Weight control 🌵and Lifestyle Medicine🌿 Part 1- Nutrition🍲

 

There is no better time 🕰 to consider the subject of weight control from a Lifestyle Medicine perspective. It must be evidence based. You must know why weight control is a whole life decision to take. The importance of health must come first. Hence, as we explore this subject, you will learn what your long-term health changes will do for your future. Then weight loss becomes a bonus to good health. 

Therapeutic lifestyle interventions must include nutrition and stabilizing our weight at a healthy level to avoid chronic disease. The Lifestyle Medicine nutrition plan is a change for life. You hear endless claims about hundreds of diets, but they will never tell you of the dangers to your health they present. Nutrition as defined by T Collin Campbell as “the biological expression of food that promotes health”. This pillar will give you the foundation for achieving the highest quality nutrition🍲 to encourage better weight control🌵. 

The first nutrition recommendation is that you move towards a more plant-based diet. A whole food plant-based diet (WFPBD) has been proven by evidence-based medicine studies to be the most superior way of gaining our total nutrition needs and also reducing the onset and progression of chronic disease.  Read back over the blog on “Cardiovascular health with Lifestyle Medicine-Part 2 Nutrition” https://talkinglifestylemedicine.blogspot.com/2023/05/cardiovascular-health-with-lifestyle_11.html  for a deeper dive into why whole foods are best for you.  Like cardiovascular disease prevention, the dietary recommendations are exactly the same, which means a diet rich in whole foods, fruit, vegetables, wholegrains, nuts, seeds, legumes and beans. It means reducing consumption of processed food and take away food. 

Guess what? This eating style will facilitate the environment for reversing aging in the cells, especially our beautiful skin cells. There is evidence that the above eating style can create the environment to give your 30 trillion body cells a younger biological age. It will give you a new perspective on aging, which will be about longevity with quality of life. Why aren’t these nutrition styles promoted in the media? That question takes 1000-page academic textbooks to discuss…Basically there is no big industry gains 💰 to be made by telling you this. I can assure you hundreds of highest quality evidence based articles have been written on this subject. 

I consider the lifestyle Medicine🌿 approach to weight control 🌵as the safest and best way to maintain optimum health. By using the above dietary approach to eating, there are huge benefits to your health including but not limited to: 

•   Prevention or reversal of cardiovascular disease

•   Lowering your weight

•   Preventing a whole array of cancers, or assisting in reversing them, including breast and prostate cancer

•   Preventing and reversing type 2 Diabetes, and even lowering the risk of Type 1 Diabetes in growing children by addressing mothers’ eating and breast-feeding practices before and after birth.

•   Prevention of immunosuppression diseases including multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease

•   Prevention of obesity in children and adults.

•   Lowering risk of Alzheimer’s disease, peripheral neuropathy and rheumatoid arthritis 

Processed and takeaway foods 🍔 🌭🧀🍿🍩 often hide large amounts of salt, sugar and fat. They are often high in refined ingredients. Whenever we refine foods, we strip huge amounts of nutrition out of our diet. Such as vitamins, minerals, thousands of phytonutrients and fiber can be removed in processing and leave you with a food that encourages insufficient nutrition and excessive weight gain plus exposure to chronic disease risk. They are often more calorie dense than their whole food alternatives, meaning smaller quantities will reflect higher calorie intake each time you eat them. The list of under consumed nutrients that you will find in a whole food plant based diet include adequate fibre, Vitamins A,C,D,E, calcium, choline, iron, potassium and  magnesium, which are vital for good health. 

Aim at small quantities of lean meat such as chicken breast and fish, and as little or no red meat in your diet. Meat has NO phytonutrients which are rich sources of nutrition and disease preventing/ treating molecules that only exist in plant foods. Do not make the mistake of thinking we just promote becoming a vegan or vegetarian. Many of these dietary types don’t always include healthy eating, they still can include high quantities of fat, sugar and salt; and be cooked in ways that are not health promoting. Cooking is a crucially important topic, which I will expand on in future, in relation to its impact on chronic disease risk. 

Red meat and dairy are often promoted for their excellent suitability for our protein source. Yet more calories often come from the saturated fat content in the red meat than protein content; dairy products are promoted for their high calcium levels, yet the WFPBD can supply you with all your calcium needs. Excess animal protein and dairy make weight control harder to achieve and can also be associated with higher levels of diseases including cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancers, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. 

