Embracing the Mediterranean Diet: Nutritionist Insights for Mindful Eating and Healthy Living in Midlife

Have you ever wondered how the Mediterranean diet can transform your relationship with food and enhance your overall well-being? Join host Heather Carey as she invites the inspiring Stavros Mastrogiannis, a seasoned nutritionist and the founder of the Stavros Method, to explore the rich tapestry of the Mediterranean lifestyle in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories. As they dive deep into the principles of the Mediterranean diet, you’ll discover not just healthy eating tips, but also how cultural habits surrounding food can lead to a more joyful and mindful eating experience.

Stavros shares captivating insights from his upbringing on a picturesque Greek island, where food was woven into the fabric of life rather than a source of stress. He emphasizes the importance of eating out of true hunger, savoring each bite, and embracing the social aspects of meals—elements that are often overlooked in our fast-paced American culture. This episode is packed with nutrition advice that encourages you to prioritize whole foods, enjoy meals mindfully, and adopt a relaxed attitude towards eating.

Throughout their conversation, Stavros reveals the five ancient secrets of healthy eating, including the power of eating slowly, treating junk food as an occasional treat, and the critical role of fruits and vegetables in our diets. As you listen, you’ll learn how to adapt these Mediterranean diet insights to modern life, especially for women navigating the complexities of midlife and menopause health. Whether you’re on a weight loss journey or simply seeking to nourish your body with real food, this episode provides invaluable nutritionist insights that resonate with personal food stories and family food traditions.

Join Heather and Stavros as they discuss how to overcome common nutrition myths and the cycle of dieting that many face, particularly during perimenopause. With a focus on empowering women and fostering body positivity, this episode of Real Food Stories is not just about food; it’s about cultivating a healthy lifestyle that honors your unique personal food journey. Tune in for practical cooking techniques and sustainable eating practices that will inspire you to embrace the joy of food while nurturing your health.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from a culinary nutritionist who truly understands the intersection of food, culture, and women’s health. Let this episode guide you towards a more mindful and empowered approach to eating, helping you to embrace the Mediterranean lifestyle and all its benefits. Are you ready to transform your relationship with food and discover the secrets to a healthier, happier you? Listen now!

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. And if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you. And I’m really glad you’re here with me today. I am your host, Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relation to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Hi everybody and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. Today I have Stavros Mastrogiannis with me. Stavros is a 29-year veteran in the weight loss field and the founder of the Stavros Method. Growing up on a Greek island surrounded by people who were thin, healthy, and commonly lived productive lives well into their 90s, Stavros learned the five ancient secrets. unique insights on weight loss, nutrition, and longevity that very few weight loss experts know. Savras graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, and he uses this prestigious training to teach audiences not only how to eat, but what delicious foods to eat to help propel forward momentum in the weight loss process. Savras’ insights also help to develop the habits necessary to sustain and maintain optimum weight. Stavros, welcome to the podcast. I wanted to get you on the show today because I wanted to focus on the benefits of the Mediterranean diet. And since you grew up in Greece and are in the nutrition field, I know you can be a great resource for people who don’t know a lot about the Mediterranean diet, even though it’s always publicized as the best way to eat. But we also talked when we were off air. not just about the what to eat, but you have your theories on the Mediterranean diet and the how to eat. You gave me some insights that I didn’t really necessarily know about or give a lot of thought to because it’s always about the what to eat. So let’s talk about first you just growing up in Greece, how that was, what your diet was like, and what you learned from that experience.

