KATHERINE ISACKS’ REASONS FOR BEING (PT. 1 OF 4)

Kamala Appel: Hello everyone, this is Kamala Appel AKA “The Key and KEA Productions.” We are here talking about reasons for being healthy and I am here today with Katherine Isacks. And we are going to find out more about her quest to help people with diet and nutrition. Katherine please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background.

Katherine Isacks: Thank you Kamala, I’m a registered Dietitian and I work for two hospitals and I own my own business. I work primarily in weight control and diabetes education. I’m passionate about nutrition and helping folks control their health, reduce risks… that sort of thing. I’m thrilled to be here.

Kamala Appel: Great, thank you so much! Well, you’re obviously someone coming from a lot of knowledge, but certainly there must have been things that you learned along the way that surprised you. Was there anything about health and fitness that surprised you?

Katherine Isacks: Yes, actually I shouldn’t be surprised but I am continually surprised at just how many calories are contained in processed foods, foods from restaurants (even good quality restaurants) as well as in fast foods. I keep up on nutrition information from all sorts of different sources and I’m continually surprised at how many calories, how much saturated fat and sugar is actually in our food that are prepackaged and also from dining out food.

Kamala Appel: Wow…

Katherine Isacks: Yeah, continual source of surprise (Laughter).

Kamala Appel: Now many restaurants display calories on their menus and you see that one meal is around 1500 calories and it’s like wow!

Katherine Isacks: Yes and it gets much worse than that by the way. Some of the casual restaurants can easily go over 2000 calories and not to single one out as being worse than others, but Cheesecake Factory, people love Cheesecake Factory, it taste good and their huge portion sizes but that’s also one reason why you’re going to get a lot of entrées that are close to 2000 calories if you dine out there and eat the whole entrée. It’s good to be aware and I think that simply being aware by tracking calories, using whatever tool helps you; I find that the mobile apps are really a huge benefit in this area. I use, oh gosh I think I use 4 different devices that I track calories on to make it really convenient for me but I’m always surprised. And then the other thing that’s surprising is that we just assume that “oh if I exercise, I’m going to burn so many calories and it won’t matter really if I track or not.” And in fact, exercise is extremely important for health definitely even if you don’t lose weight it’s important for health. But it doesn’t burn that many calories unless if you have very high intensity exercises for a prolong period of time. So tracking is important in that sense too because then you have an awareness like “oh I just walked 30 minutes and wow I only burned 100 calories (laughter) or 150 calories” and then you will be like, you know, it’s not equivalent to a slice of cheesecake or something like that. The tracking has been a big deal in something that I’ve been doing a lot of lately and it’s also helpful not just in weight control, but related to diabetes management as well since folks need to know their carbohydrate content of their meals and snacks to help control their blood sugar level.

Kamala Appel: Yeah, I definitely think the tracking, if you can do it in a manageable way. I do triathlons and distance running like half marathon running or marathons but when you get to a certain point for those kinds of sports, you actually need to fuel like crazy because you are burning and going over 45 minutes. I think the 20 minutes (20-30 minutes), it’s so good for your body but you’re not burning a lot of calories. It’s when you get past that 45 minutes to an hour.

Katherine Isacks: Right, you make a great point. It’s intensity as well as duration and so if you’re running half marathons or marathons, you’re having high intensity long duration exercise and you really are burning quite a bit of calories. Even if say for instance, you’re only a 120 lbs. woman, you’re still burning a lot of calories. So absolutely and I mean that’s more in the athlete range but we’re talking about the regular folks more like me who gets exercise when they can and are primarily sedentary, sitting at a computer or a desk walk from patient room to patient room. For someone like me, I might be running only 30 minutes at a jog and then most of my other activities are sedentary but you make a very good point. Athletes are definitely a little bit, have a much better calories burning cushion there.