Without any meat or fish in our diet we must have Vitamin B12 and some Omega-3 fats, which need to be added to our daily diet as supplements. When we eat this way, our body does some amazing things. It can decide how many carbohydrates, fats and protein it needs, and take it out of the food. If it needs to manufacture specific proteins, it can do that also (without meat). The rest of your nutrition can be taken from a WFPBD 🍓 🌽🍆 🥔 🍠 🫘 🥕 🧄 🧅.  If you are being prescribed supplements or vitamins by your family doctor or specialist, don’t alter their prescription. But as for the rest of the vitamins and supplements marketed in the global multibillion dollar industry, there is next to no high-quality research to indicate their nutritional value, except where dietary intake is insufficient or they have been prescribed by your family doctor or a registered healthcare physician, as mentioned above. Not only can the vitamins and supplements be unnecessary, but also may interfere with your body getting all these nutrients from the diet described above naturally, therefore end up being more of a risk to your health. I am going to explain why. When we get them from our food, they are in the presence of fiber, antioxidants, over a hundred thousand phytonutrients, proteins, carbohydrates and healthy fats; this makes the body more able to access them, in that way the body decides what it needs and what it will excrete as waste. The vitamin companies try to persuade us the other way around, but only the body knows. In fact, our body decides when there is a need for the natural vitamins from the food and extracts them on a requirement basis. Over the counter vitamins may interrupt the progress of this natural process. 

Now I can hear the question about portion size. How much and how big? The answer is that portion size will take care of itself along the way. Because you may eat up to 2 or 3 times of your current fiber intake from the WFPBD, you will be full before portion size is a concern, isn’t it amazing! 🤓 In fact, some research demonstrates you can eat more calories on the above diet, with much of the excess calories consumed by thermogenesis, that is the heat created in our diet from the nutrition, instead of being stored as fat by many other so called healthy diets. 

Watch out for the high protein/high fat diets with low carbohydrates and other wonder diets that come up in the media. See if they come with a guarantee to not harm your health. You will find they don’t, as the quality of evidence related to good health outcomes will be questionable. There are also many highly evidence-based diets with WFPBD foundation that have hugely beneficial outcomes for management of different diseases, which we will discuss over time. 

Some recommendations for improving your diet immediately include: 

•   Getting as much processed food out of your diet as possible

•   Reducing fried food🍟 and red meats 🥓 🥩

•   Reduce excessive sugar intake and refined grain intake

•   Reducing or ceasing to eat take away foods, where the quantity/quality of fats, sugar and salt are often completely unknown

•   Keep a small take away container when you go to restaurants 🍽, and ask them to pack food, to avoid excessive quantity intake

•   Make manageable changes to your nutrition by implementing meaningful changes that make evidence-based improvements to your long-term health.

•   Use water 🥛 as your main beverage throughout the day and avoid sugar containing soft drinks, especially processed fruit juice.

•   I recommend an appointment with a Dietician who may be a Board-certified Lifestyle Medicine practitioner, or certified Lifestyle Medicine practitioner with your countries Lifestyle Medicine society/college. 

In summary, your nutrition levels are vital to allow the sophisticated processes involved in body metabolism to serve your best. Increasing energy levels and better long-term health will allow you to be more active 🤸 and exercise 🚶🏽more efficiently and effectively. Your mood 🤗and mental health😇 will be positively influenced, which will help you to deal with food cravings that may also make weight control harder to achieve. Your sleep 💤and cardiovascular 💓 health will improve, helping to reduce the risk of sleep disorders that can lead to excessive weight gain. Reducing alcohol 🍷 use will help lower the chance of gaining more weight and feeling too tired to exercise. We will continue next week by looking at the role of activity in weight control, and how to get the best out of it. Have a great evening and I wish you farewell till next week. Have a great week!

 

References

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9. Campbell, T Collin “The China Study”. Black stone audio inc.

9. Heber, D; Li, Zhaoping. Primary care nutrition. CRC Press. 2017. P. 1-232.

10. Eager, G, Binns, A; “ Lifestyle Medicine”. Lifestyle, Environment and preventative Medicine in Health and Disease. Academic Press. Elselvier inc. 2017. P 1-200.