2022’s Most Popular Dishing Up Nutrition Episodes
By Nutritional Weight & Wellness Staff
December 27, 2022
It’s the time of year where we take a moment to reflect back on all the things we did this year. To honor the year, we can take stock of all the projects we completed, new things we tried, memories we made. Being in the health and wellness industry, we also like to think about what people are going through, what challenges they are experiencing, and what resources have been the most helpful (let us know some of yours in the comments!).
One of our favorite free resources to create for you is the radio show and podcast. Dar, our founder, has been collaborating with MyTalk 107.1 for over 15 years! That’s a lot of weekly conversations on health and the library of work is vast. Listening to past shows is a great way to get your toes wet if you’re new to thinking about nutrition or they can be used as weekly peptalks for those who are practicing eating real food for life changing results.
To wrap up 2022, here’s our annual article highlighting some of our most listened to shows, like we do every year.
Diets For Cholesterol Management
The health concern:
48.3% of American adults have cardiovascular disease, which is the number one cause of death in the U.S., with stroke being number five. Because of this statistic, many clients come in who are worried about their cholesterol numbers. Surprisingly, only half of the people who have heart attacks have high cholesterol. Despite the messaging we’ve received, cholesterol is NOT the leading cause of heart disease or stroke! The biggest risk factor for heart disease is chronic inflammation.
Cholesterol has a lot of very important functions. It helps to make hormones in our body, it assists in making vitamin D from the sunlight, and it actually helps to reduce inflammation in your body. If there's inflammation, the body is producing more cholesterol to help reduce that inflammation. And the LDL is the carrier. So the cholesterol itself is not the villain. If it's elevated, that's just a sign of underlying issues. It's an indication of what is going on in the body. To keep your arteries strong and clean from this plaque, it's important to reduce overall inflammation in your body.
“If we focus on decreasing inflammation in our bodies, health follows. So you have to ask yourself, what are my sources of inflammation?” – Melanie Beasley, RD, LD
The nutrition solution:
What do you eat and what choices can you make to live an anti-inflammatory lifestyle? Here are a few steps:
- Avoid hydrogenated oils and manufactured processed fats like margarine that leads to more inflammation in our arteries. Whenever you buy anything with a label on it, look for the type of fat that’s used and only choose ones with the healthy types of fat. You want to avoid soybean oil, corn oil, vegetable oil, cottonseed oil, canola oil, and margarine.
- Decrease sugar and processed carbs from your meals and snacks. Any processed sweets that raise your blood sugar will also increase your inflammation.
- Choose grass-fed meat when possible. Grass-fed meat has higher levels of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids and heart disease-fighting antioxidants like vitamin E because the animals are out in the field eating grass grown in the sunshine. This impressive nutrient dense food, like grass-fed beef burgers, sirloins, and ribeye, helps to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease rather than the conventional options, which have less nutrient density depending on what the animals were fed.
- Eat the eggs! Often people are afraid to eat eggs more than once a week because they contain cholesterol, and it surprises people that the dietary cholesterol found in eggs does not increase blood cholesterol. The cholesterol in your blood comes mainly from your liver. Eggs are a great source of protein and they are anti-inflammatory. Like beef, the best eggs come from the ones that live the way nature intended, where those chickens are running around in the sun, are grass-fed, and free range.
- Focus on vegetables. Every time you load up your plate with vegetables, think “I'm loading up with heart-healthy antioxidants and anti-inflammation.” Veggies are a powerhouse for preventing disease and we're not talking one or two little servings in a day. We're talking every meal.
- Add 3,000 to 4,000 milligrams of omega-3 fish oil to your supplement list, because omega-3 fish oil can reduce triglycerides by 40% and it can increase your HDL, which is our protective cholesterol. And most importantly, it can lower inflammation. Omega-3s are one of the most anti-inflammatory molecules that we can take.
How To Lose Weight Without Counting Calories
The health concern:
Since the 1950s a lot of the recommendations behind losing weight has been that low-fat, low-calorie diet treatment for obesity. Maybe you've been on a diet like this in the past. Did it work for you or did restricting your calories leave you feeling deprived and hungry? Is it sustainable? Is it healthy? Are you getting the nutrients you need to support a good quality of life?
If you're someone who's trying to lose weight, that's our number one recommendation: stop counting calories. It turns out this approach of “calories in, calories out” to losing weight is a little outdated because it's not really a sustainable plan for most people. It often leads to eating low calorie and low fat in attempts to lose weight, which can lead to restriction and feeling miserable. If you’re not eating enough, you can feel shaky, moody, tired, or have frequent cravings. It’s easy to be driven back to the foods that you've been told to cut out of your diet! It's a tough cycle to break. There's a lot of guilt and shame around this approach.
“The two pounds that maybe you did lose after working so hard for so many weeks or months, once you fall off that plan, they come back almost as fast as you lost them. And maybe they brought a few friends with them, maybe a few more pounds tacked onto that. And then that whole cycle is so frustrating. It is a lot of work and you end up feeling like you've done something wrong. What's wrong with me? What am I doing wrong?” – Brandy Buro, RD, LD
If you've tried low calorie dieting and it ended in frustration, it's probably just the wrong plan for you and your individual needs. There are some diet plans out there being recommended, but they don't work for most people.
