Healthy Diet advices

A healthy diet is a diet that helps improve or maintain health. The quality of your diet plays a major factor in weight gain. If your diet consists of a high intake of calories, particularly from snacks & fast foods that are high in fat. In addition most of the chronic diseases are nutrition-related, including bowel cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis, stroke, and obesity.

- Energy imbalance: Energy balance is the difference between your energy consumption and your energy output. When energy input is greater than the energy output you gain weight. A gain of only 1 per year can result from an imbalance of less than 20 kcal per day….
To put on muscle, you need to run a slight positive energy balance, but if you are not doing any heavy resistance training a positive energy balance will cause you to put on fat.

- Unhealthy Food: The impacts of unhealthy food such as snacks & fast food are numerous and dangerous: Fast foods tend to be full of empty calories and lacking in nutrients. In addition they create Blood-sugar spikes: Fast foods tend to be high-GI foods, which cause people to get hungry quickly and eat more in their next meals because our brain regulates our appetite based on our blood-sugar levels.
Fast-food advertising can be misleading. Quite often a food is advertised as low fat in order to cover up for its high sugar content. Many foods advertised as low GI tend to be very high in fat. The food advertising industry takes advantage of people’s ignorance about nutrition.
Eating foods that have very few nutrients will actually cause your body to lose nutrients. The body will use its own store of nutrients to digest and absorb these foods.
Sugary beverages are also a big problem. One soft-drink can contain up to ten teaspoons of sugar. These sugary drinks contribute to obesity.

- Large Portions of food: One problem with large portions is that we are conditioned to eat whatever is on our plates. One way around this is to tell your clients at the outset to control their portions. Put a smaller amount of food on their plate in the kitchen rather than bringing it out to the table. It’s easy to have just a little more while you’re chatting away.

- Emotional Eating: Emotional eating is eating for reasons other than hunger. Many people respond to depression or stress by eating excessively. In addition most of us consume specific foods to maintain good moods. Experts estimate that 75% of overeating is caused by emotions.

Some tips to control your eating habits

- Reveal your habit patterns: Be aware of what you eat when you’re not really hungry. Over time, you will see patterns emerge that reveal negative eating patterns.

- Comfort management: Whenever you fall into emotional eating try to achieve comfort by different activities such as exercising, listening to music, read or meet a friend.

- Don’t buy unhealthy foods: Avoid having an abundance of high-calorie comfort foods in your home by simply not buying them when you do your shopping.

- Eat smartly: Try to eat at fairly regular times and don’t skip breakfast. If you’re not getting enough calories to meet your energy needs, you may be more likely to give in to emotional eating. Include foods from the basic groups in your meals and you’re more likely to feel fuller for longer time.

- Get adequate rest & exercise regularly: when your body is fit and well rested, your mood is more manageable.

- Is your hunger physical or emotional? Learn to recognize true hunger. If you ate just a an hour ago and don’t have a rumbling stomach, you’re probably not really hungry. Be aware of this and give the craving a few minutes to pass.

- Healthy Snacks: If you feel the urge to eat between meals, choose a low-calorie food or test low-fat versions of your favorite foods in order to satisfy your craving.

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