Eating to Feel Great in the Season of Joy and Feasting

Thanksgiving is the start of the holiday season.

We start thinking of New Years Resolutions to make, many of them ways to take off the excess pounds we gained from Thanksgiving thru New Year.

In the spirit of good health and wellness, let's try something new this year.

With some tasty and real life tips on how to accomplish this monumental task, Dr Jennifer Phillips, an affiliate of the Institute for Medical Wellness has prepared the following:

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Eating to Feel Great in the Season of Joy and Feasting

Starting next week, what gathering will not feature rich deserts to be enjoyed (never passed over) after a rich meal? It wouldn’t be a holiday season without plenty of opportunities to overindulge and to eat what we consider fattening foods. This is the nature of Thanksgiving (proceeded of course by Halloween- we need not forget) and followed closely by Hanukah, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve! And along with this comes all the reasons that we may over-indulge during the holiday season; if not for the sake of tradition, we eat due to stress and fatigue of all the busy-ness and demands that come with the season. But most of all, it’s just fun to eat, and eating is part of the Joy of the season.

I know why I love the holidays- nostalgia. And for me it’s all about the tradition, smells, and joy of preparing delicious foods as the focus of gatherings and gifts. However, not long ago I decided that I was all done with baking 300 cookies to give as gifts to friends and relatives that were already inundated with sweets and treats of the season. No one seemed to miss it! It was a much less stressful season for me. This decision came at the start of my career as a naturopathic doctor and was just one way that I began to slowly change the nature of the feasting season so that it didn’t pack on 5 lbs and a load of unnecessary stress.

The following is not a list of ways to make your holiday stuffing “low fat” or your Christmas cookies “sugar free”. I am a good cook and know that butter and sugar are a necessary part of delicious holiday food!

The key is, as always, moderation and balance. Here are 5 easy suggestions to make a difference in your feasting season:

1. Eat Healthy for 5 out of 7 Days. If your holiday gatherings are on weekends, you have the other 4- 6 days each week to eat as healthy as possible with 1 serving leafy greens, 2 servings of other vegetables (broccoli, carrots, beets, among the best), and 3 servings of whole fruits daily. On non-feast days, (weekdays for example) avoid sugar & white flour, and eat fewer than 3 servings of grains/pasta/potato each day.

2. Eat Healthy the Day of the Event. In anticipation of a holiday feast eat moderately for the meals that proceed it. You can still get in your one serving of leafy greens, two servings of colored vegetables, and 2-3 fresh fruits during the day if you know that it won’t be possible at the evening meal.

3. Bring a Healthy Dish. If you are going to attend a pot luck, bring something healthy but tasty, such as mixed green salad topped with cranberries, pecans and mandarin oranges to make it special. You can fill your plate with this if there are few other vegetable options at the event. I guarantee that you will have complements from others if you make the effort to bring this type of dish instead of a plate of cookies or pumpkin pie.

4. Send Your Guests Packing. If you are the host of a holiday feast, send your guests home with food! Your guests will be glad to go home with a foil-covered plate full of your delicious dinner or dessert. Don’t even ask them before you make a plate for them to take home. Less left-over in your house means less that you’ll be feasting on for the days after your event.

5. Just say NO to the holiday candy jar or “goodie” table at work. Eating sugar at work will lead to cravings that eventually get you many more calories and much less energy to get through your work-day.

Implementing these suggestions will help to keep weight off and will keep you feeling better throughout the holidays.

Enjoy a healthy and happy holiday season!

Jennifer Phillips, ND

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Dr Phillips is a Naturopathic physician and sees patients at my office on Thursday afternoons.

Steven Horvitz, D.O.

Board Certified Family Medicine

Founder of The Institute for Medical Wellness

For past issues of the newsletter, please click here.

Study: Low-carb diet best for weight, cholesterol

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical WriterThu Jul 17, 7:23 AM ET

