Reduce Your Risk: How You Eat

Eating for your heart health can actually be delicious! That’s right. Your taste buds and your heart can enjoy the same foods. Plus, the same diet that protects your heart has also been found to be good for your health in general. It protects against diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoporosis and even certain types of cancer.
Better still, your whole family can eat it. Because it doesn’t look, feel or taste like a therapeutic diet, it’s a food pattern everybody in the household can enjoy (and benefit from, including children).

Heart-Healthy Eating

A Cornucopia of Fruits and Veggies
Every woman should be eating seven to nine daily servings of produce. No, it’s not a half cup of steamed green beans with a scant pat of margarine on top. It’s a snack of six to 10 baby carrot sticks dipped in hummus; a half cup of berries (frozen or fresh) thrown over yogurt; a half cup of frozen spinach on a whole wheat English muffin. Be creative. The choices are only as limited as your imagination.

Choosing the Right Fats
You want to be eating fewer saturated fatty acids found in fatty beef and other meats, and also fewer trans fatty acids, found in all manner of packaged snack foods, including store-bought cookies, stuffing and rice mixes, and so on.
But unsaturated fatty acids, found in various cooking oils and other foods, are great for heart health—as long as you use them sparingly, since they’re high in calories. Canola oil is particularly low in saturated fat. Try it in dishes for which you’re not looking for a strong, oily flavor. Olive oil has a rich, full-bodied flavor. Dribble it onto salads and other dishes where you want the oil to assert its flavor. Sesame oil works great for Asian cooking.
In terms of spreads, opt for liquid or tub margarine rather than butter or hard margarine. They’ll be lowest in the kinds of fats you’re trying to limit.

Truth on Carbs
Grain-based, high carbohydrate foods like bread and pasta have gotten a bad wrap with the recent popularity of low-carb diets. But carbohydrates are good for you. You just want to emphasize the more healthful ones in your diet.
Choose whole grains rather than refined whenever possible. Of the four to nine servings of grain-based foods you should choose each day, try to make sure at least half are whole grain. That includes a 1-ounce slice of whole grain bread; a serving of whole grain breakfast cereal (including oatmeal, which is a whole grain); a half cup of whole wheat pasta; or a half cup of brown rice. The first ingredient on ingredient lists should be “whole wheat” or “whole grain.” Oats and oatmeal do not have to have the word ‘whole.’ They are automatically a whole grain. The same is true for brown rice.

Dairy Does It
Go for two to three servings of dairy foods everyday, which help reduce blood pressure, a major risk for heart disease. That includes a cup of skim or 1% milk; a cup of low or nonfat yogurt; or an ounce to an ounce-and-a-half of hard cheese such as Swiss or cheddar.
Go easy on ice cream, heavy cream and most other whole-milk dairy foods. It’s not that you can never have them; there’s no food that’s totally off limits. But those should be the once-in-a-while foods, while low- and nonfat dairy should be dietary mainstays. (Hard cheese is high in saturated fat, which is why the recommended serving is on the small size—about the size of one to two dominoes.)

Pulses, Poultry and Other Protein Picks
All women should shoot for three to four daily servings of high-protein foods. The best ones for women trying to keep their hearts healthy don't come packaged with a lot of saturated fat. That means going easy on fatty cuts of beef and other meats. But even more than that, it means keeping protein servings on the modest side. A protein serving is 3 ounces of cooked fish, meat, or poultry; a half cup of cooked beans, a half cup of tofu, an egg (yes, eggs are okay a few times a week), or 2 tablespoons of peanut butter. To stretch small meat servings, slice them up for use in stir fries, stews or casseroles. A 3-ounce serving of meat pushed by itself to the side of the plate can look rather small.

Is Fish Fishy?
Fish, with its particularly heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, is highly recommended at least twice a week. A lot of women are concerned about fish because of reports of mercury and other toxins. But only four types of fish should be off the menu for women of childbearing years and young children: shark, swordfish, king mackerel, and tilefish. All other fish are okay, and it’s fine to eat up to 12 ounces of fish a week, as long as you vary the type. (Don’t just go with two 6-ounce cans of tuna fish.)

Snacks?
Sure!A lot of women feel they get very hungry between meals and need something to tide them over. Go for it. Snacking is a great idea because it provides more opportunities for women to get the foods they need. A reasonable snack contains anywhere from about 80 to 120 calories. That includes a piece of fruit, an ounce of cheese, 2 to 3 tablespoons of nuts or a small container of yogurt. Don’t forget those baby carrots—just go easy on the hummus and other dips, which tend to have a lot of calories.

Circuit Training Video

Contours Night out

Last Saturday on 13th Sept, Contours members and staff were having bowling competition at Cathay Cineleisure and breaking fast. Here is the photo;

Here is the winner, our own Contours Trainer....Sally!!

