Improve Your Weight And Lifespan Using Longevity Guide Diet Factors

This longevity guide for diet factors is offered as a preventative advisory to help you better manage your weight control and lifespan. The cornerstone of our consumer directed healthcare and fitness culture is that no one will mind your business better than you will, if you know how. Our purpose is to show you how.

It would be terrific if we could invoke Woody Allen's longevity rule that says “I don’t want to know when I’ll die. Just tell me where, so I can avoid the place.”

It’s not that simple, so this idea requires four things that we hope are true for most of us most of the time.

1. That you can achieve a quality, fulfilling life that you enjoy so that you want to continue it and to improve it. The basis is a positive attitude. Not always present, but always available if we seek it.

2. That you are sufficiently motivated to maintain your quality of life so that you will expend the effort to achieve it and exercise the discipline to maintain it.

3. Avoid conduct that detracts from quality longevity. Rejecting the attractive but harmful often requires more discipline than doing the tedious.

4. If you wander from your intended regimen, exercise self-control to get back on the right track. Return to good habits as soon as you can.

The Longevity Game

A creative and fun way to help you take charge of your wellness issues can be found in “longevity games” that predict human lifespan. They seek to make individual lifespan projections based on heredity, environment and personal conduct factors that affect us. They point the way to the things we should do, the things we should avoid and the things which we can not control that affect our health and our life spans.

Because it incorporates vital “fixed factors” that we can not control, we favor “The Longevity Game”, as published by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. We do not represent or have any association with Northwestern Mutual. To see and play Northwestern Mutual’s game, go to Longevity Game.

Northwestern’s game uses an average life expectancy of 76 years as its baseline. Lifestyle factors allow you to add to or subtract from that baseline to estimate your own life-expectancy. We cite this game primarily as a reference point to discuss the lifestyle factors that you should or should not use in seeking to improve the quality and length of your life.

Diet And Weight: Eating is one of life’s joys, if we control it. We’ve heard all the diet clichés. You are what you eat. Eat a balanced diet, whatever that is at the moment. Avoid fast foods, saturated fats and transfats. Eat red meat. Don’t eat red meat. Don’t eat any meat. Etc, etc, etc.

It’s hard to keep up with it all. Maybe the safest rule is “If it tastes good, it’s probably bad for you. Better spit it out.” Well, let’s try to combine some dietary truths with some common sense for the sake of safe dietary enjoyment and longevity.

One undeniable truth is the high cost of obesity. It impacts money, health quality, life quality and longevity. Obese people suffer more lost work days by a factor of 13 to one. Medical claims for obese people are higher by a factor of 6.8 to one. There is a sharp drop off for mildly over weight people, but even they have higher cost factors than normal.

What’s A Serving? That depends on gender, age and size. An easy solution is to say that a basic serving for you is the size of your fist. As you age or if you’re in a weight loss mode, reduce your serving size. If eating a high-caloric or high-carb food, reduce the serving size. And, no seconds. If you want more, wait ten minutes. Then decide.

Diet Habits And Longevity: Less food intake is better than more, but less does not mean passing on meals and fasting. It is better for your body and your weight to eat small amounts four to six times a day, than eating two or three large meals. Always include breakfast. As a rule, try to avoid eating after eight o’clock in the evening. Make avoidance a harder rule after nine o’clock.

Weight Control: To maintain a healthy weight, keep track of your weight. Weigh regularly, at least weekly. If you’re on a diet to lose weight, weigh daily. Always try to weigh yourself first thing in the morning under the same conditions before ingesting any food or water. In weight maintenance mode, set a weight range for yourself. If you approach the upper limit of your range, go into a weight loss routine until you get back to your desired weight.

When in a weight loss or maintenance mode, try to get at least eight hours of sleep a night. People who are overweight often do not get enough sleep. We can’t prove a correlation, but we’d bet on it. Anyway, it will make you feel better and look better.

Diet Do’s:

Magnesium: To promote muscle tone and better body mass index (BMI), eat foods high in magnesium. It may also help to control insulin and blood sugar. High magnesium foods include halibut, spinach, dried beans, dry-roasted nuts (almonds, cashews, and peanuts) and plain yogurt. The recommended daily value for magnesium is 300 mg + for women and 400 mg+ for men. Our diet averages about 200 mg. Our lean ancestors may have eaten up to 1,000 mg per day.

Weight Control: To increase your metabolism and to stimulate weight control, eat a high-protein, low-glycemic breakfast; eat healthy fats (avocados, fatty fish [salmon], fish oil, grass-fed meats, olive oil and nuts); avoid or minimize sweets, processed foods and starchy carbohydrates (flour products, sugar, white rice, white pasta, potatoes and corn); and drink plenty of water, as well as green tea, rather than regular or diet soda or sweetened fruit juices.

