Pure Womens Fitness (404) 246-5088

 

Palm = Proteins: Make protein portions the size of your palm. Protein is found in animal products, like fish, meats, and cottage cheese. Some veggie protein sources include legumes (beans, etc.), tofu, tempeh, and wheat glutens.

Thumb = Fats: Fats are important, but they’re also very dense, so match fat portions to the size of your thumb. Good fat sources are avocados, olive oil, nuts, and seeds.

Fist = Fruits, Grains, etc.: Your bread, fruit, cereal, rice, and grain portions should be about equal to the size of your closed fist. Remember that it’s always preferable to consume whole grains.

Hand = Veggies: Open your hand and spread your fingers as wide as you can. That’s a good vegetable portion. Raw vegetables are loaded with fiber and nutrients, and they contain very few calories.

• Eating snacks straight out of the bag while watching television, or even grabbing a second bag to munch on because your show is still on.
• Continuing to finish your food at a restaurant because others are still eating, even though you’re full.
• Arriving at a party starving, so your dinner consists of fried appetizers and mayo-laden salads.
• Eating an entire packaged item only to realize later that it actually contained multiple servings.

I know I’ve been there. Once in a while is OK, but doing this too often can supersize your waistline and your risk for medical complications, including heart disease and type 2 diabetes. With just a little bit of preparation and planning, you can keep your eating habits and your portion sizes under control.

At restaurants

Doggie-bag it. Don’t finish your food just because it’s there—or because you’re still at the restaurant waiting for others to finish. Most restaurant portions contain more food and calories than you need for one meal. Bring your leftover food home, or allow the busboy to take it away early. Even better, have the server pack half of it to go before bringing it to you. It seems like an odd request, but it’s not uncommon these days Share with a friend. When you split a meal, not only do you cut the price in half, but you cut the calories in half, too! Order the lunch or appetizer portion. Lunch and appetizer portions are cheaper and contain fewer calories than full-sized portions. Avoid buffets and all-you-can-eat specials. If you’re like me, you want to try everything when you go to a buffet. That’s why it’s better to avoid buffets when you’re trying to control the size of your portions. When you have no choice about where you go (like a large family gathering or party), find the smallest plate and fill it up with the healthy stuff like grilled chicken and vegetables first. If you must go back for more, allow yourself one trip. And only get what you really want. It’s such a common habit to take a bit of everything, but if you can savor one reasonably sized serving of your favorite item, you’ll enjoy it a lot more. Choose items with large portions of veggies. Or order salad or fruit on the side instead of fries. If you’re starving, you can fill up on high-nutrient, low-calorie food to keep full. Eat your favorite “indulgence” foods every now and again. Totally denying yourself the foods you take pleasure in is a surefire way to set yourself up for failure. So go ahead and treat yourself once in a while to avoid feeling deprived. But eat a smaller portion, and savor every bite.

At home

Hang up fridge visuals. Don’t swing the fridge door open mindlessly. Think before you eat. Hang up a picture of how you once looked, that one piece of clothing you wish you could fit into, someone who you want to look like, or even someone you don’t want to look like. Take a moment to think about what you’re really hungry for and about your weight loss/health goals before you grab something out of the fridge. I’ve gone as far as putting up a “closed after 9 PM” sign on mine, since I can’t seem to find a fridge lock with a timer. Preplan your groceries. Don’t shop when you’re hungry and you’ll be less likely to bring unhealthy food home. Stock your house with healthy foods and snacks that are easy to grab when you’re hungry, such as fruit, cut-up vegetables with hummus, or light cheese and crackers. You can also purchase single-serving snacks. I love The Skinny Cow^® ice cream sandwiches. (Mint chocolate is my favorite.) They’re less than 150 calories and are preportioned so I know when I’m finished. Don’t eat straight out of the box or bag. If you do this, odds are you’ll finish everything in it—or at least eat more than one serving. Instead, fill a small container or baggie with a single serving and leave the rest in the kitchen. Break leftovers down. Instead of putting leftovers in one big container, break them down into single-serving meals or snack-sized portions before storing them. Hang wall mirrors. We tend not to eat as much when we see ourselves. Use smaller plates. If you can’t fit as much food on the plate, you’re likely to eat a smaller portion. Even better, use non-microwavable plates so you can’t heat up seconds—lay down a sheet of wrinkled-up foil, or use one of Grandma’s metal-glazed dishes; both are considered unsafe for microwave use by the USDA. Don’t put serving bowls of food on the table. Fill your plate in the kitchen and put your leftovers away promptly after they cool so it’s too much of an effort to go back to the kitchen to get seconds. Look at the serving size listed on the package. You may not realize you’re actually dishing out a double serving of packaged food for yourself. Make sure you look at the nutrition label so you aren’t overeating without even knowing it.

