Can healthy eating be taken too far? If so, what are the consequences of becoming obsessed with healthy eating? This blog explains orthorexia, how it may affect people, and strategies to overcome it. Read more here >>>> https://www.fortitudenutritioncoaching.com.au/blog/what-is-orthorexia
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7 Tips to Stay in Control of your Nutrition During Covid-19
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Here are the 7 Tips to Stay in Control of your Nutrition During Covid-19.
Create eating inconvenience, by removing ‘zero-cook’ foods from the household
Set an eating routine
Place more emphasis on main meals
Get ‘red-light’ foods out of the house of at least out of sight.
Create an example day of eating or a ‘default diet’
Go on short walks or brush your teeth when questionable hunger strikes
Keep the mind busy with a passion project or hobby
We’ll explain more about them in detail below.
Firstly we must outline what sort of goals are feasible during this time. Due to the fact many folks will have full control of structuring daily schedules and diet, great fat loss and healthy eating goals can be achieved. However the situation still isn’t optimal, so 'best possible', aggressive results or ‘high level’ goals are probably not feasible.
Appropriate diet-related goals during COVID-19 restrictions:
1. Improve or maintain health
2. Form & solidify healthy eating habits
3. Maintain current body composition
4. Achieve a slow rate of fat loss
Goals that likely aren’t feasible during COVID-19 restrictions:
1. Growing a notable amount of muscle for those who are beyond the ‘newbie lifting phase’.
2. Achieving fast, aggressive fat loss.
Why are these goals not feasible or not a good idea?
Growing notable amounts of muscle, or retaining muscle during aggressive fat loss, requires a pretty hefty training stimulus. When dieting aggressively, the risk of muscle loss is higher so the level of stimulus required to maintain muscle is elevated compared to situations of maintenance Calories or mild fat loss rates. Similarly, the amount of stimulus required to grow muscle for many folks will be difficult to achieve with a minimal home gym environment. While you can certainly train effectively at home, ‘high level’ goals are best saved for when gyms open or if you have a neat home gym set up.
Now onto the 7 Tips to Stay in Control of your Nutrition During Covid-19
1. Create eating inconvenience, by removing ‘zero-cook’ foods from the household.
During normal circumstances, a lack of convenience is often a reason why people struggle to eat healthfully. However when you’re spending all of your time at home, a lack of convenience is no longer a concern. In fact, it might actually become an issue, as the risk of mindless eating and snacking is so high.
Given this, adding some inconvenience to your ‘at-home’ food environment might provide a needed level of annoyance that can deter you from grabbing at random foods, or provide you with extra few seconds you need to consider whether your urge to eat is justified or just an ‘in the moment’ impulse.
2. Set an eating routine.
When you move house, change the workplace, etc. The first week or two might be a little ‘all over the place’. But after a while, you develop a routine and settle into a structure that's the most efficient or effective ordering of events. Over time you know the quickest route to take to work, the most efficient morning routine, or the best way to navigate the supermarket. The same can apply to the foreign situation of working from home that many aren’t familiar with.
It’s a good idea to sit down and plan a rough daily schedule that includes your ‘eating time slots’ (how many meals, roughly when you’re going to eat them). Have this as a start point to evaluate and refine from. This will help create efficiency, productivity, and make eating time and non-eating time clear cut, rather than a grey zone.
3. Place more emphasis on main meals.
You’re either eating or you’re not. Consume large, filling, fibre and plant-rich meals that will erase food from your thoughts for several hours. Plan them well to ensure they adhere to these requirements. Rushed, or in the moment decisions around food with poor planning will reduce your chances of making choices that are conducive to Calorie-conscious goals. Keep it simple and by placing more emphasis on main meals it may reduce any unjustified urges to eat in gaps between predetermined eating times.
4. Get ‘red-light’ foods, out of the house or at least out of sight.
Any foods that when present, you struggle to control your intake of are not ‘bad’ foods but rather ‘red-light’ foods that might be best kept out the house, or at least out of sight. If the option isn’t there, then mindless consumption can’t happen. Crackers, dips, biscuits are all classic ‘zero-cook’ pantry-snack-attack foods that can add a tonne of Calories before you can blink. Either don’t buy them or arrange your kitchen to hide them from plain view.
5. Create an example day of eating or a ‘default diet’.
In combination with creating a daily structure with meal times, the rough composition or structure of each meal should be planned. For example, breakfast might be a yogurt, oats and fruit-based meal. Lunch might be a Mexican style burrito bowl meal, and dinner might be a frozen veg and lean meat ‘one pan special’ with a moderate portion of fibrous carb-dense food such as brown rice. This structure is not rigid, but rather an example day of eating to always default back to. Change the proteins, change the fruit and veg choices, etc. Just keep the general structure and portion sizes roughly the same. This will help you plan appropriate nutrition, shop efficiently for only the things you need, and avoid having random foods present that don’t really fit your meal structure.
6. Go for short walks or brush your teeth, when questionable hunger strikes.
In the time gaps between meals, if hunger strikes that you feel might not be justified or if you get urges for random indulgent type foods, you need to slow things down to give yourself a chance to consider things. Giving yourself a 10 minute time zone to let things settle before you assess whether eating is a good idea might work a treat for making you realise the urge you previously had isn’t needed.
7. Keep the mind busy with a passion project or hobby.
Staying busy is one of the best ways to control your Calorie intake. The time gaps between exercise, house chores, eating and work need to be filled or the boredom might lead your mind to food. If you’ve been wanting to learn something, research a topic of interest, work on a passion project or start a new hobby, these times present an awesome chance for you to do something exciting and mentally stimulating. They can fit into your daily schedule to fill the gaps that might result in needless food intake.
