12 Tips to Help You Promote Healthy Eating for Your Entire Family- January is Family Fit Lifestyle Month (Part 3 of 4)

In Part One of this series which was posted two weeks ago, I mentioned that, January just happens to be Family Fit Lifestyle Month and that, if you are thinking about making a New Year’s resolution to lose weight and to exercise more, I gave you 12 great tips to help you get started.

In last week’s post of this series, I answered your question: Do You Know How Much Exercise You Should Do To Stay Healthy? In this week’s post of this series: I am giving you 12 Tips to Help You Promote Healthy Eating for Your Entire Family, the final Fourth Part of this post series: 4 Tips to Help You and Your Entire Family Stimulate Your Minds will be posted sometime next week.

If you don’t want to miss this last post in this series just subscribe to the Email Updates HERE or you can subscribe to the RSS Feed HERE (See: What’s This?).

I hope you find this post series of information useful and welcome any of your thoughts or additional tips that will help my other loyal readers. So, once you’ve finished reading this post, please feel free to leave your comments below.

Family fitness is about a lot more than just exercising. Food and eating habits are just as important. You must also practice good diet and eating habits as well.

Here are 12 Tips to Help You Promote Healthy Eating for Your Entire Family:

1. Eat meals together as a family.
2. Eat a small breakfast daily. A yogurt smoothie, multigrain toast with preserves, and some fruit.
3. Limit fast food. No more than 1 a week! It’s a treat not a nutritious meal!
4. Use correct portion sizes. 1/2 a plate of fruits and/or veggies, 1/4 with protein, 1/4 whole grains.
5. Portions add up. 100 extra calories a day will add 10 pounds to your weight in a year. That’s just 4 Oreo cookies or 2/3 of a soda/canned drink a day!
6. Limit sugar-sweetened beverages. Try water with a squeeze of lemon.
7. Drink more water.
8. Get your children involved with grocery shopping and reading food labels.
9. Let children have one day a week to cook healthy meals. It is more likely that your kids will eat healthy foods if they have had a hand in preparing them.
10. Find recipes for healthy good tasting snacks you can make. Hummus and pita chips, celery sticks with peanut butter, or fruit with yogurt dip.
11. Take a healthy cooking class together.
12. Focus on prevention of weight gain, not losing weight.

However, if you do want to lose weight, Diet News is Old News: It’s input vs. output!

We all want a silver bullet to lose weight. This week it’s the Beach Body program, next week it’s the Slimfast, followed by NutriSystem and so on.

There is one secret that all of these programs have in common. It’s input vs. output. If you look at any diet program, it all comes down to calories consumed and calories burned. What’s great about these programs is the “dieter” gets just that… a program. Often, they also get dieting and exercise support.

Well, a study released by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute supports the premise of weight loss can only be achieved if “output” is greater than “input”. Here’s what they say:

According to a study funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health, and published Feb., 26, 2009, in the New England Journal of Medicine:

Heart-healthy diets that reduce calorie intake — regardless of differing proportions of fat, protein, or carbohydrate — can help overweight and obese adults achieve and maintain weight loss.

Researchers from the Preventing Overweight Using Novel Dietary Strategies (POUNDS LOST) study found:

Similar weight loss after six months and two years among participants assigned to four diets that differed in their proportions of these three major nutrients. The diets were low or high in total fat (20 or 40 percent of calories) with average or high protein (15 or 25 percent of calories). Carbohydrate content ranged from 35 to 65 percent of calories. The diets all used the same calorie reduction goals and were heart-healthy-low in saturated fat and cholesterol while high in dietary fiber.
On average, participants lost 13 pounds at six months and maintained a 9 pound loss at two years. Participants also reduced their waistlines by 1 to 3 inches by the end of the study. Craving, fullness, hunger, and diet satisfaction were all similar across the four diets.

You don’t have to be a science or math major to get it… it’s all in the numbers, simple as that.

Be sure to check back for Next week’s final post in this series: 4 Tips to Help You and Your Entire Family Stimulate Your Minds . . . or keep yourself up to date with what is going on at Belvidere Chiropractic Center by simply subscribing to the RSS Feed HERE or to the Email Updates HERE. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, or YouTube.