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NUTRITION UPGRADES Five Strategies for Better Health by Melinda Hemmelgarn
Springtime brings a desire to clean up
our diets and refresh our plates. Here are five worthy strategies for upgrading nutrition and greeting the season with a renewed sense of well-being.
Ditch dieting.
According to the Boston Medical Center, an estimated 45 million Americans go on a diet each year and spendmore than $30 billion annually on weightloss products. Despite this hefty investment, restrictive diets don’t work, says Sandra Aamodt, a neuroscientist based in northern California. Aamodt co-presented the Neurobiology of Dieting: Evidence for Improving Mental Health With a Self-Care Approach session at the Academyof Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) annual meeting last October in Washington, D.C. “Diets are not harmless,” Aamodt explains. “They create stress, persistent hunger trigger eating disorders such as binge eating and even make people fatter over time.
”It’s better to take a kinder approach, says Rebecca Scritchfield, a Washington, D.C.-based registered dietitian and Aamodt’s co-presenter. Scritchfield is the author of Body Kindness: Transform Your HealthFrom the Inside Out – and Never Say Diet Again. She teaches her clients to value their self-worth regardless of body size, practice mindful eating and focus on overall self-care: Think enjoyable physical activity, adequate sleep and positive self-talk. Mindful eating includes paying attention to thoughts and feelings that trigger eating such as hunger, but also stress, boredom and loneliness, says Californiabasedregistered dietitian Andrea Lieberstein,who wrote Well Nourished: Mindful Practices to Heal Your Relationship with Food, Feed Your Whole Self, and End Overeating. She encourages clients toidentify voids in their lives and fill themwith healthy relationships and pleasurable activities, rather than food The “health at any size” philosophy is accepted by a growing number of health and nutrition experts, including Annie Kay,a registered dietitian and
registered yoga therapist at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She’s the author of Every Bite is Divine: The Balanced Approach to Enjoying Eating, Feeling Healthy and Happy, and Getting to a Weight That’s Natural for You. Kay injects compassion into her work, promoting stress reduction, conscious eating and finding peace for individuals to reach their natural weight.
Learn how to cook and garden. The best
dietary upgrade starts in our own kitchens, where the cook controls the ingredients. Home cooking with fresh, whole foods is at the heart of feeding ourselves well. Processed food manufacturers would like us to equate cooking with drudgery or think that cooking takes too much time, yet this couldn’t be further from the truth. Tanmeet Sethi, an integrative physician at the Swedish Cherry Hill Family Medicine Residency, in Seattle, established a culinary medicine program that includes both cooking and gardening classes. Sethi says, “Eating is sacred; it’s our connection to the earth.” She also believes there is wisdom in the way food has been traditionally cooked. Sethi recommends a Mediterranean eating pattern for its power to reduce depression and ward off chronic diseases. She also promotes the “herb and spice pharmacy” to reduce inflammation and treat and prevent disease. For example, she says, “Ginger and turmeric both act on the same biochemical pathways as antiin-
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