Samantha and I are in privileged company this week – we’re looking forward to a guest post from Louis Ignarro Ph.D, Nobel Laureate*,  consultant to Herbalife and member of the Herbalife Nutrition Institute Nutrition Advisory Board, in which he’ll describe the impact of a healthy, active lifestyle on heart health.   A healthy diet is, as Dr. Ignarro says, “as good for your heart as it is for your taste buds.” 

I couldn’t have said it better.  But what I often run into with my patients is that it’s one thing to know what to eat – and why (okay, that’s two things…) – but they often get hung up figuring out how to incorporate more healthy foods into their diet.  So let’s take a good look at the key “whats”, “whys” and – more importantly – the “how tos” of a heart healthy diet.

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Whether you’re a new mother or not, I bet there is something in today’s article that will help become more fit, gain confidence or just learn a little empathy.

No matter how or why you’ve gained weight, know that it takes as long – if not longer – to lose that weight again.  Pregnancy is a special time and new mothers need to concentrate on their baby but you  may need to reprioritize if you are still blaming a spare-tire on baby weight, three years later!

Dads-to-be often gain baby weight too – if someone around you is eating more then the temptation to join in is hard to refuse. This week, I’m going to share five tips that will help you regain the figure you want.  I’m focusing on how to reclaim your pre-pregnancy body because it’s a message I relate to strongly.

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Eating out doesn’t have to be a diet disaster.  Here are six tips to help you navigate a menu and ask for what you want in a restaurant.

It’s Thursday, but I’m still thinking about a ridiculous experience I had at a restaurant last weekend.  We were at a new trendy – but casual – neighborhood place for dinner. I scanned the salad offerings – dismissing the vinaigrette-dressed roasted beets (not my favorite) and the “southwest” (loaded with refried beans and cheese) – and zeroed in on the mixed baby greens with creamy buttermilk dressing.  I asked my server (“Mike, I’m happy to be taking care of you tonight”) if I could please have the mixed baby greens with the vinaigrette instead of the buttermilk dressing.  “I’ll need to check with the chef,” he told me. “Our menu clearly states, ‘no modifications’.”  Huh?  After a few minutes he came back – with attitude.  “The chef said he’ll make an exception.” Looking down his nose at me, I half expected him to add, “… just this once.”

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Another reason to eat protein at breakfast. Protein helps keep you full and satisfied until lunch – and a new study suggests it might even help curb snacking at night.

If you keep up with the latest in dietary advice, you can probably list a few reasons why protein is such an important nutrient.  It’s necessary, of course, to help you build and maintain your muscle mass, and it’s also known to be a much better at filling you up than either fat or carbohydrate – which is why we suggest that people aim to have a good source of protein at each meal or snack.  The idea is simply this:  high carb meals don’t stay with you, while higher protein meals can help control hunger from one meal to the next.  But here’s something else… a recent study by Heather Leidy¹ suggests that a high protein breakfast not only helps control your appetite until the next meal, it might reduce unhealthy snacking in the evening.

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Want to shape up for summer?  Don’t wait until the last minute!  If you start now, you’ve got six weeks or so – plenty of time to see some serious results before swimsuit season starts.

I’m nudging you now, because many people have the tendency to put this off.  As in, “I’m going on a surfing trip next week and I can’t be seen looking like this”  A crash diet to take off a couple of pounds in a week might make you slightly less self-conscious in your board shorts, but if you really want to make some headway before swimsuit season, the time to start is now. 

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When you eat fast, you tend to eat more.  If you always finish your meal before everyone else, here are my top six tips to help you slow your eating habits.

“They call me the vacuum cleaner!” one of my patients told me recently.   He’s been a fast eater his entire life.  “I grew up with six brothers and sisters – so, counting my folks, there were nine of us at the dinner table,” he told me.  “As soon as mom put the food down, we’d all scramble to get our share, and then eat it up as fast as we could – because the fastest eater had the best chance of getting a second helping before it was all gone!”  Even though he no longer has nine people at his dinner table, those old eating habits die hard.  This guy can still demolish a plate of food in seconds flat.

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One key to maintaining a healthy weight is to balance the calories you eat with the calories you burn.  But that’s sometimes easier said than done.

Balancing your calories sounds deceptively simple.  Eat more calories than you burn and you’ll gain weight. Take in fewer calories than you burn and you’ll shed some pounds. Keep your “calories in” and “calories out” about the same, and your weight should stay pretty stable.  So why is it that hardly a week goes by that someone doesn’t complain to me that they’re “exercising like a madman, but not losing any weight” or, “eating like a bird but the scale won’t budge”?  It simply boils down to this: when it comes to counting calories accurately – the ones you eat and the one you spend – there are so many ways it can go wrong.

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Everywhere you go, it seems, there’s pressure to eat.  Here’s how to push back.

