"My Plan for Health"

Since January, Ohio State science writer Pam Frost Gorder has been blogging about her efforts to live a healthier life.

Gorder is using Ohio State resources, including Your Plan for Health, a program for Ohio State faculty and staff and their families, run by the Office of Human Resources. Under the plan, university employees can knock money off their monthly insurance cost by practicing healthy habits, including monitoring chronic conditions, attending wellness programs, getting nutrition counseling, and exercising.

Below, excerpts from her blog:

May 28:

Belly dancing is really hard. Harder, even, than I thought it would be, and I tried to keep my expectations in check.

On the first night, I learned that the rest position for belly dancing is basically a squat. You stand there, knees slightly bent, and your pelvis tilted outward just a little, so that your back is straight. Standing like that for an hour is really tiring.

Just hours after my first class, my legs started to ache. The aching got worse the next day, when it felt like my legs were going to fall off. Just walking was hard!

It amazes me how, every time I start a new activity, my muscles find a new way to hurt. But I guess that’s the point of pursuing many different forms of exercise. Muscles that aren’t often used grow stronger.

June 24:

If you’re looking for a good place to walk around Columbus, check out the Rails to Trails Conservancy, a non-profit organization dedicated to assisting local communities in converting unused railroad corridors into community trails. Many of the trails are paved, and they are all easily accessible from roads with convenient parking. A search engine will help you find a trail near your home.

My favorite is the Heritage Trail, a six-mile paved trail that runs from downtown Hilliard all the way to Plain City. I’ve never walked the whole thing at once, but according to the folks at MyPyramid.gov, doing so at a moderate pace would take about two hours and burn more than 500 calories. (A more realistic outing would be about half that long).

July 23:

“I apply the same standards to this journal as I do to my research stories. I talk to Ohio State researchers about their latest findings, and I will discuss how those findings apply to real life.”
—Pam Frost Gorder, assistant director of research communications at Ohio State

Shopping healthy requires knowledge and organization.That was the lesson of the Lunch & Learn seminar on healthy grocery store shopping. Jenny Anderson, a registered dietitian and newest member of the OSU Wellness team, offered tips on how to shop smart.Surveys show that 70 percent of people bring lists with them to the grocery store, but only 10 percent actually adhere to them, Anderson said. And for every item on our shopping list that we put into our carts, most of us add two impulse items.

Not surprisingly, Anderson said that a healthy diet contains low-fat, high-protein foods and whole grains, and lots of fruits and vegetables. The easiest way to get all these foods into your diet is to cook healthy food at home.This is usually where I stall out of the healthy eating process… I don’t do all that much cooking from scratch. I buy a lot of convenience foods.

But, to my surprise, Anderson mentioned some healthy convenience foods, and I was pleased to find that I already had most of them at home: frozen edamame, whole wheat couscous, low-fat yogurt, and frozen veggie burgers. She also mentioned grains such as quinoa, which I can happily cook in my rice maker with little effort.

Anderson handed out sample grocery lists and menus for cooking at home. Click here for a PDF. She advocates planning a week’s worth of meals ahead of time, and buying only the fresh food you need for that week. Pantry staples like grains and canned goods make up the rest.

All this healthy shopping and cooking is easier if you’re organized, and Anderson recommended cleaning and prepping your food as soon as you get home. Her coolest tip: store lettuce in your salad spinner (note to self: buy a salad spinner). When you bring a fresh head of lettuce home, pull it apart and wash it in the salad spinner, then leave it there in the fridge. The salad will have just a little moisture with air freely flowing around it — the ideal conditions for keeping it fresh longer.

She also recommended buying pre-chopped vegetables (from salad bars and such) to save time. I was way ahead of her on that one. I joke that I like my food pre-washed, pre-chopped, and hermetically sealed… Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not joking. Pre-prepared foods are incredibly convenient. One lesson from Anderson’s Lunch & Learn was that prepared foods don’t have to be unhealthy if you know what you’re buying.

July 28:

After several weeks away from yoga, I returned to class with Holly Wagner, RN, and got a bit of a surprise.

She asked us to sit straight up, legs crossed — a typical beginning posture. She reminded us to reach around and pull the fleshy parts of our backsides out to the sides, so that we could plant our sitz bones (the bones on the base of the pelvis) directly on the mat.

This is a standard yoga move not just for plus-sized people, but for anyone who… well, anyone who has a backside. And I’ve been doing it for so long now that it’s second nature.

What I noticed that day was that I seemed to have a little less backside to move out of the way than I’d remembered. That was a nice, positive thing to think about as I started class!

(Read Gorder's blog.)