Probably not. But, some of it I might be using and the stuff that I don’t use will be passed out in urine of feces.

Activity combined with a sensible diet of healthy food will cause weight loss. I know many people that eat more than they should but they are quite active and exercise frequently. They are still skinny. I know some people that eat very fatty foods and in large amounts. These people also don’t exercise. Guess what, they are obese. If you want to lose weight, start eating healthy food and begin an exercise program. Control your portions and make sure your food is low in fat. Begin to exercise every other day and you stick with it. Being overweight didn’t happen overnight and won’t go away in 2 weeks. It takes a big commitment and a change of lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle that includes making time for exercise on a regular basis will lead to weight loss.

Obesity is big problem with public health, especially in America. Some of the statistics I have heard say that 1 of 3 people in America is overweight. Patients are always asking me about losing weight and how to do it. Some of the people that want to lose weight need to and others do not. Weight loss for the sake of losing weight is not good. I am reminded of many young ladies in Athens, Greece. They are mostly very, very skinny. They are also starving themselves. Eating one meal per day and drinking 10 cups of coffee per day and smoking 2 packs of cigarettes per day. Yes, they are skinny but very unhealthy. The big secret to losing weight is not a fad diet, not counting carbs, not skipping meals, not starving yourself, not laxatives, none of this. Simply, use more energy in a day than you eat.

I always tell people trying to loose weight that they can basically eat as much green salad and fruit as they want. Most people I know that are overweight take in too many calories. Salads make you feel full and contain a lot of healthy vegetables. Just don’t drench them in a fatty dressing. If you get hungry, eat a salad or some cut up, raw veggies. Eat as many of these as you want. They will make you feel full and not add on extra calories.

Also, I have to speak a bit about people who are just “big because everybody in their family is big” and it is “in their genes”. Not true! If you look at people who are obese, they generally come from a family of overweight people. This is true. The reason this is true is because they all share the same poor eating habits and sedentary lifestyle. An overweight family produces overweight children because the parents lead by example. The diet the child eats is probably full of fatty, processed foods. There is never exposure to anybody exercising. These are patterns that are learned, not passed on in genetics or “big bones”.

Another thing that is important to learn from these people is that they always stop eating after getting 70% full. They do not stuff themselves like it is the last meal they will ever eat. They eat until feeling full and stopping. Then they eat again in a few hours. Smaller meals more frequently. I try to eat 4-5 small meals per day. A small sandwich and some fruit for lunch, a salad in the afternoon. This portion control and theory of smaller meals more frequently combined with exercise make a healthy person.

Okinawa is an island off the coast of Japan. The people that live there have the longest lifespan of anybody on the planet. The census bureau that tries to count the people on the island have a difficult time finding the people in their homes because they are out walking for hours at a time. They are swimming or gardening. They are very active.

These foods contain great energy and some of the Slimfast style shakes are actually complete meals with vitamins and minerals of a larger meal. The point is eating little meals, more often and making them healthy snacks. Some people are concerned that eating 4 meals per day will take too much time. Remember that these aren’t typical meals, think of them more as quick snacks. Snacks don’t take a lot of time to eat.

Portion control is one of the keys to losing weight and being healthy. One method I use to control portions and make sure that I eat smaller meals more often is to have snacks that are easy to eat and quick. Slimfast shakes and other products like them are great for this. Granola bars, Cliff bars etc. are great. They are small portions and healthy. I try to carry a few of these with me, so that if I get hungry after a smaller than usual lunch, I can have a healthy snack that is very quick to eat.

Fish are rich in these oils and they are believed to help lower cholesterol. Salmon is a great example of a fish that is rich in these omega 3’s. Fish contain great amounts of protein and virtually no “bad fats”. However, you can take a healthy food like fish and make it unhealthy by frying it in cholesterol filled oil. Grilled or broiled fish is the best and healthiest way to prepare the meal. When it comes to grilling food, like barbecuing, I can’t get enough of it. There are some people that believe the BBQ is unhealthy because the bits of blackened meat could cause colon cancer. The answer to that is garlic. Some new literature suggests that garlic protects against these "burned meat" carcinogens.

Red meat is probably my favorite food. Red meat is also not the healthiest thing in the world to eat. I think most people eat too much red meat. By red meat, I mean beef. I think that red meat should only be eaten once per week, in a perfect world. Some vegetarians will disagree and think that it should never be eaten. Red meat contains some vitamins and minerals that are essential to the body. However, it also has a lot of fat. Chicken, pork and fish all are great sources of protein and have a much lower amount of fat in them. Fish is one of the best foods to eat. You may have heard the new buzz word “omega 3 fatty acids”.

Speaking of oil, there are good oils for cooking and bad oils. Olive oil is the best way to go. I don’t think it is possible to get too much olive oil in your diet. As I said, olive oil is the ticket for a healthy heart and low cholesterol. Canola oil is another oil that is not as good for you as olive oil, but still won’t hurt you. The rest of the oils should be avoided because they have too much cholesterol and will cause health problems.

Olive oil is a huge part of what makes the “Mediterranean diet” so good for you. Olive oil helps lower your bad cholesterol (LDL) and raise your good cholesterol (HDL). As long as we are speaking about cholesterol, I want to make sure that everybody understands the difference between good and bad cholesterol and what they do in your body.

The more LDL you have, the quicker your body accumulates the cholesterol in the blood and tissue of your body, leading to heart attacks. Everybody should know their cholesterol numbers and have them checked regularly. There are many factors that effect these LDL and HDL numbers. Diet, exercise and family history are the three biggest factors. A diet high in fat will increase your LDL. Exercise will decrease your LDL and raise your HDL. Family history is something that you’ll not be able to do much about. But, if you know you have a tendency to have high cholesterol and it runs in your family, take steps to keep it from being a problem. Watch your diet and exercise. There are many drugs that help lower the LDL “bad cholesterol” and raise your HDL “good cholesterol”. Ask your doctor if you are worried.

“Bad cholesterol” is LDL or low density lipoprotein. This is actually a substance that carries cholesterol from your stomach and intestines to your muscles and tissues of your body. This LDL is what accumulates in your bloodstream and can lead to arteriosclerosis and heart attacks. The “good cholesterol” is HDL or high-density lipoprotein. This carries cholesterol from the muscles and tissues of your body to the liver to be broken down into something that can’t harm your body. So, the more HDL you have the more your body can remove and breakdown the bad cholesterol.