Ksenia Andreeva, mother of three weather women, business lady, Vice-Mrs. St. Petersburg, finalist of the beauty and talent contest “Mrs. Russia – 2018”, talks about why proper nutrition is very important for a mother with many children who is trying to do a lot.
“What to eat to lose weight?” – this is the question, the answer to which is looking for a large part of the female population of the planet. And I am one of them. I have always been quite slim, but during my first pregnancy I gained extra weight. Kilograms so 18. In fact, the weight of an average first grader. Too much for me! Like many women, I did not want to stay with this acquisition, and I decided to do something. The first thing I did was to go in for sports. However, as you know, exercise is only 30% of the work to get yourself in good shape. Everything else is determined by nutrition. I tried strict diets and dismissed them for myself, since they gave only a short-term effect with a quick “rollback” to the former indicators. And in general, diets are a strong stress for the body, an additional load.
As a mother of three little weather children, I often did not have enough time not only to choose and prepare wholesome and healthy food – but just to sit down to drink tea!
However, over time, I realized that healthy wholesome food is a mandatory necessity, a must have, without which it is much harder to cope with all matters and – an important point – to remain in an excellent mood. Proper nutrition makes us feel good. And the better we feel, the more we succeed at work, at home and in other areas of life.
Fast forward to a regular supermarket – what’s in a standard grocery basket? I bet most foods will contain sugar, unhealthy fats, salt, white flour, and a fair amount of additives, preservatives and flavor enhancers. About 80% of the shelves of any grocery store are packed with these products. Why is that? It’s just that such products are stored longer and have a lower cost. In addition, the combination of salt, fat and sugar produces a very strong taste impression that our receptors can easily get used to. In his book Salt, Sugar and Fat. How the food giants put us on a needle “Michael Moss calls this experience the” bliss point “- the very combination that all food manufacturers are trying to find.
Here is the diet I follow every day:
Breakfast: complex carbohydrates. Most often it is oatmeal. Sometimes – pancakes or waffles with whole grain flour. I can add nuts, urbech, nut butter.
Lunch: fruits. Sometimes dried fruit or a healthy dessert. If after sports – 2-3 squirrels.
Lunch: protein (meat / fish / poultry: baked, stewed, boiled, fried in a dry pan) + complex carbohydrates (a side dish of healthy cereals) + fiber (vegetables – fresh or cooked in any form, not in oil). Lunch fats are found in cold-pressed oil for salad dressing, or avocado, or meat / fish.
Snack: fruits. Sometimes it’s a healthy dessert.
Dinner: protein (meat / fish / poultry) + fiber (vegetables can be seasoned with oil).
I also drink black coffee and tea during the day. Without sugar, of course. Once a week or two, I allow myself honey / maple syrup / date extract to dress desserts or pancakes. If dinner was too early in relation to the time of going to bed and by the night there is a feeling of hunger, I try to cope with it with vegetables, sometimes – berries or fruits (in an amicable way, you should not eat fruit at night, but occasionally you can). To the above, I will add that I have not drunk alcohol for more than 5 years: the fact is that, like any source of light endorphins, after a while alcohol takes up energy in an even greater volume than it gave. For me, given my vast goals and objectives, this is an unaffordable luxury. Also, I have not eaten dairy products for a year now, with the exception of low-fat cheeses every couple of months. I refused it because of lactose – milk sugar, and this helped to remove the last extra pounds after the birth of my youngest son in preparation for the beauty contest “Mrs. St. Petersburg”. I thought it would be a temporary activity, but so far even the smell of milk seems unpleasant to me. Nevertheless, I do not exclude the possibility that some day I will return to my diet.
I have always been quite slim, but during my first pregnancy I gained 18 kilos.
It is very important to find a middle ground when consuming salt. Yes, a person needs a certain amount of salt every day, but an excess of it increases the chances of developing gastritis, diabetes, arthritis and other unpleasant diseases. This is a superfluous thing for a mother with many children, on whose health so much in the family depends! If you follow the WHO recommendations, an adult should consume no more than 5 grams of salt per day. These 5 grams also include products containing salt by themselves, even before any processing: meat, fish, cereals, vegetables, eggs. However, taking into account the addition of salt to food and the presence of salt in ready-made food products, its average daily consumption in an adult exceeds the WHO standards by 3-4 times! So, when you cook even simple vegetables, be sure to think about how much salt already exists in raw foods. Eating food without salting seems unusual only at first, but gradually the body will begin to distinguish the insipid shades of food and feel natural tastes.
