Eat Healthy At Home

Justine Routhier of the Weekend Wakeup Show on CJOB gave me a call about this article she read in the Huffington Post "How Eating at Home Can Save Your Life".

Link on link below for audio of the CJOB interview with Justine

The main points I liked from the article were:

• Throw out junk food
• Learn how to cook and shop
• Plant a garden
• Invest in food

Whenever we see lists like this it doesn't mean we have to embark on all of the initiatives immediately to benefit.  Choosing just one of these will lead to positive health changes that make you feel good.

While the family meal may seem like something from the 1950's, or indeed earlier as the article points out, there are many positive health benefits to making our own meals at home.

Make preparing meals a reward process that provides nutritious food that makes us healthy and feel good.  Sounds like mere words, a bunch of self appeasing rhetoric, but it's true.

We're so detached from eating for our health the mere mention of it puts many on the defensive as it's seen as a suggestion that trespasses on ones personal choices and rewards.

But those heavy calorie foods are killing us.. literally.  And we smile, and we make jokes, and we laugh it off. Every year though it catches up with more and more Canadians becoming overweight, inactive, and presenting with the health problems that accompany being overweight.

But why dwell on that..

It really is satisfying and rewarding to sit down with the family and enjoy a healthy meal.

Take turns making meals, explore the uncountable number of healthy recipes from around the world that can be found on the net.

One of my fave's is Worlds Healthiest Foods

If you haven't done it for a while, make a point of having some regular healthy family meals.

Canadians to be told to exercise less

Chris Reid, host of Cityscape on UMFM wanted to talk to me about the latest buzz in health and fitness.  This week one of the top stories was about Canadians being told to exercise less.

We're not really going to be told to exercise less; CSEP (Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology), will, according to news releases this past week, be presenting their new recommendations for the minimum amount of exercise Canadians need to get a health benefit. Which isn't much.

Children 5 to 17 years old will be pared back from the current 90 minutes per day to 60 minutes of daily physical activity.

Adults 18 to 64 can feel good about only needing 150 minutes over an entire week compared to the current  60 minutes daily of light activity, or 30 minutes daily of moderate intensity activity.

The over age 64 changes are about the same for the 18 to 64 crowd.

The past Handbook for Canada's Physical Activity Guide suggests we don't need much activity to start realizing health benefits, and that starting with a mere 10 minutes walking is all it takes.  Which is right of course.

These official guidelines are already quite conservative, and achievable.

The problem is very few people like exercise or see any point to it, so it doesn't really matter how much we minimize the time recommendations for exercise, few will buy into a product that has a poor reputation.

The genius is supposed to be that we align Canadian recommendations with that of the World Health Organizations physical activity recommendations.  This should work really well because countries like the US, Australia, and UK, have adopted these lower guidelines, and we can see how well it's working as those countries clearly have the healthiest and fittest populations.

Oh wait, I lost my mind for a moment.  Actually those countries each are experiencing the same obesity and reduced physical activity trends we are, if not worse.

So maybe the genius is about putting into reach physical activity recommendations that can be achieved.  We've set the bar too high.  People are so far away from being physically active for 60 minutes a day that doing so seems like you might as be asked to swim the Channel.

We're better off lowering the bar to only 150 minutes over seven days.

Let me clear something up here.  These minutes of "activity" that are being referred to here.. we're not talking about slugging out a high intensity workout in the gym or running 10k up hill with a packsack full of bricks.  We're talking about walking.  Just walking.

On one hand that shows how dismal we're doing.. Canadians are so physically inactive that from the time we wake to the time we go to bed, most of us don't move our bodies for more than 60 minutes total.

Yikes.

The good news is that being so out of shape it doesn't take much physical activity to produce measurable health benefits.

The recommendations also include flexibility exercises and strengthening exercises.  Click on the link to the guide for more info.

I don't think this new deal will work. There should be emphasis on how good it feels to gain the benefits of strength, flexibility, and endurance.  Up front and centre we should talk about building excitement towards the rewards of getting more fit and little by little by gradually adding more exercise.

How about something simple like;

"Start easy, add more, feel great".

One phrase imparts the idea of not needing much to get going, but implies there's more to be done, and that it's rewarding to do so.

Already CSEP is fielding questions about the bar being lowered (read this CTV Calgary article in which Silken Laumann, former Olympic rower doesn't show much love for the new standards), which is certainly how this will be perceived by many.

I usually like what CSEP does.  I'm not in favour of this latest move though.  It's a retreat.

"No safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke" US Surgeon General report

I used to smoke.

I used to scoff at non-smokers.

"What.. are you too weak to handle it?"  If one of those do-gooder non-smokers told me about the risks of smoking I would reply, "hasn't done anything to me yet!"  Or the infamous, "So and so smoked until they were 90 years old.. didn't bother them."

Of course these reactionary words from me were simply an expression of denial and my inability to come to grips with the reality of my own ignorance and addiction.

I remember feeling cool and tough looking when I smoked.  Or perhaps even sophisticated if I took a drag in just the right way;

The "French inhale"- letting smoke come out of your mouth and be drawn up your nose in two silky streams..

The long hold- holding the smoke in your lungs, then speaking without releasing smoke until you finished your sentence, which concluded with a sigh where you let the smoke out.  If you were really good at this you could hold enough smoke in your lungs to allow smoke to percolate out of your mouth on the start of your next sentence. Apparently this advanced smoking technique shows how in control you are.

And who could forget blowing circles?  While I never quite mastered this pinnacle of smoking prowess, I was able to blow off a few good "o's" now and then.  Impressive.

What a wicked irony wherein the smoker is actually displaying the various ways they can introduce toxic chemicals into their bodies under the guise of modelling self control, intellectual superiority, entertaining party tricks, or perhaps even freedom to choose.

After a while those superficial ego based attachments to smoking wained and I had simply become a habitual smoker.  It was part of life (sic).  Cigarettes were on the grocery list; milk, eggs, bread, veggies, oh yes, and the other necessity; a pack of smokes.

I would receive as gifts fancy ashtrays or high end lighters with the mechanical action of a finely engineered Porsche manual transmission. My favorite lighter was one from Japan; it looked like a cigarette and held the same dimensions; taking off the filter revealed the flint action.  Unwittingly these were all ways of celebrating a deadly habit.

Quitting

Despite the front, inside I always knew that smoking was not a smart decision. Eventually this other me, the non-smoking me, made an increasing presence in my conscious thought.  You know the heart beat sound at the beginning of "Dark Side of The Moon", by Pink Floyd?  That's how my desire to quit started. Faint, but grew steadily, and finally a huge relief to defeat the beast.

Before success though, I failed many times.  I tried cutting down, switching to "light" cigarettes (what a joke those are), and went cold turkey.  Then there was the throat infection.  It was pretty bad.  A doctor told me if I didn't quit right then, the throat infection could take a turn for the worse and become very, very serious.

Go here for the conclusion on how I finally quit smoking.

It's been known for decades that smoking, if you do it long enough, will eventually cause serious health problems.  This might give the impression that one has some time to consider their smoking habit.

It's now understood that there is no safe level of cigarette smoke exposure either first or second hand.  The chemical constituents of cigarette smoke instantaneously cause cellular damage.

Quitting smoking has immediate benefits.

I can confess that quitting feels really good.  Instantly sleep quality improves, cognition improves, energy levels increase, and best of all you don't have that beast of burden dragging you down.  Maybe that isn't the real "best of all"; that might best be reserved for the fact that quitting smoking saves your life both physically and emotionally.

If you're a smoker; quit.  You'll like it :-)