10 Steps to Healthful Eating
Sports Drinks 101
Caffeine Drinks: Bad Idea during Exercise
Side Stiches
|
10 Steps to Healthful Eating
Content provided by Better Home and Garden
Any time is the perfect time to take charge of your family's eating habits. Check out these 10 healthy eating tips.
|
|
1.Take stock. Inventory your pantry. Have each family member (you, too) keep a diary of what and how much he or she eats for a week. Analyze the results for high-fat foods and oversize portions.
|
- Learn the basics. Find a good book on how to eat healthfully. Cut fat from your diets by choosing lower-fat alternatives.
- Reduce fat. Children as well as adults should aim for a diet consisting of around 30% of the calories coming from fat. Children over 2 years of age can eat the same lower-fat foods as the rest of the family. Just make sure they aren't losing weight.
- Read labels. Pay special attention to the fat content. For a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, hold the fat to less than 65 grams.
- Improve on your favorites. Many of your favorite foods can be cooked using alternate methods. Instead of frying, try broiling, grilling, or roasting.
- Plan healthful snacks for kids. Choose low-fat cheese, wheat crackers, skim milk, and fruit, for instance, and offer them several times a day to keep up with children's high-energy lives.
- Plan ahead. Map out a week's menu at a time and make out a grocery list. Last-minute fast-food solutions will be less enticing.
- Be realistic. It takes a while to break old habits. Begin by eating on a regular schedule-no meal skipping. Snack only at designated times. If weight loss is a goal, aim at no more than 5 pounds a month. Activate the E word: Exercise at least three times a week.
- Expect setbacks. Everybody has times when they don't want to think about eating at all-never mind how healthful. That's okay. Keep a positive attitude and move forward.
- Reward yourself and your family.
Sports Drinks 101
By Jeanie Davis WebMD Medical News - Reviewed by Charlotte Grayson, MD
When you exercise heavily, you lose water and salts in your sweat. Gatorade was an advance over water because it added a number of electrolytes that were lost in sweat, says Steven Zeisel, MD, PHD, chairman of nutrition at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Today's true sports drinks are still the classic Gatorade -- packed with the electrolytes potassium, magnesium, calcium, and sodium to provide energy during intense workouts -- as well as competitors such as Cytomax, Allsport, and Accelerade.
Take a swig of an electrolyte drink, and you make sure your body doesn't overheat. You also give yourself an energy source -- one that only serious athletes need, Zeisel tells WebMD. "The amount of sugar in the sports drinks is relatively small compared to the amount of sugar someone burns in exercise. But clearly, it's better than nothing as a calorie source."
"Certainly for people engaging in exercise in a hot environment, an electrolyte replacer can be a lifesaver," he says.
Electrolyte drinks provide the body with fuel in the right quantities, so you don't get an upset stomach, says Bonci. "And the carbohydrates, sodium, and potassium help move fluid more quickly out of the body and into the muscles, where it needs to be during exercise."
Caffeine Drinks: Bad Idea during Exercise
By Jeanie Davis WebMD Medical News - Reviewed by Charlotte Grayson, MD
Soft drinks are never a good option during sports. "They have no electrolytes, so they really don't replenish what the body needs," says Chris Carmichael, who heads a training company for personal coaches in Colorado Springs. He's also the personal coach of three-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong.
"Sports drinks help you sustain energy or recover from your workout," he tells WebMD. "Soft drinks are really poor at doing either of those."
Like soft drinks, the so-called energy drinks like Red Bull "have huge amounts of caffeine -- which can be a diuretic and can even have a laxative effect," says Leslie Bonci, MPH, RD, director of Sports Nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. This can worsen the dehydration often experienced with heavy exercise.
Side Stiches
by Rich Weil (WebMD)
Stitches are sharp pains like cramps that occur during exercise (particularly running), usually near the ribs, usually in the same spot, and sometimes they can get so bad that a runner has to stop and wait it out. There is not a good explanation for why they occur, and there is not a very good cure either. Some people believe it has to do with a small area of ischemia where blood and oxygen get cut off to a small area of muscle which leads to a spasm or cramp. Things you can do when they occur is massage the area, stretch, slow down the exercise, take deep breaths into your belly, or stop exercising. You’ll have to experiment and see what works best. You may also want to start with a slow warm-up for 4-5 minutes, followed by a stretch of the upper body, and then go on and start exercising, and try not to increase the intensity too quickly. Stitches are not dangerous, just painful, so you can continue to exercise and try some of the above interventions when they occur.
|