At work

BYOL (bring your own lunch). When you make your own lunch, you get to control the portion and exactly what’s in it. Cook a big batch of food on Sunday, like pasta and veggies or chicken and brown rice, then refrigerate or freeze portions to take with you. Keep healthy snacks at your desk. When you have healthy snacks at your desk, you won’t be as tempted to head over to the vending machine for candy or chips. I love Pirate’s Booty^® Aged White Cheddar baked corn and rice puffs at 130 calories per serving, or Kashi^® TLC Honey Sesame snack crackers. Make sure to divide them into single portions in baggies so you don’t overeat. And keep them tucked away in a drawer rather than on top of the desk in plain sight. Keep protein bars handy. Protein bars can be a lifesaver when you don’t have time to run out to get food, or a meeting postpones your lunch for a couple of hours. Watch out for bars that only have a few grams of protein and seem to taste more like candy bars than meal replacements. P90X^® Peak Performance Protein Bars are jam-packed with 20 grams of protein. My favorite flavor is the chocolate fudge. They save my stomach from growling louder than the speaker in meetings and can replace a meal in an emergency. Research healthy lunch places near work. A few minutes of research can save you calories in the long run. Some places have light menu options with smaller portions that contain fewer calories. Plus, you can look up the nutrition information for many popular restaurants online even if they’re not posted on the menu. And, of course, remember to avoid those all-you-can-eat specials. Stock up on Shakeology^® single-serving packets. I actually set reminders in my email calendar for 3:30 each day so I remember to have a Shakeology shake as my afternoon snack. It keeps me from raiding the fridge like a maniac when I get home for dinner. Shakeology single-serving packets not only contain protein and fiber that help you feel full, but also whole-food ingredients to nourish your body—all with only 140 calories a serving. I know that whether or not I eat healthily throughout the day, as long as I have my Shakeology, I’ll be getting all the nutrients I need, and I’ll feel full so I won’t overeat. Drink tea—and lots of water. If you’re filling up on zero-calorie water and tea, you’ll feel fuller and eat less when it’s mealtime. Log what you eat. Hold yourself accountable for what you eat. If you’re a Team Beachbody^® member, you can track your meals here or keep a notepad handy if you’re not near a computer. Keeping track of everything you eat will help you take a closer look at your eating habits so you can make better choices. Don’t always have your cake and eat it too. There are about 300 people who work with me. If I ate cake every time there was a birthday, I’d have it almost daily. (Fortunately, Beachbody discourages people from bringing sweets to the office.) It’s OK to treat yourself to some cake occasionally, but don’t always eat it just because it’s there. Make sure that when you do choose to indulge, you stick to your nutritious meal plan for the rest of the day, and just augment it with a small slice of cake. Bring healthy snacks to meetings. If you’re hosting a meeting, instead of the usual donuts and pastries, provide fruit, veggies, hummus, cheese, and wheat crackers. If you’re not in charge of food-planning for meetings, break room, or vending machines, request that healthy food alternatives be made available at your office. After all, a sugar crash 30 minutes after the morning meeting isn’t going to boost anybody’s productivity.