The Atkins diet may have proved itself after all: A low-carb diet and a Mediterranean-style regimen helped people lose more weight than a traditional low-fat diet in one of the longest and largest studies to compare the dueling weight-loss techniques.
A bigger surprise: The low-carb diet improved cholesterol more than the other two. Some critics had predicted the opposite.
"It is a vindication," said Abby Bloch of the Dr. Robert C. and Veronica Atkins Foundation, a philanthropy group that honors the Atkins' diet's creator and was the study's main funder.
However, all three approaches — the low-carb diet, a low-fat diet and a so-called Mediterranean diet — achieved weight loss and improved cholesterol.
The study is remarkable not only because it lasted two years, much longer than most, but also because of the huge proportion of people who stuck with the diets — 85 percent.
Researchers approached the Atkins Foundation with the idea for the study. But the foundation played no role in the study's design or reporting of the results, said the lead author, Iris Shai of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Other experts said the study — being published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine — was highly credible.
"This is a very good group of researchers," said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.
The research was done in a controlled environment — an isolated nuclear research facility in Israel. The 322 participants got their main meal of the day, lunch, at a central cafeteria.
"The workers can't easily just go out to lunch at a nearby Subway or McDonald's," said Dr. Meir Stampfer, the study's senior author and a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.
In the cafeteria, the appropriate foods for each diet were identified with colored dots, using red for low-fat, green for Mediterranean and blue for low-carb.
As for breakfast and dinner, the dieters were counseled on how to stick to their eating plans and were asked to fill out questionnaires on what they ate, Stampfer said.
The low-fat diet — no more than 30 percent of calories from fat — restricted calories and cholesterol and focused on low-fat grains, vegetables and fruits as options. The Mediterranean diet had similar calorie, fat and cholesterol restrictions, emphasizing poultry, fish, olive oil and nuts.
The low-carb diet set limits for carbohydrates, but none for calories or fat. It urged dieters to choose vegetarian sources of fat and protein.
"So not a lot of butter and eggs and cream," said Madelyn Fernstrom, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center weight management expert who reviewed the study but was not involved in it.
Most of the participants were men; all men and women in the study got roughly equal amounts of exercise, the study's authors said.
Average weight loss for those in the low-carb group was 10.3 pounds after two years. Those in the Mediterranean diet lost 10 pounds, and those on the low-fat regimen dropped 6.5.
More surprising were the measures of cholesterol. Critics have long acknowledged that an Atkins-style diet could help people lose weight but feared that over the long term, it may drive up cholesterol because it allows more fat.
But the low-carb approach seemed to trigger the most improvement in several cholesterol measures, including the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL, the "good" cholesterol. For example, someone with total cholesterol of 200 and an HDL of 50 would have a ratio of 4 to 1. The optimum ratio is 3.5 to 1, according to the American Heart Association.
Doctors see that ratio as a sign of a patient's risk for hardening of the arteries. "You want that low," Stampfer said.
The ratio declined by 20 percent in people on the low-carb diet, compared to 16 percent in those on the Mediterranean and 12 percent in low-fat dieters.
The study is not the first to offer a favorable comparison of an Atkins-like diet. Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last year found overweight women on the Atkins plan had slightly better blood pressure and cholesterol readings than those on the low-carb Zone diet, the low-fat Ornish diet and a low-fat diet that followed U.S. government guidelines.
The heart association has long recommended low-fat diets to reduce heart risks, but some of its leaders have noted the Mediterranean diet has also proven safe and effective.
The heart association recommends a low-fat diet even more restrictive than the one in the study, said Dr. Robert Eckel, the association's past president who is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado-Denver.
It does not recommend the Atkins diet. However, a low-carb approach is consistent with heart association guidelines so long as there are limitations on the kinds of saturated fats often consumed by people on the Atkins diet, Eckel said.
The new study's results favored the Atkins-like approach less when subgroups such as diabetics and women were examined.
Among the 36 diabetics, only those on the Mediterranean diet lowered blood sugar levels. Among the 45 women, those on the Mediterranean diet lost the most weight.
"I think these data suggest that men may be much more responsive to a diet in which there are clear limits on what foods can be consumed," such as an Atkins-like diet, said Dr. William Dietz, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"It suggests that because women have had more experience dieting or losing weight, they're more capable of implementing a more complicated diet," said Dietz, who heads CDC's nutrition unit.
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On the Net:
New England Journal: http://nejm.org

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Finally, some validation that a low carbohydrate diet is not only effective but safe longterm.

As many of you know, I have long been a proponent of low processed carbohydrate diets. I have seen many beneficial effects including weight loss- especially around the waistline, increased energy level, decrease in appetite, better sugar levels for diabetics, and much improved cholesterol levels. Almost all of these benefits have been linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

When I think of diet, I try to think of what makes sense by how our bodies react to what we put into them. Our ancestors ate more of a low processed carbohydrate diet, as it was before industrialization and food processing began. They seemed to have had lower rates of what I called DRD, or diet related disorders. Some DRD’s include obesity, heart disease, diabetes and arthritis.

We need to eat more like our ancestors and stop believing that our modern food processing systems know more about how we can stay healthy than our individual bodies! If you have any further questions on how your diet can affect your health, then I encourage you to come in for an evaluation. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

Steven Horvitz, D.O.

Board Certified Family Medicine

Founder of The Institute for Medical Wellness

For past issues of the newsletter please click here.