Category: Baby steps

Baby Steps – Step 5, FAT

Once shunned like it was evil, now being shoveled into our mouths at an astonishing rate.

Keto – Adkins – whatever, it’s all the same.

And then with the coconut oil – poor thing has it as bad as the egg.

It’s good, it’s bad, it’s good, it’s bad… for years. But this time no one is suppressing it from the public.

Fat IS part of a healthy diet – but as with all things, too much of a good thing, isn’t always a good thing… and pairing it with too much of other good things… well that’s where we start using big scary words like heart disease, diabetes, obesity. Continue reading “Baby Steps – Step 5, FAT”

Baby Steps, step 4 – PROTEIN

Quite possibly my favorite macronutrient.

The most overhyped and also underrated of the three. To start this, I’d like to get a few things out of the way.

NO, high protein intake will not kill your kidneys.. You’d have to eat copious, and I mean COPIOUS amounts for it to hurt them. Can you choke down a 72 ounce steak  for every meal of every day?

Nevermind, don’t answer that.

Continue reading “Baby Steps, step 4 – PROTEIN”

Baby steps – mini challenge (step 3.95)

With just a few days left before step four is due (hours really before I usually release the blog) I decided to switch it up.

I know people struggle so much with loving carbs.. well we love them but we are so damn afraid of them. And giving a fiber goal and trying to lead everyone to track it, or to calculate their own goal isn’t actually what I want from this. But I just couldn’t figure out how to help, then I felt I lost everyone.

So all week I thought on it… or tried, through my post-bachelorette party and travel fog… it just hit me.

A mini challenge.

It’s perfect.

So far we have us sip sip sipping our water, baby steps numero uno.

Then are are focusing on our non-starchy veggies with baby step number two.

So yes – I want us focusing on soluble and non-soluble fiber, but I want to challenge it further, in a bit more challenging yet straight forward way.

Mini Challenge:

For the next seven days starting on Monday, the 29th of April (or whatever Monday follows after you’ve found this blog), I want you to include no less than…

three carbohydrate servings a day.

I want them to come from:

  1. Starchy Vegetables
  2. Fruit

That means for one week we are avoiding

3. Grains

4. Dairy (excluding Greek Yogurt, Cheese and Cottage cheese)

5. Sugar

I put them in ugly red just to burn them into your brain.

I want to go ahead and state that grains, dairy and sugar are part of a healthy diet. But for OUR PURPOSES I want you to learn to eat plants, and lots of them. Watch how over time your body starts changing because you simply choose a piece of fruit over a cookie, beans instead of rice (or half and half), a potato over fries.. which brings me to my next point.

I want you to choose at least one fruit and one vegetable – so it’s not all coming from fruit and no all coming from starchy veg, a bit of each.

It only counts if the skin is on and it is not fried or with any added sugars and doesn’t come from a box.

So a whole piece of fruit.

No french fries or mashed potatoes – eat the whole thing

Stuff like that.

Eat the food the way we found it in nature, sans the cooking method if you use one to make it edible (like cooking beans, corn or potatoes)

Please refer back to baby steps number three for more complete list of foods and serving sizes.

I recommend doing some planning this weekend and focusing this next week.

Also – some of you may already be following step three on your own but it’s still good practice to replace things like jam with whole berries or mashed potatoes with whole – or adding beans and corn into things like rice or replacing bread with them.

Thanks for reading! Eat your plants!

Calculating your baseline nutritional needs

Given, there are a million and one sites, people, pro’s, books, blogs and calculators that will do it for you. All giving you slightly different answers depending on how “hard core” you are.

I’m not in the business of super fast weight loss. If you haven’t gathered that already. Tracie Blair is not a fad. Thank you.

But someone did ask about macros (okay, a few people have) and no one in my baby steps group is asking questions about carbohydrates except for the macros.

I CANT, given the 70 or so of you, (or however many of there are of you out there) give a blanket answer. I stated this in the step 3 blog on Carbs. But it did get me thinking about a starting point… most of you probably don’t have one. And then some of you have been given all sorts of answers.

To figure out the absolute baseline we use all sorts of fancy equations and different tests to tell you what you need… a secret – they’re not accurate. They can, however, give you an idea of where to start.

While you’re here, why don’t you go ahead and calculate your Basal Metoblic Rate or BMR:

For men: BMR = 10 x weight (kg) + 6.25 x height (cm) – 5 x age (years) + 5
For women: BMR = 10 x weight (kg) + 6.25 x height (cm) – 5 x age (years) – 161

This is just one of a few different calculations you can use… they all give very similar answers. But this one is easy enough. It’s called the Mifflin St. Jeor Equation.

I want to stress that the number you get from the equation is a calculation of how many calories you burn sitting around doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Laying down all day binge watching game of thrones type of day.