At parties

Pre-eat. Before you leave home for a party, eat your own healthy, nutritious food. When you arrive at the party, you can focus on the people and the festivities instead of making a beeline for the buffet table. You can still enjoy tasting the appetizers, but you’ll be satisfied with less. Be a healthy host. Hosting a party? Serve healthy food. Your guests will thank you—plus you’ll probably burn a ton of calories running around playing host! Wait 20 minutes before going back for seconds. Sometimes, especially at extravagant parties, there’s an endless variety of delectable food you’d never make or buy for yourself. Make sure you sit down with your first plate and eat slowly. It’s okay to go for seconds, but before you do, take your time enjoying your food and conversing with fellow partygoers for at least 20 minutes while that first round of food digests. After you do, you may realize you’ve already had enough. And if you do decide to go back for seconds, don’t restock the plate with everything on the table. Just take a small amount of a few of your favorites. Don’t hover around the food table. This is a recipe for disaster. I’ve found myself picking up olives and crackers as if my hand had a mind of its own. Take a cracker and run—far, far away from the food table. If you’re still hungry, walk back over—but don’t hover. Your waistline will thank you. Treat yourself with nonedible rewards. It’s natural for people to associate events and personal accomplishments with food. Holidays, weddings, football games, movies, job promotions, housewarmings, school events, community celebrations—customarily, they’re celebrated with food. Instead, though, try treating yourself with nonedible rewards. Work out, watch a TV show, get a massage or a manicure, buy a new outfit, or phone a friend to share your excitement. Focus on the reason for the celebration rather than the food. Dress to impress. Don’t wear clothes that let you overeat without feeling or showing it. If you wear extra-loose, über-comfy clothes—or ones with an elasticized waistband—you might eat more. Instead, try wearing an outfit you look great in—if possible, one that’s a little bit formfitting. Then there’s less room to get away with eating too much. Besides, you’ll get deluged with compliments that’ll make you feel so great you won’t want to overeat.

Mastering portion control will give you more control over your body and your life. Whether you’re at a restaurant, at home, at work, or at a party, there’s no excuse. You have the power to set yourself up for success. Being mindful of your portions will help you feel better right after each meal, which will help you manage your weight more effectively. You’ll learn how to enjoy your favorite foods, boost your health, and even save some cash by eating less. Now isn’t that worth a little bit of effort and planning ahead?

That’s not to ding these books, by the way. If you’re bored you’ll probably learn something by reading any one of them. But in my experience, the glycemic index is not the be-all and end-all of your diet concerns. So I take the opposite approach and say that if you learn to eat properly, you can strike the phrase from your vocabulary entirely.

Simply put, the glycemic index is a way to measure how carbohydrates react in your blood. It’s measured on a scale from 1 to 100+, where products with a GI of 55 or under are classified as low GI, those with a GI between 56 and 69 are classified as medium GI, and those with GI of 70 and above are classified as high GI. A high GI number means that a food is quickly converted to glucose in the blood (in layman’s terms, a “sugar rush”). The lower the number, the slower the food is converted to glucose. The scale was invented for people with diabetes, but the advent of processed foods becoming a cornerstone of the American diet and the rise of type 2 diabetes have given the average person a good reason to pay attention to the GI index of foods.

Essentially, if we ate nothing but natural whole foods, the GI scale would have little meaning for anyone who didn’t have diabetes. Even then, the highest GI foods have low numbers in their natural state. It’s the cooking and processing of food that alters it so it breaks down much more rapidly. Eating too much food that is converted to glucose rapidly can lead to type 2 diabetes over time. Pretty much the highest of high GI foods are processed junk foods. There are a few exceptions, which we’ll get to, but essentially if we eat a balanced healthy diet with very little junk food, the GI index is far less important to us.

Sugar is the big villain in the GI world. In nature, sugar comes from plants, where it’s surrounded by fiber. Fiber in foods slows digestion, lowering the GI number of even foods that are high in sugar, like bananas. Processing, as well as some types of cooking, break down or strip these plants of their fiber. This makes them sweeter to the taste, but it also makes them less healthy. And along with the fiber, processing usually removes a lot of the vitamins and minerals.

