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Paleo Diet Eating Out Tips
When you’re eating following a paleo diet, it’s not that difficult when you’re at home. You’re the one who buys the food and prepares it, so you know what’s going into your body.
But when you eat out, you don’t get to control the foods bought, the way it’s prepared or the choices offered to you. That doesn’t mean that you can’t stick with a paleo diet when you’re eating away from home.
You can still follow this healthy way of eating whether you’re eating at a restaurant near your home or travelling on the road. It can help to plan ahead. If you know where you’re going and what food options will be available to you, then you can know ahead of time what you’re going to be able to order.
Learn what ingredients come with the meal you’re going to order and plan around the ones that aren’t paleo friendly. Don’t set yourself up for discouragement by expecting that you’re going to be able to find 100% perfection with paleo eating every single time you dine out.
Instead, opt to make the best possible choices based on what you’re faced with. When you’re at the restaurant, choose the meals that offer you the best paleo friendly choice. Some of the meals you’ll find will have side items that aren’t healthy and aren’t on a paleo diet.
This is when you can simply ask if you can exchange one side item for one that is paleo friendly such as choosing to have a vegetable instead of potatoes covered in some kind of sauce.
If at all possible, make sure you’re not too hungry when you go to a restaurant. This can make it too easy for you to forget what you should eat and order anything so that you take care of those hunger pangs.
So either have a light snack before you leave the house or eat a paleo friendly snack in the car while you’re travelling before you stop to eat the meal. Many gluten free meals are often paleo friendly.
So if in doubt, order gluten free. Also, look for meals that say they’re an organic choice. Most organic meals are also paleo friendly. If your only option to eating out as you travel is a burger joint, order a burger but take off the bread and just have the meat, lettuce and tomato.
Or, add a side salad and have that without dressing and eat it with the meat. Since some restaurant salads can contain ingredients that aren’t paleo friendly, you can always build your own salad.
Also, if you are travelling and don’t see a healthy option, some grocery stores have a deli and sandwich section. You can ask for individual bags of the vegetables that are put on the sandwiches and top it with some roasted chicken.
Does the Paleo Diet Help You Lose Weight?
Going on a paleo diet offers you a lot of benefits. You can stave off certain diseases, stop inflammation and lose weight. It’s because of these benefits that many people choose this diet over other ones.
One thing you’ll hear over and again about this diet is that you don’t have to count calories. This might shock you, but you don’t. However, that doesn’t mean that you can eat everything you want and consider it free foods that won’t count.
Even though the foods on the paleo diet are healthier, better for disease fighting and lower in calories, these calories can still add up. Because the paleo diet focuses on more natural foods and a more natural way of looking at the food, you will lose weight.
Like all diets, though, you can’t expect to lose weight overnight. You will lose it but it’s not going to be in the blink of an eye. So you need to determine up front that you’re aiming to change your lifestyle and focus on losing weight and keeping it off rather than quickly dumping weight.
You lose weight on the diet because the foods that you can eat are more nutrient rich than calorie rich. You should avoid grains and sugar. You also need to stay away from dairy and certain types of oils.
What you can have are fish, meat, vegetables, fruits and foods that are good for you. These foods, when combined with eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re not, work together to eliminate excess weight.
What you have to remember when it comes to eating on the paleo diet is to focus on foods that are real. If the food comes in a jar, box, can or bag, look closely at it for ingredients that are unhealthy and can sabotage your weight loss efforts.
One thing that might surprise you about eating on a paleo diet is that while you can still have plenty of different types of fruit, you want to be careful not to overdo your fruit consumption.
Fruit can be high in natural sugar which can quickly lead to you getting more sugar in your diet than is healthy. Natural sugar spikes your glucose often higher and faster than processed sugars do.
Make the main focus of your diet one that’s rich with plenty of protein and vegetables. You can have carbs when you’re on this diet, but the amount of carbs that you eat should be considered in proportion to your lifestyle.
If you’re sedentary, then you should pay more attention to your carb intake. Remember to choose the foods that offer you the most nutrients for what you’re eating. And watch your hunger cues carefully to see if you’re eating out of habit or true hunger.
Click here for one of the best current resources about the Paleo Diet
Benefits of the Anti Inflammatory Paleo Diet
Dealing with inflammatory issues is never fun. You can often develop inflammatory health problems because your body’s response system begins to attack the body. In many cases, you won’t even know what’s going on until you start to develop symptoms.
