Fitter, healthier, cheaper

Simple, Green, Frugal is a collaborative blog exploring different aspects of living a simpler and more sustainable life. This might be an unlikely place to find weight loss tips but one of the contributors, Frugal Trenches has written about some healthy and cheap ways of obtaining your ideal weight.

The diet industry can be as disempowering as it is lucrative. Some companies’ focus on providing all your meals, the emphasis is on portion controlling (ie: small servings), heavy on frozen foods and light on education. Creating this kind of dependence is a costly solution. So too if your life is spent driving from point to point, relying solely on exercise in a gym or personal training environment.

Here are her tips, with additional thoughts of my own in italics.

“Frugal and sustainable weightloss”


1. Make the time each day for a walk, a 30 minute walk each morning, or on your lunch break or even after work will work wonders! Eventually try to increase this to 45 minutes to an hour.
Even better if this can be part of your daily commute, walking to work or school or to a further station or tram stop. Sometimes it is easier to walk for a purpose, to get you reacquainted with the other benefits of walking eg: seeing your world literally from a different angle, smelling the scent of the native plants after the rain, the meditative like effects from walking)

2. Start a food diary & be honest - have a good look at what you are really eating and see if you can find any patterns or areas where you could make changes.

3. Focus on getting your 5 a day - that means a mix of 5 fruits & veggies a day (minimum) with protein, dairy & good carbs!
Go for broke and aim for 5 different vegetable and 2 seasonal fruits. Nuts, seeds and beans fall into an overlapping category of providing calcium (in a more water efficient and ethical way than dairy), as well as being a vegetarian form of protein and a slow release carbohydrate. They fill you up as well.

4. Get as much FREE support as you can - go to your Dr, nurse or public health department. See if you can get a referral to a dietitian if you are really struggling or having food cravings etc.
This site has heaps of resources and links that can help broaden your relationship with food. What’s more, by calling me on air on RRR during the Health Trip segment you can get free advice on all aspects of your health.

5. Learn what a portion is! So many people eat 3 or 4x a standard portion size and wonder why they can't lose weight. Again a dietitian should help!
Or a naturopath with an interest in working holistically with food. Where most people go overboard is with protein. A serve of meat = a deck of cards, or if you need a handier (sorry about the pun) reference, its about the size of your palm (not your fingers as well).

6. Get some books from the library with good recipes in them to keep yourself motivated and encouraged.
I love my library and it has a great collection of cookbooks and magazines. But as you are online already, my tip is to list the ingredients your want to read and add the “recipe” eg pumpkin + tofu + recipe.

7. Get into the garden and get your house tidy! Gardening and cleaning are great forms of exercise! If you need to get moving when you are cleaning, try putting on some music and dancing around to it! Just remember you may want to close your curtains ;-) In fact, the week I painted my lounge I lost 5 lbs without trying!
Bugger the curtains ;-) open the door, crank up the music, dance in the garden, the street, under the stars!

8. Get on your bike (remember the helmet!). If you don't have a bike see if you can borrow a friends, get one on freecycle or save up for one! Always remember those helmets!
For those in Melbourne there’s the bike shed at Ceres in Brunswick. For a token membership fee they can help you rehab a recycled bike.

9. Phone your local council and find out all the info on your local pools, rec centres etc. Many offer free or subsidized sessions, see if there are any special promotions on or if they've received any funding that you could tap into. For example my local gym has lottery funded sessions with a personal trainer for free. You can only go once a week for 30 minutes but it is a great program!
Your local pool will probably have a gym with cheap classes, childcare etc to make it even easier for you to try a new way of moving your body. Also check out your nearest neighbourhood house or community centre for other discounted classes, like belly dancing, yoga etc.

10. Try to make your meals from scratch. You will then know what is going into them, how much butter, creams etc. I make a big batch of homemade soup each week, it costs me about £1 = $1.75 to make and I get 6 healthy sized portions. This is a good healthy, frugal meal which helps me keep my calories in check!
If you don’t know how to cook the neighbourhood houses will probably have cheap cooking courses too. Ceres also has some interesting classes including “Cooking for blokes”.