The main problem in the American, as stated above, is that we’re eating too many processed foods. Although we seem to understand that desserts are mainly sugar, crafty advertisers have been pulling the wool over our eyes by hiding the fact that most American processed foods are not much better for us than sugary desserts are. Breads, cereals, some potatoes and pastas, some rice, crackers, chips, fruit juices, sodas, and condiments, plus almost anything that’s ever received a “no fat” label or comes in a box or bag, is high in sugar and probably low in fiber and nutrients. When these processed, packaged foods are all you’re eating, you cause your body’s insulin response to work overtime. Do this enough, especially without exercise (the great equalizer in the sugar game), and you can wind up with type 2 diabetes.

Of course not every food in the categories I listed above is bad. There are companies that make healthy versions of pretty much everything. But marketers can be tricky. As a consumer, it can be hard to know what you’re getting. Even reading food labels can be misleading, which is why every diet that comes with a Beachbody^® program consists mainly of whole, natural foods.

So the very simple rule is to make sure your diet consists mainly of whole, natural foods and you will no longer have to pay attention to the GI index. There are some variables worth mentioning, especially since eating nothing but natural foods can be challenging in today’s hectic world. Here are ten quick tips to help you understand the GI index:

Desserts. These tend to be mainly sugar and/or fat, and as such, they generally don’t try to fool anyone with health claims. If we could keep our desserts small and make them a once-a-day indulgence, we’d have no problems. My tip is to do just that: with desserts, keep a close eye on portion size and frequency. Also, fatty desserts lower the GI influence of the sugar, meaning that, especially if you’re insulin sensitive, a richer, fattier dessert might actually be preferable to a “no fat” dessert that’s all sugar. But either way, unless you’re diabetic or borderline, if indulging in desserts is the only way you stray from your diet, it’s not going to cause much harm in the big picture. Sports. When you’re active, and especially when you’re operating at your physical limit, your body burns up its stored carbohydrates (known as blood sugar) very rapidly. During and after hard or long bouts of exercise, sugar isn’t bad for you—in fact, it’s actually good for you. This is the only time this is true. Unfortunately, we often like to eat sugary stuff at the opposite times, like when we’re watching TV, and no Wii Fit^® game has yet been designed that’ll burn off blood sugar unless you do it all day long. When you’re not active, you should severely limit your sugar intake. Sports drinks are for sports. This may seem redundant, but Gator/Power/Acceler-ades et al are only good when you’re playing sports that make you sweat. This is also true for things like P90X^® Results and Recovery Formula^®. These are not your standard foods. They’re formulated for when you’re playing sports vigorously. The difference between the “-ades” and Results and Recovery Formula is that the former only give you sugar and a small amount of electrolytes you lose when you sweat, whereas the latter uses its sugar (which gets absorbed rapidly when you’re out of blood sugar) to transport all sorts of other nutrients to help repair your body after exercise. Oh, and also that the “-ades” market themselves as things you might want to drink all day long, exercising or not. Salads are your friend. Not only are they loaded with fiber, but many of the things we tend to put on salads, including vinegar, lemon juice, and lime juice, as well as pickled vegetables, etc., tend to have acids that lower the GI index of other foods. Add protein to all your meals. Like fats, proteins slow absorption rates of high GI foods. Use semolina or whole wheat pastas. These have a much lower GI number (around 30 to 55) than pasta made from refined, enriched white flour. Use long-grain or brown rice. All rice is fairly high in the GI index, but long-grain rice can be fairly low (50 to 60), whereas white short-grain rice can be as high as 130. Eat crisp fruit. Fruit is not a real concern unless your diet has an inordinate amount of it. If so, the mushier—and sweeter—a fruit becomes, the higher its GI number. But even the sweetest fruits, like ripe papaya, are only around 60. Beware of fluff. Fluffy and puffy foods tend to have a high GI number. Cereals are a good example. When a cereal is chewy, that generally means it has more fiber and is less processed, as opposed to soft, fluffy cereals that have been excessively processed and injected with air (and sugar). Potatoes, especially white, fluffy ones, can have extremely high GI numbers, often in the 90s. Fortunately, we tend not to eat potatoes plain, and, as stated above, adding meats, fats, and acidic ingredients will bring the number way down. Oddly enough, sweet potatoes, despite the deceptive name, have a very low GI number. Yams, too. Some sugar can be OK. If you see a trend here, it’s that sugar speeds itself into your system, and if this is your primary mode of eating, it’s bad. However, sugars can also speed other nutrients into your system, so you’ll sometimes see sugar as an ingredient alongside a lot of healthy nutrients to serve this purpose. A good example is Beachbody’s Shakeology^® meal replacement shake. It has around 10 grams of sugar (40 calories) in a serving that also contains a lot of protein and 70 other healthy ingredients. In lab tests, Shakeology scored a 24* on the glycemic index, as low as a lot of vegetables. So while sugar is generally the GI villain, you need to look at the entire profile of the foods you’re eating before you pass judgment.

