One of my fellow RD’s, MaryAnn Tomovich Jacobsen, runs the blog Raise Healthy Eaters.  This blog is dedicated to providing credible nutrition advice to parents.  As a parent myself, I am focused on making sure I’m providing the best nutrition for my daughter.  A huge part of this is raising her to have a positive relationship with food and with herself. 

This week marks the beginning of MaryAnn’s new series:  Eating Disorder Prevention: 3 Things Every Parent Must Know.  The goal is to provide parents with the information we need to raise children who have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies.  I hope you will join me in reading along with this series and gain valuable information on raising a healthy eater.

This is week 9 of the 12 Weeks No Diets Series.

This week I wanted to talk about letting go of the cheat day.

There are thousands and thousands of diets out there that have a “cheat day”.  We are supposed to follow rigid guidelines all week and then have that one-day where we can eat whatever we want.  What this can do is eventually lead to an all out binge day (trust me, I’ve been there).  We feel we have to eat everything we can’t have during the week on that one-day.  This leads to a last supper mentality where we think to ourselves “tomorrow I’ll start over again”.  The problem is that this mentality can spread to days other than our “cheat day”.  If we go off our diet, it’s so easy to “just call it a cheat day”… which leads to a full on binge, which leads us back to the thinking “tomorrow I’ll start over again”.

Letting Go of the Cheat Day

Another common way of thinking is to eat healthy all week and “splurge” on the weekends.  I definitely went through a phase of thinking this way.  Don’t get me wrong… I enjoy a good splurge every now and again… it’s the quantity of the splurge that matters.  Eating healthy during the week and allowing ourselves to eat out more on the weekend is perfectly healthy, but what we need to watch is the amount of food we splurge on.  We still need to listen to our bodies, listen to our hunger, eat food we truly love, and stop eating when we’ve had enough.  Remember… it’s all about the portion sizes.   If it tastes so good you want to keep on eating, keep in mind that you can take the rest home to enjoy the next day. 

How to Splurge the Right Way

Be realistic in terms of the calorie content of your food.  I’m not going to encourage full on calorie counting, but think of calories in a very loose and realistic way. If we order a dish of fettuccine alfredo, we know that dish has upwards of 1,600 + calories.  Realistically, we do not need to be eating that much food.  Think about the bread, side salad, and wine we’ve already consumed prior to our dish arriving.  This can put us way over a 2,000-calorie dinner.  Have a game plan and assess the menu before you order.  If you really want the fettuccine, you can pass on the bread and/or wine, or, you can order it all and have a small taste of everything, but in reality, you’re not eating much food at all.  It’s the amount of food we eat that matters the most.

Never Deprive Yourself

If we let ourselves eat the foods we love whenever, we don’t need to have a designated day to enjoy them.  Eighty percent of your diet should be healthy, and 20% is whatever else you want (healthy or not).  As long as you are honoring your body, eating when you are truly physically hungry, and being mindful of your portion sizes, you can easily reach and maintain your healthy weight all while allowing yourself you daily “cheats”.

Don’t forget your workout of the week!

Click here for Jessica’s No More Resolutions Workout!

No More Resolutions will run for 12 weeks along with No Diets in the New Year

There are beginner, intermediate, and advanced workouts for everyone!

I’ve gotten many many emails asking for nutrition and diet advice.  With the holidays here and temptation staring us in the face, I thought it would be timely to talk about diets… 

When I first started seeing clients I thought January would be my busiest with all the New Year’s resolutions… I was wrong.  November and December were always my busiest.  I found it strange at first, but then I quickly realized people were trying to avoid the holiday weight gain and were looking for the next“diet” to follow.  My main message to them what “It’s not about the diet.”

The truth is we all want to be at a healthy weight… we want to know how to reach it and how to maintain it.  The confusing part is finding the best way to do this!  For those of you who’ve read my bio, you know that there was a phase in my life where dieting was the only option.  I was constantly thinking a diet would solve my problems.  A common thought I would often have would be, “Once I reach my goal weight, my life will begin”… “I can finally have fun”.  It got to a point where no diet was working for me, I became a slave to the scale, and worst of all, it affected every other aspect of my life.  No matter how hard I tried, or how much I exercise… nothing worked. 

