Why Eat Healthy?
The answer to this, simply put; humans run on food. It’s the fuel that keeps us going. Everything we eat is either helping our body or working against it. Often, it’s vital purpose is ignored as we opt out a healthy home-cooked meal for whatever’s available.
The food industry, from it’s evolution, has been capatalizing on the need for fast convenient food. They increase the shelf life of packaged goods by adding sugars, fats and salt and the expansion in food production has created an excess of inexpensive food.
Consuming these products on a regular basis over time has led to a physiological adaptation where a human’s ability to store energy as fat is now maladapted. The balance of food availability and how much energy we burn has been disrupted. Our biggest problem is the refinement and processing of the foods. We eat too much calorie dense foods and not enough nutrient dense foods.
It’s important to remember that not any one thing can be labeled as a bad ingredient as we once did with carbs, fat and sugar. Balance and moderation is key.
The first step starts with home cooking. It’s important to prepare your own meals without having the food industry do it for you. Cooking allows you to use the best ingredients, create a meal as simple or complex as you desire and allows you to enjoy it with others.
Lack of time, skill, and money can easily be used to excuse the idea of eating healthy being unattainable. Solutions to this – prep ahead, minimize the work by sharing prep tasks among the household, improve skill over time and simply do the best you can with the resources you have.
Successfully committing to healthy eating requires behavioral changes that are best faced in a step-wise approach. This lowers the chance of failure (which typically happens when trying to achieve too much too fast) and increases your ability to sustain the changes long term.
- Make 1-2 changes a week opposed to all at once
- Identify target areas – time of day, specific situations, etc. that enable bad eating habits
- Come up with a resolution to solve these areas of concern and slowly implement them in your daily life
Nutrition Basics for Healthy Eating:
Here’s what you need to know,
- Metabolism – We need to burn more energy than we intake. Eat a low calorie diet of nutrient dense food and burn more calories via exercise
- Carbs intake – stick to grains with a lower glycemic index (whole grains, unrefined)
- Protein intake – maximize veg protein intake and moderate animal based protein intake (remember veg proteins are incomplete and need to be used in combination with other foods whereas animal proteins are “complete protein sources”)
- Dietary Fats intake– moderate unsaturated fats, minimize saturated fats and eliminate trans fats
How To Make It Happen:
Create a healthy plate (50% variety of vegetables / fruit, 25% lean protein and 25% whole grains)
Take the time to sit and enjoy your meal (this may sound unimportant but it does make a difference in how you view meal time).
Don’t assume you have to go the whole nine yards (farmers markets, buying organic, etc.) to be able to eat healthy. The biggest and most important step is moving away from processed foods and towards real foods.
Tips for navigating the grocery store…
- Write a list before you go and stick to it & do not go grocery-shopping hungry; you’ll be more likely to make impulse purchases
- Stick to the perimeter of the store where all the real food is and only venture through center aisles for things like oils, legumes, rice and other healthy choices
- Avoid imperishable foods (when foods have a long shelf life, it’s a sign of over processing)
- When purchasing packaged foods, look for labels with the smallest ingredients list (5 ingredients or less and you should be able to pronounce and identify all ingredients)
When it come to nutrition labels…
- The healthiest foods don’t need nutrition labels so make these the majority of your food purchases
- For the few packaged items you purchase…
- Calories are not a good way to judge the healthiness of a food (some good foods like avocado are high in cals) but you do want to assess the serving size and compare to the allotted calories
- Dietary fiber content – more is better
- Sugars – less is better, preferably under 6 grams per serving
- Fats – saturated fats can be eaten in moderate amounts while trans fats should be avoided
- Sodium – less is better
- Vitamins and minerals can be misleading. Adding vitamins to foods does not make it healthier.
Master moderation! Eating moderate amounts of food everyday that give you pleasure and satisfy your appetite in a healthy way won’t allow subtle deviations to destabilize you. So enjoy a dessert from time to time, guilt free.