*Shakeology was tested by Glycemic Index Laboratories, Inc., a premier facility for testing the metabolic responses to foods and ingredients. GI Labs is the only lab in North America recommended by the Glycemic Index Foundation. GI Labs follows a Determination Standard protocol of testing in vivo with ten human subjects. GI Labs’ protocol exceeds the standards set by the World Health Organization.

The solution: Plan ahead. If weight loss is your goal, you should never be caught off guard and hungry. A little forethought is all it takes to create meals that will keep you satisfied and your hunger at bay. It doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming either.

Here are a few reasons that planning your meals in advance can help you lose weight more easily:

Keeps your hunger under control. Fuel your body at regular intervals to tame your appetite and make it easier to stick to your diet. When you’re not starving, you’ll be able to resist the office candy jar or the coffeehouse muffin. Easier to monitor your calorie intake. Advance planning means you can decide how many calories to eat at each meal, then prepare food that meets your goals. It’s easier than trying to add up calories throughout the day. You’ll be less likely to binge. When you plan your meals in advance, you can add in your favorite treats or schedule a special cheat meal and still meet your calorie requirements. You’ll stay in control of your choices and be able to enjoy your food without guilt or anxiety.

If you’re following a Beachbody® program and meal plan, you’re probably trying to eat more often throughout the day to keep your metabolism up and your blood sugar stable. This might seem overwhelming at first, but all you really need is enough tasty food to meet your calorie requirements and stay full until the next time you eat. Here are five tips for planning your meals in advance to keep your energy up and your hunger at bay:

1. Â
   • hard-boiled eggs and whole-grain toast
   • oatmeal with berries and nuts
   • grilled chicken and a salad
   • canned tuna or chicken and brown rice
   • sandwiches on whole-grain bread or wraps
   • nuts and dried fruit
   • string cheese and whole-grain crackers
   • yogurt and fruit
   • Whey Protein Powder
   • vegetables and hummus
   • Shakeology® (take one of the new single-serve packets or a scoopful in a plastic bag or your shaker cup)

Cook in bulk. When you prepare meals, make double and freeze half in individual containers. Use the weekends (or any free time during the week) to plan your meals with your family. Decide what you’re going to eat, then shop accordingly so healthy food is always on hand. As you prep for one meal, cook more vegetables and meat than you’ll need, and use the leftovers in the next day’s food plan. You can also chop extra vegetables and store them raw in the refrigerator for a quick salad later. Portion food into single servings. Measure out cereal, nuts, Whey Protein Powder, vegetables, and fruit into bags or containers. When you’re in a rush to leave the house, just toss what you need into your bag or car. You can also keep protein bars on hand for a convenient on-the-go snack. Bring one container; eat twice. If you’re going to be at work all day, bring one large container of food and eat half at lunch and the other half later in the day. It’s one less meal to plan. Keep it simple. You don’t have to prepare a multicourse feast five times a day to eat well. When you’re on the go, choose things that are portable and don’t require a lot of fuss, like: Anticipate busy days. If you know your kids have soccer practice every Tuesday evening, then make that night’s dinner quick and easy. Perhaps that becomes your cheat meal and you order pizza (better yet, have the ingredients on hand to make your own healthy version. The kids will love creating their own pizzas). Or you can simply defrost a meal you’ve frozen ahead of time, so it’s ready to throw in the oven when you get home. Plan ahead so your busy schedule doesn’t get in the way of your weight loss.