With social drinks and meals not being a limiting factor, the current situation presents a great opportunity for fat loss and healthy eating goals to be focused on and nailed. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy… With some tweaking of your environment, you can mitigate some of the potential speed bumps your healthy eating goals might face during these odd times.
If you’d like to learn some more strategies surrounding food selection, recipes, meal inspiration and shopping lists, our Team FNC Community is an ever-growing nutritional resource that has you covered.
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Yes, only $5 per week. You read it right. Less than the price of a drink at a pub that you can’t even go-to for a while. The money you’re saving there could be put towards improving your knowledge and understanding of nutrition over the next few months.
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Nutrition for Recovery from Injury
How To Eat "Healthy" During The Holidays
6 Simple Steps to a Healthy Life rather than “Netflix Nutrition”
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This blog is not medical advice and should not be used for that purpose.
6 Simple Steps to a Healthy Life:
Don’t smoke
Don’t drink alcohol excessively
Exercise
Eat fruit and vegetables daily
Choose a way of eating that you enjoy and which helps you reach and maintain a healthy body weight
Don’t focus all of your time and energy on one particular food
An individual’s dietary pattern may be more relevant than a direct effect from a single component (1). This is taken from the Australian Dietary Guidelines and it’s a perfect place to start. Health is more than one particular food, it is all of your lifestyle factors and choices combined.
Much of the talk around meat vs plants comes from observational, population level nutrition studies.
Observational studies can give associations and correlations but not causation. For example, an observational study may question a large group of people about their dietary habits over the past decade. Some correlations may then be able to be formed, such as those who drink soft drink are more likely to be scared of spiders (I made this up, but there are some really funny correlations if you check out this site https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations).
Correlations are great for directing further, more controlled study to try and prove or disprove causation - the reason things happen.
When taking these observational studies and looking at meat eaters versus non-meat eaters, the vegetarian and vegan populations regularly fare better in terms of correlations towards health outcomes, specifically mortality (2). The obvious counter-arguments for this are that overall, non-meat eaters may be more health-seeking, more health conscious people. They tend to smoke less, drink less (3), exercise more and eat more fiber (4).
So what happens when health seeking meat eaters, who are conscious of smoking, alcohol consumption and exercise, are compared to vegetarians and vegans?
Turns out there doesn’t appear to be any difference between health seeking meat eaters and health seeking vegetarians, vegans, pescatarians or once per week meat eaters - “semi-vegetarians” (5).
In the 1970s in the UK, about 11000 people were recruited from health shops or other avenues such as health food societies to participate in a long term observational study . 11000 health conscious, health seeking individuals. Less than half were vegetarians/vegans and they were studied for until death, or for up to 17 years if they survived the length of the study. There were initial questionnaires and follow up interviews and questionnaires.
When the results were analysed there was no difference in mortality rates between those who ate meat and those who didn’t. The group as a whole had much lower mortality rates compared to the general population and this was linked to a lower amount of smokers in the group studied. The most significant observation from this study was that daily fresh fruit consumption correlated well to a reduced risk of mortality from disease (6). (Again, correlation not causation, but another little point to keep up your sleeve for the next fruit-fearing, fructose warrior who gets up in your grill for eating an apple).
Between 2006-2008 in NSW, Australia, nearly one quarter of a million people, aged 45 and up, took part in a dietary survey and six year follow up. This observational study also looked at dietary choices and mortality rates and found no differences between regular meat eaters and non-meat eaters. Researchers concluded that they found no correlations between vegetarian, pescatarian or semi-vegetarian and improved mortality rate. However, when compared to the general population, they did state that those who completed the survey were less likely to be smokers, more physically active and less likely to be overweight and obese (5).
These are just two observational studies, but there are many others which also conclude that when lifestyle factors (smoking, alcohol, exercise, fruit and vegetable intake) are accounted for, there does not appear to be a clear correlation between excluding meat from the diet and mortality from disease (7)(8)(9).
One more point which is important to define when talking about observational research and nutrition is relative risk versus absolute risk. These terms are not usually defined when trying to make a particular food sound scary -
”Each 50g portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18%” (10). This is relative risk, a comparative risk. Your chance of colorectal cancer is estimated to rise by 18% compared to the same person who doesn’t eat that 50 grams of processed meat each day.
Absolute risk is your chances of getting a disease over a period of time - this is the one which should be reported because it is more fair and less sexy - exactly the reasons it doesn’t get included in articles and “mock-umentaries”.
Looking specifically at colorectal cancer. Your absolute risk of getting colorectal cancer as a human at age 50 is 1.8% (11).
Taking the above relative risk increase, if you eat 50 grams of processed meat each day you increase your relative risk by 18%. To apply this to your absolute risk you multiply your absolute risk by 1.18.
0.018 x 1.18 = 0.021
So by eating 50 grams of processed meat each day of your life, you’ve taken your absolute risk of developing colorectal cancer from 1.8% to 2.1%. Not sexy, not headline grabbing, not worth using on Netflix or a clean eating blog.
If you want a summary of the research around nutrition, taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of studies and claims, in all honesty the Australian Dietary Guidelines is a great place to start. It is inclusive of all foods and rates the claims for and against particular foods against a scale of research strength. Before reading blogs about restricting any particular foods or before watching any more Netflix-Nutrition, take some time to read the Australian Dietary Guidelines to give you some context around what you may hear.
Furthermore, if you’d like more education on nutrition and how to find a way of eating that suits you and helps you life a healthy, enjoyable life; contact us today.