Editorial

A New Year’s Wish: Grow Well, Not Swell

Did you climb under a baggy sweater this morning for reasons other than fashion? (Okay, okay it was a Christmas sweater.)

No, we’re not being cruel. We understand what it feels like to haul around extra pounds after holiday festivities.

After all, we devoured our share of cookies, apple spice cake, rum balls, cheddar hunks and chips dragged through mystery dips. (Probably more than our share.)

In other words, we’re no different than you: feeling a tad bloated and trying to figure out how to be trimmer and healthier this new year without doing anything painful or abrupt.

Don’t let us dissuade you from that New Year’s resolution to re-up at your health club or resume jogging.

But in the first issue of 2006, Bay Weekly offers you a few helpful hints on regaining your figure, and your health, by tinkering with your diet.

In her feature, Are You Gonna Eat That?, Paula Phillips, a professional healer (who sports no excess on her frame), offers a bounty of dietary tips we’d all be wise to follow in the quest to live longer and fit properly into last year’s pants.

Some of her advice is common sense. Most of us know what super-sized fast food, white bread and soft drinks do to our waistlines. But many of us are less familiar with the risk of unnecessary consumption of milk and the butt-swelling effects of food additives like high fructose corn syrup, which processors use now as a cheap alternative to sugar.

At the moment, many of us are thinking about looks and the fit of our favorite threads. But the real issue underlying Phillips’ piece is health.

Most of us are aware of the increase in childhood obesity and adult-onset diabetes. But often, we don’t equate diet with disease.

Nor, despite obscene health care costs and the increasing burden of co-pays, do we pause to figure how we can keep our family from falling prey to every virus that slithers into school and workplace. Phillips writes about how to think before we eat.

Also in this issue is the advice of author Gregory Mestanas, a retired Annapolis psychologist who offers more advice on the value of whole grains, low-fat dairy products and common-sense eating.

Like Phillips, Mestanas draws on a lifetime of smart eating while reminding us that better health lies at our finger tips.

“We have an abundance of good food sources, like the farmers’ markets, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods Market. We also have an abundance of clean recreational areas, like Quiet Waters Park. In addition, we have an abundance of learning and exercise activities. Therefore, we have a choice in devising our own routines to take charge of our health,” Mestanas says.

Sounds better to us than going on a diet.