Strategies for Healthy Eating
Arline Kallick: Hello everyone and welcome to the Y-ME ShareRing Network National Teleconference. We’re happy to have you with us this evening. Our call will begin with tonight’s speaker, Dr. Kim Dalzell, who is a nationally known and recognized cancer and nutrition expert and an award winning author. Our topic tonight is “Strategies for Healthy Eating”. This will be followed by a question and answer session and end with small group discussions. We realize with the one-hour teleconference, it will be difficult to answer everyone’s questions. If your question does not get presented during the question and answer portion or group discussion, please remember you may contact the Y-ME Hotline at 800-221-2141. The Hotline is answered by certified peer counselors who are breast cancer survivors, which is available to you 24/7, or simply visit our website at www.y-me.org. When presenting a question to Dr. Dalzell this evening, please be courteous to other callers by keeping your questions brief and realizing that this isn’t a private consultation. We are now ready to begin tonight’s teleconference and I’d like to welcome Dr. Kim Dalzell. You may begin.
Dr. Kim Dalzell: Thank you Arline. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to everybody and thank you to all who are listening today to learn a little bit more about the value of solid nutrition for women who are living with breast cancer. I would say maybe it was a month or so ago that I met Judy and Judy was diagnosed with a recurrence of breast cancer. She was a 40-year-old woman; and when she sat down to counsel with me, she said, “You know, the first time I was diagnosed, I asked my doctor specifically, ‘What can I do? What can I do to fight this?’ and the doctor said, ‘Just make sure that you’re eating right.’” Well, she said she took that advice and thought she was doing really great and, lo and behold, she had a recurrence. It dawned on her at that point that she really didn’t understand what eating right meant. It can take on a lot of different meanings depending even on the area of the country or the cultural influences that you have in your life. So eating right is just this really broad topic and my goal tonight is to put together some very fine points on how you can exactly do that – Eat right to optimize your chances of living a long and healthy life and not worrying about recurrence, which is ultimately, I think, everybody’s goal. Also, it was interesting that during our conversation she mentioned to me that upon her diagnosis of recurrence, she decided to go out and a get a list of foods and so she had all these lists and she bought all this food. But then she didn’t quite know what to do with it and she didn’t really understand that when she was out on the grocery market aisles what she should be purchasing. I got thinking about it a little bit and I thought, I knew I would be giving this talk tonight and I thought: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to institute some of the, maybe the preliminary information that you need to really help you eat right before you’re actually eating it. So that’s what I’m going to focus on tonight, I’ll explain in just a minute. What I think is also very important to get across to the group is that it can be really challenging to make and stick to dietary changes, so it’s really important to focus on those foods or dietary habits that will most significantly impact your health and goal to prevent a recurrence. After all, it’s nearly impossible to eat right consistently every day. I certainly don’t; and I’ve got good news for you: You don’t have to. There’s a rule out there called 80/20, maybe some of you have heard of it. The good news is, is that you don’t have to be very stringent with your diet. About 80% of the time you want to eat what’s right and another 20% or every once in awhile you can eat some of those foods, just for the sheer pleasure of the meal, keeping out of your mind the nutritional value or lack thereof of the food. So I guess what I’m saying here, is that once in awhile it’s okay to have Lucky Charms for breakfast. That happens to be my personal favorite. I don’t have it very often, but every now and again I decide that that’s what I want to eat. I think it’s really an important lesson here to everyone that you don’t have to eat perfectly; and you shouldn’t feel guilty if once in awhile you want to have something that you know doesn’t necessarily have 100% health value. There are also some specific foods that fight breast cancer, and there are really far too many to outline tonight. So, as I said, I’m not going to give you a list of foods, but rather I’m going to arm you with specific steps that will help you put into action what you know about nutrition. I always say that people who read a lot about nutrition are really nothing more than armchair nutrition experts. Just knowing about healthy choices does not promote healing and health. So it’s important to find ways to integrate that knowledge into your life in a very practical way. The practical aspect is really the key here, being practical.
So eating well doesn’t have to be difficult or frustrating, as long as you follow some basic no nonsense guidelines that I’ve put together. The first place to start is to plan for what you’re going to eat. Now this sounds simplistic, but when I speak around the country, I ask people if they plan their meals and the huge majority admit they don’t. If you don’t plan your meals, you will be faced with making decisions when you are hungry, rushed, and tired; and you know what’s next: McDonald’s or Wendy’s. It’s right there. You’re in the McDanger zone and you’ll find yourself under those golden arches swearing this will be the last time that you visit. But what I know is that if you can plan your meals, if you take time to plan your meals during the week, you’re less likely to veer off into the unhealthy pathway. Now for example: What I do is every Thursday I sit down with my calendar, my cookbooks and a pad of paper and I plan out my following week’s meals. Now before your tittering and laughing to yourself, it’s not that I love doing this, but what I realize is that it takes me 30 minutes to do this and from the planning sheet of my recipes or whatever I decide to plan for the week, I can build my grocery list. So it actually helps me create my grocery list as well. So I’ve planned and I’ve shopped for the food I need. It’s just waiting for me and once I’m at the grocery store I also need to have a specific plan of attack too because there’s a lot of pitfalls when you go into a grocery store. So I’d like to share with you some very important tips that I think will help. So you’ve got your meat, you’re got your meal plans; you’ve got your grocery list all figured out and you head into your favorite grocery store. The very first thing you want to consider is that you want, if you want to save time, and I think most people do, you want to become one with the store. Now what I mean by that is that when you are very familiar with how the aisles are laid out, then you can almost plan your grocery list aisle-by-aisle and that way you don’t have to go back; you don’t have to waste a lot of time by returning from aisle ten back to aisle one trying to find something and again, it sounds very simplistic. Not a lot of people do it and I rush through that grocery store when I’m not spending a few extra minutes looking at some new product and I’m able to get out of there very quickly and I’ve got all my nice healthy foods.
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| Free teleconference and small group discussion
May 21, 2008, 7:00 p.m. (CT) |
