Eating to Fuel Your Body

Healthy Gourmet had the pleasure of sitting down for a Healthy Chat with Patty Martin-Stewart, registered and licensed dietitian, and Founder of Sugar Land Nutrition, in Sugar Land, TX. Patty helps her clients lose weight, get the nutrition they have been lacking, and maintain healthy lifestyles by focusing on food and diet.

At Patty’s practice in Sugar Land, each client’s health is monitored on an individual level from the ground up. Patty starts by figuring out her patient’s resting metabolic rate. Basically, that is the energy required to keep your body functioning while resting. So if your work requires you to sit in an office, or in a car all day, then you will not expend as much energy, and your caloric intake should reflect that. Patty goes in-depth with her clients to figure out what foods best fit their lifestyle and develops diets that will ensure they get their daily nutritional requirements.

It’s all about “eating to fuel your body.” And we’re sure Patty agrees that if we can fuel the body with great tasting food, that’s even better. As you will hear in the video below, Patty’s Cajun background means she does go for “that real stuff” every now and then, but moderating these meals and sticking to special occasions is key to maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Healthy Chat with Patty Martin-Stewart

https://youtu.be/rDbbj5c4EL4

Patty Martin-Stewart
Founder of Sugar Land Nutrition
Registered and Licensed Dietitian

Patty Martin-Stewart: My name is Patty Martin-Stewart and I’m a registered dietician nutritionist and I have been in private practice for about 12 years.

HG: What makes you approach to achieving a healthy diet different?

Patty Martin-Stewart: Resting metabolic rate is the amount of calories your body will burn for like a 24-hour period, just you sitting there, not doing anything, just to keep your heart pumping, keep your organs functioning, you are burning calories. Okay, so we figure that out with our clients and then from there we figure out an activity factor and we add that on and then also you have the calories you burn from exercise so that’s added in the equation and from there we instruct on how to, you know eat for everyday living.

HG: What are some crazy diet myths that your clients have brought you?

Patty Martin-Stewart: A lot of people they think they, you know, they got to be like no carbs but it’s like yes you do want any have carbs. You want to select the best source of it and about the right amount, and of course, you want to combine that with a good source of protein and healthy fat source. People who get these ideas weird ideas because of the marketing. It really makes them feel like, okay that’s me, like that’s just for me, and that’s what’s gonna solve a problem and it’s gonna, you know, be a quick fix. It shows that you lost weight, but you see those people, they regain and they even get fatter because they lost the lean muscle that was burning calories for them. So that’s why you get in that rut of just trying all these different diets that are just making you fatter.

Eating to fuel your body is really what you gotta learn how to do.

HG: Do you have a diet philosophy?

Patty Martin-Stewart: What I believe in is what I teach my client, as far as, you know, come up with meals that are gonna give me those vitamins and minerals and nutrients because you know you’re not gonna get it out of, you know, processed foods packaged foods. Like I said I would love to see them cook you know, not so simple for a lot of people but if you can have a source where you can, you know, say that hey I’m eating very well here, it’s tasty it’s convenient, they don’t want to take that time to cook and clean when they’re, you know, busy professionals. Eating to fuel your body is really what you gotta learn how to do.

HG: What is your favorite meal?

Patty Martin-Stewart: I’m Cajun so I will eat that real stuff, you know, that it’s like a once in a year type meal, some meals are once-a-year-type meals but you know, majority the time I am eating pretty clean,  I would say I eat just about everything I want but what I want is something good mostly.

We at Healthy Gourmet have to agree with Patty. We love as she put it, “real food” and that’s what we crave (most of the time… I’m looking at you chocolate chip cookies calling from a nearby counter). Healthy Gourmet recipes are carefully created with the intention of using food to fuel your body. If you think that sounds a bit cold or overly scientific, you may be right. We know there is much more to eating than just charging up our body with the energy it needs, eating needs to be enjoyable, and sometimes adventurous. Nutritional food needs to taste great so one does not fall prey to the siren’s call of processed, overly salty, or sickly-sweet junk food. Healthy Gourmet’s prepared meals not only fuel your body, they also taste delicious. If you’ve tried eating diet food or sticking to a raw-only diet, you know that if your “fuel” is not tasty, its hard to maintain a consistent healthy diet. And as Patty touched on, finding a consistent source of nutrition is key to long-term healthy living.