Inflammatory problems are on the rise and much of this can be traced back to the foods what we consume. You might not know that there are foods that can cause an immediate inflammatory response within your body, but there are.
What you eat or don’t eat can make a big difference in your symptoms and in the way that you feel. There are multiple benefits to changing your lifestyle to include an anti inflammatory paleo diet.
You can benefit from improvements in any of the glands that often struggle due to inflammatory responses. This would be things like the thyroid, adrenal glands, the digestive track and more.
Regardless of whatever inflammatory problem you have going on in your body, this diet can help. When you eat this type of paleo diet, it directly targets the problems that cause the inflammation within the body.
When you follow an anti inflammatory paleo diet, it gets to work relieving the symptoms associated with the inflammation in your digest track because you’re no longer putting foods into your body that can trigger a flare up.
The diet soothes the inflammation from head to toe. This process of elimination and addition of foods that work to restore your body’s health can prevent many inflammatory issues from recurring.
You’ll have to let some foods go when you follow this type of diet because they contribute greatly to inflammation. Even having small portions of the foods that trigger the response can cause problems.
When you change your eating habits, you can enjoy better health. While many inflammatory conditions never completely go away, they can be successfully managed by using a lifestyle change with the paleo diet.
You’ll want to avoid foods that are processed like meats. These are packed with preservatives, colors and are often full of sodium. The chemicals in the process used to help the meat stay fresh longer can cause inflammatory reactions.
You can have meats like chicken, beef, turkey or pork as long as it’s not processed. In fact, there are a lot of meats as well as seafood that you can have on this diet. You can also have plenty of fruits and vegetables that have antioxidants that help to fight inflammation.
Stay away from sugars in things like sodas and syrupy fruit drinks. Avoid things like energy drinks because they’re also full of additives the body doesn’t need. Focus on what all you can add, rather than what you have to give up and you’ll feel relief from inflammation quickly.
Click here for one of the best current resources about the Paleo Diet
Basic Paleo Diet Rules
A paleo diet refers to the way that cavemen once ate. It’s a healthier, more natural way of eating than what most people do today. There are a few rules, but they’re simple and pretty easy to follow, which is one of the reasons the diet is so popular.
Plus, it eliminates the harried calorie counting, which is the basis of most diets that fail. Instead of focusing on the food itself, what the paleo diet does is it focuses on the person and the person’s natural drive to eat – or not.
The foods you should eat on this diet are in a healthier form, less processed – so you end up gaining more vitamins and nutrients, which helps your body fight inflammation and diseases.
The first rule is to eat when your body tells you it needs to eat. Don’t just eat because it’s a certain time of day. Listen to your body. It will let you know when it’s hungry. You need to eat protein in its natural state rather than processed meats.
It’s best to choose grass fed meats whenever possible. Eat what you need to eat to feel full and don’t fret over the size of the meat, how much of it you eat or how little you eat. Just consume the food until your body has had enough.
That means no longer hungry, not full or stuffed. You have to eat slower to give your brain time to catch up with your stomach. This way of eating frees you from constantly counting calories or measuring out portions.
On the paleo diet, it’s okay to eat the fattier types of meats in your meals. In caveman times, the people didn’t worry about the fats in their meats. Make sure that you eat carbohydrates as well as fats like olive oil.
You can learn to adjust your tastes to having natural oils on your foods and on things like salads versus having preservative heavy salad dressings. Fruits and vegetables are part of the paleo diet, but you’ll want to avoid buying the ones in the cans because there are unnatural additives with foods in cans.
Remember that on this diet, you’ll want to consume food in as close to its natural state as possible. You can have these foods in their fresh state or you can cook them. You can have nuts on the paleo diet, especially ones that contain plenty of the omegas.
But if you’re following the anti inflammatory paleo diet, you’ll want to either limit the consumption of nuts or remove them from your diet altogether since nuts can sometimes trigger an immune reaction that can cause inflammations.
Take grains out of your food intake, especially ones like wheat, barley and oats. Don’t consume products that are laden with sugar. If the food has been processed in any way, don’t have it.