Speaker #1
Absolutely. Basically, I lived in Greece in the 70s and 80s. And as a kid, I grew up, I never really thought about our diet because that’s the way we ate. In other words, nobody gave it any thought as far as eating healthy or losing weight or getting in shape. That’s the way we ate. We’re not doing it to be healthy. We’re doing it because that’s the way we were raised to A couple of big contrasts of the way that we live here. is like number one as a child yes we did it sometimes breakfast sometimes we did not it was something it was something that we did not they the parents did not push on us to absolutely must have something in the morning and when we went to school uh the school itself didn’t have a lunch break so basically there was a little store that would sell uh sandwiches or small snacks uh and my mother used to give us money in between periods Usually we had like a 10 minute or 15 minute break between periods. If you were hungry, you went and got yourself a snack. The funny part was that I remember as a child that it was drilled into our heads to make sure we did not ruin our appetite for lunch. We had to be home, I think I remember like 1.45 or 2 o’clock in the afternoon that we ate lunch. And I remember as a kid that if I hadn’t eaten at school my snack by 12 o’clock, I would Nod. dare eat anything because I knew when I got home, I had to be hungry. In other words, you got in trouble. And there was something that it was drilled into our heads. Like for example, like out of 350 kids in my school, literally there were three kids overweight out of that many. Everybody else was a normal weight. And the other big contrast is like, you know, the school on a regular basis, it took, we took field trips. Like once a month we’ll go on the field trip. So we’ll go. to the beach or up to the mountain. And then it was like an hour and a half hike. And we set, we played for three or four hours, then we went back to school. And the biggest difference is nobody worried about bringing snacks with us, or water or anything. We just went and came back. And with no snacks. Nowadays, if we do like an event for a couple hours, everybody worries about what to bring, what to eat. And I thought that was a very big difference. Now, adults on the other, you know, let me finish this as a child. So we went home, we had our lunch, then we did our homework, and then we went out. And we’re outside playing in the neighborhood for hours until my mother will go out to the balcony and yell our name, and we’ll hear it, and we’ll come back home, because we’ll know the telephone’s at the… Actually, we’d never had a telephone when I was in Greece. So, but so basically, even as a child, we’re not doing this snacking nonstop throughout the day. And when we came home and our dinner was a light dinner, it was usually leftovers. Whatever we had for lunch was leftover for dinners. And another interesting contrast is that we never complained that, oh, I ate this already for lunch. Why would I want to have for dinner? And you know what I mean? The nowadays people use words like it’s boring. Food cannot be boring if you’re truly hungry, right? Would you agree?

Speaker #0
Right.

Speaker #1
Ciao. And that’s how, you know, that’s how all, most of the children were raised. You know, so we ate, you know, yes, as children, we ate more often than adults, that’s for sure. Adults, on the other hand, only really ate lunch and dinner. That was the two times they ate. And a lot of times, especially if you worked in the quarries, breaking rocks or in the fields, a lot of times you only ate one meal. Breakfast was something we had on the weekends. And that’s always… got me when I watch shows about the Mediterranean diet, and they talk about what we ate for breakfast. What these shows are talking about is what we had for breakfast on the weekends. During the week, most adults did not eat anything. They had the coffee, the Greek coffee, and it’s like same as Turkish coffee. It’s the same coffee. Sometimes people refer to it as Greek coffee. Some people refer to it as Turkish coffee. And they went to work, and then they had lunch and dinner. Now, I think another big difference is like lunchtime, we had a two hour, no, three hour lunch break because people stopped working at two and I think they went back to work at five. So we ate lunch. We took our time, which I think it’s part of the healthy behavior about eating, but taking your time eating. Now, woof, you fall down because you have five minutes to eat your lunch and you have to go back to work. And I think that makes a big difference. And then they will go back to work and then they will come back later in the evening and we have a very light uh light dinner and again leftovers from lunch whatever we had left over we ate for dinner most of the time the the funny part is in the villages that’s where my mother was raised the opposite was true they had a light lunch and a heavy dinner why because in the in the in the villages people worked in the fields during the day so They knew if I ate a very big lunch, I can go back out in the fields and keep working. So they had a very light lunch and a big dinner. And I remember as kids, like in September, they would take us out of school for a couple of weeks and we’ll go collect olives. That was the tradition. Well, when we did that, automatically our dinner became a heavy meal and lunch became a light meal. Like instinctively, they knew that, hey, if I eat a big lunch, I won’t be able to go back to work. So they make it very light. And that’s how life was.

Speaker #0
So, yeah. So, so far, I’m just hearing about the how you ate, right? I mean, and like I said at the beginning, most when you look up the Mediterranean diet and Google, you know, or how to eat the best diet, it’s always like, okay, here’s your list of foods to eat.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
Right. So let’s talk. I want to, I want to get back because I have a lot of questions about this, the how part, but let’s just talk about. what you were eating then? Because that has to factor, I think, into, you know, you said the kids in the school, no one was overweight. What about other health issues? Did you find people to be relatively just healthy overall?