The nutrition solution:
Rather than focusing so much on losing weight, our approach is to focus on healing the body. We need to start looking at health, underlying issues, symptoms, and quality of life. Weight loss will often come naturally after we start to experience all the other benefits, like fewer aches and pains, better sleep, more energy, less cravings, and good moods.
In this episode, our very own dietitian Brandy Buro shares her personal weight loss story along with a client story from a woman who had success by focusing her efforts on following an autoimmune plan for her MS. What do these two women have in common? They both stopped counting calories and instead focused on following a balanced eating plan, incorporating all the healing nutrients that come from vegetables, healthy fats, and meats.
Skipping meals and not eating enough can lead to low blood sugar, which leads to cravings and makes it harder to stay away from sugar and processed foods. Skipping meals messes with your insulin levels. Insulin is a really powerful hormone. It's actually one of our fat storage hormones, but the good news is we have some control over that through balanced eating. We have the ability to stabilize our blood sugar, which helps control your insulin levels and, in turn, helps to keep your metabolism working efficiently.
To lose weight without counting calories, eat a balanced diet of animal protein, vegetables, and healthy, natural fats. Eating a combination of these three macronutrients at least four times per day, while also hydrating with plenty of water, getting enough sleep, and stop skipping meals will be your recipe for success.
Setting Your Health Goals
The health concern:
This episode aired right after the new year in January of 2022, so what a great time to revisit this topic. As we start 2023, many of us are in the habit of setting health goals for the upcoming year. It's kind of nice, right? We have a new year. It's a nice blank slate. We can get started with some new health goals.
What do you want to accomplish with your health this year? Deciding to make lifestyle changes, especially in your food choices, is never easy. Developing new health habits can be challenging and most people need support, education, and a real reason to change.
Now we've all seen the commercials and social media ads about those weight loss plans and “new year, new you” goals. There are some that want you to buy all that expensive pre-made boxed meals or special weight loss drinks. There are others that promote detoxes and cleanses. But these are only temporary solutions to a very long-term problem. These plans don't teach us the lifelong skills that we need to be healthy and once these programs and boxed meals are gone, you're going to go back to the same old, same old. So real food cooked in your own kitchen is the long-term solution. It's a more sustainable solution.
At Nutritional Weight & Wellness, we teach these healthy skills. We don't give products in replacement of the food. We teach how to change behaviors, how to cook, what to eat, which actions will make a difference in how you feel for your long-term goals.
The nutrition solution:
What do you think is the number one habit you need to develop for better health and for weight loss (if that happens to be your desired resolution)? To make those healthy goals stick for the long haul, here are a couple of goal-setting steps to take:
1) Determine what you want to happen. What is your goal? What do you want your end result to be? And what is your why behind it? We talk about this in some of our classes: find your why. Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want more energy? When temptations arise, you can dig down into that why and know that it's for something more important.
2) Set up a strategy on how you are going to get to that result.
3) Decide on a method for tracking. How are you doing on your progress? How do you know if you are accomplishing your goal?
4) Build in accountability. Have a spouse, friend, practitioner, family member be part of your process to check in with and to get feedback or cheerleading when you need it.
Part of the plan needs to be believing in yourself and believing you can make that change. After you have that positive mindset, in the early stages of setting that goal, you might have to make some revisions on the plan. Sometimes you make a plan that sounds good on paper and then you start living the plan to realize that it’s not really working out like you thought it was going to. So by making that specific plan, making those revisions to make it fit your life, creating that checklist to hold yourself accountable, you’ll be able to create those healthy habits.
In this episode, we also covered a few ideas on what healthy habits would be great to set as goals:
- Eating real food at least four times a day. Real food supports your metabolism at the cellular level, supplies the nutrients needed for good mental health, supports good sleep, and can ease the pain and inflammation. If you have any of these issues, real food can help.
- Focus on managing blood sugars and using the data of your numbers to help track your progress.
- Getting enough quality sleep by putting a plan in place to go to bed early enough to get the amount of sleep you need.
- Cooking more meals at home and practicing the craft of cooking. The body is under assault from everyday stressors from modern life, like pollution to stress to poor quality, toxic food that’s full of sugar, chemicals, damaged fats. Cooking at home can lessen this stress on the body because you get to choose your ingredients.
- Tracking your fiber from vegetables to make sure you’re getting enough in your diet.
- Incorporating a probiotic or probiotic foods to support the gut for weight loss and immune support.
- Work with a dietitian or nutritionist to help you with a plan, so you can be successful and break the chain of behaviors that throws you off course.
“Everybody needs to be more forgiving with themselves in the kitchen. It can be tough. If you're not used to being in the kitchen, it's a whole new experience. I always say that cooking is a craft and it's a craft that we build upon. Think about how you didn't just learn how to knit or, ‘oh, I'm just a great gardener’. You acquire knowledge as you go along and everyone is somewhere on that journey. And I think it should never be intimidating or overwhelming. I encourage my beginning clients to start really small. Plan for one new recipe per week or per month and try a new cooking technique that maybe you haven't tried before. One of my favorite quotes is ‘Change is hard at the beginning. It's messy in the middle and glorious in the end.’ And that is so true when we're setting any goal.” – Marianne Jurayj, chef & culinary nutrition educator
Join Us In 2023 For More Conversations
For more inspiration and information on many health concerns and nutritional solutions, check out our podcast episodes on our website or wherever you like to stream your podcasts. We also have a private Dishing Up Nutrition Facebook group that is free to join. And stay tuned in 2023 for much more content and conversations! Happy New Year!
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