11. Make use of any free internet tools but remember to keep the focus on your health! We all have different bodies with different needs and I don't believe in a one size fits all approach!
If you are spending too much time getting lost on the net, set your kitchen timer on for 20 or 30 minutes. When it goes off, get up and walk about, even better have a little dance.

12. Buddy up with a friend or work colleague, see if you can start a walking group at work or try to get together with a friend a couple times a week to encourage each other, run or walk with each other.
Don’t forget your neighbours. Going for a walk with them, or offering to walk their dog, is a good way of connecting to your community and getting exercise as well. Likewise, mothers groups can get out of the lounge and into the world.

13. Remember what you loved doing as a child - did you love playing tennis or sprinting. See if you can incorporate what you love into your weekly budget!
Don’t forget the skipping rope – a cheap and fun way to do some short bursts of intense cardio work/

14. GET OUTDOORS - most of us have times in our lives where we feel like we spend the majority of our lives behind a desk, so try to make the most of the time you have off work to get outdoors! Like the picture at the start of the post, there are so many beautiful places to explore. Get a book out from the library about the city you live in or find out from your local council what walks are in your area and make use of them. Treat yourselves like tourists at the weekend and get out and enjoy what is all around you!

15. Finally, my personal motto is Forgive Yourself And Move On! We will all have the odd day or two when we eat too much and move too little, but honestly that is life. There will be birthday parties, work events etc, there will be days where everything seems to be going against you. When you let these days get you down, you begin to feel like you have to throw in the towel. Instead try to learn from those days, how did you feel, what coping mechanisms did you employ and brush it off as just another day.
If you are eating something fatty/sweet/fried etc then go for quality over quantity and enjoy every mouthful. Eat it slowly and consciously; listen to your body when it says it is time to stop. Never feel guilty.


Do you have any other tips you’d like to add?

Ten Ways to lower your Breast Cancer risks

Today, according to the pink banner of the online newspaper I am reading, is pink ribbon day. But within the same publication, not wrapped in a pretty pink bow, is part of a real way to prevent many known causes of cancer – an article on food as medicine.

While ribbon days raise awareness about a disease, we are still selectively deaf to some of the messages that the research validates. While much energy is spent looking for genetic causes or pharmaceutical ‘cures’, how we live can determine some degree of risk for developing cancers, especially breast cancer.

Body size, diet and alcohol consumption are among the main lifestyle factors that may influence a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.

National Breast Cancer Foundation 2006-2007 Annual Report

Tucked away in the report is Professor Graham Giles’ research that includes:

The risk of breast cancer increases by 18% for every 10 kilograms of extra body weight gained, in post-menopausal women.

In all women, drinking 4 or more standard units of alcohol a day increases the breast cancer risk by up to 40%.

Folate, the equivalent to two cups of boiled spinach (400 mcg folate) a day, may negate some of these risks.

But these findings are not new. The connection between breast cancer and excess fat and ANY consumption of alcohol has long been demonstrated.

Furthermore we know that the risk of developing most if, not all, cancers can be increased by our dietary choices. Top of the list is preserved meats (ham, bacon, salami, Devon etc).



Ten Ways to Prevent Breast Cancer

So without tens of millions of research dollars at your direct disposal, how can you save money and decrease your risk of breast cancer? These tips are for lifestyle related causes (not BRCA risks).

1. Eat anti inflammatory foods and herbs: such as ginger, turmeric, deep sea fish, fresh raw seeds and nuts.

2. Opt out of the oestrogen disruptors and xenooestrogens in the food chain. While pesticides and other chemicals used in conventional farming may have a direct effect on your health when you eat the food grown with it, there is flow on effects for everyone when run off from these agricultural chemicals enter our waterways. Buy as much certified organic food as you can afford.

3. Other suspected oestrogen disruptors can be found in plastics. Use less plastic and don’t cook (microwave) food in plastic containers or with plastic wrap. Try to source BPA-free baby bottles made from glass if you need to use them.

4. If you want to drink pure water, stop spending money on expensive bottled water and invest in a reverse osmosis water filter. This is the most effective filtration method and will even reduce ionizing radiation in water, a known cause of breast cancer. Store your water in glass, rather than plastic.