Speaker #1
Yes. As a matter of fact, actually, as a kid, I actually thought that cancer was a rare disease because nobody had cancer. Never mind, I didn’t know anyone that had cancer. I didn’t know anyone who knew anyone who had cancer. like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, those diseases did not exist. I learned about them when I first moved to the States because in Greece, we didn’t have those diseases. All these heart disease, all those things that we consider normal nowadays, I’m sorry, it’s something that we didn’t experience. Did people have heart attack? Yeah, I knew some people had heart heart attack. It wasn’t like nobody had it, but it was rarely or like, um, blood sugar problems. That was something that you deny encounter on a regular basis. Like the average person in their 90s lived independent. Matter of fact, we had a nursing home in my home city. It was empty because there was no need for it. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know why they built it to begin with, to be honest with you. Now, the nursing home is full. And unfortunately, things have changed a lot. As far as like the what we ate, I think that all the studies that I’ve seen, they do a pretty good job on that, I got to admit. Like a typical diet, I would say we ate meat once or twice a week. And the meat a lot of times, because to me, there’s meat and there’s meat. The meat, the animals raised the right way. The meat is much, much better. So a lot of the meat that we ate was our own chickens, our own goats, our own animals, which we took care of, and they lived a very good life, raised naturally. No hormones, none of the stuff. The milk that we drank, it was sheep or goat mostly. We didn’t have that many cows. I mean, the area didn’t have that many cows. and sheep’s milk. Goat milk, I don’t know if you ever had goat cheese, has a distinct taste. So we had sheep and the milk wasn’t pasteurized like they do here. Yes, we did boil it. But you know how many times I would drink milk directly from the goat? Directly. Okay. Which actually helps. I know a lot of people look at that like, oh my God. Risky,

Speaker #0
right?

Speaker #1
Yes, it’s different. But here you are.

Speaker #0
You lived.

Speaker #1
Yeah, exactly. Obviously, I’m still alive. But all that stuff, our milk, it was, or we had our own milk, or we had the guy with the donkey going around the town delivering milk. And you had like the little glass bottles, which he would fill it in. But it was not pasteurized milk. And like I said, sometimes as kids, we would have milk in the morning or nothing. But it was really, it was something very like, cereal only at the end. Like in the 80s, cereal starts coming around because in the 70s, late 70s, it wasn’t really milk was the only thing the kid would have in the morning if they ate anything. Cereal came more in the 80s. I remember right before I came to the States in 87, the last few years, we started having, there were no cherries at that time. Cornflakes were one of the first ones that got there. So, and the rest of our diet, you know, we had fish, I would say once a week. It’s kind of funny because a lot of people say, oh, you’re on an island. Did you eat fish all the time? Like, actually, we did not. We ate fish, I would say, once a week. And the rest of the time, we were truly vegans. We ate a diet. Like, if you look at traditional Greek dishes, most of them are vegan dishes, like casserole dishes, like beans, like a lot of zucchinis we ate. Eggplant is very popular. So those are the typical dishes we used to have. And everything swam in olive oil. Because I think a lot of people don’t realize that when you let yourself, oh, if I eat vegan, if I have my protein, I don’t feel satisfied. Yes, but if you took a vegan dish and you put plenty of olive oil in it, you’re going to be as satisfied as you had a steak. Because I know myself, like a lot of the Greek dishes my mother makes, it has a lot of olive oil. When I eat them, I feel satisfied, just like you would have a steak. I think when you went vegan and low fat.

Speaker #0
it’s that’s when they made the diet less satisfying i think you were missing something oh yeah well you’re missing the satiety i mean the flavor of it i mean the olive oil right that carries flavor yeah exactly so yeah so having more olive oil is not only you

Speaker #1
know it’s healthy for you but yeah probably added a lot of flavor to your food exactly and the other thing too is well i think that’s one thing that makes a big difference is that because we ate slowly and that took our time. Remember, I always tell this to people. Think about it. When do you get pleasure from food? When the food is in your mouth. Well, the longer you keep each bite of food in your mouth, don’t you get more pleasure from less food? That is why I think it’s, you know, because nowadays if you, let’s say I’m eating, but I’m doing work on the computer or I’m watching TV, how much pleasure do you get out of your eating? Not that much. You lose some of it. That’s why I think you end up eating more than you really need to.

Speaker #0
Well, you barely even know what you’re eating, right? I mean, you’re sitting like, you know, clicking away on your computer and you’re just eating, you know, with the other hand. Sometimes you barely, you’re like, oh, I finished my food. Oh,

Speaker #1
yeah.

Speaker #0
No thought.

