Five Jaw Dropping Tales From The
John's Hopkins Weight Management Clinic
For the last 16 months, I’ve been meeting with clients at the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center - clients coming to me and wanting to improve their weight, their health, and/or their performance.
As you might assume, there were good and bad days. However, in looking back over my times at Johns Hopkins, there were 5 specific clients that left me speechless. In fact, the things these clients told me disturbed me so much that I lost sleep!
Ever had a person tell you they’ve never heard of celery?
How about someone who hadn’t been into a grocery store for over a year?
What about counting “20 minutes of standing” as your weekly exercise?
I’m not kidding about any of these. And I’ve got more. The good news is that we can capture some important take-away messages from these situations.
Number 1.
The pediatric client who I introduced to celery
What can we learn from this traffic-jam?
Introduce yourself and become friends with as many produce items as possible.
Here's a newsflash - vegetables are healthy. And better yet, they are virtually impossible to over consume (calorically speaking).
Like I said, the client had no clue what celery was, but you know what, the client turned into Rain Man when listing every variety of sugared breakfast cereal.
Lying in bed that night, I thought to myself, "When is the last time I saw a TV commercial about celery?" I guess it's not so hard to believe after all. Ok, maybe it is.
Number 2.
The adult male client with lack of grocery store attendance
What can we learn?
Calling all adults! If you can't remember the last time you were in a grocery store, you might want to resign from society.
This client relied exclusively on airport food, room service, restaurants, and spousal cooking support. If you rely on these sources for your daily nutrition, make sure you know exactly what you are getting.
Grocery shopping can be overwhelming and intimidating. If you need some assistance with developing a shopping list and making beneficial selections...
Number 3.
The adult female client who engages in vigorous bouts of "standing"
What can we learn?
Yes; I do know many cultures are becoming more sedentary. No; I don't remember reading about the cardiovascular, muscular, or metabolic benefits of "standing" in my years of exercise physiology studies.
Then again, I guess standing is better than sitting?
Number 4.
I had a morbidly obese adult female client who looked me in the eye and said with complete seriousness that she avoided bananas because they were high in calories (meanwhile she was eating 3000 calorie restaurant meals every night).
Any outlandish nutrition claims you just can't let go of? Do yourself a favor and take all food myths out to the garbage. This client heard from a friend that bananas were too high in calories to be included on a healthy nutrition plan.
Get this. To get 2000 calories, you need to eat about 19 medium sized bananas. That's about 5 pounds of bananas. Repeat after me, "60 grams of fiber!"
Needless to say, overconsumption of raw fruit was not this clients problem. She needed some nutrition triage, Stat! Her issues were poor meal pacing and reliance on unhealthy restaurant food.
Number 5.
I had an overweight adult male who was consuming a “diet” yogurt and a diet soda for breakfast every morning at about 6:30am.
By 11:00am, this client complained of being famished. He would proceed to the local convenience store and stock up on junk food.
We discussed adding more to breakfast, but he refused. He thought adding food at breakfast would be too many extra calories.
Does anyone else see a problem with this?
Adding quality nutrition during the day is fine. What’s not ok is eating 20 dollars worth of convenience store junk food when you are overly hungry.
...clear up any and all of your own nutrition myths. Else you may become jaw dropper number six.