5. Reduce all animal fats in your diet. Eat less meat and dairy foods, and more whole grains, fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans and fish.

6. Throw the scales away but measure your waist once a month. Abdominal fat is a known risk factor breast and other cancers, as well as adult onset diabetes. For women the maximum waist measurement for good health is 80cm.

7. Waist measurement can be reduced by pilates, walking and almost any exercise that is suitable for your particular body type. Clean up your diet with a spring clean, which by the end of the ten days has created a sustainable way to eat healthily.

8. Stop smoking, cigarettes and marijuana are known carcinogens. If you need help, see a psychologist who specializes in hypnotherapy for addictions. Most people can give up smoking in just 1-2 sessions.

9. Really understand what a standard drink is. If you drink wine, did you know that every different bottle of wine you drink may vary in strength? At home, before you open the wine read how many standard drinks it contains, take the amount of mls of wine the bottle contains, divide by the number of standard drinks and measure the amount you come up with. Compare the measured pour to how much you’d usually put in the glass. You’ll be surprised!

While it is questionable that any alcohol (even a glass a week) is considered safe in terms of breast cancer prevention, at least get clear on what a standard drink is. If you really enjoy alcohol – choose quality over quantity, stop habitual drinking (your after work “reward”) and stick to 1-2 standard drinks, 1-2 times a week.

10. Decrease everyone’s exposure to radiation. While you might not mine uranium or deal with nuclear weaponry yourself, women living near uranium mines are at an elevated risk of developing breast cancer. Uranium from mines also has a risk of entering the wider community through contamination of waterways. Say “NO” to uranium mining in Australia, support campaigns for nuclear disarmament and alternative fuels to nuclear power. There also appear to be breast cancer clusters after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant leaked, as far away as California and Japan, correlating with areas of rainfall the day after the disaster occurred.


While the research is almost exclusively on women, it is often forgotten that men get breast cancer too. There are many ways you can celebrate prevention and survival of breast cancer – just choose the easiest thing from my Ten Ways to Breast Prevent Cancer and start with the first step today.

Is the environment making you fat?

A great report on a new book by Cathy Banwell, Megan Shipley and Lyndall Strazdins "The 7 Deadly Sins of Obesity: How the Modern World is Making us Fat" University of (NSW Press, 2007). Beyond the oversimplification of the 'energy in is greater than the energy out' argument, some thought provoking research into environmental issues that are creating obese nations.

There's more to obesity than eating

Reality television shows built around people losing weight are fuelling an oversimplified view of what makes people fat, writes Christopher Scanlon

28apr07

WHICH of the following is the most effective weight loss tool used on reality TV show The Biggest Loser – the gruelling daily workouts; the improved diet; or the "White House", the North Shore Sydney mansion where the show is filmed?

It's a trick question.
All these factors play an important role in the impressive weight loss contestants experience over the course of the show. If you've ever battled with a weight problem, though, you'd choose the White House hands down.

Why? Because the exercise regimes and the dietary changes are a product of the artificial environment created in the house and its grounds. Such radical changes in body size would be almost unthinkable if, instead of being holed up in a mansion, the contestants were left to their own devices.

The Biggest Loser house powerfully illustrates a frequently overlooked factor in the national debate about obesity: our environment is making us fat.

As Australian health researchers Cathy Banwell, Megan Shipley and Lyndall Strazdins write in their book The 7 Deadly Sins of Obesity: How the Modern World is Making us Fat, published by University of NSW Press (2007), parents "and their children are caught in an obesogenic environment that is itself the product of cultural, social and economic trends, many of which are promulgated by the marketplace and government".

Policy-makers are loath to acknowledge the effects of the environment, preferring instead to attack the food industry, or to see obesity as a matter of individual willpower and lifestyle.

The federal Government's program for tackling obesity, Building a Healthy, Active Australia, reflects the individual-willpower approach. The four-year program encourages people to exercise more and eat a healthier diet. Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott – a veteran runner and general exercise fanatic – sums up the underlying philosophy of the program in his view that the weight game is "a simple equation: energy in minus energy out equals weight gain or loss".

