Home audit for weight loss
By Dr. Garry Egger
Practicing Lifestyle Medicine identifies that the environment influences much of what we eat and do for exercise. And while we can’t do much about the bigger‘macro’ environment, there are things we can do about the more local ‘micro’ environment.
Checking around the home for example might be a good start. Try a ‘home audit’ to check your micro-environment.
Changing the home environment can reduce the prospects for fat gain. So here is a check list which can be used as an indicator for modifying this ‘micro-environment’.
Get you patients (and yourself) to check the household for:
High fat foods: Try to make sure foods with more than 10g of fat per 100g are not stored in the house – or at least kept in a prominent position.
Accessibility of fatty snack foods and other ‘treats’: Put them up high, or away from easy sight if you do have them at all.
Oversized meals presented at meal times: Having them means the family are more likely to eat them, so keep the portion sizes down to begin with.
Low fat alternative products : Keep products like low fat, instead of high fat milk.
Limited fats or oils used in cooking: Don’t keep them and you won’t use them Low fat cooking methods and machines available (i.e. microwave, grillers)
Easy access to fresh fruit: Where fatty foods should be hidden, these should be easy to see and easy to grab for a snack.
Too many effort-saving devices: The things that STOP you moving (e.g. remote control TV; cordless telephones, leaf blowers, electronic kitchenware etc.).
Bikes or exercise equipment: If these are handy, they’re more likely to be used.
Limited eating places: get the family used to eating at the one place on most occasions. Then other places (like bed), don’t become a stimulus for eating.
Don’t shop on an empty stomach: You’re bound to buy more of what you don’t need if you shop when you’re hungry. Then these things lie around the house begging to be eaten.
If you would like to add any suggestions, please comment below. Remember we are all in this fight against Obesity and many hands make light work.
2
Nice one. The only thing i would add is “who” is in your environment as well. Remember those with obesity promoting behaviours have the ability to influence yours. It may not mean getting rid of them, but choosing how and when you spend time with them may help. Unless your looking for an excuse to ditch them anyway……..
Garry
I have bought your gutbuster material, and read your books. Surely you have to agree that the “low fat” mantra of the 80s and early 90s has failed many people? Low fat products are not real food, come from a factory, are not satisfying, and tend to be full of sugar. People were not fat before low fat products came about were they. Traditional diets full of lean people tend not to be low fat do they? The biggest low fat chants tend to come from America as I understand it, and look at them. What a disaster. I guess it is horses for courses but I see the low fat path as an 80s and early 90s fad that is best left in that period. Learn to cook real food, like the French, Italians or Greeks, avoid heavily processed food (including that which claims to be low fat). Read food sticks to your ribs, and you eat less of it. Plus people were not as fat when they ate it. I find the low fat food deeply unsatisfying and leads to depression and weight gain.
On grog, I guess again it depends but whenever I do off it I feel much better, sleep better (which I think means I eat less), I exercise more and my clothes feel looser in as little as 3 weeks.
Just my feedback for what it is worth. I know you have probably been thinking the same way for 20 years and why would you change it.