Health & Fitness Journey–Part B

Food Habit / Dietary System

• Eating Balanced Diet

A varied diet comprises a variety of foods. To ensure your body gets the nutrients it needs and improves your overall health, all you have to do is to have a balanced diet full of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats.

Benefits:

Internal Support: A balanced diet should include a variety of dietary groups, such as carbs, proteins, healthy fats, and vitamins and minerals. This supports the body in performing vital functions such as energy creation, tissue healing, and immune system management.

Disease Prevention: Eating a balanced diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats helps reduce the risk of chronic conditions like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and certain cancers. It also promotes better weight management and supports overall longevity.

Eating a balanced diet can help to improve energy levels, mental clarity, and overall well-being.

Strategies:

Cooking at home: This is the most important aspect of getting a balanced diet. A “balanced” diet can never comprise processed and fast/junk food. To get a balanced diet, you should eat home-cooked foods with all the necessary nutrients and healthful ingredients.

Planning meals ahead: Keeping up with a balanced diet might be challenging due to various reasons like busy schedules or lack of knowledge. To overcome these hurdles, planning meals ahead is one of the solutions.

Make Healthy Substitution: Depending on your budget, the foods you have access to, and the needs of your family, making healthy substitutions like choosing whole grains over refined grains and lean proteins can make a big difference in the quality of your diet.

Avoid some unhealthy constituents: Some food constituents are always harmful such as sugar, oil, salt, etc. Try as much as possible to avoid eating all of these things. If you have to eat or drink something that has been processed, try to avoid things with too many harmful ingredients.

Diversity in food Intake: To Avoid taking a particular type of item continuously, try diverse menu items. Include a variety of food groups: consume a couple of fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean proteins (like chicken, fish, and beans), and healthy fats (found in avocados, nuts, olive oil, etc.). This ensures that you are getting a broad spectrum of essential nutrients.

Include some fresh fruits and vegetables in your daily intake: Fruits and vegetables are primary sources of vitamins and minerals. Try to circulate different types of fruits and vegetables in your routine so you won’t miss any essential vitamins and minerals.

Incorporate healthy snacks: Don’t consider breakfast, lunch, or dinner exclusively for a healthy balanced diet. Also, think about the snacks you consume frequently. Adding healthy snacks to your daily routine can help you nourish your body.

Consult a nutritionist: Consult a nutritionist or dietitian to receive personalized diet guidance based on your health goals and dietary preferences. In exceptional circumstances like pregnancy, diabetes, heart disease, etc., this is an absolute necessity.

Enjoy the food: A balanced diet is not about strict restrictions; it’s about feeling great, having more energy, and improving your health. Try to get enjoyment as much as possible from a healthy balanced menu, avoiding junk foods or processed foods. To that end, switching up the menu choices whenever possible is helpful.

Along with a balanced menu, portion control is another vital part of a healthy diet. We’ll talk more about this below.

Practising Portion Control

Portion control is the process of regulating how much food is eaten in a single dish while maintaining a balance between the recommended serving sizes and the energy needs of a healthy diet.

Controlling your portions doesn’t mean giving up your favorite foods. Instead, it means knowing how much food your body needs to work well. It is an essential part of a successful health and fitness journey. Eating the right amount of food helps you maintain a healthy weight, keep your energy up, and ensure your body gets all the nutrients it needs.

Benefits:

Balanced Caloric Intake: Portion control helps prevent overeating and ensures you consume appropriate calories for your body’s needs. It promotes energy balance, which is crucial for weight management.

Healthy Eating Habits: Controlling portion sizes makes you more likely to choose foods high in nutrients and less likely to eat too many unhealthy, high-calorie foods. It helps you eat a balanced diet full of essential nutrients.

Improved digestion and more energy: When you control your portions well, you feel satisfied after meals, you don’t feel too full or too hungry, and you have consistent energy throughout the day.

Strategies:

Strategies to practice portion control can vary, but some effective methods include:

Use Smaller Plates, Bowls, and Spoons: Choose small dishware to create the illusion of a larger portion. Researchers have found that using smaller plates can help people eat less food.

Measure out servings: Determine the appropriate portions for the various food groups, and then practice measuring them. Use measuring cups, a food scale, or other tools to get the correct quantity of food for your daily needs. Always try to limit yourself within the calorific value appropriate for you.

Fill Half Your Plate with Vegetables: Give non-starchy vegetables top priority because they contain fewer calories and essential nutrients. Fill at least half of your plate with a variety of colorful vegetables.

Avoid Eating Directly from Packages: Everyone has a natural tendency to finish the packet when eating directly from the container. You may prevent yourself from overeating by putting the food in a bowl, sharing it with others, or eating only a portion.