Speaker #1
Yeah. That’s funny because when I first came to the States, I picked up some bad habits and I became a really fast eater. And how many times I will be eating and all of a sudden look down on my plate because I was doing other things. And I’m like, wait a minute, it’s empty. When did I finish eating? But I don’t feel satisfied. So I felt like I had to get up and get more food. And I think those things are also playing a role in the diet. Now, the other thing that we used to eat, like bread with everything. We had bread with pasta, actually. Like pasta, potatoes, and rice was something pretty much we ate every day. Now, all three of them, you know, one of the starches. We always had some kind of a starch. A lot of beans. We have a lot of bean recipes. And it’s kind of funny, though, how as a child, I never liked the beans. Like, yeah, there’s a dish called yigades, which is lima beans, like big beans in a type of tomato sauce. And I used to hate it as a child. Now it’s one of my favorite Greek dishes. And it’s kind of funny how your taste buds sometimes change also. So, but, and again, and I think that we ate a lot of starches, but because we ate less often, we ate out of true hunger, we ate slow and mindful, so we did not stuff ourselves. That’s why I believe that although we ate a lot of starches, it did not affect our weight or health. Where nowadays, a lot of times that people say that, oh, no, bread is fattening or pasta is fattening. Well, technically speaking, everything can be fattening. It all depends. Are you overeating it? And I think that’s the problem is because we’re mindlessly nowadays. I think that’s part of the problem that we’re overeating a lot of the foods.

Speaker #0
Well, we’re also eating highly processed.

Speaker #1
Yes, that’s.

Speaker #0
Carbohydrates and a lot of sugar and a lot of refined foods. So I imagine that the bread you were eating was homemade. Is that true?

Speaker #1
Yes. The bread, a lot of the bread actually, someone was showing me a lot of the local bake shop, but the bread actually has like three ingredients in it. You know what I mean? And even the flour itself, it was more of a, I wouldn’t say it was whole wheat flour, but it was more of a full grain flour. It wasn’t like the bread that we have today. The bread was different bread and doesn’t have 20 ingredients and half of them you don’t even know what they are. And the same thing with the pasta. I think a lot of the ingredients, unfortunately, have been modified. And I think that also plays a role. And I think that, yes, you could say bread is somewhat refined, but that was only one small part of everything we ate. All our food were less refined, were more wholesome foods. And I think dipping it in the sauce, which has tons of olive oil, also slowed down the absorption of the bread. because a lot of times We use bread. We didn’t eat it by itself. Most of the time, we would dip it in the sauce and we eat it. But the sauce is a lot of its olive oil. So again, it slows down the absorption of the carbohydrates into your system.

Speaker #0
Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. What about nuts and seeds? Any emphasis on…

Speaker #1
We ate nuts regularly because we had a lot of almond trees and walnut trees. It’s kind of funny that you mentioned that in my… I think it’s not middle school, the one through sixth grade in the in the courtyard of that of our school. We had almond trees. And I don’t know if you ever had almonds before they get hard. They usually are green. And if you break them off, come on. You’ll see the almond, but the almond is actually soft and you almost taste like cucumber. And as kids, we used to actually go and pick them and eat them. And it’s like really soft, like it’s very watery, actually. And we used to eat those things a lot. Or we had walnuts. We had a lot of almonds and walnuts were the two type of nuts that we used to eat regularly. And the other big thing was pumpkin seeds. Like when you go to the movie theater, people have popcorn and Coke. In Greece, we had pumpkin seeds. That was… the, the snack that we have in the theater, but because the bag is about really small bag. And because you do one at a time that wasn’t pre-peeled, well, guess what? You didn’t eat that much, but it kept you occupied.

Speaker #0
Yeah. That’s, that is interesting, right? It’s not like you could just open the bag and put it down your, your, you know, down your mouth. Anything else that you were eating that stands out to you? I mean, it sounds like to me so far, I mean, like all good, lots of vegetables. We didn’t really talk about fruits, but tell me about fruits.

Speaker #1
Yes. Fruits. Again, there was another thing that, yes, we ate fruit almost every night. Like usually my mother would have dinner. And by the way, this is my family. That was the typical family. After you would have your dinner, most of the time my mother would peel apples, with apples, oranges were the main ones. And then in season, like cherries, a lot of apricots. In the fall, we had grapes. So we went by the season, too. In the wintertime, we had tangerines. We had a lot of tangerine trees and oranges. And in the fall, we had a lot of apples and a lot of grapes. But it was something we ate almost every night after dinner. So we had dinner, and we always had some kind of a fruit. It was a tradition.

