The Senior Walking Fitness Blog

Hello Everybody,

If you want to try the best healthy diet plan you must know what it is. That may sound easy – you ask your friends, check Google and try what most people say works. But the problem is you are not finding out the best healthy diet plan. You are finding out the most fashionable, which may be the best but probably isn’t. What you should do is ask yourself why you want to eat healthy food and what you want to achieve by doing so. I would guess it is to become fit and lose weight, or maybe just to lose weight.

Diets to lose weight fast are not usually healthy, but some like Collagen Renew are better than others. Don’t worry if you really need to lose weight fast for an event or to avoid buying new clothes. It can be safe enough short term.  Just don’t diet for long and don’t keep going back to a fast diet when your weight increases again.

But a fast diet is not the best healthy diet plan. What you need is a diet which you can eat long term and it has to be one you enjoy. There is no good giving up a lifetime love affair with fast food to live on lettuce, you will never do it and neither could anybody else. What you need is a diet with tasty ingredients and recipes which, if wanted, can be different every day of the week. It would be even better if you could drink a glass of wine with your meal without thinking you have had a serious relapse into bad old ways.

This brings us to my old favourite the Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet is well known. It is the sort of food you might eat on holiday. It can contain many ingredients, but the basics are fresh fruit, salads, vegetables, wholemeal pasta, lean meat and fish, often dressed with olive oil. You can eat it with granary bread, with olives or maybe a handful of almonds. There is no problem about drinking wine with the Mediterranean diet; red wine in moderation is good for you.

The advantages of the Mediterranean diet are well known and well studied. People eating it live long and active lives. It is the food of the farmers and fishermen who live around the Mediterranean Sea. They eat good food and get regular exercise. Of course you will not have to work long hours on the land or go fishing like they do. Just spend a minimum of 30 minutes a day doing your favourite exercise. Walking, jogging, swimming or cycling are all good, but anything which makes you a little breathless is fine.    Losing weight without exercise is possible, but you need to reduce your food intake and it does make it much more difficult

That is all there is to it. You won’t achieve fast weight loss with the Mediterranean diet, for that try Collagen Renew or something similar. But you will be a lot fitter and can expect to lose about 14 pounds in 2 months. That is safe long term weight loss and at the same time you will be enjoying your food and drink. I hope you agree that has to be the best healthy diet plan of all.

See you soon,

Peter Stockwell

Cambridge UK

25 September 2011

Photo. Yug_and_her (Flickr)

Technorati Tags: best diet of all, best diet plan, eat healthy, eat healthy food, healthy diet, mediterranean diet

Hello Everybody,

The best healthy fruits are those in season. Now is the time to eat fruit freshly picked and in its prime. Of course we can eat fruit out of season if we want to. There is no problem in getting apples in April, strawberries in October or plums in May. Your superstore will be happy to help. But the remarkable thing is not that we can obtain out of season fruit but that anybody wants to eat it. The produce will have been stored long term or shipped half way round the world. People interested in carbon footprints should be ashamed of themselves for buying fruit out of season. But a good reason for not eating apples in April or plums in May is that they taste like cardboard – if they taste like anything at all. For the best tasting fruit buy organic local produce in season, and if you have a farmer’s market near you that is a good place to find it.

What are the best healthy fruits? These are five good ones.

Apples.  High on the list of best healthy fruits, they contain fibre and antioxidants.  Eating apples can help reduce blood pressure and fight ‘bad’ cholesterol, Type2 diabetes, prostate cancer and asthma. A medium sized apple contains about 80 calories.

Pears.  Good for fibre – one pear contains 20 percent of your daily fibre needs.  Pears also contain pectin which lowers ‘bad’ cholesterol. A medium sized pear contains about 95 calories.

Blackberries. These are rich in fibre and the antioxidant, anthocyanin which helps reduce the risk of stroke and some cancers. One cup contains about 75 calories.

Plums.  Contain plenty of fibre and equal or more antioxidants and phytonutrients than blueberries – another well known healthy fruit.

Plums are low in calories – 66g of plums contains about 35 calories.

Purple grapes. These are high in fibre and antioxydants. Grape skins and seeds contain resveratrol which is good for heart health. Resveratrol also occurs in red wine, which is a good reason for drinking it. Do not eat too many grapes. They are high in sugar and will not help a weight loss program. But a handful a day will do you a lot of good. 150g of grapes contains about 100 calories.

If you want to make sure your five best healthy fruits are really safe to eat wash their skins. Most organic fruit is grown with the minimum of pesticides but there may be a residual amount on some fruit, particularly grapes which are imported into colder countries. Just fill a spray bottle with equal parts of white vinegar and water. Spray the fruit, rub and rinse. For soft skinned fruits like grapes fill a bowl with equal parts white vinegar and water, soak for 1-2 minutes and rinse. Alternatively Veggi-Wash is a good product which does the same job.