Track your food: Keep track of your daily food intake so that the day’s total calorie intake remains within the limit. Also, nutrients such as proteins, minerals, and vitamin intake should be maintained so you do not feel sick due to low energy or surpass your limit of over-nutrition.

Avoid Mindless Eating: Minimize distractions such as watching TV or working while eating. Instead, pay attention to the food and enjoy it so you don’t eat more than you need.

Listen to Your Body’s Hunger and Fullness Signals: Eat slowly and pay attention to your body’s signals of hunger and fullness. Stop eating when you feel satisfied but not overly full.

By practicing portion control and implementing a set of strategies, you can develop healthier eating habits, manage your caloric intake, and support your overall well-being.

• Limiting Processed Foods

Processed foods are defined as food items that have been refined using various techniques and contain additional ingredients, including preservatives, artificial flavors, colors, and other chemical additions.

Limiting processed foods is an excellent way to improve your health and well-being. Processed foods are full of sugar, salt, and fats that can hurt your fitness and health goals. To keep your health and fitness at their best, you should limit how much processed food you take. This will prompt you to eat healthier with more energizing foods, which will help you reach your goals.

Benefits:

The benefits of limiting processed foods are numerous.

Nutritional Quality: During refining, important nutrients and fiber are often removed from processed foods. By limiting these foods, you can focus on whole foods high in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

Reduced Health Risks: Many processed foods have a lot of added sugars, unhealthy fats, and sodium, which can lead to weight gain, heart disease, diabetes, and other long-term health problems. You can lower your risk of these diseases by choosing minimally processed options.

Improve overall Fitness: It includes improved weight management, better digestion, and increased energy.

Better Feeling: When processed foods are controlled successfully, you will feel satisfied after meals, don’t feel too full or hungry, and have consistent energy throughout the day.

Strategies:

Reading Food Label: Try reading food labels when purchasing food in a package. Make it a habit to buy food items following your body’s needs, not because of attractive labels or advertisements but the ingredients inside them.

Only purchase processed foods with studying labels: Familiarize yourself with food labels and ingredient lists. Identify the ingredients in the labels that you do not recognize. Choose products with shorter lists of ingredients and stay away from those with added sugar, trans fats, and artificial ingredients.

Cook at Home: Cook your meals from scratch using whole and unprocessed ingredients. This way, you can choose what goes into your body and ensure it is healthy and good for you.

Prioritize Whole Foods: Focus on eating whole foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and legumes. These whole foods are full of healthy nutrients and are a better choice than processed foods.

Prepare Snacks Ahead of Time: Plan and make healthy snacks like cut-up fruits and veggies, homemade granola bars, or yogurt with natural toppings ahead of time. This keeps you from being tempted to eat easy but unhealthy processed snacks.

Avoid Convenience of Processed Foods: We shouldn’t give in to the temptation to eat processed foods just because they are easy to find and convenient. Eating home-cooked meals or fresh produce leads to a lifestyle that is better for your health and fitness in the long run.

By actively cutting back on processed foods and using these suggestions, you can focus on whole, nutrient-dense foods and make giant steps toward a healthier, more balanced diet.

• Practicing Mindful Eating

Mindful eating is the practice of paying attention to the present moment while you eat, focusing on your senses, and becoming more aware of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction.

Mindful eating is an integral part of any health and fitness journey. It means paying attention to what you eat, how much you eat, and why you eat. Instead of focusing on taste and other things, it’s more important to consider the foods you eat and ensure you’re eating healthy foods that will fuel your body. Also, it’s essential to watch the size of your portions and learn to eat slowly and enjoy each bite.

Benefits:

Mindful eating can help your physical and mental health in several ways:

Enhanced Awareness: Mindful eating makes you more aware of your body’s hunger and fullness signals, which enables you to make better food choices and avoid overeating. It helps you feel more connected to the eating experience and builds a good relationship with food.

Improved Digestion: Mindful eating means taking your time and enjoying each bite. This makes digestion and nutrient absorption better. It can help relieve stomach pain and make sure nutrients are used in the best way possible.

Reduce Stress: Mindful eating can help reduce stress, keep emotions in check, and make you more satisfied. All of these things lead to better eating habits and overall mental fitness.

Strategies:

Avoid Distraction: Get rid of things that could be a distraction while you eat, like the TV, your phone, or the computer. Focus on the food in front of you, enjoy the tastes and textures, and eat slowly to enjoy each bite thoroughly.

Remain inside hunger level: Rate your hunger level before eating on a scale of 1 to 10. Eat when you are only pretty hungry and quit when comfortable but not overstuffed.

