The Arc Plan Lifestyle- How to balance your meals using your sense of Taste!

25 May 2010 at 15:45

uzoma

Food Corner, The Arc Plan Lifestyle

2 Comments

This week I want to  to raise awareness of two more of our senses –  taste and smell. I have put these together under ‘taste’ because they are very closely connected to one another. Often, we smell something in order to determine whether we will like it or not, whether the food is fresh, going off, or rotten. Babies are able to detect the presence of harmful chemicals in their mothers’ breast milk via the odour. A baby will delay feeding when a high alcohol content is detected in the breast milk, for example. Our taste is dulled by the absence of our ability to smell- as experienced when we suffer with a bad cold or blocked nose.

In short, our senses of smell and taste are natural first line defenses that help protect us against harmful food pathogens and poisonous chemicals. Our primitive ancestors used their sense of taste to help them to survive as hunters and gatherers. Bitter tastes were warning signs of poisons, while sweet tastes were nourishing. As babies, our first taste is sweet(breast milk) but then we are gradually weaned onto a variety of other flavours. This variety is important because the nutrition provided by sweet foods alone is not sufficient for our bodies once we are developed enough to walk on our own.

Look at your diet and note the proportion of taste that is sweet, salty, sour or bitter. Do you cook a wonderful meal only to overwhelm the taste of the meal with added salt, ketchup, gravy (more salt), or hot chilli pepper? Do you prepare a creatively colourful salad only to mask the taste with salad dressing? Are many of your main meals heavy on the taste of one ingredient thereby preventing you from being able to distinguish one type of food from another? What about your drinks? Are they mainly sweet tasting?

In order to balance your meals effectively, ensure that you can taste or smell  individual food items within the meal. Do not overcook food as this destroys some of its taste (as well as important vitamins). Do the blindfold test. Close your eyes and try to determine what your dish consists of. If you are only able to detect one taste, you are not getting the best out of your food selection!

The Arc Plan Lifestyle – How to Balance your meals through your Sense of Touch!

18 May 2010 at 17:58

uzoma

Food Corner, The Arc Plan Lifestyle, Weight Control

1 Comment

Last week, I explained that The Arc Plan Lifestyle was about using our senses to balance our meals. I explained that food needs to be balanced visually. This week, I want to talk about balancing meals using your sense of touch.

Raw food has a different texture from cooked food and different food items have a variety of what I refer to as ‘mouth feel’. If you were to close your eyes when eating, you should be able to detect these differences without much of a problem.

The Arc Plan encourages a mixture of textures. Food generally falls into one of five categories – crunchy, soft, chewy, smooth, and liquidy. For example, raw carrots and nuts are crunchy foods; fish and avocados are soft foods; beef and baguettes are chewy foods; cheese and chocolate are smooth foods; while soup and yoghurt are liquidy foods. A reliance on only one texture in a meal will reduce the variety of nutrients in the diet and will also disrupt the healthy functioning of the digestive tract.

To add a further dimension to your sense of touch, you can experiment by making your meals a mixture of raw and cooked foods and by serving hot and cold dishes. A rough guide to textures in your diet would be to look at what eating utensils you use at the table. A spoon and a cup would suggest liquids, a fork would suggest soft, a knife and fork would suggest chewy, and fingers would suggest crunchy.  When you include at least two different contrasts in mouth feel at each meal, you stimulate your metabolic system more intensely, forcing it to burn up more calories!

The Arc Plan Lifestyle- How to Balance Your Meals, Visually!

11 May 2010 at 01:52

uzoma

Food Corner, The Arc Plan Lifestyle, Weight Control

12 Comments

The Arc Plan Lifestyle is uncomplicated and makes choosing a balanced meal easy for you and your family. Use your senses to guide you. The first one is to use your sense of sight. Meals should be full of colour. ‘Natural’ food comes in five main colours – white, brown, green, red and orange.

Make sure that you have at least three of these colours in each meal and then look at the proportion of each in your meal. Try to even up the amounts of the ‘vibrant’ colours (red, orange, green) against the more ‘calm’ ones ( brown and white).

Remember that a meal can be made up of one, two, or three courses. It is the over all ‘visual’ that you need to look at, not necessarily individual courses. I have found that this approach works very well with children and they enjoy making up their colour palate.

P.S. I don’t want to hear that you are colour blind!

Baby Food Diet! Has The World Gone Mad?

06 May 2010 at 16:40

uzoma

Weight Control

4 Comments

When I heard about the latest diet to hit Hollywood, I could not believe it! The ‘Baby Food’ diet.

Not only is it an insult to any intelligent adult to suggest that we eat food that babies require ( because they have no teeth to chew food), but to try to label the food as ‘cleansing ‘ is a misleading claim. There is nothing unique about pureed vegetables. Just heat it up and call it soup!

Of course Jennifer Aniston lost 7lbs in her first week on this ‘diet’. Which 41 year old wouldn’t lose weight if they had the discipline to  stick to the calories prescribed for a 6 month old baby?

This ‘diet’ takes me back to when I used to work in an Eating Disorders clinic in England and some of the anorexic women had regressed so much that they were only eating baby food from the jar.

I wonder how following a weaning diet can be explained to young children by their baby food diet following mothers. Surely, the self esteem of women has not dropped to that degree…Or has it??

How Can We Increase Our Activity?

02 May 2010 at 07:27

uzoma

Fitness, The Arc Plan Lifestyle, Weight Control

1 Comment

Have you noticed all the labour saving devices there are out there? ‘Drive through’ -restaurants, banks, post offices, dry cleaners, pharmacies? Satellite navigation system to get us to our destination in our automatic cars, also equipped with auto drive and a hands-free, voice activated phone?

We  have a robot to record our television programmes, another to automatically switch on our heating, air conditioning, music, lights, cooker, washing machine, and now we have one to vacuum our floors. How often do you see children playing outside these days? We will get on a bus to go on a 5 minute journey; and sit in our cars waiting for a parking space close to the entrance to a shop or restaurant rather than park further away and walk! 

Our food comes pre-peeled, de-seeded, unshelled, pre-mashed, pre-washed, pre-sliced, pre-diced, par boiled, ready to eat with no cutting and a melt in the mouth quality (it is that soft and tender!). Food is sold with the allure of sex: Easy mastication, and very fork-able!

Only small decreases in activity levels combined with even smaller increases in food intakes will result in noticeable weight gain after only a few years. We need to go back to basics and begin to find ways to work the energy balance in our favour. Think healthy planet- revolving around the sun and, at the same time, turning around on its own axis. If that movement stopped, we would die.

Our body expends a lot of energy keeping us alive (the earth turning on its axis can be equated to our metabolic rate) but we are not doing enough ‘revolving around the sun’. The voluntary movement aspect of our lives has reduced in favour of labour saving activities and appliances. Technological advances are good but we need to use our free time to work our muscles more effectively.

Exercise is an essential part of healthy living. Just as everything in nature is connected via carefully controlled eco systems, our inactivity affects others around us too. Can you think of ways that your inactivity can affect other living things around you?

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