After many years of trying to set personal goals in various ways and then failing to stick to them, I’m finally having some success. I can’t claim all the credit for this. To get from someone who has never been able to be consistent at anything, to someone who appears to be making the [...]
We should all encourage healthy eating in our children, most of us do that by making sure they eat the right things, but how many parents have you come across who report that their children will only eat junk food despite eating well in their early years? One possible reason for this is that they are eating only what they saw their parents eating. Children learn a lot from observation, so it follows that to make sure our kids make the right food choices in their later life, we need to let them see us making the right food choices for ourselves in their early life.
I decided to make sure that my child sees me eat a lot of fibre rich foods. There is a family history of high cholesterol and bowel cancer on both sides of my parents, making fibre very important to us. The problem I found was that while I can use Doctor Internet for research it doesn’t give me very much to work with. It gives me tables of statistics, or statements like ‘eat more grains’, but really that just means I’m back to people creating pages for ranking and traffic, not actual use. So, as usual, I did it myself.
First I needed a little science, not too much, but just enough for me to explain to my family what they are eating. I came up with the fact that there are two types of fibre. One type turns into a jelly after you eat it (that’s the soluble type). It helps to make you feel full for longer by helping your body take it’s time to digest the food, as well as soaking up bad cholesterol. The other type (the insoluble type) acts like a cleaner, it collects up all the stuff your body doesn’t need and helps get it out of your body. Obviously you need both.
The amount you should eat is a tough one to establish. Opinions vary from country to country and medical advice ranges anywhere from 20g to 38g per day. Making it even harder is the fact that scientists have struggled to work out how much fibre exists in food, apparently it’s complex. One thing on our side though is that foods generally contain a 50:50 mix between soluble and insoluble and that’s roughly how we’re supposed to split the amount that we eat.
I decided to simplify the entire thing. I reasoned that by finding easy fibre rich foods that I could include in my weekly shop, I would be pretty confident that I’d be seen eating the right foods without number crunching or over thinking. This is the list I came up with:
That’s it, just 7 easily palatable, easily prepared foods high in fibre. If I ate all that each day I’d be eating somewhere between 36g and 42g of fibre. I don’t, but I try, I probably get to about 25g on average though. My aim is for my family to see me eating those foods and that is certainly being achieved.
As ever, if you have any comments, corrections, arguments or suggestions, send them in.
I only need 3 iPhone apps to help me with my health and fitness and they cost me nothing. If you’ve got more then you may be focussing on the tools and not the outcome; you may be thinking of the apps as a shortcut. As I have said: there are no shortcuts.
Google “best free fitness apps” and you can wade through 150 million pages. Mostly you’ll be looking at lists of apps pulled in by the sites straight from the Apple store, these are just attempts to generate traffic, a simple and easy story to get a high Google ranking, covered in ads to claw in a little revenue. The apps I’m about to recommend I use daily. They came to me through suggestion, trial and error. I’m an actual user of these apps, not a paid reviewer.
Firstly: what you don’t need
You do not need any form of workout routine or phone based personal trainer. An app cannot manage your fitness any better than a book could. Only you can do that. If you think you need an app to work out then you are unlikely to succeed because you are relying on a tool to achieve what you feel unable to do yourself.
You do not need a calorie database or calorie counter. If you’re on a diet or think you need a diet then you already know what you should eat, right? A calorie app is not going to tell you anything new, or make you thin. Buying one implies that you think information equals success. It does not, so focus on the right thing, your own motivation.
App 1: The camera
The iphone comes with one of the best tools straight out of the box. The camera. Keep a food journal by photographing everything you eat. The best advice you can get from any dietician is to keep a food journal. It forces you to see what you eat and from that you are able to take control. The iPhone camera has a camera roll, time stamping and so it can be used as the perfect food journal. If you need more information on how just email me or leave a comment.
App2: A weight tracker
You need a way of tracking your weight in a way that lets you see the trend over time. This is because the trend is more important than the daily fluctuations. Adjusting what you eat based on daily changes is not sensible. Your weight creeps up and down constantly so if you see an increase one day you may be tempted to panic and starve yourself the next day. That is one reason why diets fail. A trend line allows you to adjust your diet based on the trend over a number of weeks and so there is less of a temptation to panic. I recommend the free (lite) version of True Weight because it shows a 3 week trend line which is all I find that I need.
App3: An activity tracker
So far I’ve described a way of recording what I eat and recording what I weigh, so the final app is one that records what I do; tracking activity. Nothing beats trail guru for this as a free app in my opinion. You need to set up an account at Trail Guru and once done the app will track your movement when it’s on. The site will record that over time, and will give you reports on such things as distance covered, method, and calories burned. I would link to a review of this app but mostly those reviews are based on simple short trials, to really understand how to get the most from this tool you need to use it. You can contact me for more information or just go the Trail Guru site and explore the forums and FAQ’s.
And that’s it. Just 3 simple applications. As these are free apps it means that the developers don’t get paid for their efforts directly by you so you should consider donations and clicking through on any adverts presented to you as a way of showing your support.
I have come to the realisation that there are no shortcuts worth taking. I believe that advertising and marketing that tell you otherwise is snake oil; companies employing experts to convince you that they have the quick and easy answer to whatever ails you. Child not sleeping at night? Here’s the book to solve it! Overweight? Here’s the pill to fix it! Need a nutritious breakfast for your family? Here’s a sugar coated, machine formed, empty bunch of calories in a colourful box that your kids will just love!
If you’re reading this you may be considering trying some of these things. I know I have.
Over the years I have tried the health, lifestyle and diet fads. I have low calorie, low carbohydrate, high fibre, antioxidant rich, organic cookery books for adults and children stacked in shelves all over my house. I have books and DVD’s on parenting, education (the bionic wife is a primary teacher), schemes, themes and shortcuts, all guaranteeing that they will help me to be perfect and to raise the perfect child. That doesn’t mean I believe any of them.
“The Bionic Dad” is actually a phrase coined by one of my best friends. His theory was that after the birth of your first child you become aware of your failings and so become driven to develop into more of a role model. This results in parents embarking on fitness drives, lifestyle changes and the taking up of sports long since consigned to the back of the wardrobe. At the time I thought it was a stupid idea. Now it’s happening to me. Now I’m online.
So I am going to describe my experiences and the things I have experimented with and am now trying in relation to my goals as a parent. If I had to sum up what being a bionic dad is I think that it means being healthy and wise.
My wife and I began a family about 18 months ago. At that point I decided that I needed to bring together my thinking on topics such as health, lifestyle and parenting. I had no strategy to help my kids navigate this increasingly complex 21st century and I needed one.
It took me some time after the birth to go from being aware of the problem to doing something about it, but eventually I began to make progress. I’m finding ways to navigate the mess of information available to us all every day in the media.
I made the decision to take this self improvement project of mine online. This was based on a very selfish reason; if I can connect with other parents like me then I can learn from them and perhaps make this project more than I can on my own.
So I’ll be writing about issues that concern me as a parent. Mostly based on my research and experiences.