These Fruits and Vegetables Are Linked to Weight Loss
Not only are they healthy but they are often delicious as well and I’m obviously talking about red fruits because it so happens that a new study shows once again that:
Deep red produce is associated with the most weight loss
It may not feel like news when scientists uncover more evidence that fruits and vegetables are healthy. But Americans seem to need every shred of science to convince them to eat them. Despite reams of research backing up a plant-heavy diet for overall health and for a healthy weight, fewer than one in five adults eat enough of them, according to recent federal data.
In a study published today in The BMJ, researchers found that one little-understood group of compounds—flavonoids—might be partly responsible for the weight-loss power of produce. The researchers looked at up to 24 years’ worth of data from 124,000 people in the U.S. The people in the data set, who were ages 27 to 65, had reported their weight every two years and their diet every four years between 1986 and 2011.
The results revealed a relationship between diets high in flavonoids and less weight gain. The ones that had a biggest impact were anthocyanins, found in dark red foods like blueberries, cherries, grapes and strawberries, and flavonoid polymers, found in tea and apples.
Previously, the researchers had found that some foods, including blueberries, apples, pears, prunes, strawberries, grapes, peppers and celery, were linked to lower weight gain. “We wanted to better understand why those particular fruits and vegetables stuck out,” says Monica Bertoia, research associate at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health and lead author on the paper.
Fiber and glycemic load—how much a food raises blood sugar when consumed—didn’t explain the association, so they focused on flavonoids, natural compounds found in fruits and vegetables that seem to have a protective effect on their host plants. Past animal studies have suggested that flavonoids in whole foods might decrease the absorption of fat and may increase calorie expenditure..
Exercise alone won’t cause weight loss
I hate to break it to you but in case you thought signing up for that fitness subscription was the missing link in your weight loss efforts a new study seriously undermines that concept:
Exercise alone is not enough to lose weight because our bodies reach a plateau where working out more does not necessarily burn extra calories, researchers have found.
The team are the latest to challenge obesity prevention strategies that recommend increasing daily physical activity as a way to shed the pounds.
In a study, published in Current Biology on Thursday, they suggest that there might be a physical activity “sweet spot”, whereby too little can make one unhealthy but too much drives the body to make big adjustments to adapt, thus constraining total energy expenditure.
Exercise is good … but it won’t help you lose weight, say doctors
If true, it would go some way to explaining an apparent contradiction between two types of study carried out by researchers. On the one hand, there are studies which show that increasing exercise levels tends to lead to people expending more energy and on the other, there are ecological studies in humans and animals showing that more active populations (for example hunter-gatherers in Africa) do not have higher total energy expenditure.
Prof Herman Pontzer of City University of New York (CUNY), one of the new study’s authors, said: “Exercise is really important for your health. That’s the first thing I mention to anyone asking about the implications of this work for exercise. There is tons of evidence that exercise is important for keeping our bodies and minds healthy, and this work does nothing to change that message. What our work adds is that we also need to focus on diet, particularly when it comes to managing our weight and preventing or reversing unhealthy weight gain.”
Zika Virus ‘Spreading Explosively’ in Americas
Just in case you missed this story last week, a rather worrisome situation is developing at an alarming pace:
The World Health Organization rang a global alarm over the Zika virus on Thursday, saying that the disease was “spreading explosively” in the Americas and that as many as four million people could be infected by the end of the year.
The global health agency will convene a special meeting on Monday to decide whether to declare a public health emergency. It is moving swiftly to combat this outbreak after widespread criticism that it had allowed the last major global health crisis, Ebola, to fester without a coordinated, effective strategy.
Since last spring, more than 20 countries have reported locally acquired cases of Zika, which is transmitted by mosquitoes and may cause birth defects.
“The level of alarm is extremely high,” said Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the W.H.O., in a speech in Geneva.
The focus of concern is the growing number of cases of microcephaly, a rare condition in which infants are born with abnormally small heads and damaged brains. Reports of babies born with microcephaly have been rising sharply in Brazil as Zika spreads
Digital Detox
Are you connected all the time? I mean are you living with your phone on all the time?
How much time do your spend on your smartphone or and Ipad or laptop every day?
Most people just spend way too much time on this digital connection to the world and aren’t getting any healthier by doing so.. and if that’s your case than I suggest you read the following article which was recently published by Yahoo Tech:
We live in a constantly connected world. From our laptops and smartphones to smartwatches and smart TVs, it seems like an Internet-connected something is always within arm’s reach — or, in some cases, literally on our arms.