Speaker #0
So I’m not hearing you say anything about anything. This is now 70s and 80s, right? So no really added sugars or processed foods?

Speaker #1
or refined ultra refined grains the uh the only thing junk food i will always say to people we need to make junk food special because junk food was meant to be a treat i remember as a kid once a week if it was a good movie on tv my mother will go out and get us uh popcorn and coke that was a snack but it was something we had i would say junk food we had once or twice a week like a piece of chocolate. It was. such a big deal that we got to have it or ice cream. I remember ice cream, by the way, you couldn’t even buy it in the wintertime anyway. Ice cream was only available in the spring, summer, and by the end of the summer, then they stopped selling it. So even if you wanted it, you couldn’t do it. Chocolate, so junk food was something you ate on the weekends. It wasn’t something we ate all the time. And I think that the body can tolerate some bad food, because either way is bad. However, though, I was looking at it actually recently. If you look at a Greek chocolate and compare the ingredients to a chocolate that’s made here, the Greek chocolate, I think it was like five or six ingredients. I don’t remember all the ingredients, but it was five or six. Look at like a Hershey’s chocolate. Here’s like a thing like 10, 15 ingredients. Why?

Speaker #0
It’s not even chocolate.

Speaker #1
Wow, yeah.

Speaker #0
It’s like all sugar. I mean, it’s like really not. I don’t even know if you could classify Hershey’s like as chocolate. even though they can call it chocolate.

Speaker #1
Yeah, exactly. And of course, I’m sure you know about all the Greek desserts, the baklava, the galaktoburiko, a lot. But those things were very high in sugar, but those things were only on holidays, like Christmas, Easter, like baklava was something you had around the holidays only. Easter and Christmas are our main ones, and there’s some other minor ones. But again, you end up eating it, I would say maybe four times a year. That was it. It wasn’t something that you have all the time. But again, something that has changed, even in Greece now, it’s something now it’s available all the time. Like I remember there’s a Greek sweet bread. You could only get it on Easter. It was something that even if you want to buy it, it wasn’t available. And every Easter, they used to make it. And I used to love the bread. Now you can get it whenever you want. It’s more, by the way, I call it bread is really a cake. It’s really a sweet cake. And again, it’s and I think that’s what unfortunately, even in Greece now, if you go back, they’ll go back all the time. People have become more overweight. They have the same health issues as we do here. Unfortunately, a lot of the people, they no longer live the way we used to. Oh, and I forgot to mention, I think we talked about fasting. That was another part that was part of our culture. And the fasting, by the way, just to define this. two types of fast. There’s fasting that you don’t eat. And there’s a fast that we did four times a year where you eliminated all animal products. So we’re basically strict vegans, no milk, no butter, nothing. And those fasts lasted 40 days before Easter. There was, I think, one week in June, a couple of weeks in August, and two weeks before Christmas. So notice that every quarter of the basically, we had some form of Let’s call it vegan fast, where you ate no animal products. Studies have shown that practice alone is extremely good for your health, that type of practice. And then we had a regular, like before you received communion, you had to fast for 24 hours. Oh, I forgot to mention.

Speaker #0
With no food.

Speaker #1
No food at all.

Speaker #0
Okay.

Speaker #1
And the other thing, throughout the year, you’re not allowed to eat meat on Wednesdays and Fridays. throughout the year. Although we didn’t eat the meat to begin with, that much meat to begin with, but that was part of the practice that you’re not supposed to eat meat every Wednesday and Friday. So the Wednesday and Fridays you always had vegan dishes.

Speaker #0
Okay. So let’s summarize this because it sounds like there’s two things going on. One, I mean, you said that there was almost no health issues. So is it the food itself or is it the fasting and like that, those behaviors and habits? But when food became more mainstream, like Americanized. in Greece, right? Health issues started going up.

Speaker #1
Dr. I actually think it’s a combination of the two. I think both things play a role. So I don’t want to say one or the other because I think both are important. Obviously, because the one thing that has changed the most is like for introduction of breakfast. Like in Greece, when I was there, no breakfast at all. Now, everybody eats breakfast. And that’s one of the biggest changes. And all of a sudden, we’re eating more often than we used to. I don’t want to say one is more important than the other. I think both play a role. So I think it’s a combination of, well, this is the way I put it. When you learn how to eat, in other words, how often you eat, eating slowly, mindful, stop eating when you’re satisfied with your hunger, the more forgiving your diet becomes. So in other words, it gives you a little bit more lead way to not eat the perfect food and still get away with it. Ideally, I think you’ve got to eat really good food. I do believe that less processed food. the better off you are. Like the fruits, for instance, the fruits will ripen on the tree. And guess what? A lot of them were bruised. Nothing wrong with the bruised fruit. Or nowadays, like the apple, you can even need to peel anymore because they put the wax film on it. So that’s something we didn’t do in Greece because nobody worried about, oh, the apple has a little bruise that I’m not going to buy. Nowadays, they go so much about the way that the food looks instead of Is it good for you?