Breaking fast time at Warung Penyet at Curve

Strength Training

"Research has shown that strengthening exercises are both safe and effective for women and men of all ages, including those who are not in perfect health. In fact, people with health concerns-including heart disease or arthritis - often benefit the most from an exercise programme that includes lifting weights a few times each week."
-US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in "Growing Stronger - Strength Training for Older Adulst"

Exercise As Good As Medical Treatment

When we think of "medicine", we often think of a drug,something to be taken by mounth or injection. Although not "taken" but 'done', an exercise prescription is much like a drug prescription.

Exercise is a medicne that can prevent or treat many disabling or fatal diseases...heart disease, cancer, stroke, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes and osteoporosis. Many other diseases treatable with exercise.

Evidence-based studies have found that exercise is highly effective as treatment and prevention for these diseases as well as for health enhancement.

The health rewards of exercise extend far beyond its benefits for specific diseases. Exercise reduces blood clotting, enhances self-image, elevates mood, reduce stress, improves appearance, increase energy, gives the feeling of well-being (probablt by stimulating endorphins). It reinforces other positive lifestyle changes, such as healthier eating habits and smoking cessation. It also stimulates creative thinking.

Furthermore, the ability of exercise to restore function to organs, muscles, joints and bones is not shared by drugs or surgery. Paradoxically, conventional medical practice favours physical rest and inactivity during recovery from illness.

Basics of a Healthy Diet

What’s in a healthy diet? It’s hard to know these days, isn’t it? Regardless of the type of diet you eat, most all nutrition professionals agree on three basic concepts:

Balance. Providing balance in your diet involves an intentional inclusion of different foods in proportion to each other based on the value that each food has to your total goal. For some, food choices might include a specific macronutrient balance. Most health organizations recommend a diet consisting of a balance from Carbohydrate at 55-65%, Protein at 10-15% and Fats at no higher than 30% of total calories. Other programs sometimes recommend that the nutrient balances be altered to a 40: 30: 30% or 75: 15: 10% Carbohydrate: Protein: Fat total calorie percent balance, respectively. Lastly, balance refers to choosing healthier foods more often than foods that are less healthy.

Moderation. With obesity incidence growing at epidemic rates, one of the biggest concerns for Malaysian should be portion control. Moderation first involves learning how much food is enough and how much is too much. Many dieting programs are very successful simply because they are very good at helping clients learn to plan food portion sizes appropriately. Because the feeling of fullness in the stomach can take as long as twenty minutes to register to the brain, it is important to regulate how much food is ingested before waiting for a full-feeling. Moderation, therefore, also involves learning the distinct difference between hunger satisfaction and fullness.

Variation. The best healthy diet involves the inclusion of several food-types. The primary reason for this is health. Including a wide-variety of foods increases your likelihood of obtaining the required amounts of essential nutrients. It is well recognized that vitamin and mineral composition is food-specific. While some fruits are high in vitamin C, they are low in Calcium. Also, variation helps to avoid food-boredom: trying new foods can be interesting and exciting.

Who knows, you might discover that you really do like spinach!

Five Surprising Reasons You're Gaining Weight

4. You May Be Gaining Weight Because of a Medical Condition
The most common medical condition that causes weight gain is hypothyroidism. A deficiency of thyroid hormone can decrease metabolism, causing appetite loss and weight gain.

"If you are feeling fatigued, lethargic, swelling, hoarse voice, intolerance to cold, sleeping too much or headaches, you should see your doctor for an easy test to determine if you have hypothyroidism.

Much rarer is a condition known as Cushing's syndrome—a disorder caused by
an excess of the hormone cortisol—that can also result in weight gain.

5. You May Be Gaining Weight Because of Menopause
Women reach menopause at a range of ages, but most are in midlife and are often less physically active than when they were younger. Along with aging comes a natural slowing of metabolism. At the same time, hormonal changes can trigger hunger, depression, and poor sleep.

"It is multifactoral. When women go through menopause, they lose estrogen, causing their shapes to change—usually a loss of hip and thigh weight. And they start to gain more in the middle. She explains that estrogen favors fat deposition in the lower body, and when you lose this hormone, fat is more likely to be deposited in the midsection (much like men). This spare tire around the middle has been not so affectionately called the "menopot.

"The key to avoiding this extra belly fat is to maintain and increase the amount of lean body mass, which will, in turn, increase your metabolism or calorie burn rate."Women need to understand how critically important weight lifting and strength training is to their health. And don't worry, doing strength training won't make women muscle-bound, experts say.

Exercise also helps offset bone loss that can come with menopause. A combination of exercise and a healthy, calorie-controlled diet rich in calcium and vitamin D is the answer to thwarting menopausal weight gain.