nutrition

With so many choices at the grocery store shopping can become overwhelming and confusing!

Join us for our February Grocery Store Tour

February 25^th 12-1pm

Cost $30

Contact us at admin@rbitzer.com or call (301)474-2499 to sign up!

Losing or gaining weight takes determination and support, but what happens when you reach your goal weight? It is very easy to get back to where you started. Here is this week’s Quick Nutrition Video: How to Maintain Weight.

How to Maintain Weight

What are your tips for weight maintenance? What is your biggest struggle when trying to maintain weight?

By: Amy Bortnick

By: Kathy Kendall, MS, RD, LD

Too busy to cook dinner every night? Trying to not spend a ton of money at the grocery store? Here’s how you can take 1 main ingredient and turn it into 5 new dinners.

1) Chicken

• Grilled chicken parmesan with mozzarella and tomato sauce
• Chicken stir fry with brown rice, broccoli, and sauce of choice
• Chicken paninis with spinach, roasted tomato, and pesto
• Breaded and baked chicken strips with buffalo sauce served over salad
• Chicken kabobs with zucchini, mushrooms, and peppers, marinade and BBQ on a stick

2) Ground Turkey

• Turkey Chili
• Turkey Burgers with carrot fries
• English muffin pizzas with spinach, cheese, and ground turkey
• Turkey meatballs with whole wheat pasta with basil and olive oil
• Italian turkey meatloaf

3) Eggs

• Sweet potato with spinach and egg scramble
• Savory omelete with goat cheese, spinach and onions
• Egg salad sandwiches made with light mayo and terragon
• Add hard boiled eggs to a Greek or Caesar Salad
• Quiche feta, salmon, and dill

4) Black Beans

• Healthy baked nachos with black beans, avocado, and salsa
• Mix with rice, veggies, and tofu for a vegetarian stir fry
• Make homemade black bean burgers
• Process to make a bean dip for veggies and pita chips
• Black bean soup

5) Salmon

• Make fish tacos with whole wheat tortillas, cabbage, and yogurt sauce
• Top with salsa and serve with roasted vegetables
• Make salmon cakes
• Teriyaki salmon with pineapple and snap peas
• Salmon chowder with vegetables

By: Amy Bortnick

I just took a trip down to Raleigh and stayed with one of my old college friends!  When I was in school with him a couple years back he was the number one fan of some of the South’s least healthy comfort foods such as sweet tea, fried chicken and Cook Out (a southern fast food chain). Recently however, he has taken a vested interest in his health and now aims to gain weight without having to bring back Cook out, fried chicken, and sweet tea to his daily diet. Often times weight gain is assumed to only occur through empty calories and junk food detrimental to your health…but that doesn’t have to be the case.  Since my friend was nice to let me stay with him I figured I’d help him out!

I did some research and found a lot of the same sports nutrition concepts I learned as a runner:

1.     Glycogen from carbohydrates is the main source of fuel for the muscles If you live an active lifestyle you must consume an adequate amount of carbs. To gain weight you must saturate your muscle with glycogen (3-5 grams per pound of body weight)

2.     Protein is needed to restore muscle fibers and the amino acids from proteins are needed for muscle growth and repair. HOWEVER, the body does not store excess protein as BULGING muscles! You need about .7-.9 g per lbs body weight and the rest will be lost in urine.

3.     Timing is key! If you are trying to gain weight healthfully it is important to fuel properly before and after workouts. Consume small meals throughout the day instead of large ones. It is ideal to eat at least every four hours consuming a combination of carbohydrates and protein! This will ensure that your muscles have a decent supply of fuel consistently throughout the day and are not being broken down for fueling during fasting periods.

Ok… the nutrition concepts don’t change you get it! But how does that apply to gaining muscle weight and bulking up without adding fat? The most important and only way to gain muscle is an effective weight lifting or resistance training routine! Your muscle fibers get bigger when you overload them with strength training period.

Where does eating come in? If you want to gain weight you need to eat more calories!! The trick to gaining muscle and not fat is ensuring that when you increase calories you maintain BALANCE in your diet. The best way to add muscle mass is to stick to a healthy diet containing 55-65% of calories from carbohydrates, 10-15% of calories from protein and less than 30% of calories from fats.