Speaker #0
Living in that time and just being in the lifestyle of not eating breakfast. And it sounds like only eating when you’re hungry.

Speaker #1
Yes.

Speaker #0
Right. Physical hunger versus like emotional reasons, slowing down, eating mindfully. I mean, that all work in that environment. So I know one of your quotes, you have it on your website is. Weight loss has less to do with what you eat and more to do with how you eat. Here in the United States, with our busy lifestyles, and we’re chronically stressed, and we’re going, going, going, and how does that work? I mean, is this something that you still prescribe?

Speaker #1
Yes. That’s a good question. Actually, it works extremely well. You know why? Because number one, I teach my clients to eat less often, which means if you eat less often, And you have to worry about, in other words, if you eat. breakfast lunch and dinner snacks in between and you want to eat healthy that means three or four or five times a day you have to worry about what to eat if you’re eating only twice a day well it’s only two times a day that you have to worry about making a better choice so you automatically eliminate like for instance a lot of my clients say oh thank god since i start eating breakfast now i have more time in the morning to get up more relaxed i have to worry about eating healthy breakfast and then run and a lot of them all of a sudden started walking in the morning because all of a sudden they have and an extra five or ten minutes because I don’t have to worry about eating the breakfast. So I’m finding actually people have more time by learning how to eat and also saves the money on their food bill. Because a lot of people say, well, you know, eating healthy is expensive. I’m like, well, it could be. But if you’re eating less often and you’re eating only two times, well, you can spend more of your budget on buying healthier food. Because you only eat twice instead of eating three or four times. You see what I mean?

Speaker #0
I understand what you’re saying. But I also feel like if you skip breakfast, I’m not a fan of it. I can’t make it past like 30 minutes in the morning. I need to like fuel myself with something. But I also, I feel that if you skip meals, you’re skipping opportunities to nourish yourself. It’s not just about like losing weight. for me, isn’t just about lessening your calories. I mean, right. We know that you can just reduce calories and lose weight, but you have to make your food really count that. I mean, you have to be really mindful about what you are eating for your health.

Speaker #1
Not just,

Speaker #0
it’s not just, you know, in, in my world, it’s not just about weight loss for the sake of losing weight. I want people to be as healthy as possible. So if you skip a meal, you’re missing an opportunity to add in really healthy nutrients into your diet. I totally get though what you’re saying about the breakfast, lunch, dinner, and two snacks a day and the constant worrying about food and constantly worrying about, am I going to be hungry? You know, like that’s an American thing, you know, that like our kids are going to be hungry. We have to over, you go to the soccer game and there’s like tons of snacks and it’s like, crazy you know it gets out of control so i don’t believe in that butI have my opinions on skipping entire meals, but it sounds like you, I mean, this is how you were raised and it was working. And so that’s why I’m just trying to get to the bottom. Like, is it the food or is it these habits or both?

Speaker #1
It’s both. I mean, obviously, there’s other aspects of our lifestyle that I think makes a big difference. In other words, low stress. We had a very low laid back attitude. We didn’t let things get to us. You know what I mean? Nowadays, people stress over things that shouldn’t be stressing. So we had more of a laid-back attitude. Honestly, sometimes even today, they still have a much laid-back attitude than we do here. And sometimes when I go to Greece, I still have to kind of, like, I’ll give you an example really quick. We set out to go out for dinner with my cousins. Okay? We told them, 9 o’clock, meet you at dinner. Great. They show up at 10 o’clock. Not even, I’m sorry, I’m running late. Nothing. Let’s stand our shirt up. It’s not a big deal. It’s not like, no. Things are real.

Speaker #0
I would never work here.

