Making better nutrition choices is a big struggle for the firefighters, too – so you’re not alone. Kary Woodruff, TOSH dietitian, gives you the following tips to help you achieve nutrition success… which means better health for you and your entire family.
Track your nutrition and your exercise There are numerous forms of tracking your nutrition and exercise. You can choose to track with pen & paper, such as with the Habit Tracker, and/or electronically with websites such as myfitnesspal.com & livestrong.com. Either way is fine, whichever you’re most likely to utilize!
Keep in mind the tracking websites also have corresponding apps which can make tracking on the go much easier.
Track everything. It doesn’t do us any good if we just track the healthy foods we eat and exclude some of our less-healthy snacks. Everything that we eat and drink (other than water) has to go into the tracker!
Speaking of tracking everything, we need to know correct portion sizes to make sure we’re capturing everything. It’s hard to look at a bowl of pasta and estimate how much it is – if you track it as one cup, but really it is 2 cups, that will really change your information. So get used to measuring things out, it makes a significant difference.
Don’t wait until the end of the day to track everything. We just aren’t able to remember everything – we may remember our meals, but we tend to forget some of the add-ons, snacks, drinks, handful of M&M’s, etc. So check in with the tracker throughout the day
Make exercise part of your routine! Meagan Kline from the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute will talk more about exercise, but I always recommend individuals schedule it into their time – we’re much more likely to do it if it’s on our schedule!
Read the rest of the tips at: http://intermountainhealthcare.org/blogs/2014/03/tips-for-nutrition-success/
