Eating healthy, although it may sound complicated, it is not complicated at all. Provided you are ready to follow the instructions of the professional dietician and start your journey towards a healthy lifestyle by eating a clean and balanced diet. It’s never too late or too early to make the decision to live a healthy life just by making small changes to your diet. Eating clean & healthy not only helps you maintain a healthy lifestyle but also aids in the prevention of chronic illness or disease, improves overall health and immune system along with making you feel better and achieve your weight & fitness goals.
A healthy and balanced diet will help in more ways than you can imagine, it would help you in preventing long-term diseases like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and many more. It can help in reducing the risk of cancers and also help in keeping your weight in check. In this blog, we will stress the importance of a healthy and clean diet and how it can benefit you. However, before we begin, we would like to mention a tiny disclaimer, all the advice and tips & tricks mentioned in this blog are more generalistic in nature, and it may vary for certain people, namely, people with certain health issues, ladies that are pregnant, and individuals with special dietary requirements (this could include food allergies). We recommend that you consult with an experienced dietitian (Click here to book your appointment) before starting your journey to a healthier life.
What’s a healthy diet?
A healthy diet is a diet that provides the right type of nutrients that helps your body to function properly. It is important for your health, to have the right intake of calories and your body is able to absorb essential nutrients when you give your body a diet consisting of food like fresh vegetables, fruits, lentils, meat, and whole grains in proper proportion.
What comes under a healthy diet?
A well-balanced diet includes a few specific food groups:
- Fruits: By saying fruits we are referring to Fresh fruits, whole fruits, and not the canned ones with syrup.
- Vegetables: Vegetables are a great source of fiber, vitamins, and minerals that are essential for your body. Vegetables like starchy vegetables, leafy greens, legumes like peas and beans, and various other vegetables like eggplant.
- Protein: Practically every cell in the human body consists of protein, making it an important part of a balanced diet. Foods like lean meat, chicken, fish, peas, beans, and legumes are a great source of protein
- Dairy: Dairy products like yogurt, low-fat milk, soy milk, and cottage cheese
- Grains: Whole grains & refined grains like oats, quinoa, barley, buckwheat, and brown rice
You will find a huge array of food options from these food groups, however, when it comes to consuming the food one has to be very careful about the quantity. The foods from all the given food groups offer your body the same amount of the key micro & macro-nutrients that will meet your needs.
Looking at the Advantages of a Healthy Diet
- Prevents infections and diseases: If you consume foods that are diverse and rich in minerals, vitamins, and other essential nutrients, your immune system is bound to get stronger and a healthy diet will help to keep several small and large diseases & illnesses like cough & cold, seasonal flu, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and stroke at bay.
- Manages your weight: We all have a goal when it comes to our weight, whilst some of us may want to lose weight, some may want to pack on a few pounds. Weight management & regulation happens to be a sore point and topic in many of our lives. Eating a healthy and balanced diet helps you to manage your weight and even maintain it.
- Good for overall growth: A healthy and well-balanced diet is very important for kids and adolescents. When your body grows it’s very important to get the essential nutrients so that the cells are rightly maintained and your body grows at the right pace. That being said, it’s not only kids that happen to benefit from a healthy and balanced diet. Individuals that plan on getting stronger, those that plan on gaining muscles and getting fitter also benefit hugely.
- Better hair and skin: A healthy diet gives an amazing effect on the way you look. Eating right and consuming the right vitamins and minerals along with other essential nutrients not only contribute to a healthy-looking skin with a “glow” but also helps you appear much younger.
Hacks for Eating healthy
Now that we have established the fact that eating healthy, clean, and having a balanced diet is important, let’s take a look at the healthy eating practices as they too have a pivotal role to play in improving your health. Let us look at some simple eating habits that you can adopt in a day to day life and should not be very hard to follow on a regular basis.
- Eat-in smaller portions: By this, we don’t mean that you starve or cut down the quantity you eat exponentially. But this is a way to trick your brain into thinking that you’ve had your fill. Helping yourself to a meal in a comparatively smaller bowl would trick your brain interestingly enough you might realize that’s all the food you required to fill yourself up.
- Snack Healthy: Fast foods are unhealthy and so are most packaged snacks, as they contain preservatives and other such ingredients that may not be suitable for consumption. But snacking is fun and we don’t want to take anything away from anyone, especially fun. However, replacing these foods with something healthier like maybe nuts, or some sort of homemade snack that doesn’t contain preservatives, and harmful fats would do wonders. A thing to note though, one must try to minimize fried snacks, because if you have taken on the challenge to get healthier, don’t let something so small ruin it.
- Do not Rush: Do not rush your meals or eat too fast. Take time off from your busy schedule to eat properly. Rushing your meal is more detrimental to your body than you may imagine. When you eat slow, your brain has the time to process the act of eating and knows exactly when you have had your fill. On the other hand, when you eat fast, your brain picks on the signal later, as a result, you end up overeating.
Now that we have established that eating clean, healthy & maintaining a balanced diet can help you in more ways than one. We must make note of the current global crisis of a deadly virus on the loose and how important it is for each of us to have a strong immune system. That being said, we wish you all the best and hope you make small lifestyle changes and stay healthy and focused!