Speaker #1
I know. That’s why I don’t suggest. But I also agree with what you said before. Also, I look at weight loss as a side effect of taking care of your health. It’s a side effect. It’s not what we look. To me, if you do the right things, weight should come off. Because to me, there’s ways to lose weight that are extremely unhealthy. That doesn’t work either. To me, it’s like whatever you do to take care of your health. And I look at the weight loss as a natural side effect of taking care of your health. And that’s the way I also do. So I agree with you 100% that weight loss is a side effect I’m looking for by taking care of your health. But I found that applying what I learned in Greece here actually, in a way, works really well. And I do find that… people can still get good nutrition with their two meals. They still get enough of good nutrients that keeps them in really good shape. But the, and again, if you look at other healthy regions around the world, they pretty much eat the same way as we do. Because remember, I took nutrition here too. And I remember in school, I learned about breakfast, most important meal of the day. it contradicted my upbringing. And that’s when I started researching. And then if you really look at breakfast studies that are paid by cereal companies, and I think the reason too much conflicting information in our industry is because too many special interests pushing their products. And I think, I would say even myself, the first thing used in the industry, I was as confused as everybody else because I kept reading things that completely contradicted each other. And I’m like, well, What would be a good example to follow? Well, let’s look at healthy regions. And that’s when I’m like, wait a minute, I was raised in one. Because, you know, when you’re young, you don’t think that way. And now in the rest of history, and that’s where I started discovering this five simple habits. Oh, before I was saying before, but the low stress, I think, is also very important. Controlling our stress, I think that’s killing us. Also exercise, obviously, I think we all can agree on. But what I’ve done with exercising is that I… incorporated into my day in small increments. Like in Greece, there was no gym, but because of everyday life, we walked everywhere, we lifted things, but it wasn’t a workout. It was part of our life. And I tried to incorporate even for myself and to my clients the same way, incorporate the exercise into your life. So it becomes part of the routine, like brushing your teeth or combing your hair. You don’t have to think about it. Just part of your morning routine or afternoon routine or before going home routine.

Speaker #0
Yeah, I mean… The breakfast thing, I agree with you. I don’t think that anyone should force themselves to eat, you know, if they’re not hungry. I just also, but on the flip side, I don’t feel like you should restrict yourself if you feel hungry.

Speaker #1
Yes.

Speaker #0
And you’re, you know, and we’re getting some information about just not eating breakfast and intermittent fasting and, you know, and like it’s healthier because I can’t live without breakfast. I literally, I’m not a human being until I have breakfast. So I know it works for me. And I think that that’s my bigger point too, is that everyone should eat in the way that works for them. I mean, I’m a big fan of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I rarely do I snack because I don’t need to. I don’t feel, you know, I’m not pressured to or feel like I have to. I just, this is what works well for me. And I think everyone should do what works the best for them. right because then it turns into a diet and then there’s like strict rules and and i guess for my clients and myself i’m trying to get away from that you know keeping like strict rules

Speaker #1
Yeah, rules backfire usually.

Speaker #0
Yeah. I mean, and then I know like, you know, with stress and then, you know, even exercising, it would be great. Yeah. Moving, just all moving, you know, we’re so sedentary. Most of us, you know, are sitting in chairs all day long and, and then maybe you have to go to the gym and if you can’t make it to the gym, then there’s no exercising to be done. And so I agree with you with the just moving as much as you can.

Speaker #1
and yeah it’s a lot of little things that we can all do like you know, every day, like, you know, you can do some squats, you can do some pushups against the wall. There’s a lot of little things that you can add, like, you know, between clients and that have five minutes. Well, those five minutes, instead of just sitting there looking at my TikTok videos, well, you can do some pushups. You know what I mean? We all have two and three and four minutes between things that we waste on social media. Nothing wrong with social media once in a while, obviously, but we waste too much of our time. And to me, there’s so much little time that we can recover in every day that we can make, that we can use that in more productive ways.

Speaker #0
Yeah, exactly. I totally agree. I mean, we’re, we start talking about this stuff, our stress levels and the social media, we’re like, ah, we’re doomed. But, but I mean, we have to make our choices, right? We have to be mindful of staying off of social media or the 24 seven news getting sucked into that. And yeah, so there’s a lot that we. can do and a lot that we can learn from from the places you know like places in the mediterranean and that lifestyle of just slowing down and hopefully where you’re from doesn’t totally adopt