So there you have the best healthy fruits to eat in the fall. There are, of course, plenty of others and so long as you eat a portion of fruit each day you will go a long way to keeping fit and losing weight. Enjoy.

See you soon,

Peter Stockwell

Cambridge UK

18 September 2011

Photo. Geoffrey Slight

Technorati Tags: best healthy fruits, fruit for weight loss, fruit to eat, healthy fruit, lose weight with fruit, low carb fruit

Hello Everyone,

A lot of parents ask how to get kids to lose weight. But maybe they should ask why their children are fat in the first place. We know how they got fat. Unless they have a medical condition they got fat by sitting around eating junk food and getting no exercise. But why were they doing it? Maybe they like computer games and play them every spare minute. Perhaps they are unhappy, either at home or at school. It could be their friends sit around and eat junk food all day and they do the same. If a parent can find the reason for an overweight child being obese that is half the battle won.

To help your obese child start by laying down a few rules – the success of this will depend on the age of the child and how long it has been living without rules. But rules are necessary. Tell the child it is only going to play computer games for half an hour a day. Don’t discuss the matter with the kid.  Just tell it. Find out if it has a problem at school, is it being bullied? Is a teacher giving it a bad time? Fix it. If all your child’s friends are idle slobs encourage it to make friends with some who aren’t. Proactive parenting is the only way forward. But what if parents are part of the problem?

Have you ever seen overweight parents with a slim child? Not very often. They all eat the same food and the child would have learnt from an early age that exercise is something other people do. So how to get kids to lose weight is more a case of how to get families to lose weight. It is easy enough to achieve, but it must be a joint decision and a long term commitment.

Ask the child if it really enjoys being laughed at in school, not having many friends and being frightened of sports because it can’t do them. Ask older ones if they like never getting the girl, or boy, because of how they look. Then tell them it is easy to fix and you are doing it with them. Even if you are a slim parent of a fat child you can still join in.

What type of exercise? Most children love bicycles – they give older ones independence and all ages plenty of exercise. Skateboards can become an obsession and hours of practice equals hours of exercise. Overweight kids may not want to take part in team sports or athletics – but if they wish they could it is something to aim for. Those who hate the outdoors can dance or bowl or maybe go to the gym with friends. Given the facilities indoor cycling or tennis is possible. Family swimming trips, cycle rides or just a half hour’s walk each evening can take care of adult obesity, if it is accompanied by a healthy diet. That’s all there is to it, how to get kids to lose weight is not difficult, so long as you and your child get regular exercise and eat the right food those extra pounds will soon be gone. 

See you soon,

Peter Stockwell

Cambridge UK

11 September 2011

Photo. Perolo Orero (Flickr)

Hello Everybody,

Not so long ago we knew exactly how chocolate benefits health – it didn’t. But thinking moves on and maybe chocolate is not as bad as we thought. Researchers at the University of Cambridge found that people eating higher than two chocolate bars a week had a 37 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease and a 29 percent reduction in strokes compared with those eating less than two chocolate bars a week. It appears likely that this is the result of chocolate decreasing blood pressure. Like much research it raises as many questions as it answers. Will three chocolate bars a week give less protection than (heaven forbid) three chocolate bars a day?

It does seem, however, that there are good reasons to eat chocolate. More research – this time from the National Institute of Public Health and Environment in Holland – has found that catechins, chemicals that can protect against cancer and heart disease, are present in dark chocolate. Catechins are also found in tea, so it is suggested that we have a daily cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit. Something I have always considered a horrible combination, but there are those who enjoy such things and good luck to them.

There are other ways that chocolate benefits health. It can make you more alert due to theobromine which is similar to caffeine without causing the caffeine high you get from coffee. It contains iron, magnesium and, in the case of milk chocolate, calcium. So now we know – chocolate is the new miracle diet and we should all live on chocolate. Rejoice.

Sadly, as with most things, there is a down side. Perhaps it is a good idea to have an occasional bar of chocolate, even three a week. But consider the calories. A bar of chocolate contains on average 250 calories. To burn this off you will need to walk at 3 miles an hour for just under 60 minutes. You can do that, of course you can – it’s worth it. But it gets worse. Have you forgotten you ate the bar of chocolate on top of your usual meal and that we are advised to exercise for at least 30 minutes a day to help burn off the calories in that meal? Now you must walk for 90 minutes to burn off those calories. It becomes more of a challenge. You could eat 250 calories less in your main meals to accommodate the chocolate, but you probably won’t. Which explains why people who eat chocolate get fat.

There’s nothing wrong with chocolate, we have seen how chocolate benefits health. The problem is the calories, something which most of us knew already. I suppose we could always try to love a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit.  

See you soon,

Peter Stockwell

Cambridge UK

4 September 2011

Photo. Njekaterina (Flickr)

Technorati Tags: chocolate benefits health, healthy chocolate, healthy dark chocolate, lose weight with chocolate