Stealth Health
I LOVE this concept! It’s all about making small, gradual changes to your lifestyle that will give you long term health benefits.
“The idea behind Stealth Health is to pick three new strategies and try them for four days in a row. Once a new behavior has become a regular part of the day, even if it’s something as small as drinking a glass of water first thing in the morning, add another.
Covert health strategies
Though covert health strategies are nothing new, registered dietitian Evelyn Tribole first popularized the concept in her 1998 book Stealth Health: How to Sneak Nutrition Painlessly Into Your Diet (Viking, $24.95).
Tribole not only gives tips on how to slip more fiber, beans, soy, calcium, fruits and vegetables into a diet, but she also includes more than 100 recipes that address what she calls the major stumbling blocks to good nutrition: flavor, convenience and prejudice.
To sneak vegetables into meals, for example, she suggests pureeing cauliflower and adding it to twice-baked potatoes. Drop bits of a grated carrot into cheddar chowder or spaghetti sauce. Or divert the taste buds by spicing food up with chilies, garlic and ginger.
“People want to eat healthy, but there’s a preconceived bias that healthy food tastes bad,” she said. The mere mention of tofu often evokes a disdainful look. “Yet if I make a delicious chocolate marble cheesecake (with tofu) and have a person taste it (without mentioning the ingredients), I get raves,” she wrote.
Gordon and Katz devote an entire section to Stealth Healthy Cooking, which includes tips on how to cut back on “bad” carbs, sugar, bad fats and salt.
But they also weave nutritional nuggets throughout the chapters. They tell you how to survive dining out at full-service and fast-food restaurants, what to eat for healthy skin (soy isoflavones found in soy milk and tofu) and the numerous benefits of omega-3 fatty acids.
Stealth Health Top 10
Some ideas are so good they’re often repeated; these make up the Stealth Health Top 10 list for guaranteed health benefits:
It may not be easy or possible to live by the Top 10, but Stealth Health preaches that small changes add up to a large difference. In the current environment, where junk food is encouraged and regular movement is discouraged, it’s impossible to stay healthy by maintaining the status quo. Good health requires proactive measures every day
The article refers to two books on Stealth Health:
I would add to that list:
- Drink at least 2 litres of water every day
- Work your muscles gently with yoga or tai chi every day
- Replace negative thoughts with positive ones
- Turn the TV off for at least 2 hours and go and do something else instead
- Practise good posture, when standing and sitting
What else would you add?