Spring is finally springing!

I was hoping to write about spring last week, when it was brand new…but it just didn’t feel right what with the snow and freezing cold and all. Today, however, is a different story. It’s in the air, my friends! It’s in the mail, as they say!

Spring is a time of renewal. We begin to emerge from our hibernation mode of months gone by, taking a real glimpse of sunlight, basking in its promise of warmth. Cravings for hydration and fresh produce increase, and the gravitational pull towards comfort food begins to subside. What better time to focus on renewing our commitment to wellness?

While I’m not a supporter of detox diets for weight loss, I enthusiastically support the idea of renewing your relationship to food by choosing fresh, whole foods as much as possible.

Here are nine easy ways to refresh your nutrition this spring to feel revitalized and full of life:

Focus on colourful fruits and vegetables – aim for 2 servings with each meal.

Drink all 8 cups of water that are recommended for proper hydration.

Minimize stimulants like caffeine as well as sweeteners and sugar.

Flavour your meals with fresh herbs and spices rather than heavy sauces…a little lemon juice goes a long way!

Eat to the point of pleasant fullness rather than continuing until you feel stuffed.

Breathe while you eat. If you begin to focus on this, you might be surprised at how much you hold your breath during meals.  Breathing deeply helps to relax the body and aids digestion.

Keep meals simple, using few ingredients so that you can digest them easily.

Choose not to eat within three hours of bedtime so that you sleep well and wake up ready for breakfast.

Prepare as much of your own food as possible.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy the sunshine!

A New Way to Journal

Today’s tip is short & sweet.

Most of us have heard that food journaling is a great way to stay on track with our nutrition. It increases our awareness about what we’re actually putting into our mouths, and boosts our accountability. The problem is actually remembering to write it all down. If you managed to write it down, did you remember to write down how much you ate? Oops…

So while journaling helps us stick with healthy nutritional choices, sometimes the journaling is the part that’s hard to stick to.

Solution: Try taking a picture of everything that you eat on your cell phone! It takes just a second, doesn’t require that you carry a book around, and they say a picture is worth a thousand words! So if you’ve been trying without success to use a food journal, try this approach to make it easier on yourself.

Good luck!

Holiday Shopping Nutrition

The season of busy malls and day-long shopping trips is upon us. Don’t get stuck with a plateful of sugar and fat that you don’t need.

Plan for success by eating at home before you head out for a day of shopping. If you do find yourself searching for a meal in the food court, be mindful. Chains like Subway offer healthy choices as long as you pick from their special menu, and choose healthier condiments. Opting for a place where you choose your own toppings will give you more control. Go for a sandwich on whole grain bread for a filling fix. Add a side salad to help meet your daily vegetable quota (7-8 servings of fruit & vegetables per day!). Keep fresh fruit and nuts in your bag for a healthy snack, and choose herbal tea rather than the tempting holiday drinks at coffee shops. You can easily drink 500 calories without even noticing it! You might be thinking, “That’s okay! I’m burning so many calories by walking around all day!” If you weigh 150 pounds, you’ll burn about 300 calories in 90 minutes. Keep in mind, that’s a walking pace rather than the sauntering that usually takes place in crowded stores. Walking is certainly better than not walking, but if you consume a Caramel Brulee Latte from Starbucks (Grande, with 2% milk and whipped cream), you’ll be inhaling 440 calories, so that 90-minute calorie burn will be long gone.

So friends, show up prepared, plan for success, and remain mindful. December doesn’t have to mean that your pants get tighter!

Surviving the Social Scene

Eating Well at Family Feasts & Functions

Social eating can be a challenge for many of us. Temptation surrounds you, everyone else is doing it, and it’s hard to keep track of exactly how many little half-inch squares of cheese you’re downing. Here are some tips to get you through, whether it’s a family dinner or a networking cocktail party.

1) Arrive well-nourished. You may think that avoiding food all day is a great way to make up for your splurge calories at a party, but it sets you up for disaster. You’ll be famished and your decision-making ability will be sorely compromised. Instead, eat healthily all day in order to keep cravings and hunger at bay.

2) Choose hors d’oeuvres mindfully. Look for lower-fat choices like lean meats or vegetables, avoiding cheese and pastries.

3) Limit your alcohol consumption. It disarms you psychologically and depletes your blood sugar, causing you to crave things like bread and other carbohydrates.

4) Enlist the support of a friend. If you’re attending an event or dinner with a close friend of loved one, let them know that you’re trying to be mindful of what you eat, so if they could show solidarity and make healthy choices too, it would make your journey easier.

5) Change your language. We often think, “I’m going to be so good. I’m not eating anything at this party,” only to feel weak upon arrival and succumb to the social pressure of eating. Instead, use empowering language that doesn’t create an image of being “good” or “bad.” Think, “I am choosing to eat mindfully today. I will make healthy choices and tune in to my hunger instincts. If I’m not hungry, I’ll stop eating.”

6) Be honest. If your family is pressuring you to have dessert, let them know that you’re making healthier choices and would rather not. Some families may joke about it and give you unwanted attention, and this sometimes has the effect of making you give up. Instead, tell them that you’d appreciate it if they could be supportive of your choices.

7) Offer to bring dessert. That way, you can choose to make something healthy and you won’t have to worry about succumbing to the temptation of Aunt Heather’s double chocolate cake.

Drink lots of water. Sometimes we eat just so that we’re involved in the act of consumption. It can be hard to sit on your hands while everyone else indulges. If you’re drinking water, not only will you feel less hungry, but you’ll still be doing something with your hands – still participating in the act of consumption.

9) Try using a mantra. Pick a sentence to mentally repeat to yourself when you feel tempted in order to maintain your focus.