The Minister is right of course – up to a point. Blaming society because your jeans no longer fit is easier than admitting that Silverchair were still at high school when you last went for a run.

But when you start to think through the "energy out" side of the equation, that all starts to look a bit too simple. Energy expenditure is dependent on the environment that is shaped by culture, social and economic factors, the interplay of which turns out to be quite complex.

A study in the International Journal of Obesity, published last November, illustrates this point. The authors of the study questioned the main two reasons given for rising obesity rates in the US, namely reduced physical activity and the manufacturing process and marketing of high-calorie foods.

While activity levels and food manufacturing and marketing practices are certainly important factors in the obesity epidemic, the authors of the study claim that they are far from the whole story.

The authors nominated 10 other candidates linked to rising obesity rates. Some of the nominations were surprising.

Sleeping less, for example, has been shown to lead to increased hunger and appetite. The authors noted that over the past several decades, sleep has reduced from an average of nine hours per night to just over seven hours.

Airconditioning and ducted heating are also straining our waistbands. The reason? If you have the airconditioning roaring or the central heating humming, then you're burning less energy to regulate your body's temperature. The authors estimate that between 1970 and 2000 the average temperature in homes in the UK rose from 13C to 18C, and that between 1923 and 1986, the standard temperature in US homes in winter rose from 18C to 24.6C.

The result is that our bodies have had to burn less energy to maintain a comfortable temperature.

Broader lifestyle and demographic changes are also believed to be linked. For example, the age at which a woman gives birth has been linked to child obesity. One study of nine to 10-year-old girls found "that the odds of obesity increased 14.4 per cent for every five-year increment in maternal age".

Changing patterns of drug use have also been implicated in the obesity epidemic.

One of the unintended side effects of public health campaigns and legislation to reduce smoking, for example, has been increasing obesity. Nicotine is a well-known appetite suppressant and increases the metabolism. On average, smokers weigh less than non-smokers – though that's hardly an endorsement of Kath and Kim's nicotine-driven approach to weight loss.

At the same time as smoking rates have gone through the floor, prescriptions of some anti-psychotic medications, anti-diabetic drugs and contraceptives linked to weight gain have increased.

Australia is a particularly striking example of such changes. According to the OECD the number of daily smokers among adults dropped from 35.4 per cent in 1983 to 17.7 per cent in 2004.

Meanwhile, between 1990 and 2004 there has been a twofold increase in the use of insulin to treat diabetes. Insulin is often associated with weight gain.

The study's authors caution that none of these factors is definitively related to rising obesity rates. Their point, rather, is that taken together they are plausible candidates for rising obesity levels.

In separate recent research, evidence has been found that some people's genes may make them more prone to become overweight; and another study even found "strong evidence . . . that associates certain viruses with obesity".

Obesity researchers in Australia have backed the findings of the IJO review, although with some local variations. Cathy Banwell from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the ANU, for example, says that she would expect the background of immigrants to vary the effects of demographic changes on obesity levels.

A higher proportion of Asian migrants, as compared with Hispanic immigrants looked at in the US study, is 'unlikely to contribute to a population-level increase in weight, even though they too have put on weight', suggests Banwell.

The study in the International Journal of Obesity claims that ignoring other factors in rising obesity may lead to "well-intentioned but ill-founded proposals for reducing obesity rates".

Kylie Ball, a senior research fellow with Deakin University's School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, says strategies to combat obesity that fail to take account of societal and environmental factors on behaviour are unlikely to succeed in the long-term.

"Unfortunately, I think the approach taken to date has failed from this point of view," says Ball. "Our federal Health Minister has explicitly stated his position on obesity – individuals are solely responsible for the food choices and physical activity decision they make. This is reflected in obesity strategies which have tended to place the focus for weight loss/management on individuals themselves. This is problematic when we consider that individual choices are often constrained by factors within the social, physical, economic and policy environment."

Ball advocates a range of prevention measures to complement individually targeted initiatives. These include infrastructure and incentives to encourage active transport, such as greater use of bicycles, and childcare to help overcome pressures associated with lack of time and work/family commitments.

"We need a better understanding of the impact of these environmental factors on obesity risk, as well as a more detailed evidence base to underpin prevention efforts', she says.