Is The Easter Bunny on His Way to Your House?

Well if he is, here are some things to consider.

Any 100g of any chocolate is a minimum of 500 calories. Yes, that’s right, that cute 200g foil wrapped hollow bunny beckoning you from the end of the supermarket aisle is going to add at least 1000 calories of mainly fat and sugar to your day.

Fancy a decent hot X bun (and let’s face it, there’s no point in having anything less than a decent one), slap a couple of teaspoons of butter on it and savour the sensation as the grease leaves telltale smears around your mouth. The calorie cost? Around 200 calories for the bun + 70 calories for the butter. Those 270 calories of bun + butter will take you almost an hour of brisk walking to even the odds.

The 200g bunny, well that will take you around 2 hours of running or 3 ½ hours of walking. Phew, makes you think doesn’t it!

Something else to consider is: Do your kids really need a ton of chocolate at Easter? With grandparents and other family members buying for the kids, often they end up with a ridiculous amount of Easter Eggs. Remember that milk chocolate is around 55% sugar……..so for every 100g of milk chocolate there is 55g of sugar. That is a heck of a lot. An egg or a small bunny is fine, but make it a smaller size and really savour it.

Three Important Points to Keep in Mind When it Comes to Fat Loss

1. It’s do-able
2. It takes time
3. It’s a long term commitment

I know we all wish that there was an easy way to lose weight which didn’t require lifestyle changes. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to eat what we like and not gain weight? But, unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.

I’ve written an article and put it on my website which goes into more detail on the above points. Find it here.

Fad Diets

I know I’ve written about this before, but it really gets me going when I see outrageous claims made for products or weight loss programmes which are just marketing, money making hypes. At best they are harmless (and useless); at worst they can damage your health and teach you to binge.

Here are two (of many) I’ve noticed lately.

The KEN, or Ketogenic Enteral Nutrition diet, involves eating absolutely nothing at all.

Instead, for ten days at a time, a patented liquid formula made up of protein and nutrients is dripped directly into the stomach via a plastic tube that goes up the patient’s nose and is taped on to their face. (Yes, that’s right; you walk around with a tube taped to your face!)

At the other end of the tube is an electric pump which works day and night to deliver two litres of the formula over 24 hours.

While on the KEN, dieters can go about their lives as normal but must carry the pump and liquid in a bag or backpack and hang it by their bed at night. They are allowed to unhook themselves from the pump for one hour a day — for bathing — and can drink water, tea, coffee (with no milk, sugar or sweeteners) or sugar-free herb teas with the tube in.

Side effects –constipation caused by a total lack of fibre, bad breath, exhaustion and no doubt the social stigma of having a plastic tube hanging out of your nose for 10 days at a time. Effective? Probably, if you could suffer it for the 10 days, but what would you learn? I’d suggest that once you got the tube out you would end up bingeing on everything you’d missed out on in the previous 10 days.

I received something in the mail the other day about a “celebrity secret” which turned out to be a colon cleanser and wait for it, you ‘lose up to 4 kilos every week’ with this product. 4 kilos of what I have to wonder!! To lose 4 kilos of fat you have to be in a 32,000 calorie deficit, so no matter what you are flushing out, if you don’t reduce your calorie intake, you aren’t going to lose fat.

There are loads of quick fix type products out there, but you have to ask yourself, does this product involve me eating less, because if it doesn’t then you aren’t going to lose fat. Nothing works better than learning what to eat, how much to eat, when to eat it and what options there are. Put that together with a regular exercise routine and you are on to a winner. No fancy products required. Read my article on the Three Important Points for Fat Loss here.

Kathy recently reached her fat loss goal and this is what she wrote: “Thank you so much for helping me achieve a new approach to food. Your support and knowledge has been fantastic and my lifestyle has changed. As a result I feel great.” Just like you, Kathy didn’t need to buy into any fad type diet, she just needed to learn what to eat for her body and to learn how to tweak her lifestyle to achieve the result she wanted.

True or False: A kilo of fat weighs more than a kilo of muscle?

I hear that statement quite often, but when you think about it, a kilo of anything weighs a kilo. But, fat takes up more space than muscle. Fat is fluffy and squishy whereas muscle is firm and dense and takes up less space on the body than fat.

Another fallacy is that if you stop exercising, your muscle will turn to fat. Muscle cells and fat cells are two different things. If you are thinking of an ageing ex athlete who has gained fat, it just means that he is consuming more calories than his body needs and he has expanded his fat cells. His muscle mass may be less from the natural ageing process and less exercise, but the two types of cells are not interchangeable.

It’s a win-win situation to have more muscle, as muscle burns more calories than fat does. A person with 50 kilos of muscle burns a lot more calories in a day than a person with 40 kilos of muscle does. Fat is burnt in muscle cells and used for energy, so more muscle = more muscle cells = more fat burning. We all lose muscle as we age, unless we eat sufficient protein and do resistance exercise. Don’t let your muscle and fat burning capability decline, stay active and eat right.

Fitbit

An amazing personal gadget that does so much. I recently purchased one of these (click here to see the detail) and have found it very useful. It has a huge capability – you can diary your daily food intake, current weight, goal weight, water intake, blood pressure, etc as well as your daily activities and it calculates calories in and out for you. It does so much, it even measures your sleep patterns. I love it! www.fitbit.com is the official website for it.

Fizzy Facts: New Zealanders are the 9th highest consumers of soft drink in the world, drinking 82.4 litres a year per person. Australians drink 100.1 litres and Americans – wait for it – 216 litres per person, per year!

From the Kitchen:

For recipes this month I wanted to show you some recipes that the Healthy Food Guide website contains as it is a wonderful resource. Their website has recently been updated and contains over 1500 recipes, all with nutrition panel details.

I’m happy to show you which recipes to look for when you are in at your next appointment, but here are a couple which meet the guidelines of higher protein, lower carb and moderate calories.

• Honey and Soy Chicken With Cashews
• Simple Chicken Casserole
• Barbecued Beef and Orange Salad

Each of these recipes meets the criteria I mentioned above, so you can see it’s possible to eat healthy, tasty meals while losing weight.

The Healthy Food Guide magazine is a great little monthly publication which I highly recommend as being educational and informative.

That’s it for this month, so until next time, beware of the Easter Bunny!

Regards
Lynda