Katherine B. Chauncey - Low-Carb Diet For Dummies

After you have an idea of your health status and history, look at your lifestyle. The good news here is that, unlike your age or your family history, you can make changes to your lifestyle. Some of the risk factors you can change include the foods you eat, how much physical activity you get, whether you smoke, and how much alcohol you drink. If you have family tendencies for diabetes, heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, and obesity, or if you’re starting to show early signs of the conditions yourself, your diet and lifestyle can make those conditions worse or better.

These sections help you evaluate what you eat, how much exercise you get, and what your stress levels are so you can begin to make positive changes.

An important factor in determining whether a low-carb eating plan is right for you is your willingness to look at your current eating habits. But you can’t figure out where you want to go if you don’t know where you are. What you need to do is keep track of what you eat so you can then determine how healthy it is.

How frequently do chips, crackers, cookies, fast foods, soft drinks, snack foods, cakes, or desserts appear in your food intake? You may not even know the answer to that question. Eating is such a normal daily activity that you may be unaware of what you put in your mouth on a regular basis.

To keep track, record everything you eat. Buy a little notebook and write down what you eat, open a new file on your laptop, or download an app that helps you keep an accurate record. Do it as soon as you eat and keep track for a week; make sure you’re honest (you’re only cheating yourself if you aren’t). Eat as you normally would. Don’t make any changes while keeping the record. If you aren’t up to keeping a one-week record, then keep it for a day or two. Record the type of food eaten, the amount, where you were, and your current mood.

Another option is to sit down and recall what you’ve eaten in the last 24 hours. Start with your most recent meal and track back for 24 hours. (The only problem with this approach is that you can easily forget about small snack items you ate, like bread or crackers, as well as beverages, all of which should be counted.)

No matter how you do it, develop a picture of your eating pattern. Interestingly, even with all the variety in the food supply, most people eat the same seven to ten meals on a regular basis. So, what does your dietary pattern look like?

After you have a record of what you’ve eaten, you need to evaluate how healthy it is. To determine the number of servings you consumed, you’ll need to estimate portion sizes. You’ll be surprised to see that normal portion sizes are a lot smaller than you think. Here are some examples:

To assess your diet, follow these steps:

1 Look for the basic foods known to be essential in a healthy diet.Calculate your average daily intake by taking your totals and dividing them by the number of days you kept your food record. For example, if you’ve tallied seven fruits over a four-day period, you’ve consumed an average of 1.75 pieces of fruit each day (7 ÷ 4 = 1.75).Use a chart like Table 4-4to track what you eat. TABLE 4-4Recording What You EatFoodsRecommended Daily ServingsNumber of Servings You ConsumedFruitMedium piece or ½ cup2Vegetables, non-starchy½ cup3Starchy vegetables½ cup3Breads or cereals1 slice or ½ cup2Whole-grain breads or cereals1 slice or ½ cup3Lean meats, poultry, or fish3 ounces2Egg or cheese, low-fat*1 ounce*1Milk (skim, ½%, 1%) or yogurt1 cup2Water or other Nonsweetened beverage1 cup8 *You don’t need foods from this category every day.

2 Look for extra foods that contribute calories but don’t contribute significant nutrients.There are no recommended servings in this category so you just need to record your daily intake. Be honest in this assessment. Research indicates that the Western diet can contain more than 50 percent of refined and processed foods. These foods count as carbs and provide calories, sugar, and fat, but no significant nutrients.Use Table 4-5to record your intake. TABLE 4-5Recording Your Refined and Processed FoodsServing SizesNumber You ConsumedChips, 1-ounce snack sizeCookiesDessert, cake, pie, pudding, ½ cup or 1 pieceIce cream or other frozen desserts, ½ cupSoft drink, regular, 8 ouncesMeals away from homeFast-food mealsHamburgerCheeseburgerFried fish or fried chickenBurritos or tacosFrench fries, regular sizePizza, 1 medium sliceBiscuits, 1 mediumRolls, 1 mediumGravy, ¼ cup

3 Answer the following questions about your food intake:Did you meet the minimum servings for the basic foods in Step 1?Did your intake of the foods in Step 2 equal or exceed your intake of the foods in Step 1?Can you replace some of your Step 2 choices with Step 1 choices?Are you starting to get the picture of your food habits?Step 2 food choices are okay if you’re meeting your intake of the basic food groups and if your weight is in the normal range. If you’re physically active, you can handle more Step 2 foods than people who aren’t very active.

Being active in today’s environment doesn’t come easy. Advances in the modern age have decreased the opportunities for exercise. Streaming services, video games, the Internet, smartphones, televisions, and so on have all pulled people indoors and gotten them sitting down. But your body is designed for physical output. You have large muscle groups in your legs, arms, back, chest, and abdomen, and smaller but very important muscles in your organ systems like your heart and lungs. If your muscles don’t get the workout they’re designed for, your whole body suffers.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) published its 2nd edition of Physical Activity for Guidelines for Americans in 2018. These recommendations for exercise are a mix of moderate-intensity aerobic activity at least 150 minutes up to 300 minutes per week and muscle-strengthening activity at least two days per week:

Moderate-intensity aerobic activity is any activity that gets your heart beating faster counts, such as, biking, swimming, gardening, or even walking the dog.

Muscle-strengthening activity is activity that makes your muscles work harder than usual such as lifting weight, wearing ankle weights, or working with resistance bands.

If those activities are more than you can do right now, then do what you can. Even 5 minutes of physical activity has real health benefits.

This recommendation stems from studies that indicate that physical activity is linked with even more positive health outcomes than researchers previously thought. The good news is that the exercise can be cumulative — you don’t have to get in 30 minutes or one hour all at once. The recommendation means you have to look for opportunities throughout the day to be more active. Taking the stairs, parking farther away, walking to a coworker’s desk rather than sending an e-mail, and walking short distances rather than driving a car are just some of the ways to build more exercise into your day. (You can find more on this in Chapter 22.)