At what point in our life do we think we need to “go on a diet?”

It all comes down to unhappiness.  It may be that we are unhappy with our appearance, unhappy with the way our pants fit, unhappy with the person we see in the mirror, unhappy because we realize we are truly overweight, or, just unhappy with life in general.  All the while we still think the next diet will solve our problems, make us happy, and finally enjoy life. 

Does a Diet Really Work?

The answer is yes… and no.  People want to see results!  When we make the decision to lose weight, we want the weight gone yesterday!  Diets promise quick results.  Some diets often going to extreme measures such as unsupervised detoxes, cleanses, and eliminating entire food groups.  Can we see results doing this?  Absolutely!  Why do we see results? Because we are cutting back on calories and the foods we love… resulting in a nice gift we call weight gain in return!

It all comes down to basic math.  If you want to lose weight, you have to eat fewer calories than what your body needs.   There’s no miracle diet or solution.  If you’ve had success on a past diet, it’s because you were eating less calories than what your body needed, not because we ate our protein 20 minutes before we ate our starch.   Programs such as Nutri-System and Jennie Craig will definitely produce weight loss because they are reducing your calories.  Everything comes pre-portioned or frozen.  They do all the work for you.  You don’t have to count calories or measure anything out.  All you have to do is heat and eat.  This does produce great short-term results, but what we really have to ask ourselves is “how realistic is it to follow this for life?”  That’s the question you want to ask yourself every time you are tempted with a diet.  “Can I commit to this for the rest of my life?”

A Calorie is a Calorie 

No matter what ratio of carbohydrates, protein, and fat our meal comes in, a calorie is a calorie.  If we eat more than our body needs, we will gain weight, whether our meal is vegetarian, vegan, low carb, or fast food.  I’ll say it again… IF WE CONSISTANTLY EAT MORE THAN WHAT OUR BODY NEEDS, WE WILL GAIN WEIGHT.

Now don’t get me wrong here.  I would be doing my role as a Dietitian an injustice if I said the health of a meal didn’t matter.  It certainly does.  A well-rounded healthy diet is important for heart health and disease prevention.  The point I’m trying to make is that we don’t have to follow a crazy diet.  It’s all about balance and moderation. 

Eating healthy is very important, but how much we eat is even more important.  We have to find that place of balance and moderation.  For example, lets say you’ve been craving a cheeseburger and French fries all week long.  Make a plan to eat it, and enjoy it.  Here’s how you do that… You know the average cheeseburger and French fry combo has at least 1000 calories if not more.  Let’s say you’re a 5’5” active female and require around 1800 calories per day.  Eating that entire cheeseburger meal will blow your calorie budget.  The goal here is to be mindful of what you eat during the day surrounding that cheeseburger.  This doesn’t mean to starve yourself all day so you can “splurge”.  The idea is to make sure you surround that meal with other healthy meals.  Make sure to be active that day.  Eat a healthy portioned controlled breakfast.  If you know your going out for cheeseburgers at dinner, don’t eat steak & eggs or a stack of pancakes for breakfast.  Opt for a healthy cereal or an egg white breakfast taco.  The same idea goes for lunch.   Choose something healthy and portion controlled.  Make sure your comfortably hungry prior to each meal.  When the time comes to enjoy the cheeseburger meal, take your time and try to only eat half.  Think to yourself “Does my body really need to ingest 1300 calories at one meal?”  The answer is most likely “NO!”    

What’s the point of all this?

The main point I’m trying to get across is that you can enjoy the foods you love every single day, it’s all about making a plan, balancing it all out, and enjoying in moderation.  If you eat a stack of pancakes for breakfast, a plate of pasta for lunch, and 4 slices of pizza for dinner, that’s unbalanced.   Make it a plan to keep your intake 80% healthy, and 20% junk!  If you went the whole day without eating any veggies, make it a point to get some in the next day.  What’s most frustrating to me is the “diet world” puts out so much conflicting information.  This confuses the heck out of people!  Including myself!  What I hope you get from reading this article is “go back to the basics”.  It all comes down to how much we eat.  Remember… EATING HEALTHY IS VERY IMPORTANT, BUT HOW MUCH WE EAT IS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT!

What are your thoughts?  Are you stuck in diet world?

It’s all about the portions!