New Year Revolution

Number one; yes, you can make change. And number two, don’t try to change everything all at once,’ says Dr Alana Wilson, a General Practitioner in Wellington.

Whether you’re wanting to change your diet, wish you were more fit, or want to achieve a better work-life balance this year, Alana says the key is to make change slowly, and not to expect perfection.

Food for thought

If you’re wanting to manage your weight, Alana warns against getting caught up on numbers—whether it’s the bathroom scale or your Body Mass Index (BMI). ‘Aspiring to a size eight is ridiculous. Skinny is not necessarily better; it’s about maintaining a good average,’ she says.

The simple rule when it comes to weight control is that if you take in more energy than you expend, you’ll put on weight. In other words, don’t eat more than you need in a day. ‘Especially for those of us who work, we often don’t have set meals and we graze. Then we go for the high-energy food with refined sugar. But you need to have all the food groups in proportion each day to get a balanced diet,’ says Alana.

Making long-lasting dietary changes is all about balance, variety and watching your portion sizes. ‘Visualise your dinner plate,’ says Alana, ‘the top half should be vegetables, a quarter of the bottom half should be protein or meat, and the other quarter should be carbohydrates—which includes potato and taro.

She warns against getting sucked in by dietary fads, especially if it means cutting out whole food groups. ‘Diets don’t work, and quick-fix solutions don’t work,’ she says. ‘You’re trying to make changes all at once—it’s too different, often too expensive and too rigid.’ Instead, she suggests concentrating on making small, manageable changes. Choose a few goals that you can stick to, and build on that.

This may not lead to instant weight loss or dramatic results, but Alana says it’s more important to be healthy than to be skinny.

Making change work

When her children were growing up, Alana’s philosophy was not to make a battle of meal times. Instead, she put out bowls on the table, including healthy choices like carrots and peas—either raw or cooked—and let the children create their own meals. Her only requirement was that they eat at least one vegetable, and because they got to choose, it wasn’t an issue.

Alana bases her meals around the vegetables, not the meat, and has never insisted that dinner plates are empty. But she laughs when asked whether she always sticks to healthy eating guidelines. ‘We’re appalling! We have way too much junk food in the house, and yes, sometimes it’s just easier to put packaged snacks in their lunchboxes.’ But the aim is not perfection, but balance.

The principle is the same if you are wanting to start exercising, Alana advises. Recommended guidelines are 40 minutes of exercise a day—but she points out that people can start by doing this in 10-minute stints.

It’s also a great idea to get teens interested in sport. ‘We encouraged our kids to be active, and we found one thing that each of them was good at and encouraged them in that—so now one is a dancer, one is a gymnast, one is into film and drama and walks everywhere, and one is very sporty.’

Team sports are great. Set up a neighbourhood touch rugby team, or join a rugby, soccer or netball team. There is a huge choice when it comes to sports activity in New Zealand and much of it is free, or available at only a minimal cost.

Living with less stress

Despite the headline grabbing statistics of obesity, the problem of stress is perhaps an even greater health issue—in fact, obesity is often a stress-related disorder. ‘Anecdotally, it’s estimated that over 60 per cent of visits to GPs are for stress-related problems,’ says Alana.

Other stress-related health problems range from high blood pressure, an increased rate of accidents, and heart disease, to anxiety and depression. ‘As GPs, we’re more often than not dealing with mental health issues. So it’s very much about the whole person, and the physical and mental are intimately related.’

The greatest causes of stress that Alana sees in her practice are work and family related issues.

‘Make sure you take your holidays. Some people have to work two or three jobs, and it’s very stressful, but everyone is entitled to a month’s holiday a year. You will get more out of your holiday if you take them in two-week blocks. This allows you to get sick—which will happen—recover, and still have some time to relax.’

Alana is critical of sick leave allowances in the workplace and emphasises the importance of taking enough time off when you’re ill. ‘Many sick leave allocations are ridiculous. If you’re sick, just stay home and get better. Firstly, if you come in to work you’ll infect everyone else; and secondly, for a lot of illnesses the only treatment is rest—you’ll be sick for twice as long if you come into work.’

Parents have a particularly hard time because they often have to stay home with their sick children, and when they fall ill themselves, don’t take time off to recover. ‘It’s our work culture that needs to change,’ says Alana. ‘But you need to give yourself permission to stay home and rest.’

Making time for your family and your partner are equally important for reducing stress. ‘You need uninterrupted time with your family, your partner and time for you—even if that’s 20 minutes in the bath listening to music.’

As a busy doctor with four children, Alana knows well the work and family pressures that can become overwhelming. For this reason, she has some simple boundaries that make life more manageable: ‘I don’t cook anything that takes longer than half an hour; we’ve surrounded ourselves with support from friends and family; and we spend a lot of time in the car taking the kids to activities, so we use that as quality time,’ she says.

‘My message is: you can do it! Everyone’s different, everyone’s an individual, and change takes time. It doesn’t always work, there’s always that odd step backwards—and that’s fine. Just try, and don’t give up. It’s always possible to change’

By Ingrid Barratt (abridged from War Cry, 14 January 2011, p5-7)