10) Think of the confidence boost you’ll feel from having stayed on track all weekend, rather than the oh-so-common guilt complex that usually visits the week after an event. Feel motivated by forward momentum.

Think Before You Eat

We eat for many reasons: hunger, sadness, happiness, stress, fatigue, habit, boredom, to satisfy a craving…no wonder so it’s hard to keep consumption in check! One fantastic approach to reducing unintentional or unnecessary eating is to practice mindfulness.

Mindfulness can be broadly defined as present moment awareness, or conscious living on moment-to-moment basis. This might sound a little new-agey, but bear with me here.

Are you aware of how often you’re eating on auto-pilot, or eating just to go with the flow? There are the three bites of dinner you eat while you’re preparing it, the cookies you didn’t even think about until the tray showed up on the table at your two o’clock meeting (everyone else was eating them…), the glass of wine you didn’t necessarily want (but your friend wanted one and wouldn’t open the bottle unless you shared), and the list goes on. Now, this probably sounds too simple, but keep in mind that many solutions are far less complicated than we make them out to be. So, here goes. Just paying attention or tuning in to the circumstances surrounding your food choices can go a long way to opening the door to change. The first step is awareness, then comes making a conscious choice. It’s not even necessarily important that you make the choice not to consume in all of these circumstances. The important thing is to actually be aware of what’s going on and to make a choice rather than just doing it automatically. Chances are that you’ll end up reducing the number of times you eat random stuff simply by being mindful. It’s not about counting calories, or denying yourself. It’s about living with your eyes open, and making a point of choosing what you really want instead of letting the workplace birthday schedule, or friends, or circumstance dictate the size of your waistline.

So give it a try. For a few days, whenever you’re about to eat, ask yourself, “Why am I eating? Am I hungry? Do I really want this?” Again, the point is not necessarily to say no to the food. The point is the pause. Once you’ve paused to notice what’s going on, eat or don’t. Just practice cultivating awareness at first. See where it takes you!

Giving Thanks Without Getting Stuffed

Ah, Thanksgiving. For those of us who celebrate the tradition, this impending holiday conjures up pictures of gravy and stuffing, pie and whipped cream. Holiday meals celebrated with the family are often heavy on the sugar and fat. Couple this with eyes that are bigger than stomachs, and the little voice in your head telling you to clean your plate (or maybe your mother’s actual voice encouraging you to have some more of the pie she made with love), and chances are you’ll feel like a stuffed turkey come Monday. So, let’s consider how to enjoy the festivities without regret.

1. Eat a healthy breakfast and lunch before the family get together. “Saving calories” doesn’t work. If you show up starving, you’ll just eat more (a.k.a too much).
2. Drink plenty of water. It promotes feelings of fullness, so chances are you won’t feel as compelled to go in for that second (or third, as the case may be) helping.
3. BREATHE! It’s not a race, so take your time. Savour each bite, and eat mindfully. Notice the tastes and textures of your food – especially when enjoying your favourite treats. If you make a point of being present for the experience of yumminess, it will take less of it to satisfy you.
4. Be the storyteller. Have you ever gone out to eat with a friend who had loads of news to tell you? Did you finish your meal way before him or her? If someone else is doing the bulk of the storytelling, everyone else eats while that one person talks. Then they sit there with empty plates, staring temptation in the face while the storyteller finishes his or her meal. Consider being the talker at the table to increase the fun factor while simultaneously not-so-inadvertently minimizing the size of your meal.
5. Be choosy. Most of us have certain elements of traditional meals that we can’t imagine doing without, while we could pass up others easily. If you absolutely love pumpkin pie but could take or leave stuffing, take the pie and leave the stuffing.

Most of all, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you end up overdoing it, balance it all out with a few days of super healthy meals or some extra cardio during the week. You might even want to work it out in advance and put in some extra effort before the weekend. That way, you’ll rest easy knowing you’ve already earned your wiggle room.

How do you stay on track over the holidays?

Finding Joy on Your Lunch Break

Have you ever had one of those days where you had so much to do that, in retrospect, you know you ate lunch, but you seriously-for-the-life-of-you can’t remember actually eating? One of those days where you’re on auto-pilot and constantly absorbed in what’s coming next rather than what you’re immediately doing? Who hasn’t had one of those days? The unfortunate truth is that for many, this is a fairly accurate description of every day. We might dream of winning the lottery and quitting our jobs so that we’d have time to pay attention to things like eating, but that’s no fun for the majority of us who never win. We might think that when we go on vacation in December, we’ll have the time and energy to be present then. But December just seems so far away…So, how does one go about finding the happy moments in the midst of every day existence?

You create it.

Delicious food, for instance, makes most of us happy. The other day, I made a delicious salad. It had lentils, cherry tomatoes, shallots and fresh basil, and was splashed with a light homemade lemon vinaigrette. This salad took me literally five minutes to make, and was so delicious that I had to tweet about it and call my good friend Jo to recommend that she try it.

Now, my lunch itself was a great source of joy due to the flavour party in my mouth, but that wasn’t the only thing that made my lunch so blissful. Because we’re so busy, we often think of meal time as something else we just have to do, something to get through. So we sit down and start shoveling. I chose to create a different ritual, and you might be surprised to hear that it really doesn’t take any extra time. I sat on a park bench in downtown Toronto and I thought, “This salad deserves a soundtrack.” So I took out my iPod and chose “At Last” by Etta James. That song always makes me feel good. After all, it was the first dance at our wedding. Once the song was playing, I sat with my food in front of me and looked at all the beautiful colours in the salad. I took a moment to relax and breathe deeply. Then I ate slowly, savouring each bite, listening to the soothing sound of Etta James’ voice. My lunch experience lasted a mere ten minutes, but it was ten minutes of pure joy.