For most of us, the last thing we need is the pressure to eat more.  But it happens all the time.  A few years back, one of the fast food chains in the US began a push to add a whole extra meal to your day –  “the meal between dinner and breakfast”.  I do understand the desire for an occasional midnight snack – sometimes you eat dinner early, you stay up late and you get hungry. But once that midnight snack morphs into “the fourth meal”, it starts to sound more like an everyday need – which just makes it easier to justify why we cave into the pressure to eat it.

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Make your daily staples as healthy as you can.  Small changes in the foods you buy and eat every day can add up to big rewards.

The holidays are over, and we’re all getting back to our routines – which means it’s time to get serious about those New Year’s resolutions you’ve made.  If “eating better” is something you plan to do this year, now is the time to think about how you’re going to go about it – before you slip back into your old eating habits.  Rather than adopting a complete dietary overhaul (a complete “out with the old, in with the new” approach rarely works), your best bet is to begin by working on several small steps you can take to improve your everyday eating habits.  And your first steps should take you directly to the grocery store, since that’s where healthy eating really begins.

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A “meal deal” is no bargain if you’re just buying extra fat, sugar and calories.

There’s an old joke that goes something like this:  two women are having lunch in a restaurant they haven’t been to before.  As they’re finishing up their meal, one says to the other, “You know, the food here is really terrible!” To which her companion snaps back, “I’ll say!  And such small portions, too!”  It’s so true, isn’t it?  No matter what we’re buying, we’re always looking for a good value – even if it’s food that isn’t very good…or very good for you.

Getting more for your money is generally a good thing, and we’ve been conditioned to look for the best value in everything we buy – from laptops to laundry soap.  But if getting more for your money means getting more fat, more sugar and more calories, that can spell trouble for your waistline.

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Have you heard of carbo loading?  It’s a potential energy booster for endurance athletes – but for everyday exercisers it could lead to weight gain.  Here’s the lowdown on carbo loading.  

If you were to sit down for dinner with a bunch of runners the night before a marathon, chances are good they’d be chowing down on carbs – lots of them.  You’d be surrounded by people eating heaping piles of spaghetti, rice, potatoes and bread – all in an attempt to top off their fuel tanks before the race.  Most endurance athletes know that it takes a lot of carbs to keep their engines running – so there’s always a big push to pack in as much as they can the night before an event.  But many endurance exercisers that I talk to don’t think about what they’re eating for the last few days before a race – which is too bad, because it could make a big difference in how well they perform.

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Eating more slowly and mindfully can help you control how much you eat. Here are my favorite five tips for fast eaters to help you slow down and regain control.

A friend and I were swapping stories about last week’s Thanksgiving feast, and she mentioned to me that her uncle was the fastest eater she’d ever seen. When she was a little girl, she used to think her uncle was a magician – it seemed to her as if one minute he had food on his plate, and the next minute… zap!… his food had simply vanished.  One Thanksgiving, her aunt set a mirror infront of his dinner plate, thinking that he might just slow down if he watched himself shoveling it in.  Instead, he simply sat down – and complimented his wife on the creative table decor.

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Want to change your diet behavior? Break through these diet barriers first! Getting out of your usual comfortable routine is hard and the first step is figuring out why you’re resisting change in the first place.

When my son turned 5 years old, we had an “inside-out, upside down, backwards” birthday party for him.  We handed his friends their goodie bags and waved goodbye as soon as they arrived at the house, and we ate cake and ice cream before the pizza.  The parents had a lot of laughs, but the kids were totally bewildered – in no small part, I’m sure, because we were also wearing our underwear over our clothes.  So why am I telling you this?  Because sometimes when I’m talking to clients about the lifestyle changes they need to work on, I see that same bewilderment – as if I’m suddenly turning their world inside-out, upside down and backwards.  Why is change so hard for some people?

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You only need small amounts of fat to be healthy.

Years ago, I had a client who was truly ‘fat phobic’.  If she could detect any trace of fat in her food, she’d reject it.  She’d dissect a piece of roast chicken into tiny pieces, teasing out any specks of fat she could find between the muscle fibers, and she dressed her salads with straight lemon juice – never a drop of oil.  She did this primarily as a weight control strategy – she was a tiny woman and intended to stay that way – but she’d also heard that people need to eat fat.  So she was worried.  Was being this finicky about fat bad for her health? And – more importantly – did she really need fat in her diet at all?

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What happens if one person needs to diet and the other one doesn’t? This week, I’ll look at how couples can support each other throughout a lifestyle change.

Do you remember the old nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat who ate no fat, while his wife “could eat no lean”?  As the tale goes, things with Jack and his wife worked out pretty nicely – he ate his foods, she ate hers – and between them, they “licked the platter clean”.  But what happens in real life?  How do couples work it out when one person needs to lose weight and the other one doesn’t?

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