I like it because it gives you the bottom line goal. I never want people to drop under their baseline number because … well of all the arguments I could use I’ll go with… why would you want to give your body absolutely less than it needs just to function? If you hit your baseline number and you move around – walk, workout, clean all day.. you will lose weight. Because you’ve elicited a response that requires more energy than just sitting.

Anyway.. for finding your macros – you need to reflect on your goals. Do you just want to lose weight? Do you want to be good at sport/stronger/more endurance? Are you trying to gain weight (few but there are people out there that do)?

I will encourage you to meet with a professional for this  (like me! Hello!) but a nice little starting point could look like this:

Protein: 30%

Fat: 30%

Carbs: 40%

So you would take your BMR break it down by each percentile to give you calories for each category.

Then you would take the numbers from the % and divide yet again by:

Protein: 4 calories

Fat: 9 calories

Carbs: 4 calories

To give you grams of each category

EXAMPLE:

If you need 2,000 – it would look like:

Protein – 2,000 x 0.3 = 600/4 = 150 grams protein

Carbs: 2,000 x 0.4 = 800/4 = 200 grams

Fat: 2,000 x -0.3 = 600/9 = 67 grams

TA-DA – you have calculated your own macros. Tweak as you go. Be your own scientist… and remember my baby steps program is free. That’s why I’m not diving into each of you, you have to figure things out on your own… and honestly, in the end, this is probably better for you. You’re in control not mindlessly following some program written “for you”.

Admittedly this is a lot of work. And yes! Tailoring nutritional needs to someone is a lot of work. That’s why we end up just paying someone else to do it for us… but you all are capable of tailoring your own nutrition to yourself… be honest, no one knows you as well as you do.

I also want to state that I don’t like giving macro’s that often. I don’t like people trying to control their diet in this way where they’re freaking out because they went over… or they’re two grams low on fat so they like the peanut butter lid… I hate that obsession.

I want people to just eat healthy… naturally. Easily. I want them to WANT to eat right. To LOVE to eat right. And I want it to be second nature… that’s why I implemented the baby steps program in the first place. I want to give you the tools to make the right choices and for it to not be some crazy nutrition mind game.

I want being healthy to be easy.

Baby Steps III – Carbs are a dirty word

Carbs, the macro everyone loves to hate.

The most abused food in the world.

Keto, cleansing, juicing, paleo, south beach, whole30, zone, low carb, Beverly Hills, alkaline, weight watchers, Jenny Craig, gluten free, elimination diet, Dukan Diet, macrobiotic… the list goes on and on

Fad diets will tell you carbs are bad! Carbs are sugar and sugar is causing diabetes which is killing Americans daily. Sugar is making you fat. Sugar is stealing your lunch money.

And so will people with doctorates. Society. Your mom

So you believe them and you shun shun shun the carbs, you replace all your rice with cauliflower and pasta noodles with zucchini and spaghetti squash.

You feel good about yourself. You shed a few lbs.

But eventually you either feel tired and weak. You overeat the cake at the work party and your body hates you in new ways. Causing you to either give up or restrict further.

You wonder how everyone does it.

Well here is a secret.

We eat carbs.

Continue reading “Baby Steps III – Carbs are a dirty word”

Baby steps, step II – Vegetables

Welcome to step II!

For all those who have stuck with it! Hurrah!

For those who haven’t, that’s okay – You can still focus on hydrating AND eating your vegetables. This isn’t a reason to give up. You can start being healthier any second of any day.

Anyway – WELCOME

I have chosen these steps in what I consider order of importance, many of you who know me may have thought I would have put protein first (though it does get such a bad rap for being such a great thing). But the general population just doesn’t get enough nutrients or fiber in their diet.

We are also building from the ground up which means this is the base or the bulk the diet.

Read More

Baby Steps – Step 1, Hydration

HYDRATION.

I’m sure you all have heard how our bodies can survive weeks without food but only days without water. It’s 3 to 4 days to be in the ballpark, maybe maximum a week.

You’ve also probably heard that 60% or more of our body is made of water… We are sort of like walking water balloons if you think about it… Every single cell in our body is made of water. It’s between our joints, it’s in our brain, it carries toxins out of our systems… so why is it that we don’t get enough of it?

We get so busy go go going that we forget to take a few sips here and there and then before we know it we have a headache and feel famished. Most of the time we blame it on other things likes stress or a hard workout.

Hey, maybe it is from those things… but maybe you haven’t been hydrating as well as you should be.

Drink up!

Baby Steps lifestyle change

I am SO happy for all the people who are interested in this lifestyle change! So happy!

One thing that really prompted this was the sheer number of people who ask or inquire to work with me but never end up doing it. Maybe it is cost, maybe what I offer is too intensive or maybe you don’t need a mentor but just some guidance. So I decided to do this lifestyle change for you all.
Start changing