PFEFFER MEDICAL SERVICES

Dr Pfeffer's guide to healthy eating and weight loss

• Don't skip meals, have 3 meals a day, if hungry, even have snacks between meal times.
• Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, if you skip it after a night of your body getting no food,you will overeat later without a chance of burning this off
• Have 8x200ml glasses of water per day - if thirsty you eat more, your body can confuse thirst with hunger
• Sit down and focus on your food when eating, don't eat "on the run" or while you are doing other things like watching TV.
• Try and eat slowly and chew and savour your food. You will feel fuller and less hungry.
• Put your food on small plates. It looks more on a small plate and your brain will think you've eaten more.
• Try not to have second helpings, rather snack between meals
• Make those snacks high fibre, low calorie ("fill up on fibre")
• Total calories count, you can gain weight on "healthy foods" (if you eat more calories than you burn up)
• Exercise is good for lots of reasons - but exercise without calorie control will not allow you to lose weight as exercise will stimulate appetite. Exercise causes sugar levels to drop and thus can make you hungry. Eating in a healthy way but having lots of calories can still make you gain weight.
• Think of the "food plate" or pie chart not as necessarily how every plate should look, but the distribution or proportion of food content that your daily total food consumption should look like. (see picture above )
• Food will not always fit neatly in one category on the plate. You will have to learn what food is made up of - main ingredients are carbohydrates (sugars and starches), lipids (fats and oils) and protein. Lean/low fat meat is mainly protein, as is fish and some legumes like beans, lentils.

• With carbohydrates, avoid sugar and foods that break down into sugar quickly and are called foods with a "high glycaemic index" (GI). Sucrose (the most common sugar we consume and usually derived from sugar cane), glucose and fructose (in fruit) - all the "-oses" if you read labels, are all sugar. Sugar is quickly absorbed and can give you quick energy. Starches and all carbohydrates end up as simple sugars before they enter the body. Starches with a high "glycaemic index" become sugar quickly. Carbohydrates with a low glycaemic index get digested and broken down into sugar and enter your body slowly. Think brown rice versus white rice, brown bread versus white, oats versus processed breakfeast cereal. Sugar cause the release of insulin. Insulin will put that sugar into your muscles if you are exercising and "give you go". If you are not burning up sugar or a lot of it rushes into your blood from the gut, the insulin will control the blood sugar by storing it in your body's fat cells and make these grow. If blood sugar levels drop, you feel hungry.
• Fats and oils: It is good to especially avoid animal and saturated fats, as these are usually high in cholesterol. Plant fats are free of cholesterol but carry the same amount of energy or calories per weight as animal fats. And oils and fats have a lot of calories, they are "energy dense". If you have the same volume of sugar and fat next to each other , the fat has three times the calories of the sugar. Good news about fats is that they release energy slowly and do not stimulate insulin and hunger. So a fatty meal can keep you going for a long time with the energy it contains and releases slowly. If you look at warm prepared food that you are buying made by someone else a good tip is that "yellow and shiny" means "fat and oil".
• Protein foods are also good in not stimulating insulin and hunger and make you feel full. They are essential "building blocks" for maintaining your body. However. foods high in protein may also contain or be combined with fat especially when consuming animal protein. Remove fat if visible or prepare meat in such a way that the fat is removed - eg grilling meat and letting the fat drip off.
• It is good to have different coloured fruit and vegetables for vitamins and minerals and antioxidants, but remember that fruit also contain high levels of sugars.
• The dairy group of foods is important for the calcium they supply for good bone strength. However dairy food, for example as hard cheese, has high animal fat content.
• It is good to learn about food and read labels or use the internet to research and learn what foods are made of and how many they have.
• Have your food as fresh as possible. As a general rule, raw is better than steamed is better than boiled (microwaving counts as steaming or boiling) is better than roasted/baked/grilled is better than fried.
• Avoid preservatives, colour, salt, artificial sweeteners. In general they will not harm you if you are well , however high salt consumption can cause blood pressure problems especially in susceptible individuals.
• Get help from health professionals to change food habits and exercise, especially if you have existing medical conditions or just to have a check-up before you start.
• Today is the first day of the rest of your life. It is never too late to make a change. Starting is the most important thing.

Dr Harald  Pfeffer

Some motivational pictures.