This is an extremely important component of protecting yourself against heart disease. We have always known that people who eat lots of fruit and vegetables are healthier and live longer than those who don’t; now scientific research is discovering the reasons why. You may remember that cholesterol itself is not much of a problem to your health, rather it is oxidized (damaged by free radicals) cholesterol that causes all the damage to your artery walls. If you don’t get enough antioxidants in your diet, there will be a lot of free radicals in your body, causing harm to your cell membranes, DNA, artery walls, and the various fats in your bloodstream. Antioxidants help to counteract the damaging effects of free radicals in our body. Free radicals occur naturally in our body, but toxins in our environment greatly increase the amount of these damaging substances.

Antioxidants found in foods, vitamins and minerals

A large Harvard University study in the USA of men and women found that people who eat eight or more servings of vegetables and fruit per day have a 20 percent lower chance of suffering heart disease than those who eat less than three servings. This study showed that every little bit helps, because for every one serving of fruit or vegetables per day, the risk of heart disease dropped by four percent!

It is important to eat as wide a variety of fruits and vegetables as possible, as they each have their own unique benefits. Try to include as many different coloured fruits and vegetables as possible; make sure you include some leafy vegetables, some stem vegetables and some root vegetables. Consuming one raw vegetable salad each day is essential; many vital nutrients are destroyed by cooking.

Consuming plenty of plant foods will lower your blood C-reactive protein level. People who are fit, not overweight and eat plenty of fruits and vegetables have lower blood levels of this substance.

The power of juicing

One easy way to include more fruit and vegetables in your diet is through raw vegetable juicing. You will need to use a juice extractor and consume the juice as soon after making it as possible, as valuable nutrients are lost quickly once the juice has been made. Store bought vegetable juices in glass bottles or cartons are not a substitute because they are not raw juices. Fruit juices should be avoided, as they are far too high in sugar. You should be predominantly juicing vegetables, with a little fruit thrown in to improve the taste. Juicing vegetables breaks down the fibrous components and makes the nutrients present much easier to digest and more available to the body. There is very little effort required by your body to obtain the goodness in the vegetables. Unfortunately, with all the chemicals and stress we are exposed to these days, an average intake of fruits and vegetables is not enough to protect us from disease; juicing is essential! Juices are rich in so many essential nutrients, including vitamin C, beta-carotene, folic acid, Â vitamins, vitamin K, potassium and magnesium. There really is no excuse not to consume them regularly.

Blueberries fight cholesterol

Researchers have discovered that the compound pterostilbene, found in blueberries works as effectively for lowering LDL “bad” cholesterol as the cholesterol lowering drug ciprofibrate. Ciprofibrate is in the class of cholesterol lowering drugs called fibrates; it is effective for lowering cholesterol but causes muscle pain and nausea in some people. Pterostilbene stimulates a receptor protein in liver cells which is responsible for lowering cholesterol and other blood fats. Blueberries do not cause any side effects, are delicious, high in fibre and help to protect your heart.

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Soya

Soya is a very versatile, natural vegetable protein which can make a useful alternative to cow’s milk if you are animal milk intolerant or find that it causes skin problems or sinus trouble. Buy organic to make sure it is not genetically modified and make sure the milk is sugar-free. Soya milk can be used in cooking in the same way as you would use cow’s milk and you will find you then cannot taste the difference between the two.

Tofu which is soya bean curd can be used in stir-fries, soups and also desserts and again buy organic to make sure it is GM free. It is available in most supermarkets and health food shops. Avoid TVP (textured vegetable protein) because of the amount of processing needed to make it into a meat substitute.

Dairy Produce

Buy organic dairy produce, available from most supermarkets, to avoid the harmful effects of growth hormones, antibiotics and chemicals that may have been absorbed from the animal’s foodstuffs. If you have a milk allergy or intolerance, try sheep’s or goat’s milk or a non-animal drink like soya milk or rice milk. Buy live yogurt containing the culture Lactobacillus acidophilus — organic if possible.

Oil/Fat

Use butter (organic if possible) and unhydrogenated margarines (available from health food shops). Look for cold-pressed, unrefined vegetable oils like sesame, sunflower and safflower, and use extra-virgin olive oil for light cooking.

Hot Drinks

As a substitute for coffee, try Caro and Caro Extra, Bambu orYannoh which are grain ‘coffees’ and contain various combinations of ingredients like barley, rye, chicory and acorns. Good alternatives to tea include herb teas, fruit teas, Rooibos (caffeine-free South African tea), decaffeinated tea, or Japanese bancha (twig) tea.

Cold Drinks

Use real unsweetened fruit juice. Watch out for cartons or bottles with ‘fruit drink’ on the label because this means that something else has been added. A recent analysis of fruit drinks showed that many contained only 5 per cent fruit, while the rest was made up with water, sugar and additives.

Also be cautious of the flavoured spring waters. They appear healthy enough but many contain sugar.

Water is the simplest and most natural drink of all. Our bodies are made up of approximately 70 per cent water which is essential for every bodily process. We can survive without food for about five weeks but we can’t go without water for longer than five days.