And while easy access to data has become one of the great conveniences of modern life, it can also be a burden. Whether it’s Facebook status updates, push alerts from Twitter or a constantly chirping news feed, the incessant stream of information can sometimes be too much. If you find that a fear of missing out (otherwise known as FOMO) is making you miss out on more important things — whether it’s work or a real, live person who needs some real-world face time — perhaps it’s time for a little digital detox.
Here are some suggestions for doing just that.
Erase your muscle memory
Muscle memory plays a big part in our digital lives. One of the worst of these habits is repetitively launching the same app every time we unlock our smartphones — even if that’s not why we woke up our device in the first place.
Hide your apps.
To shake up your routine, move your most-used applications to another home screen — or, better yet, to a folder on a screen you hardly ever use. Making yourself more conscious of the apps you’re launching may make you pause to consider whether you really need to check Twitter for a third time this hour…
Withdrawal Symptoms
Have you decided to finally get rid of that addiction? If so than you might be interested by this article which was just published on the Healthy Living section of the Huffingtonpost blog:
Let’s face it: Any way you look at it, detoxing is not an easy thing to do. Whether you’re coming off cigarettes, sugar, alcohol or crack, who wants to do go through the intense cravings, the sweaty nights of lying awake, chills or the flu-like symptoms that can make you want to crawl up in a hole and die? I have experienced all of the above, and believe me I never want to go through that pain again.
In the early ’90s when I got clean and sober, after having used for years, it took a while for the fog to lift. However, when it finally did, I had a profound realization that was crystal clear: I wanted to help other addicts and alcoholics get clean as well. After taking a series of required courses I got a job as a counselor in a local detox center at Brotman Hospital.
While working there over the course of five years, I met many clients whose lives had been downsized to a pill, a crack pipe or a bottle of Jack Daniels. Others who laid in the fetal position in their beds, swearing they would never drink again. There were our frequent flyers and some we’d never see again.
We averaged about one death a month and those were just the ones we knew about. Others would simply go MIA, and when an addict goes missing, it’s usually not a good thing.
During that time one of the most common questions I was asked was, “What can I expect from my withdrawal?”
Here’s what the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) says about it:
Your Heart and Hypertension
Hypertension is the clinical term for high blood pressure. What is high blood pressure (HBP) exactly, and why is it so dangerous for your heart health?
Normal blood pressure is defined as 120/80, so anything higher that than should be dealt with through natural means in the first instance, and medication if the natural means are still not enough to bring it down to normal.
The higher number (systolic) of the blood pressure reading is the pressure in the arteries when the heart is beating. The lower number (diastolic) is the pressure in the arteries when the heart is not beating.
High blood pressure is the result of an increase in the resistance of blood flow through the blood vessels due to the blood vessels being more narrowed and constricted than normal. This can happen for a number of reasons. Smoking, drinking alcohol, and stress, can all constrict blood flow at various stages. The more often this happens, the more the arteries will begin to harden.
Chronic narrowing is due to arteriosclerosis, that is, a buildup on the artery walls of plaque. The plaque is formed by cholesterol, specifically, the VLDL (Very Low Density Lipoprotein [fatty protein]) and LDL, Low Density Lipoprotein kinds of cholesterol. The narrowing of the blood vessel is called stenosis. The greater degree of stenosis, the harder the heart has to work to pump oxygen-rich blood to all parts of the body to keep the tissue healthy. Over time, the heart will become damaged, leading to heart failure, if the HBP is not treated.
HBP can also lead to damage to your blood vessels, kidneys, and eyes. It can also lead to heart attack and stroke.
HBP is caused by a number of factors, including:
* Genetic factors
* Kidney disease
* Overactive thyroid gland
but the good news is that many of the causes are due to lifestyle choices, and as such can be modified. If making healthier choices is still not enough, there are a range of effective medications to help lower blood pressure safely.
Lifestyle choices that can help you lower HBP naturally include:
* Losing weight
* Reducing the salt in your diet
* Steering clear of pre-packaged foods
* Cooking yourself from scratch
* Stopping smoking and
* Exercising more
Work on one or two of these changes, monitor your blood pressure regularly (invest in a cheap home monitor if you have very high blood pressure) and see what a difference it can make to your health.