Here are some tips and tricks for adding calories in healthy way to build muscle and avoid unwanted fat:

1.     Choose more calorie dense foods to increase calorie content without increasing volume in your stomach making you uncomfortable.–For example, choose more calorie dense fruits and vegetables. Bananas, pineapples and mangos have more calories than water loaded fruits like oranges and grapefruits. Peas, carrots and corn have more calories than dark green vegetables.

2.     Limit your intake of bad fats because they are harmful to your heart health and may hinder your workout.–Focus on healthy fats such as peanuts, walnuts, almonds, avocados, olive oil, and oily fishes such as tuna and salmonIn order to gain 1 pound per week theoretically it takes 500 added calories per day! This is a good place to start! It maybe helpful to keep a daily log for a couple days to see how you normally eat and figure out where you can add in that extra 500 or so calories in a balanced way!!

Good Luck and be patient! The best-trained athletes gain weight slowly!

Resource: Nancy Clark’s Nutrition Guide Book

By: Kait Fortunato

Ever find yourself lost in dreams and goals? Wishing for something but unable to realistically attain in? Sometimes we all just need a little motivation, not a long winded speech or paragraphs about creating your goals, rather a special reminder that is important to you and your specific dreams. Mental Blox is a community of people just like you, striving to stay motivated and dream big.  Mentalblox.com is a great resource for inspirational blogs, motivational tools, and people just like you. Whether you want to “Get Hired”, “Get Fit”, “Get out of Debt”, “Get Clean”,  Get Thinner”,  “Get Rich”, “Get Well”, “Get God”, “Get Cool”, “Get Bully Free”, there is a place for you at MentalBlox. The best part is the actual “Blox” that you can order with inspirational words associated with your goal. Just looking at it each day makes me feel empowered to achieve both smaller tasks and reach for bigger dreams. Words like empowered, inspired, gratified, clean, confident, reach out to me and make me realize all the great success and all the things I hope to accomplish.

By Elizabeth Haaser

If you are someone who believes they are constantly failing at dieting, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch would most likely ask you this; “Is it you, or really the diet that is not successful?” For 2012 and a new year, why not try a genuinely new approach to weight loss? Their book, Intuitive Eating, offers a non-diet plan for losing weight and, more importantly, to freeing oneself from food’s control. This liberating (and very popular!) method stresses the importance of listening to your body, its hunger cues, and learning the difference between physical hunger and everything else. By first identifying what type of eater you are and then following their 10 Principles, this program can help you to get to your body’s natural weight- one that is neither bloated from the abuse of too much food, nor starving from the lack of proper nutrients.

The Three Types of Eaters

Tribole and Resch categorize eaters into three personalities: The Careful Eater, The Professional Dieter, and The Unconscious Eater. They give a description of each and explain the problems that come from all three. I personally can think of several people who might fall in one of these categories, and I think their diagnoses are spot-on. Food problems are not as unique as we all might think- there are patterns, cycles, and forever-failing diets. Luckily, there is also intuitive eating.

The Ten Principles

Chapters are broken up by principles, all of which speak right to the root of the problem and guide you to mending these, rather than blindly offering quick-fixes like most diet programs do. Some of the principles include Reject the Diet Mentality, Make Peace with Food, and Respect Your Body. For anyone who is fed up with dieting and just wants to have a normal relationship with food, I would strongly suggest picking this up. Here at RBA, this book and this method are frequently used with patients.

Also, look for their new book coming out, and check out their awesome website!

If you are looking to practice this way of eating, schedule a visit with our Mindful Eating Specialist, Bobbi Boteler, who works with helping clients learn to recognize and trust their intuitive eating. Working with a person face to face will help make these concepts easier to implement, especially if you are a chronic dieter, it may take awhile for you to get comfortable with this new way of thinking. Read more about Bobbi on our website.

Great news for all of our patients in and around the Columbia area! One of our Registered Dietitians, Kait Fortunato, will be seeing patients in the Columbia office every Wednesday starting January 2012.

Address: 9881 Broken Land Parkway, Suite 105
Columbia, MD 21046

Phone Number: 301-474-2499

Feel free to give our office a call to set up an appointment with Kait in the Columbia office for the new year!