Try to drink around six glasses of water a day. Use these glasses of water to replace other less healthy drinks you might normally choose. For instance, you could start the day with a cup of hot water and a slice of lemon, a wonderfully refreshing drink and excellent for the liver.

Convenience Foods

Most pre-packaged convenience foods contain high levels of additives and preservatives so they are best avoided. However, even with the best will in the world, I know this is not always possible. So, when you do feel you have to buy convenience foods, check the labels carefully, go for organic options where available, and keep your consumption of such foods to a minimum.

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Helpful things to prevent headaches and migraines include:

1. Stop smoking.

2. Come off the Pill.

3. Stop drinking tea and coffee.

4. Cut out alcohol.

5. Stop eating sugar.

6. Cut out tyramine-containing foods such as chocolates, yeast extracts and yeast products, liver, sausages, broad beans, pickled herrings and cheese.

7. Cut out histamine-containing foods such as sauerkraut, salami and sausage meat.

8. Don’t eat oranges-they contain substances that can precipitate migraines in some people.

9. Avoid foods containing additives such as tartrazine, benzoates and sodium glutamate.

10. Avoid wheat-containing and milk-containing foods.

•    Noise and annoying surroundings can also cause headaches.

•    True migraine can often not be prevented, unfortunately, as many sufferers know. Look through the triggering factors above and see if you can avoid at least some of them in your life.

•    If during the summer months or in hot environments you tend to get headaches, be sure to drink more watery fluids. Aim to keep your urine pale yellow.

•    Cluster headaches may be helped by anti-migraine medications. See your doctor.

•    The answer to tension headaches is to learn how to relax.

•    Hangovers can be prevented by following this list of tips. Drink a pint of water or other non-alcoholic drinks for every two pints of beer or two ‘shorts’ you take. Take an antacid in the morning to settle your stomach. Take 1 g vitamin Ñ with the water you drink last thing at night-the vitamin will help your liver to cope with detoxifying the alcohol. Take a simple pain-killer if you have to. Don’t mix drinks. Don’t drink alcohol to cure a hangover (‘hair of the dog’) because this only makes the final effects worse.

•    Avoid foods that give you headaches.

•    Have your eyes checked by a good optician just in case poor eyesight could be giving you tension headaches.

•    Have your blood pressure checked if you are over 40 and have repeated headaches for which you can find no explanation.

•    Massage your scalp. A US researcher has found that he can prevent headaches by a special hair-brushing technique. It involves massaging the scalp, which could, of course, be done with one’s fingers, but he found better results using a hairbrush. Use a natural brush which is stiff but not as rigid as a typical hairbrush. Synthetic bristles are too sharp when moved across the skin. Ideally the brush should be one that can be held in the hand comfortably. When buying a suitable brush use it on the skin on the back of your hand to test it. Move it in small circles to make the skin move but not so as to cause an abrasion or irritation to the skin.

The next thing, having found a good brush, is to make the scalp massage a regular part of your everyday routine, spending 90 seconds on it, morning and night. Starting at the temple just above the eyebrow, press the brush against the skin and rotate it in small circles so that the upper part of the circle goes towards the back of your head. Move up the skull with each pass from front to back of your head so that after three circles you are at the top of the head. Continue these small circles all over the scalp right down to the hair line.

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Here are some quick glances at the key emotional issues every patient confronts at some time and to some degree:

Feelings of fear: Like a broadcast from a powerful pirate radio station, fear, especially the fear of fatness, overwhelms and blocks out every other emotional signal. In therapy we work on decreasing these fears so that the patient can pick up other signals-joy, anger, even sorrow.

An important part of the process is talking about inner feelings that may never have seen the light of day. It’s natural for people to suppress powerful fears, keeping them buried or vague so as to avoid having to deal with them. Sometimes, though, just articulating fears or “bad” feelings decreases their power. Giving them a name empowers the patient to make a conscious effort at overcoming them.

Strangely enough, a patient may fear not just failure but success as well. She worries that succeeding at something means people will demand more of her-more than she feels she can deliver. At a deeper level, fears of success may come from separation fears connected with fantasies of competing with a parent-figure. The very fact that individual therapy provides an intense relationship with another human being in itself reduces another dominant fear: the fear of intimacy.

Feelings of anger: For a woman in our society, expressing anger and aggression-natural feelings- can be taboo. Thus even when she is genuinely, righteously angry, she often swallows her feelings. But suppressed feelings erupt in other ways, like air in a balloon that’s being squeezed. As Tina’s story demonstrated, an eating-disordered person takes it out on herself through food. As she learns the art of assertiveness, her fear of her own anger decreases.

Feelings of depression: Depression and eating are closely linked. Bingeing may in fact be a person’s misguided attempt to treat her depression, using food as medicine. In many cases, feelings of depression are what drive the patient to seek help in the first place. Therapy can help point out that, although a bout of depression can be draining, there are better ways of coping with it than eating.

