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Scott Webb: If you're like me, you've been treating yourself to comfort foods during the pandemic and need some help shedding those extra pounds and keeping them off, of course. Joining me today to help us with that as Sean Beach, Registered Dietician at Genesis. This is Sounds of Good Health with Genesis, brought to you by Genesis Healthcare System. I'm Scott Webb. So Sean, thanks so much for joining me today. You know, a lot of people have gained some extra weight during the pandemic, and I know that I'm guilty of treating myself to way too many comfort foods. I find myself wandering around the house. I end up in the kitchen. I open the pantry and a lot of things look good in there. So let's just start here. What are some small steps we can take every day, you know, during the pandemic that can make a big difference and you know, how much exercise do we need to maybe lose some of the pounds we've gained during these last few months?

Sean Beach: There's a couple of things that I tend to think about. And the first one isn't even specifically food-related, I go right to trying to get people a lot more just aware of what their behaviors are so that they can develop something that resembles a plan. And when I say plan, I don't necessarily mean that they have to know exactly what step they're going to do along the way in the process of how they're going to carry out their day, but having a plan for, if you're looking to manage your weight, the calories, the total calories that you consume over the course of the day, those are going to be your bottom line. And having somebody recognize that part of it, you can still have some flexibility within that number, but if you have a plan for how many calories you're planning on eating for that day, or at least not exceeding, that goes a long way towards getting you where you need to be.

Because when people don't really have, because I was guilty of this, you know, I had a lot more home time than I would normally have had, especially in the initial phases of this. And I would do the same kind of thing that you just talked about, picking at things, eating things at certain times that I normally wouldn't. And you do find that when you don't have a plan, then anything can happen. You know, and that is where, you know, that's when you put it together at the end of the day and you realized that you stacked three, four different things that really blew your calories out of the water for the day. And once you can become a little bit more aware of that, you may eat according to that, like, Whoa, since I'm already this far along in my calories for the day, maybe I won't have that for lunch or dinner or I'll have that tomorrow or something like that rather than today.

Host: Let's just say even if we've had a plan, we're still gaining weight because you know, it's just one of those things is maybe as people get older, definitely is the case for me. So how much exercise do we need? What do you recommend do you recommend that we exercise every day or, you know, a couple of times a week, what's your take on that?

Sean Beach: Kind of bargain basement amount of activity that we're going to consider to be sort of effective at managing, you know, being kind of baseline. And this is put out by the American Diabetes Association, just for people who were initially diagnosed with type two diabetes, but it doesn't necessarily have to be related to diabetes, but we would, we consider 150 minutes in a week. That's 30 minutes on five out of your seven days, a little like more specific detail that you can plug in there is, don't have those two off days be in a row. So don't do Monday through Friday and then have two consecutive days of just doing nothing, you know, but then, you know, if somebody is going to be a little bit more ambitious, kind of that 60 minutes every day. You know, so that tends to be like, what is recommended for a lot of the general population. But like you said about starting out, you know, if somebody just doesn't have the capacity for 60 minutes of exercise right now, we're not looking at a black and white situation where unless you're able to do 60 per day, forget about it. You know, try to aim, if you're not doing 150 minutes per week, let's get you there first. You know? And then if somebody is more on that, you know, I guess in the athletic world, we'd refer to it as somebody's trained, you know, if they already have a pretty good capacity for exercise, then we're looking more at six 60 minutes every day, or at least most days of the week as being your baseline.

Host: You know, I know during this time that has been so confusing and stressful, you know, people are just eating more right, and there just chalking it up to well, you know, COVID maybe that kind of thing. How do we in general just avoid stress?

Sean Beach: Yeah. Sometimes I, you know, I try not to be too hard on either myself or any individual client or patient that I would be speaking to where I do remind them that, you know, life is especially in a situation like this, where it's brought very close to our attention, how important, and maybe even not important, certain things are in people's life. You know? So I always try to make sure that people are prioritizing where. It is not a law that's written down somewhere that weight loss or something like that has to be your, A1 concern. You know, it's okay to rearrange priorities as other things are bubbling up in your life, you know? Cause they can just cause more stress for you to feel like, Oh geez, you know, I really should be eating this way, but you know, and then you're taking care of a family member or you know, somebody, your next door neighbor, you know, you have lot on your plate. But having it in the back of your mind, at least that you're going to get back to that at a certain point in time is crucial.

You know, that you're not just going to drop everything, and you know, sometimes it's important to enjoy what you can enjoy in a certain moment, you know, grab some pleasure while you can. But you know, so I actually, I took advantage of the time that I was off to do a little bit more baking for the family, you know, and actually maybe even indulge a few things during that time period because it was sort of psychologically helpful to me. And you know, one of the, I always feel like one of the least selfish things I can do for people is to cook for them. And sometimes for me, like cooking by the act of cooking and the generosity of giving that food to somebody else or watching my children face, you know, when they're eating my bread or something like that, I don't even really need to eat it so much because I enjoy looking at them, and how much enjoyment they're getting out of it. Or a neighbor, you know, who I gave a fresh loaf of bread to or something like that, can be really, can be nice, you know?

And it can be a way to take a, you know, you got to take some silver linings, I guess sometimes, you know, and having a little bit of a respite from stressing out so much about exactly what I'm eating or what I'm not eating. But again, try to still keep it somewhere on the stove top, just maybe you can place it on the back burner for a few minutes. But like I said, a lot of it still comes back to that awareness of, you know, there's some things that I have a lot more handy than I used to, but I mean, do we have to do it all in one day? You know, so still keep keeping a lid on things with while still kind of allowing yourself to relax a little bit in certain facets of your life. I was fine to be helpful.

