Healthy Again: Welcome!

Hey! My name is Katie and you may or may not have met me at CHOA. I am a nutritionist intern working with the lap band study and am really looking forward to meeting each and every one of you if I haven't already!

So the word nutrition doesn't have a good connotation, does it... ? When people usually think of nutrition, they might think of diets, or other restrictions they might have to put on themselves. What I really hope you learn is that eating in a healthy way doesn't have to be about a "diet" where you can't eat anything but celery sticks and lettuce. After all, we're not rabbits... :)

Eating healthy foods to me, is all about COLOR. When I think about most foods that are really high in carbohydrates, saturated fat, and sugar, most of them are pretty boring... kind of "blah" colors. A hamburger is brown, the bun is a yellowy-cream color, and the fries are kind of a dirty brown (though they do glisten from the OIL they fry them in!). The colors of unhealthy snack foods like chips (yellowy-brown...blah), sodas (blah... or WHOA colors from artificial coloring like Mountain Dew), cookies (varying colors of blah), etc. just bore me to tears! When I think of a meal I want to eat, I don't imagine a plate of food that consists of colors ranging from a dirt to dirty socks... :) Seriously! Think about the lack of color in those foods!

Natural foods, on the other hand, are BEAUTIFUL! Look at the gorgeous colors that come naturally out of the earth! These foods were created specifically for us--- straight from the ground! We don't have to do anything to them... this makes them easy to prepare and also makes a more entertaining plate of food!