Diets & Weight Loss

Recommended Pre-Reading:

Supermarket Swindles: How to read food labels & make healthier choices

Marketers do a great job making products more appealing to consumers, especially on the shelves of your local supermarket.  Thankfully it’s my job as a nutritionist to help you cut through the hype and sort fact from fiction.

These days, choosing healthy options is a minefield of competing product claims, making it virtually impossible for anyone without a Food Science degree to make sense of it all.  But not anymore.

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For most keto dieters, eggs are the go-to breakfast staple – scrambled, fried, poached, boiled or as an omelette – anyhow you like them is fine.  You can also freely eat your fill of bacon, avocado, cold cuts, olives, nuts, smoked salmon and cheese as well as adding any healthy fats such as olive oil, coconut oil, butter, mayonnaise and coconut cream.  Keto friendly vegetables include leafy greens, zucchini, cauliflower, broccoli, asparagus and eggplant to name a few.

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Understanding the Keto Diet

The ketogenic diet is a high fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate diet that forces the body to burn fats rather than carbohydrates.

Because of the low carb intake, your body goes into a metabolic state called ketosis. This is where the body produces small fuel molecules called ‘ketones’ from burning fat for energy (instead of glucose which is derived from carbohydrates). When the body is in ketosis, the fat for energy is drawn from either the dietary intake or fat stores in the body, which is one of the reasons this diet is linked to weight loss.

A typical Western diet contains approximately 250g of carbs per day, whereas ketogenic diets limit carbohydrate to just a fraction of this amount. Suffice to say, adopting a keto regime can be quite a radical change from many people’s normal eating habits!

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Learning the art of healthy food swaps is so important if you want to establish a healthy body weight and maintain it for life. Here we show you how.

Firstly, what exactly do we mean by food swaps? Well, it’s simply choosing a more nutritious or lower calorie meal or snack option rather than going for the most tempting, heavily laden with fat and sugar, nutrition-less version.

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Daniella Calci, owner and franchisee of Vision Pt Balgowlah talks to us about goal setting and how it's an integral part of achieving positive results. Vision’s core focus is based on improving weight loss, strength and fitness by applying these 3 simple but important fundamentals:  

1. Be realistic - Understand your body type and any limitations when setting weight loss goals.

2. Be practical - Set achievable nutritional and fitness goals. If the client can only exercise 3 days per week that’s OK, we set the goals to suit them.

3. Be supportive - Daniella has worked with 100s of clients and the one thing everyone needs is encouragement and support. This is the best thing about one-on-one Personal Training, it’s much more personal and therefore has greater benefits.

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Most of us have all the right intentions to eat healthy food but over time we get busy or lack inspiration and suddenly we realise that the ‘sometimes’ foods become more like the ‘everyday’ foods. If this sounds like you, then here’s some tips for getting the balance right again, but first – get your pantry organised.

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Flexitarian is the new buzz word when it comes to how to eat. If you haven’t heard of it yet you will now, you might even be on one without knowing it!

The word basically means flexible vegetarian. The true vegetarians amongst you might find that odd – you either are or you aren’t – but with my nutrition hat on I think it’s generally a good thing.

It encourages those of us who choose to eat animal foods, especially meat, to opt for a few more vegetarian meals in our week and give a serious boost to our plant food intake.

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I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember snacks being much of a thing when I was growing up. As kids we did have afternoon tea when we came home from school – generally toast, a bowl of cereal or some fruit and yoghurt – but otherwise snacking didn’t really happen and certainly not for grownups.

Today I feel snacking has gotten a little out of control. We are encouraged at every turn to eat or drink something! Supermarket shelves abound with all sorts of packaged snacks for kids and adults alike, some blatantly appealing to our taste buds with tempting indulgences, others claiming to be healthy foods … yet they often aren’t.

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When we classify foods based on how much carbs, fat and protein they contain, is it really helping us determine how healthy they are? In decades past we blamed fat for our expanding waistlines and it became the dietary demon. Out went any food with significant levels of fat and in came a flurry of fat-free and low fat foods to fill our shopping trolleys.

Unfortunately, we threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater and although going low fat meant no more croissants, pies and chocolate bars, it also meant no nuts, avocado or extra virgin olive oil – all foods that are fabulously nutrient-rich and that are not only good for health but can actually help us to control our weight.

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Forget about the pictures on social media of celebrities bouncing back into their teeny tiny bodies in the blink of an eye after giving birth. They don’t live in the same world as most of us. Actually, you shouldn’t feel envy at their seemingly easy return to their pre-baby body, just imagine the pressure they were likely under to give that impression.

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