How to Practice Intuitive Eating

The correlation between obesity and chronic disease is well established. For decades, efforts to fight chronic disease have focused primarily on obesity--encouraging dieting as the best way to lose weight. Despite a thriving weight loss industry, we haven't seen significant improvements in rates of chronic disease.

Weight-cycling, losing weight and later regaining it, is often see with many diets. Eating less that the body needs triggers endocrine system changes that promote weight regain, reducing satiety after eating and increasing hunger. In addition, dieters develop a lower resting energy expenditure.

An emerging paradigm in health promotion is putting more of a focus on weight neutrality. People who are classified as obese can improve their metabolic fitness and reduce their risk of chronic disease by eating more nutritious meals and increasing physical activity--independent of changes in weight. Research on this weight neutral approach to chronic-disease management actually shows substantially higher overall weight loss retention than dieting.

Intuitive eating encourages internal regulation of the eating experience. Try to apply these key concepts to encourage more mindfulness and enjoyment of your eating experience

Restore Body Trust
Dieting enforces strict rules based on external cues. In contrast, intuitive eating restores a sense of body trust. Respecting your internal hunger cues and fullness cues is key to intuitive eating. While diets say wait for the next planned mealtime, intuitive eating says show yourself compassion by feeding yourself when it feels physically necessary.

Make Peace with Food
Rather than labeling high-calorie, low-nutrition foods as "bad," intuitive eating encourages a neutral perspective on the moral value of foods. Letting go of self- and diet-imposed judgments of foods can help heal our relationships with food.

Address Emotional Eating
We often get temporary emotional relief from eating, followed by a realization that our problem remains. Intuitive eating encourages us to show ourselves compassion by entertaining a solution that is unrelated to food and that directly addresses our emotional challenges.

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Green Exercise Benefits

Running through the forest. Cycling through your neighborhood park. Walk­ing alongside a river. To most people, “green exercise”—intentionally being physically active in natural environments—feels good, and growing research evidence confirms its benefits.

Defining Green Exercise
Green exercise is any form of physical activity that takes place in urban green spaces like city parks and campuses maintained by people or in natural green spaces with minimal human upkeep.

What the Research Says
Study findings on green exercise speak loudly: The advantages of exercising in healthy, natural environments go beyond the benefits of exercising in synthetic indoor locations. Green exercise delivers physical, mental and even spiritual rewards and has positive effects on health, well-being and athletic performance. Being active in nature has many advantages compared with doing the same activity inside or on city streets:

• more stress relief
• clearer thinking
• improved attention and concentration
• enhanced mood and more happiness
• less anxiety
• greater self-confidence
• more vitality
• more feelings of being refreshed
• reduced pain sensations
• less fatigue for the same amount of physical work
• improved quantity and quality of nighttime sleep
• enhanced mindfulness or present-moment awareness

Underlying Mechanisms
The theory that exposure to nature is in itself beneficial to people is bolstered by studies that show that viewing videos of nature scenes, having indoor foliage or flowers, seeing nature through a hospital room window, or simply having green classroom walls boosts mental and physical well-being and performance.

Ready to Take It Outdoors?
With an understanding of current green-exercise research, we’re reminded that being active in nature is restorative to brain, body and spirit. “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul,” said environmentalist John Muir.
Perhaps it’s time to take some barefoot walks in the grass.

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Creating Healthy Habits

Creating and sustaining new habits can be difficult. Let's look into the anatomy of a habit and some strategies to create new behaviors.

Anatomy of a Habit
A habit is more than just a repetitive behavior, but rather a construction of three sequential components that make up the habit loop: the cue, the behavior, and the reward.

Cue: an environmental or internal trigger that provokes us to learn a behavior. An example of an environmental trigger is placing a foam roller next to your shoes, which triggers you to do self-massage prior to running.

Behavior: the actual routine we commonly associate with the habit.

Reward: makes the behavior stick. The "high" runners feel after a 6-mile run is enough to make them want to repeat the experience.

Establishing New Habits
1. Establish goals and milestones: Habit formation varies greatly from person to person and can take as long as 66 days. It's a long process that requires consistent implementation. If you have an ambitious goal like losing 60 pounds, it's important to divide it into smaller, less daunting and more realistic outcomes.

2. Identify motivational factors: Intrinsic motivation involves doing an activity for the inherent satisfaction rather than for a separable consequence. For example, losing weight for long term health outcomes rather than an upcoming wedding. Focusing on your intrinsic motivation tends to lead to results which last longer.

3. Pick a goal-oriented behavior: While it might seem appealing to make a lot of changes at once, focusing on one habit at a time may lead to greater success.

4. Create the cue and reward: Once you've selected a behavior, choose a cue that will trigger it. For example, if you opt to drink 2 cups of water before every meal, consider setting a reminder alarm or keeping a water bottle next to the computer screen. Then select a reward to reinforce the behavior.

5. Eliminate disruptors: If you can identify disruptors, you can overcome pitfalls before they occur. For example, if not having water readily available disrupts the behavior of drinking 2 cups before every meal, purchase a water bottle that's easy to fill and transport.

6. Follow up: Hold yourself accountable to the new behavior.
--The Power of Habit: Charles Duhigg

Have you had success with creating new habits? What strategies worked for you?

