Skandia Team GBR’s top tips on healthy eating for 2010 

Sailing team nutritionist shares his advice on a healthy diet and shedding that holiday weight!

With the tendency for many of us to overindulge on the traditional Christmas treats, New Year is often the chance to shed a bit of excess unwanted weight and aim to get healthy.

But with so much (often conflicting!) diet advice out there, what’s the best way to shift those extra pounds, and more importantly, keep them off...?

Nathan Lewis is Senior Performance Nutritionist at the English Institute of Sport, and helps Skandia Team GBR’s world class sailors ensure they’re fighting fit in the food stakes.  He worked closely with the Beijing team sailors, as light wind conditions in China meant that weight loss and a carefully controlled diet were an important ingredient in medal success.

Here Nathan shares his simple tips for effective – and sustainable – weight loss and healthy eating...

Eat regularly
That includes breakfast!  The temptation when looking to lose weight is to miss breakfast, given that many people don’t feel that hungry when they wake up.  This is one of the worst things you can do!  Skipping breakfast leads to changes in metabolism (increasing insulin resistance) that lead to weight gain in the long term.

When you eat breakfast, you elevate your metabolic rate – this is a positive thing – and in turn you will break the overnight fast.  Even if you’re not hungry in the mornings, having something light is better than having nothing at all – try a café latte, or yoghurt and fruit, or a milk and fruit smoothie or a bowl of porridge, or boiled egg on toast.

Eating regularly throughout the day also means you will not sit down at the meal table starving.  When over-hungry at mealtimes, we over-eat and then tend to select inappropriate foods because of a greater degree of hunger. 

Three main meals and then light in-between meal snacks is the better approach.  Snacks of low to moderate ‘glycaemic index’ (such as yoghurt, glass of milk, most fruits, oat biscuits, many cereal bars)  make better snack choices as lower GI foods release the carbohydrate over a longer period of time, meaning you feel fuller for longer, and so are less likely to be grumpy and irritable!

Bring on the bulk!
Cut back on the large portions of starchy carbohydrates (rice, pasta, potatoes, bread) and bulk out your meals with salads and vegetables, particularly green vegetables which are very low in energy/calories and high in nutrients and fibre.  Through eating more fibre-rich vegetables you can stretch your stomach more at mealtimes, which sends signals to your brain that you are full.  Side salads make very good choices at meals for increasing food bulk and nutrient density, without adding a lot of extra calories.

Cut back on the high fat foods
We all generally know this, but you should be looking to cut out the high fat foods such as butter, nuts, peanut butter, mayonnaise, cream, full fat dairy, processed meats (eg burgers and sausages), fried foods, cakes, pastries, crisps, chocolate and takeaways.  

Use low fat versions of foods instead of the higher fat variety where they are available, for example, skimmed milk, low fat yoghurt/fromage frais, low fat cheese, low fat spreads used sparingly, low fat vinegar-based dressings, and mustards, chutney/pickle instead of mayonnaise (except Hellman’s Light) on salads and sandwiches.

The power of proteins
It’s a sensible move to include foods with protein in at snacks as well as meals – yoghurts are a simple and excellent choice.  Protein is very effective at inducing satiety – that feeling of fullness – which is one reason why higher protein orientated diets are often successful at promoting weight loss.  

But, no extreme measures here – although protein certainly helps in the weight loss effort, you still need carbohydrates for your brain and nervous system to function effectively.  Very low carbohydrate diets are not healthy, cause disturbances in your mood, are not well balanced and make exercise very difficult.  They’re not sustainable long term, and if you want long term success any dietary change has to be sustainable.  

Slowly, slowly...
We all lead busy lives with the tendency often to eat on the run, but a really effective tip is simply to eat more slowly, chew your food and really enjoy it.  Many of us, for example, eat in front of the TV which can distract us from fully enjoying our food and can lead to a tendency to overeat.  

A good tip here is to wait 30-40 minutes after a meal before deciding whether you are full or need to eat more  - it can take this long for food to be fully digested and enter the blood stream and for signals to be sent from the gut to the brain telling to tell you that you’ve had enough.  

So, time to do away with those four course meals of starter, main, dessert and cheeses! 

In addition to this, reduce your meal portion sizes just a little more than usual and make the effort to enjoy your favourite foods in smaller portions.  A small amount, a taste, is usually enough to satisfy a craving without overindulging.