Engage Your Senses: Pay attention to how your food looks, smells, feels, and tastes. Slow down and enjoy each bite. Watch how you feel after eating and how your body reacts to the food.

Encourage Appreciation: Develop a sense of thanks for the food that keeps you alive. Recognize the hardship that requires to grow the food, make the meal, and serve it.

Practice Portion Awareness: Be aware of serving sizes and give yourself the right amount. Use smaller plates and bowls to make a meal look like it has more food. The importance of Portion Control is discussed in the previous section.

You can have a better relationship with food, have better digestion, and have a more pleasant eating experience by engaging in mindful eating and adopting these practices into your daily routine.

• Maintaining Hydration

Hydration is the process of providing your body with enough fluids to perform its numerous functions, including maintaining body temperature, assisting with nutrient absorption, and supporting normal biological functioning.

You must drink enough water to keep your health and well-being at its best. Here are some reasons why it’s crucial to stay hydrated and ways to make sure you always stay hydrated:

Benefits:

Optimal Physical Performance: When you drink enough water, your physical performance, endurance, and stamina improve. It helps keep your energy up and helps your muscles work at their best when you exercise or do other physical activities.

Vital Organ Function: Hydration keeps the heart, kidneys, and brain healthy and working well. It helps keep the body’s temperature stable, keeps joints lubricated, and makes digestion easier.

Strategies:

Drink Water Regularly: Make drinking water throughout the day a habit. To stay hydrated, keep a reusable water bottle with you and sip at regular intervals.

Monitor Urine Color: Watch what your urine looks like. When you’re well-hydrated, your urine will be a pale, light yellow color; but if it’s dark, it could mean you’re not drinking enough water. As a general rule, your urine should be pale yellow or clear.

Be Mindful of Fluid Intake: Aside from water, you can also drink herbal teas, infused water, or low-sugar electrolyte drinks to stay hydrated. Eat foods with much water, like fruits and vegetables, to keep hydrated.

Consider Activity and Climate: When it’s hot outside, or you’re doing much hard work, drink more fluids to compensate for the water you lose through sweating.

Listen to Your Body’s Thirst Signals: Pay attention to your body’s signals of thirst and drink when you feel thirsty. Don’t ignore signs of thirst because they show that your body needs water.

When the body is adequately hydrated, the organs and the body as a whole work better.

• Sidestepping Fast Foods

Fast food is easy to get, ready to eat, and usually served in restaurants in a short amount of time.

Fast food has become a common part of modern diets but is terrible for your health and well-being. Here’s why it’s important to be aware of the harmful effects of these food choices and ways to cut back on them:

Benefit:

Sidestepping fast food is crucial for promoting better health because of the following:

Poor Nutritional Quality: Fast food doesn’t have the vitamins, minerals, fiber, and other good things our bodies need. Your body might not get the nutrients it needs if you overeat fast-foods.

Health Risks: When you eat fast food often, you are more likely to be overweight, have heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other long-term health problems. These foods make the metabolic process worse and cause various nutrition-related hazards.

Strategies:

Don’t Crave for Tasty Fast Foods: Be conscious of your food choices and the reasons behind them. Recognize that fast food is often driven by its taste or emotional factors. These are basically our taste habits. Our taste will automatically change if we practice choosing whole, nutrient-dense regular foods instead of fast foods.

Just Avoid Convenience: Like processed foods, we often choose fast foods because they are easy to get, quick to eat, and available everywhere. When we go to a fast-food restaurant, we get a bag of tasty, easy-to-eat food in a few minutes and then go to work. Because it’s so easy, we often eat fast food. We must avoid these as much as possible through other means we afford.

Fast foods are not ultimately cheap: We need to know how our eating habits affect our health and fitness. Even though fast food seems cheap, it ends up costing a lot. There are different health problems. We get lazy, not mentally active, fat, and ugly, leading to expensive results.

Cook Meals at Home: When you cook meals at home, you have more control over what goes into them and how they are cooked. Try making dishes using healthy ingredients.

Plan and Prepare Meals in Advance: Plan your meals and snacks for the week ahead of time. This makes you less likely to eat fast food at the last minute.

Seek Healthier Alternatives: If you really enjoy fast food or snacks, look for healthier alternatives. Find recipes for making similar foods with whole grains, lean proteins, and fresh ingredients at home.

Practice Moderation: Even though eating less fast food is important, it’s also essential to know that avoiding it ultimately may not be possible. Allow yourself these treats occasionally, but avoid them as much as possible and eat mostly healthy foods.

By recognizing the effects of fast food and using these strategies to cut back, you may improve your diet, health, and eating habits.

(Please move to Part – C for the Continuation of this topic)