Host: Well, you know, you're talking about not stressing out about the little things I'm assuming a few extra pounds is not a big deal, right? It's not going to affect our health dramatically?

Sean Beach: No. Like as a comparison of, you know, various you know different components of our like health related behaviors that can you know, and what their impact on our life is going to be. I used to work with a smoking cessation specialist and we were taking questions like this and the person who was asking the smoking cessation specialist. Well, one of the reasons I don't want to quit smoking is because I'll gain weight, you know? And she mentioned you would have to gain a hundred pounds in the process of quitting smoking for it to not be a net benefit on your health, you know, so yeah. Trying to keep things in perspective like that, where, you know, say you had lost 20 pounds prior to the pandemic kicking in, and now you've gained 11 of them back. Recognizing that you're still down nine from where you were at the beginning is, you know, that's a more important way to look at it rather than, Oh my gosh, I've lost all this ground over the time period, because I'm sure you had a few things that you were worried about, you know, during this whole pandemic thing that, you know, though, you know, you're not all the way back to square one. And even if you were, you know, how you lost that 20 pounds, you know, you can just reengage that process when it has bubbled up to the top of your priority list.

Host: You know, technology is great, whether it's on our computers, our phones, Fitbits, whatever it might be smartwatches, what are some good apps or good technologies we can use to track our diet, our exercise? What do you recommend and how can Genesis help?

Sean Beach: Okay. Couple things there are, I mean a tremendous number of apps, you know, if somebody goes on their app store and they type in diet app or fitness app calorie tracking app, they're going to get a lot of them. Invariably, the top one that'll bubble up will probably be My Fitness Pal, you know, and that's a good one. There's one called Lose It and that is, you know, lose it. And then there's an exclamation point, you know, and those are the, usually the top two that you know, that come up. And those are really good because they have, the database that's on those is really big, almost any commercial food, commercially available food item is going to be able to zero in on the calories. The fat, the carbohydrates, sugar, whatever somebody wants to you control in their diet. You're going to be able to find it on those web resources. The USDA has a food database that you can look up. And that can be really helpful too for unpackaged foods, fruits, vegetables, meats, because they really break down you know, the, like the calories per ounce and stuff.

Versus those apps will sometimes generalize or they'll say Apple, small, medium, large, which what in the world is that? You know, they don't exactly come in small, medium, large. And then here at Genesis, we have diabetes and nutrition education program, it's over on forest Avenue. And we see individuals one-on-one and that's with a physician referral, any nutrition related diagnosis, a dietician can see them. And then if they're a Genesis employee we're and they are on the Genesis insurance, we have health management program through the employee wellness department that they're entitled to come down and see a nurse. We have two nurses, Kelly Zumbro and Deb Lear, me I'm the dietician over there. And then Jess Lamb is an exercise physiologist. So we pretty much have all the facets of your health and fitness, you know, from a teaching perspective covered down there. And there's no charge to any Genesis employee or family member who is on Genesis insurance to come down and see us at the employee wellness.

Host: Sean, I'm going to put you on the spot here. What's the best advice you've ever gotten or given on losing weight? Like what's the best tip you can give people?

Sean Beach: That I always go back to. And this was like you said about being in college. I remember when I went in there, you know, you're majoring in dietetics and you think, obviously you have a passion for this stuff. You like nutrition and those kinds and how it relates to our health. And you're thinking, I'm thinking I'm going to go into the, you know, university of Akron and learn all these brilliant strategies and make it, you know, just get jet eye level on this stuff. But the deeper I got into it, the more I realized that it just comes down to these incredibly simple concepts. But the problem that most of us have is that we plug too much sort of morality into it, you know, guilt and beating ourselves up for liking this and wishing we didn't want to eat this and that. And when I recognize that I can just treat this like a math problem, you know, every food on the planet, whether it's an Oreo or a carrot, or, you know, a piece of cake is just a lump of calories and then running it, like it's a math problem from day to day. Rather than kicking myself or trying to convince myself that I'm never going to have a piece of pizza again or something like that. You know, that was when I, when I got, when I realized that it kind of really clarified things for me, where I didn't have to change my human nature to do this, you know, I just needed to be able to run a math problem. So that's a big thing, treating it like it's a math problem instead of like, you're involved in all these moral dilemmas constantly about what to eat or not eat.

Host: Sean, it has been such a pleasure speaking with you today. And I just love your perspectives on things that, yeah, sure. We want to have a plan like know about, you know, think about our calories and what's our plan for the day. But if we exceed that or we don't quite get enough exercise or we've gained a pounds, that's okay. We can let ourselves off the hook. We can reset and reboot and get back at it tomorrow. And I love that perspective of just kind of zooming out a little bit and, you know, not focusing too much on the little stuff, allowing ourselves to be human and to eat things we enjoy and get pleasure from making things for other people. So much fun talking to you today. Thank you so much and stay well. Call Genesis Diabetes and Nutrition Education at (740) 454-4568, or go to Genesishcs.org. And thanks for listening to sounds of good health with Genesis brought to you by Genesis Healthcare System. If you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the full podcast library for topics of interest to you. I'm Scott Webb, stay well.