Many of our clients say that they would like to lose weight as part of their goals.
There are two main factors that will influence your ability to lose weight: Exercise and eating the right foods and the right amounts of it.
As physiotherapists we tend to have a bias towards the exercise side of this, however the eating is just as important. Here are a few tips for making healthy lifelong changes.
Should you go on a diet?
I personally dislike all the ‘fad’ diets you see floating around. These may help you lose weight but generally this is short term and after 12 weeks of only drinking shakes (or other), most will fall straight back into their same old eating habits.
We all grew up knowing about the healthy eating pyramid. Whilst this was good, it wasn’t great. The good news is that the pyramid was recently updated by Nutrition Australia and it now has four main layers:
Base layer (layer 1): Vegetables, fruits and legumes. Older children, teens and adults should aim to have at least 2 serves of fruit and 5 serves of vegetables or legumes each day.
Layer 2: Grains: This should consist of whole grains. When choosing breads, pastas, rice etc. make the healthier choice and go for the wholegrain/wholemeal variety.
These first 2 layers are recommended to make up 70% of our diet!
Layer 3: Consists of milks, yoghurts, cheeses, meats, eggs, fish and nuts.
Layer 4: Healthy fats (polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats).
Layers 3 and 4 still provide essential nutrients to our diet every day, however we should limit our consumption of these foods as they can be quite high in kilojoules if eaten in excess.
By using the above guidelines you should be able to find a balanced diet that gives you all the essential nutrients your body needs to function at an optimal level and reduce the risk of lifestyle diseases.
Rewarding your healthy eating
One common mistake people make is to reward themselves for doing something healthy by eating discretionary foods (dessert/chocolate etc).
In reality if you go for a walk then decide to have a chocolate bar or Tim Tam you may end up eating more kilojoules than you burn. To put this in perspective: an average 30-year-old female will burn about 600 kilojoules going for a 30-minute walk. A double-coated chocolate Tim Tam contains 488 kilojoules! That means if you ate two Tim Tams you would have to walk for about 50 minutes just to burn the energy.
Importance of reading the label
A good starting point is to start reading the nutrition labels of everything you eat. Start to recognise what you are putting into your body and how this can affect your weight goals.
If you want to track it closely there are many apps that can do this for you on your smartphone (including the ease of just scanning the barcode to add the item).
My favourite for this is My Fitness Pal which allows you to input your exercise also to give you an estimate of how much energy you're burning.
If you are interested in finding out more or getting started on a healthier lifestyle feel free to come in for a free initial assessment with one of our physiotherapists.
For more information on the healthy eating pyramid please refer to the Nutrition Australia website.