Speaker #1
the american lifestyle it’s funny though because when i go back to greece uh and i go often a lot of my friends they ask well what’s the latest on diet and nutrition and everything She goes, guys, talk to your grandparents. Talk to your grandparents. They already know the solution. But back to what we were talking about before, adapting things. And I think that’s another area that, unfortunately, the industry, I think they’ve taken the wrong approach. What I tell my clients is that identify one healthy behavior that you like to adapt into your life. Adapt into your life. Make it part of your life. Then identify another healthy behavior. And even myself today, I’m always looking. for things I can adapt into my life to make me even healthier. But I do one at a time. Instead of trying to change all your bad eating habits at once, which we all know that doesn’t work because you create so much discomfort that you’re going to quit. Instead is apply one habit at a time. Find something that works for you that you would like, add it to your life, make it part of your routine, overcoming the obstacles of getting in your way of adapting that habit to your life. Once you’ve done it, go to the next habit, go to the next habit. You start them. Let’s say you’re making one healthy change every month, just one. By the end of the year, you’re going to have 12 changes. And you know what difference that could make? And that’s the way that I like to advise my clients to adopt new habits. Don’t change everything at once because it doesn’t work. But unfortunately, we are a society that wants change by tomorrow.

Speaker #0
Oh, yeah. We want quick gratification.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
But we have to learn to slow down a little bit and just take it one step at a time.

Speaker #1
People that want fast results. I always tell people, losing weight and getting in shape by changing one habit at a time, it only seems slow. Because in reality, it’s the fastest way to lose weight because you only have to do it once. You know, you go through it once and you change the way you behave because you change behaviors. You have to do it again. The fast way, in most cases, is the slowest way because you have to keep losing the same weight over and over again every year.

Speaker #0
That’s a really good point, right? And so, right, learn the good habits. then you only have to do it once. You don’t have to keep sliding back going and going in a hamster wheel of doing it over and over because that’s really defeating and frustrating. So I think to wrap this up, I’ve heard a lot. There’s the food component, right?

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
Eating like a Mediterranean diet, I think all good, all great. And then there’s these other habits that might just take some practice but have clearly been shown to work. I mean, just Thank you. practicing eating for physical reasons, not emotional reasons. Most of the time. Most of the time, right.

Speaker #1
That’s how you’re crazy.

Speaker #0
Slowing down your eating, being more mindful and, you know, taking your time to eat, getting off of our computers and social media and everything while we’re eating. Now, you mentioned, I said this in your bio, you have these five ancient secrets. So why don’t we wrap up and just tell me what those five ancient secrets are.

Speaker #1
The five habits that I tell my clients to develop is learn to eat out of true hunger. Most of the time, mostly again, I’m a realist. Learn to eat slowly and mindfully. OK, learn to stop eating when you’ve satisfied your hunger. Learn, treat junk food special. Junk food, it was meant to be a treat. That’s something that you have every single day of the week. OK, and the last one is to me is learn to eat a lot more fruits and vegetables. And last, meat and processed product. Again, I’m not a vegan, by the way. I like my steaks. But I think we eat way too much meat. We don’t need as much meat as they try to push. And to me, if you look at all healthy regions, those five things, they all have in common. So I didn’t come up with them myself. I just noticed that that’s what they all have in common.

Speaker #0
Yeah. Well, it’s like if you read the book, The Blue Zones, right? They do have things. I mean, they. all eat different foods, but they’re all, but there is a lot of commonalities in the proportions of what they’re eating, the nutrients that they’re eating and, and then the behaviors most, most importantly. Well, Savras, thank you so much for having me on just the, the how part and, you know, and, and educating people on the what to eat. I think that’s, you know, will be super helpful. And How do people work with you and how can they get in touch with you? And I know you’re pretty close by to me. We discovered that you’re a few towns away from me.

Speaker #1
Yeah, no, I do online coaching. Obviously, most people do not live where I am in Danbury, Connecticut, but they can go on to my website, thepracticalfitnesscoach.com, and they can get all the information about how they can contact me. I do offer a free discovery call for anybody that’s interested. They can go on the website. and they can sign up for it. And, you know, I have a lot of information about how I work and how I help people develop these five habits.

Speaker #0
Okay, sounds fantastic. I will put all those links in the show notes so people can find you and reach out to you. And thank you so much. That was a great conversation on the Mediterranean way of eating. Appreciate it.

Speaker #1
Thank you.

Speaker #0
And as always, if you loved this podcast, please consider gifting me with a five-star review. It is so helpful for me to get the word out on real eating, our real bodies, and real food stories. Thank you so much and have a great week. Bye for now.