New Blood Pressure Guidelines

New guidelines on high blood pressure made headlines late last year because they suggest that nearly half of all Americans have hypertension--up from about one-third under previous guidelines. The guidelines were updated because so many authoritative studies show a strong association between high blood pressure and serious health risks, such as high cholesterol, kidney disease, stroke, and heart disease. More than half of deaths from coronary heart disease and stroke happen to people with hypertension.

Blood Pressure and Aging
High blood pressure tends to worsen with age. Aging populations are more prone to "isolated high systolic blood pressure," where systolic pressure is elevated but diastolic pressure is not.

How Exercise Affects Blood Pressure
Increasing physical activity and fitness--even by small amounts--reduces blood pressure and hypertension. Both cardiovascular exercise and resistance training can reduce blood pressure. The guidelines recommend cardio (90-150 minutes/week) plus resistance training (90-150 minutes/week).

Diet and Hypertension
The DASH diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) can help reduce blood pressure. DASH encourages people to consume less sodium, saturated fat, total fat, and alcohol and eat more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy products.

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What blood pressure category are you in? Have you had success in decreasing your blood pressure with exercise or diet?

Fruit and Vegetable Storage Tips

A common difficulty in eating and preparing more fruits and vegetables is that vegetables and fruits tend to spoil quickly. I'd like to share some tips on how to keep them fresher longer. I'll use my CSA box as an example.

The vegetables when they first arrive:


I remove the greens and line several large containers with paper towels.

Then, I store bulbs and greens in separate containers or bags with another paper towel over top.













My CSA subscription is through Farm Fresh to You. You can customise your box and control the delivery frequency. I receive a box every other week and it is $33/box. I like getting vegetables this way because it increases their diversity and holds me accountable to consume the box before the next one arrives. There are also recipes on their website if you need help cooking things like celery root. If you'd like to sign up, use my promo code VIKT2992 and save $15 off your first box.

Accuracy of Activity Trackers

Millions of people wear some kind of wristband activity tracker and use the device to monitor their own exercise and health, often sharing the data with their physician. But is the data accurate?

A Stanford inquiry evaluated the accuracy of seven devices: Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn and the Samsung Gear S2. Six out of the seven devices measured heart rate within 5 percent. In contrast, none of the seven devices measured energy expenditure accurately. Even the most accurate device was off by an average of 27 percent. And the least accurate was off by 93 percent.

Sixty volunteers, 31 women and 29 men, wore the seven devices while walking or running on treadmills or using stationary bicycles. Each volunteer’s heart was measured with a medical-grade electrocardiograph. Metabolic rate was estimated with an instrument for measuring the oxygen and carbon dioxide in breath — a good proxy for metabolism and energy expenditure. Results from the wearable devices were then compared to the measurements from the two “gold standard” instruments.

“The heart rate measurements performed far better than we expected,” said Ashley, “but the energy expenditure measures were way off the mark. The magnitude of just how bad they were surprised me.”

Neither Ashley nor Shcherbina could be sure why energy-expenditure measures were so far off. Each device uses its own proprietary algorithm for calculating energy expenditure and it’s likely the algorithms are making assumptions that don’t fit individuals very well. “All we can do is see how the devices perform against the gold-standard clinical measures,” she said. “My take on this is that it’s very hard to train an algorithm that would be accurate across a wide variety of people because energy expenditure is variable based on someone’s fitness level, height and weight, etc.” Heart rate is measured directly, whereas energy expenditure must be measured indirectly through proxy calculations.

Have you noticed similar inconsistencies in your own activity tracker? If wearing an activity tracker motivates you to move and exercise more often, then keep using it. However, try not to base your calorie consumption on the caloric expenditure measurement.

Changing your Home Food Environment

In a Drexel University study published this week, researchers found that an intervention that focused on changing the external food environment, rather than internal willpower, actually boosted participants' cognitive restraint and led to greater long-term weight loss.

Three weight loss interventions were compared for effectiveness with 262 overweight individuals over a three-year period:
Behavior therapy: the current "gold standard" in weight loss treatment: involves group support, regular weight-ins, exercise, explicit goal setting and monitoring food intake
Behavior therapy plus meal replacements: also replacing breakfast and lunch with calorie-controlled shakes or nutrition bars
A condition focused on getting people to change foods in their home food environments: HFE

Behavior therapy is aimed at bolstering someone's internal sense of self-regulation over food intake and exercise. Research has unfortunately shown that increases in self-control are not sustainable. Treatments need to also ensure that foods kept in the home are permanently changed in ways that make self-control more feasible.

Modifying the home food environment (or HFE) was the most effective strategy for losing and maintaining weight loss. Participants in this group were given homework assignments to identify and make numerous changes to specific foods that were still satisfying but less calorically damaging.

"Asking people to make healthy decisions, when there are thousands of food choices available, is emotionally challenging and complicated. HFE treatment is about mechanically trying to ensure that these changes are made, so the level of chronic temptation generated by foods in their homes is reduced."

This study highlights the importance of surrounding yourself with a supportive environment to reach your weight and fitness goals. If you'd like to exercise more, spend more time around like minded people. If weight loss is your goal, keep less binge-provoking foods in the house. In a previous email, I gave some tips on how to give your fridge a makeover in order to make healthier foods more accessible.

What are some other steps you've taken or would take to create a better home food environment?