Omega 3: Eat foods high in Omega 3 fatty acids found in wild Alaska salmon, walnuts, grass-fed beef and wild game, eggs, and flax seeds. Omega 3 may benefit cardiovascular and brain function for both young and old.

Vitamin D: For better colorectal health, get plenty of vitamin D from sunlight and cod liver oil and from cruciferous and green leaf vegetables. Eat broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, turnip greens and those hated brussel sprouts. Also eat high-fiber, whole vegetables, fruits, nuts, beans and dairy products.

Blood Sugar: To offset increased blood sugar from a high-carb meal, take natural apple cider vinegar. Two tablespoons can reduce blood glucose levels by up to fifty percent. That’s better than some diabetes drugs. Another offset to high blood sugar-induced insulin is cinnamon, even as little as one-half teaspoon can reduce insulin by twenty percent.

Snacks: For a snack, eat low-glycemic carbohydrates, like walnuts. Walnuts are a zero on the glycemic scale. A cup of walnuts, good for several snacks, is 700 calories. But, it will not trigger an insulin response that will produce fat, like 700 calories of cake, cookies, potato chips or rice cakes. Almonds are a close second to walnuts, with about a 15 glycemic rating.

Diet Don’t’s:

Low Fat Fantasy: For weight control, be careful about the “low-fat fantasy”. We’ve been sold on the premise that low-fat foods will help weight control. There seem to be two problems with that. First, people who choose low-fat foods tend to eat more, negating any low-fat benefit.

Second, low-fat foods often have high carbohydrate content. Carbs, not fats, have a more fattening effect by stimulating blood sugar and insulin production. American Medical Association comparisons of low-carbohydrate diets (like Atkins or Sugar Busters) and low-fat, high carb diets (like US Government guidelines) have shown that low carb / healthy fat diets are more beneficial for weight loss, reduction of body fat percentage and improved cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar and blood pressure.

Red Meat: Don’t think you have to avoid all red meat. A Harvard study of women who regularly consumed red meat showed that these women had a higher risk for hormone-related breast cancer than those who consumed less. That’s not surprising for beef that is injected with estrogen-related hormones to stimulate quicker weight gain and higher fat content. However, there is no evidence of such correlation to grass-fed red meat that is hormone free and that is an excellent protein source.

Trans Fats: Avoid or minimize trans-fats. We’ve heard a lot about trans-fats in fast food restaurants, but it’s also in margarine, shortening and baked foods made with hydrogenated oil. You could think of trans fat oil as “plastic oil and butter”. Check labels before you buy. Perhaps our worst favorite food is French fries, a combination of high-carb potatoes cooked in trans fat oil. Tastes good, but bad news all around.

Sugar: Try to reduce your consumption of sugar. There have been dozens of studies on the adverse health effects of sugar. Of course, it tastes good, but it’s been linked to more than 75 adverse health consequences, including aging acceleration, cancer, cholesterol, triglycerides, over weight problems, and diabetes. There are natural sweeteners, such as stevia, as opposed to the aspartame-based artificial sweeteners, that do not carry the negatives of sugar and that are safe for diabetics and better for all. Use stevia as a sugar substitute whenever you can.

Milk: Don’t skim the milk. Following the low fat doctrine, many people have gone from full fat milk to one or two percent or even skim milk that has little or no fat content. Evidence published by Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine now indicates that skim and low-fat milk actually promotes weight gain. The problem is not the milk fat. It’s the milk sugar, lactose, that is left in high concentration after the cream is removed. According to the Pediatrics study, the best for nutrition and for weight control is the full, natural milk, or close to it.

Soy: Minimize consumption of soy. It’s a problem for women, a bigger problem for men. Soy has been promoted as reducing cholesterol. That claim is suspect. But, it does increase homocysteine, which raises the risk for heart disease.

In addition, it mimics the female hormone estrogen. That can be a major aging issue for middle aged and senior men because it leads to higher body fat and lower sexual desire. Of course, that may be ok for a guy who wants to look like a doughboy and has nothing better to do than stay up late to watch ballgames on TV.

Diet And Weight Longevity Scoring: For longevity, if you avoid processed foods and trans-fats in favor of fresh fruits and vegetables, fish and poultry, add two years. If you’re over weight by 50 or more pounds, deduct eight years. If overweight by 30-49 pounds, deduct four years. If overweight by 10-29 pounds, deduct two years.

For ideas on Longevity Fixed Factors, go to Fixed Factors.

For ideas on Longevity Variable Factors, go to Variable Factors.

For ideas on Longevity Fitness Factors, go to Fitness Factors.

For ideas on Longevity Nutritional Factors, go to Nutritional Factors.

For ideas on Longevity Life Quality Factors, go to Life Quality Factors.

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