Oh fat, life-saving and needed
There are fats that are useful and very necessary for our body. And then there are saturated and processed fats, which are now added to almost any food. There have even been studies that have confirmed that the mechanism of action of fats is similar to that of drugs. Therefore, when you are shaking with the desire to eat something from fast food, think: what if this is your addiction, and not hunger? The more a person consumes unhealthy fats, the higher the chance of heart disease and overweight problems. But the right fats, contained in olive oil, fish, nuts, avocados, bring one benefit to the nervous system and help to preserve female beauty, promoting the absorption of proteins and vitamins.
I don’t suffer from food monotony at all. The followers of the principles of proper nutrition have created quite a lot of recipes that allow you to diversify the diet with taste and benefit and even prepare dishes that resemble fast food or desserts. For example, pizza on the “dough” of minced chicken, a hamburger with iceberg salad instead of a bun, banana ice cream and chocolate with honey. My favorite PP weekend recipes are chocolate cake, truffles, carrot cake, charlotte, apple pancakes, and Viennese waffles. In order to pamper yourself with peace of mind, you just need to slightly edit the recipe, replacing unhealthy products with their counterparts (say, white flour for oatmeal, sugar for fruits or dried fruits), and switch to frying in a dry frying pan, baking in the oven, using a multicooker or double boiler. At first, it may seem that PP-dishes are devoid of any sweetness, salinity, but over time, taste buds will learn to recognize the natural taste of products, which was previously muffled by sugar, salt and frying in oil.
I almost forgot the main thing: drink enough water. Water helps flush out toxins and carry oxygen throughout the body. With a lack of water, a person becomes lifeless, lethargic, apathetic. According to the WHO, if you weigh 60 kg, you need to drink at least 2 liters of water per day. Drinking a lot of water is not easy. At first, you can simply forget about the water, replacing it with coffee or tea. Or mistakenly mistaking the feeling of thirst for hunger, eating any snacks or fruits. But if you start offering yourself water more often, then gradually the body will get used to it, the feeling of thirst will return to you, and as it is regularly quenched, you can feel greater lightness throughout the body and vital energy.
When I leave home, I take containers with main meals with me, and often cook separately for my husband and older children.
Life in the PP style is fraught with not only advantages, but also a number of difficulties, mainly of an organizational nature. For example, it takes me a lot of time to prepare food. Therefore, most often I cook very simple dishes (put on the oven and bake, pour boiling water and boil) and make 3-4 dishes at a time: say, I put buckwheat to cook, I send fish to bake in the oven and fry vegetables in a dry frying pan along the way. In addition, I often prepare regular meals for my husband and older children separately.
The organization of meals for the day is not the easiest one either. I often take containers of main meals with me when I leave the house. After all, if you drive around the city all day, then in conditions of lack of time (the usual state for a mother of three children) without this supply of food it will be difficult to satisfy your hunger: the right food is rarely prepared quickly. Therefore, I have the perfect thermos for food, a large selection of containers and a stock of healthy snacks based on nuts and fruits in the car.
Another not-so-pleasant aspect is that the right foods are more expensive than foods with preservatives. However, given their health benefits and how much energy there will be for new exploits, this should pay off.
Once you adapt to this new lifestyle, your body will thank you. The appearance will become more attractive, and the amount of strength that appears will help you cope with everything that work, family, hobbies and other areas of your life will present.
– The benefits of exercise for losing those extra pounds is invaluable. If it is not possible to visit the gym, then you can start classes with morning exercises at home. But it is very useful to start the day with “gymnastics” of the digestive organs, to activate their work after a night’s sleep, improve blood circulation and lymph drainage. To do this, you need to take a deep breath through your nose and inflate your stomach, then slowly as you exhale, stroke your stomach clockwise, repeat this 5-6 times. It is known that the process of burning fat occurs in intracellular structures – mitochondria, which are rich in muscles. Therefore, in order to maintain muscle mass in good shape, in addition to proper nutrition, systematic physical activity is necessary. There are different types of body shaping exercises, you can get acquainted with them on the Internet or consult a fitness trainer. Exercise not only helps keep the body fit, but it also releases the hormones of joy – endorphins, which reduce appetite, increase mood and improve metabolism. Exercise improves immunity and the quality of your sex life.