This Week's Healthy SC Challenge Tips

First Family Encourages Healthy Changes in Nutrition, Exercise and Tobacco Use

COLUMBIA, SC – June 26, 2009 – The Healthy SC Challenge is the Sanford family’s effort to get all South Carolinians to do just a little more to live a healthier lifestyle. The tips are designed to encourage individuals and communities to live healthier lifestyles in three categories – nutrition, exercise and help to quit smoking. The tips can also be found on the challenge’s website, www.healthysc.gov.

Healthy Tips

Nutrition
For over thirty years, fat in our diet has been considered the culprit in obesity, heart disease, and high cholesterol. Unfortunately, the resulting low fat foods and diets haven’t resulted in most people controlling their weight or becoming healthier. In fact, the opposite is true.
It’s the type of fat that matters in addition to how much you consume.
Reducing your intake of some types of fats reduces the risk of several chronic diseases, but other types of fats are absolutely essential to our health and well-being.

Seek monounsaturated fats.
* Are liquid at room temperature and turn cloudy when kept in refrigerator.
* Primary sources are plant oils like canola oil, peanut oil, and olive oil.
Other good sources are avocados; nuts such as almonds, hazelnuts, and pecans; and seeds such as pumpkin and sesame seeds.
* People following traditional Mediterranean diets, which are very high in foods containing monounsaturated fats like olive oil, tend to have lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

Seek polyunsaturated fats.
* Polyunsaturated fats are liquid at room temperatures as well as at cold temperatures
* Primary sources are sunflower, corn, soybean, and flaxseed oils, and also foods such as walnuts, flax seeds, and fish.
* This fat family includes the Omega-3 group of fatty acids which your body can’t make and are found in very few foods.

Avoid saturated fat.
* It is usually solid at room temperature and have a high melting point
* Primary sources are animal sources including red meat and whole milk dairy products. Other sources are tropical vegetable oils such as coconut oil, palm oil and foods made with these oils. Poultry and fish contain saturated fat, but less than red meat.

* Saturated fat raises low-density lipoprotein (LDL or bad) cholesterol that increases your risk of coronary heart disease (CHD).

Avoid trans Fats.
* Trans fats are created by heating liquid vegetable oils in the presence of hydrogen gas, a process called hydrogenation. Partially hydrogenating vegetable oils makes them more stable and less likely to spoil, which is very good for food manufacturers – and very bad for you.
* Primary sources of trans fat are vegetable shortenings, some margarines, crackers, candies, cookies, snack foods, fried foods, baked goods, and other processed foods made with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.
* Trans fat raises low-density lipoprotein (LDL or bad) cholesterol that increases your risk of coronary heart disease (CHD), as well as lowering HDL, or good cholesterol.
– www.healthguide.org  

Physical Activity
Are you in a physical activity rut? Do you plan your physical activities in the same way, over and over again? Walk the same trail? Give the same excuses for not being more physically active? Go to the same place at the same time to work out? Attend the same fitness classes? Share your physical activity time with the same people?
Though familiarity may seem to simplify your life, you need to get moving out of the routine and into some new and exciting ways to be physically active.
What are the reasons you give yourself for not including regular physical activity as part of your life? In a 2006 study about physical activity behaviors in western North Carolina, the main barriers determined are:

* Lack of time
* Lack of facilities
* Lack of money
* Lack of motivation

To address the barriers in your life, create a chart, listing the three main ones that block your becoming physically active. Beside each barrier, list at least one action you can take to overcome the barrier.

For example, if your primary barrier is lack of time, how can you find time in your day to include physical activity? As you consider strategies you might use, be sure to include some of your physical activity with something else you are doing:

* Hula hoop from one TV commercial to another
* Do one set of resistance band work between times you check dinner in the oven
* Park at least 15 spaces from the door of any building you enter
* Always take the stairs instead of the elevator -Susan Tumbelston, Be Active North Carolina, www.beactivenc.org

Tobacco
Here are five ways to learn what you are addicted to and then to combat your
addiction:

1. For two days, every time you smoke, write down the feelings you had before smoking each cigarette. Were you tired? Bored? Hungry? Fidgety?
2. Write down the positive feeling that came from smoking each cigarette.
Did it help you relax? Did you feel less bored? Did it help you wake up? Did it help you fall asleep?
3. Study your list. You’ll probably notice a pattern.
4. Next, find things to distract you when you start feeling like having a smoke.
5. Also, find replacements for the positive feelings that you get from smoking. If you smoke to relax, figure out how to relax without a cigarette.

If you smoke to clear your mind, figure out how to do that without a cigarette.

Think about the situations you are likely to be tempted in. There are a number of ways to approach them. Look at the moods you indicated: anxiety, sadness, or happiness. Times when you are especially anxious or feeling blue are likely to be especially tempting.

There may also be situations which don’t occur too often, but when they do, it’s hard to fight. Make a list of possible temptations that you are prone to.
After specifying your temptations, you need to think of specific things you will do to keep each from getting to you. Here are some ideas to help you get started:
Change your environment.  Get rid of all cigarettes, ashtrays, lighters, and matches.

Prepare yourself.  Have creative alternatives available, such as sugar-free gum, low-calorie snacks, etc. Plan an enjoyable activity and start it before the temptation occurs (for example, take a walk after dinner).

Make use of your social world. Tell a lot of people that you’ve quit smoking. Make clear to your smoking friends that you don’t want them to give you a cigarette (most relapse cigarettes come from friends). Tell a friend about an upcoming temptation and ask them to give you some encouragement in the situation (perhaps before a tense meeting).
Keep your goal in mind. Rehearse your reasons for quitting. Promise yourself something you enjoy (movie, dinner) for getting through the first week. Get involved in activities that don’t go with smoking (exercise, meditation).
Imagine yourself as you’d like to feel, enjoying favorite activities without smoking.

Reduce the appeal of temptations. Think about the harmful things cigarettes do to you. Think about the diseases you’re concerned about if you go back to smoking.
As you can see from these examples, your will-power does not depend on some inner strength – but it rests on how well you anticipate temptations and how creatively you act to change them.

Avoiding temptations is certainly a lot of work, and it requires effort in advance. But keep in mind the fact that quitting smoking is the most important, and one of the hardest things you’ll d all year. G
ive it the attention that it (and you) deserve.
– www.smoking-cessation.org

 

The Healthy SC Challenge

The Healthy SC Challenge is an outcome-based, cooperative effort aimed at encouraging individuals, communities and organizations across the state to show shared responsibility in developing innovative ways to improve the health of South Carolina’s citizens. For more information about the Healthy SC Challenge, please visit www.healthysc.gov, or call 803-737-4772.