Eat Well Wednesday: Small Steps to LiveLighter

Posted on 29 October, 2014

Many people mistakenly believe that losing weight and living a lighter version of your self requires a perfect diet and professionally delivered exercise program. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

You don’t have to follow the perfect diet and you don’t have to sign up to the latest exercise prescription promising to be the new best way to shed fat.

No. You don’t.

Perfection doesn’t exist and really, it’s just not necessary. People live lighter and healthier through the consistent application of small healthy behaviours that we like to call habits. They are the foundation on which a healthy lifestyle is built.

These simple little habits are what make that healthy lifestyle a reality and they need to exist in all parts of your life. The way you shop, prepare and cook food, your preferred method of transportation and the way you run your kitchen and household will all ultimately impact your daily food choices and activity levels.

If you want to move more, snack better and consistently eat two serves of fruit and five serves of vegetables each day, then you need to take a deeper look at the daily behaviours that either help or hinder this outcome.

The Heart Foundation ACT’s new public education campaign, LiveLighter, graphically portrays the damage unhealthy weight, poor diet and physical inactivity can cause to internal organs. The purpose of the campaign is to encourage all of us to take small steps towards a healthy lifestyle and they offer plenty of advice to go with it.

The great thing about the LiveLighter campaign is that it’s accompanied by an easy-to-use website, providing a wealth of information, resources and tools that can help you establish some healthy habits into your daily life.

With online tools that include a meal and activity planner featuring healthy, easy to make recipes by qualified dietitians, it is a resource that certainly makes living lighter manageable.

But I’ve also put together my top 10 tips that may help you to incorporate small steps of change into your everyday living:

1. Park 15 minutes away from work and walk in. Wear your runners (pack nice shoes for later) and briskly walk your way into work. The fresh air, endorphins and blood flow will make you feel fab and no-one wants to work with a lethargic grumpalump. It’ll also be just the thing you need to wind down at the end of a long day and transition into home life.
2. People who fruit together stay together. Get a bunch of work mates, or friends and share a communal morning or afternoon tea fruit plate. Go beyond just having fruit in a bowl that is hardly touched. Make up a roster so that everyone take turns cutting it all up and serving it to the group. Cut fruit gets eaten more and it’ll stop you reaching for those fundraiser choccies so often.
3. Pre-organise your snacks. Have healthy food available when you need it because you’ve planned to do so. Pre-filled snap-lock bags of nuts and dried fruit. A fridge full of tubs of greek yoghurt. A packet of vita-wheats and small tins of tuna in your desk draw.
4. Make your lunch when you make your dinner. A big factor in ensuring an adequate intake of vegetables each day is having them for lunch as well as dinner. If you are good at serving up the greens at dinner, why not get into the habit of making extra. Serve up dinner and at the same time fill a container with leftovers for lunch the next day. Two meals. One stone. Got it?
5. Take an ‘around the building’ break. Every two hours or so, get up from your desk, go outside, set your phone to a 5 minute countdown and walk around your building until the buzzer goes off. It’s really good for you to get up and move throughout the day and avoid sitting for long periods of time.
6. When dessert is your friend. I think you should have dessert. Every night. Just make it one of the ways you get your daily serves of fruit. Think seasonal, think fresh and be creative! Fresh cut strawberries, fruit salad, fruit kebabs, mango halves…
7. Meet a friend for walks, not cake. Some of the best conversations I’ve had with friends have been around Lake Burley Griffin. Gotta love that lake! There are also so many amazing and beautiful places to walk around Canberra that showcase this wonderful city in which we live. So instead of a cafe, meet a friend for walks and talks.
8. Please don’t eat boring vegetables. There are so many tasty and exciting ways to cook vegetables that there is just no excuse for boring. If you’re feeling a little stuck in a rut with your cooking, go have some lessons, go see a dietitian/nutritionist passionate about cooking or buy a new cookbook focusing on fresh produce. You gotta get those veggies in but they don’t gotta be boring.
9. Coffee is OK, water is so much better. There is nothing wrong with your daily espresso. Absolutely nothing. There is something wrong with your three, four or more daily espressos, particularly if it also means you’re not drinking much water or your skipping meals and not snacking well. Enjoy your daily coffee but don’t let it be a substitute for a healthy meal. Stay hydrated by making your primary drink water.
10. Vegetables are snacks too – Sometimes you just want to nibble. Nibble while you type, nibble while you think, nibble while you chat. If you do this mindless eating behaviour with lollies, chips or other high energy food, you’ll easily eat too much because you’re not paying attention. So mindlessly nibble away on carrots, beans, sugar snap peas, cucumber slices and capsicum. Go crazy in fact!

Don’t forget to visit the LiveLighter website for further expert advice on healthy living, managing a healthy weight and to check out recommended recipes by the LiveLighter dieticians.