Healthy Eating Tips

Healthy eating does not mean depriving yourself of the foods you love or staying unrealistically thin, but rather about developing a well-balanced, satisfying relationship with food. Your food choices can reduce your risk of illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, as well increase your energy, stabilize your weight, and boost your mood. By exploring the broad range of articles below, you’ll find help with everything from losing weight, overcoming food cravings, and eating out, to tips on buying and preparing food, managing your food budget, and devising nutrition plans to cope with or reduce the risk of specific diseases. Whatever your age, income, or living situation whether you’re preparing meals for yourself or for the whole family, you’ll find everything needed to create an enjoyable, healthy diet that works for you. You can Start slow and make changes to your eating habits over time.Trying to make your diet healthy overnight isn’t realistic or smart. Changing everything at once usually leads to cheating or giving up on your new eating plan. Make small steps, like adding a salad (full of different color vegetables) to your diet once a day or switching from butter to olive oil when cooking. As your small changes become habit, you can continue to add more healthy choices to your diet. Every change you make to improve your diet matters. You don’t have to be perfect and you don’t have to completely eliminate foods you enjoy to have a healthy diet. The long term goal is to feel good, have more energy, and reduce the risk of cancer and other diseases. Don’t let your missteps derail you, every healthy food choice you make counts. Healthy eating is about more than the food on your plate, it is also about how you think about food. Healthy eating habits can be learned and it is important to slow down and think about food as nourishment rather than just something to gulp down in between meetings or on the way to where you are going. You can improve your eating habit by 1. Eat with others whenever possible: Eating with other people has numerous social and emotional benefits particularly for children and allows you to model healthy eating habits. Eating in front of the TV or computer often leads to mindless overeating. 2. Take time to chew your food and enjoy meal times: Chew your food slowly, savoring every bite. We tend to rush though our meals, forgetting to actually taste the flavors and feel the textures of our food. Reconnect with the joy of eating. 3. Listen to your body: Ask yourself if you are really hungry, or have a glass of water to see if you are thirsty instead of hungry. During a meal, stop eating before you feel full. It actually takes a few minutes for your brain to tell your body that it has had enough food, so eat slowly. 4. Eat breakfast, and eat smaller meals throughout the day: A healthy breakfast can jumpstart your metabolism, and eating small, healthy meals throughout the day (rather than the standard three large meals) keeps your energy up and your metabolism going. 5. Avoid eating at night: Try to eat dinner earlier in the day and then fast for 14-16 hours until breakfast the next morning. Early studies suggest that this simple dietary adjustment eating only when you’re most active and giving your digestive system a long break each day may help to regulate weight. After-dinner snacks tend to be high in fat and calories so are best avoided, anyway. Finally Moderation is key, People often think of healthy eating as an all or nothing proposition, but a key foundation for any healthy diet is moderation. But what is moderation? How much is a moderate amount? That really depends on you and your overall eating habits. The goal of healthy eating is to develop a diet that you can maintain for life, not just a few weeks or months, or until you've hit your ideal weight. So try to think of moderation in terms of balance. Despite what certain fad diets would have you believe, we all need a balance of carbohydrates, protein, fat, fiber, vitamins, and minerals to sustain a healthy body. For most of us, moderation or balance means eating less than we do now. More specifically, it means eating far less of the unhealthy stuff (refined sugar, saturated fat, for example) and more of the healthy (such as fresh fruit and vegetables). But it doesn't mean eliminating the foods you love. Eating bacon for breakfast once a week, for example, could be considered moderation if you follow it with a healthy lunch and dinner but not if you follow it with a box of donuts and a sausage pizza. If you eat 100 calories of chocolate one afternoon, balance it out by deducting 100 calories from your evening meal. If you're still hungry, fill up with an extra serving of fresh vegetables. Start eating healthy today and remain healthy and happy.