Murray McMillan
Sun Food Editor
Jan Harvey changed how she eats, and the pounds and pains slipped away
Jan Harvey speaks in a gentle, deliberate way, but her eyes light up and she laughs as she tells a kitchen story on herself. Just before Christmas a year ago, she had done some baking for her church’s holiday sale. But when she took her handiwork out of the oven, it was, she says, simply “not good enough.” So she ate the lot.
Many people might say “So what?” then wipe the crumbs off their chin and keep on with whatever other tasks were at hand.
For Harvey, it was an awful moment, because barely a month prior, with the help of nutritionist Ramona Josephson, she’d embarked on a whole new approach to how she ate.
Those few minutes of kitchen disappointment had allowed her to be sidetracked from the goal of eating more wisely, eating more healthily. And like most who stray from a path they set for themselves, she felt guilt and remorse.
That’s a recurring theme among tales of diets and dieting – words that, I must quickly add, were very seldom spoken during a recent interview in which Harvey and Josephson described what they set out to do. Unlike many who reach a situation like that bake-sale demolition, Harvey fretted (and returned to old habits) for several weeks, then with Josephson’s encouragement decided to resume the new path she had chosen.
“I was 187 pounds when I started this program on Oct. 25, 2000,” Harvey said in a recent interview, quickly confirming date and weight in the “food diary” she has meticulously kept since then, recording each meal or snack on pages in a three-ring binder.
She now bears little resemblance of the ample woman in a photograph she has tucked in the front of that diary. Today she’s trim, carefully dressed in conservative taste, and her weight varies between 116-119 pounds.
What a change. How did she do it?
To get to the “how,” it’s necessary to back up to the “why.” “I’m in my 50s, and several years ago I took early retirement for health reasons. I was a high school teacher, and I had to use crutches, otherwise I couldn’t stand in my classroom.” Harvey says that during a regular health checkup in September 2000, her doctor noted that her “bad cholesterol had gone up.” (That’s LDL cholesterol, the nasty type, the stuff that clogs arteries, not the useful HDL cholesterol which helps clear the arteries.) She already had “arthritis in all sorts of joints, and phlebitis in my foot.”
“I knew that it [the high cholesterol] could lead to cardiovascular disease, and I knew that I was overweight – about 190 pounds at a time.”
Harvey says that while she expected to be put on some sort of medication, she was surprised and pleased when her doctor advised tackling the problem through dietary change. That’s when she connected with Josephson, a registered dietician-nutritionist who has a private practice in Vancouver.
She’s the former chief dietician of Shaughnessy Hospital and Grace Hospital, and author of a highly successful book, The HeartSmart Shopper (published in association with the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada).
Today, Josephson calls her role “nutrition coach,” and does both one-on-one counseling at her Vancouver office and runs group sessions for those wanting to address food and nutrition issues.
From the day the two women talk now, it’s obvious they quickly developed a strong rapport. Harvey recalls her first appointment with Josephson: “She didn’t ask my weight or tell me that I was obese. She asked about the LDL cholesterol, and we set our first goal: to lower that.”
Best of all, says Harvey, there were no scales in Josephson’s office. The focus was put on her health, not her weight.
“It was a very refreshing approach to say ‘Let’s work on my health.’”
That shift in emphasis makes a big difference. “My focus is on how food works in the body,” says Josephson, “so I look at each meal time and each snack time – the timing is very important.”
She explains the different foods – carbohydrates, proteins, fats – are used by the body at different rates of speed, and once the fuel from a meal is used up, it can set up a conscious or unconscious desire for replenishment. The problem is that at the next meal, there can be a tendency to overindulge because it takes about 15 minutes for the brain to register that the body is again being fed certain types of foods. So snacking – healthy snacking – is encouraged.
“We want a range of food options for each eating time. It’s very much geared to finding what works for each person,” says Josephson.
To form the basis from which change for Harvey would evolve, Josephson had her look at how she was eating then, and Harvey says that what she found was “embarrassing.” “I had long periods when I didn’t eat much, but I was fond of fatty foods, sweet foods, foods that weren’t good choices.” When she was still teaching, “the evening used to be my feeding time. I’d mark papers and have a snack after each set, and in an evening I could go through a brick of marbled cheese.”
Road to success was taken in small steps Instead of scales in Josephson’s office, Harvey found a large chart on the wall, the body mass index – a graphical representation of the ratio of height and weight. She saw that she was well above the desirable weight range for her height, and the goal became to work toward bringing it down…..slowly.
“I focused on losing five pounds as an initial goal, and then another five.” The gradual shedding was crucial, and along the way she says she lost her “sweet tooth” and her taste for high-fat foods, and she learned to control the size of portions.
She bought new cookbooks, several from the HeartSmart series, and now when she entertains, she asks her guests in advance if it’s okay with them if she cooks a HeartSmart meal. No one refuses. When dining in restaurants, she asks a server’s advice on a good low-fat choice.
Society is peppered with fad diets that promise spectacular results in absurdly brief time-frames, and they may work in the short-term, but seldom for long. Harvey’s experience is strong evidence that gradually shifting eating patterns may not be flashy, but it works. Slow-and-steady does win the race.
Health professionals continue to offer the same sound advice, perhaps with a few new glosses, but the core message remains: increase consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, grains and legumes, and throttle back – slowly - on high-fat proteins and dairy products.
“People try to make huge changes and it’s not realistic,” says Josephson. “It’s important to look at one’s diet and lifestyle, and create a plan you can live with. I call it a ‘turning points’ plan – turning points to health. This is not about denial, it’s about enjoyment of food.”
If you don’t eat well, if you’re using fast food for quick energy, then you have to find a way to break the cycles of bad eating, says Josephson, and sometimes you get help, a coach.
Changes made over the past 14 months have made Harvey a much more careful grocery shopper. “When I’m shopping for my food program, I can eliminate about 90 percent of the store, she explains with a laugh.
Now she concentrates on the produce department, and elsewhere she’s become a careful reader of labels, looking for lower-fat products, and seeking out those that bear the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s Health Check symbol. That logo, a big checkmark inside concentric rings, indicates a product meets specific nutrient criteria based on Canada’s Food Guide, and that the package carries an explanation of how the food fits into a sensible eating regime.
She’s long had a love of things lemon flavoured, but they used to be lemon tarts and lemon loaf. “My favourite taste now is plain lemon – I squeeze it on everything,” Harvey says. “I’m eating more soy products, tofu, and more beans and lentils and vegetables like jicama.
“Once you clear the sweet/fatty things out of your system you start to develop new tastes, say for apples and for several varieties; I enjoy Galas. And I love yams.”
Her substantial weight loss has brought other health changes. “The arthritis has vanished, phlebitis has vanished, the LDL [cholesterol] is very good,” Harvey reports. “It’s as if I’d never had the problems; it’s like having a chance to start life over again.”
