Jerry the Blogger

I love to cook. Unfortunately, I often let laziness get the better of me and I decide to heat up a "bag meal" like stir fry veggies and precut chicken rather than go to all the trouble of preparing multiple ingredients. Nothing kills my desire to cook faster than needing to dice tomatoes or mix multiple ingredients together overnight for a marinade.

Luckily, I recently discovered that there is an entire range of products geared toward "lazy cooks" such as myself. I want to eat healthy, but I don't want to spend an extra 15 minutes dicing and mixing ingredients. This is where Hunt's came to my rescue. If you didn't already know, Hunt's now offers a huge variety based on the original diced tomatoes. If you visit your local grocery store you can fine convenient canned goods like diced tomatoes and garlic, diced tomatoes and sweet onions, even diced tomatoes with basil, garlic and oregano.

Sure, you can't make a meal out of just one can of diced tomatoes, but I'm amazed at the number of healthy recipes that have diced tomatoes as a primary ingredient. One of my new favorites is Hunt's Diced Tomatoes with Green Pepper, Celery and Onions. I've used this "convenience ingredient" to make lean beef meat loaf and chicken lasagna. Being able to just open a can and toss it into the rest of the ingredients sure beats dicing a whole tomato by hand and mixing in chopped vegetables.

Of course, there are more "convenience ingredients" out there than just diced tomatoes. I'm also a fan of precut and precooked chicken ... which is great for everything from salads to stir fry. I've also recently started using precut and pre-washed fresh vegetables that come ready to steam in a microwavable bag. All I have to do is toss the plastic bag full of veggies into my microwave and I've got steamed greens in less than five minutes.

Sure, you can always toss a Healthy Choice meal into the microwave and have a complete hot meal in less than 5 minutes. But there's just something satisfying about cooking a meal from scratch ... even if you cheat a little bit by using "convenience ingredients."

In my never-ending search for nutritious meal options I recently stumbled across a helpful website loaded with recipes that aren't loaded with calories or fat. The website, Diet Detective, has a large selection of healthy recipes and is a great site to visit if you need some fresh meal ideas. Last week I found a recipe for Blackberry Peach Crisp that absolutely amazed me.

I'm a huge fan of blackberries and they are, without any doubt, my favorite fruit. If I had to choose another fruit it would be peaches, so the idea of a dessert made from both blackberries and peaches sounded perfect. Even better, a single serving of this Blackberry Peach Crisp only has 110 calories, 4g fat, and 0mg cholesterol. Not bad at all.

Desserts, it seems, are the most difficult hurdle to cross on the road to healthy eating. Let's face it, the reason we eat dessert is so we can satisfy our desire for something sweet. If a dessert doesn't taste great, it won't satisfy those desires and we'll just end up eating something else to put an end to our cravings. Unfortunately, most large desserts contain more calories, fat and sugar than a full meal ... so dessert isn't the most nutritious thing you can do for your body.

Eating a "typical" dessert with every dinner is just one of the many reasons numerous Americans suffer from obesity and diabetes.

Take something as simple as cake. Cakes are made with flour and eggs ... two ingredients that aren't horribly unhealthy by themselves. But cover your cake with frosting (composed mostly of fat and containing more than double the calories and sugar of a similar amount of protein or carbohydrates) and you're on the slippery slope to unhealthy living.

Moderation is the key part of any balanced diet. Desserts aren't the end of the world if they're consumed in moderation and only from time to time. In fact, eating the occasional small dessert can fulfill your need for something sweet and help you continue to eat healthy. If you always deny your cravings eventually you'll give in and sometimes start binge eating fatty foods. It's all about control, and making the choices that keep you healthy.

However, if dessert has become one of the most important meals of your day it's time to reconsider your meal choices. Fruit can satisfy a sweet tooth just as easily and processed sugar and fat ... and without ruining your healthy lifestyle. 

For those of you who might have been debating about whether or not the Start Making Choices program can help you stick to a healthy lifestyle, a new study from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health might interest you. According to the study, adults who lost weight in a six-month program were able to keep at least some of the weight off for 2.5 years with the help of brief monthly counseling. A Web-based intervention also helped participants keep the weight off for two years.

The results of the "Weight Loss Maintenance Trial," the largest and longest duration trial to test different weight-loss maintenance strategies, are published in the March 12, 2008, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. It's no secret that maintaining a healthy weight is a key element of every heart disease prevention plan. Despite the many choices for healthy eating and exercise, most Americans re-gain weight in the long term. This study suggests that personal and web-based interventions help adults keep the weight off and, in turn, stay healthy.

The study enrolled 1,685 overweight or obese adults with high blood pressure or high cholesterol or both. Of those, 1,032 lost an average of 18.7 pounds during an initial six-month weight loss intervention involving 20 weekly group-counseling sessions which emphasized a heart-healthy dietary pattern and three hours per week of physical activity. They were then randomly assigned to one of three strategies for weight loss maintenance: monthly personal counseling on diet and physical activity, a Web-based intervention with the same advice, and self-direction, where participants received minimal further intervention from study staff.

At the end of the study, participants receiving personal counseling retained an average weight loss of 9.2 pounds, compared to an average of 7.3 pounds for those using the Web-based intervention and 6.4 pounds for those in the self-directed group.

Personal counseling sessions were brief and mainly by telephone. The Web site was developed to provide the same advice as personal counseling. Both interventions were designed to be practical to implement in a variety of settings.

This is why programs like Start Making Choices are so important. Maintaining a healthy weight is an essential part of heart disease prevention. Weight loss is shown to lower blood pressure, lower LDL "bad" cholesterol, and help prevent type 2 diabetes. Each 2.2 pounds of weight loss can lower blood pressure by one point and can lower the risk of developing diabetes by 16 percent in high-risk adults.

Personally, I've found the help I've received from the Start Making Choices program to be essential to my weight loss since the beginning of this year. There's no magic bullet with regards to healthy living ... we each have to resist temptation and struggle to eat right and exercise. Getting some help from a personal counselor or a website helps us stay on track, but each of us have to make the choice to live healthy.