Therapy explores where the depression comes from. What’s more, it introduces alternative methods for dealing with it. Even simple suggestions can sometimes be helpful. I ask my patients to remember the “Three N’s”: Say NO to unreasonable demands. Do something NEW. Do something to NURTURE yourself. Of course, it’s important that we distinguish between the feeling of depression and the clinical syndrome of depression. The former is a response to temporary situations; the latter is a psychiatric illness, for which effective medical treatment is available.

Feelings of being fat: Feeling fat though actually being emaciated is so common among anorexics that, as we’ve seen, it’s one of the diagnostic criteria for the disorder. Patients need to learn that feeling fat is a genuine part of their illness-the feeling is really there, no doubt about it. It’s just distorted. It’s another example of a crossed wire in the emotional circuit. However, simply confronting the patient -”Look in the mirror! You’re not fat!”- doesn’t work. Better to find out what being fat means to her, and how she interprets this distorted feeling. As patients learn to recognize and trust their feelings, they see a clearer image of their body shape and size. As one recovering patient told me, “I feel like I got a new prescription for my emotional contact lenses.”

Feelings about control: Because her life is chaotic, the anorexic focuses all her energy on controlling what she eats. Often this means controlling everyone else around her too. In time the disorder controls her. A bulimic “controls” eating by skipping meals; when she binges, she tries to reassert control by purging. In therapy we work to restore a sense of healthy control over eating.

Distorted thinking: The need to be in control often leads to certain limited ways of thinking-everything becomes “black or white,” “all or nothing.” Individual therapy offers the patient a chance to explore other ways of thinking. If she says, “I know that if I gain an ounce I’ll go on and gain thirty pounds,” we’ll talk about why she feels her only alternatives are extremes. The goal is to help her rediscover balance and moderation in thought as well as behavior.

Poor self-image: Susie Orbach, a well-known eating disorder therapist, believes that “low self-esteem” is much too mild a description of this symptom; self-hatred is more accurate. She has a point. Patients are often so perfectionist that one mistake, one little slip, can shatter them. They feel like failures because they can’t meet their own impossibly high standards. Therapy allows a patient to experiment with feelings, to take risks. In scaling back her standards to a more realistic level, she discovers that a mistake needn’t destroy her, that she isn’t a horrible, rotten person after all. A therapist helps by praising the patient for her success rather than being overly critical of her failures.

Social failure: Patients often have difficulty making friends or feeling comfortable around other people. These feelings may contribute to the development of an eating disorder. What’s more, once the disorder has taken hold, these feelings can help maintain and reinforce the anorexia or bulimia. Fear can make a patient avoid situations that pose the slightest risk of rejection. Making and keeping friends is a skill, and like other skills people need to learn it and practice it. Therapy can help patients do so. After all, no one rides a bicycle very well the first time she tries.

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Irma Toce arrived in America from Holland in 1987—healthy, fit, trim, and looking for adventure. Her goal was to work for 3 months, travel around the country, and go back home. The reality was that she fell in love, got married, and stayed in the United States.

And somewhere along the line, she gained 80 pounds.

While most of these dramatic life changes were a bit a of surprise, her weight gain was not. “I married into an Italian family that loves to eat,” Irma says. “And I stopped walking as much as I used to in Holland.”

By 1997, her weight had peaked at 240 pounds. She was depressed, had no energy, and hated what she saw in the mirror. It was a sharp contrast from Who she was the decade before. “I couldn’t believe what had happened to me,” she says. “I knew that I had to do something and make a change. A big change.”

With Dutch determination, she set her goal for 160 pounds, her wedding-day weight. But she kept her plan a secret. “I stopped eating cookies and started walking 5 days a week,” she says. “I didn’t tell anyone—not even my family.”

Within 2 months, she lost 10 pounds. People noticed. Unable to hide her efforts, she confirmed “diet” speculations. “The support that I got was unbelievable,” she says.

Clients and coworkers told Irma how wonderful she looked. A friend who baked cookies for her agreed to prepare just one special chocolate chip cookie a week. And she finally started eating three meals a day. “Before, I would skip breakfast, then snack my way through the morning and afternoon, stopping only for lunch and dinner,” she explains.

On sunny days when Irma didn’t feel like exercising, her eldest stepdaughter would encourage her to take a walk. When chilly fall weather provided another convenient excuse to skip her stroll, her husband bought her a treadmill.

Irma started to feel better about herself. Suddenly, everything changed for the better. “I even started to laugh at jokes again,” she says.

Three years later, Irma was down to 170 pounds. She’s still 10 pounds shy of her goal, but she’s confident that she’ll hit her wedding-day weight soon. Her advice to others who want to slim down is, “Stay positive, and don’t talk yourself down. If you blow it once in a while, get right back on track. Just take it one day at a time, and don’t be too hard on yourself. After all, you’re worth it!”

WINNING ACTION

Spread the word that you’re trying to lose. According to a University of Pittsburgh study, those supported by friends and family have a 95 percent chance of slimming down successfully. What’s more, they are twice as likely to keep the extra pounds and inches off.

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