For many people, nutrition is a difficult thing to break down. With all of the proposed “miracle diets” and the “unbelievable weight loss pills”, it’s a difficult world to figure out who is actually out to help you and who is out to make money off of you. That is where this article comes in: no matter what diet you choose, or what pill you decide to take, this article has nine hard-and-fast rules for nutrition that stand the test of time…and revolving diets.
Water Intake
Your water intake is one of the most important things with any diet or lifestyle choice. Not taking in enough water for the short-term run can mean that your performance deteriorates, but, in the long run, it can evolve into issues such as dehydration, heat-stroke, muscle cramping, and loss of memory. While the rule of eight glasses a day has been proven time and time again to be less and less accurate, whenever you find yourself thirsty, the drink you need to be reaching for is water. It helps curb your appetite, it hydrates your multi-functioning organs, it helps rejuvenate your skin, and it helps flush out any sort of toxins that your body might be holding on to. Make sure you that you keep taking in your water.
Consider Eating Less Meat
Now, I am not insisting that you throw out every ounce of meat in your house now and immediately start in on a diet of legumes and vegetables, however, people have a tendency to prefer steaks and chicken legs over things like salmon and shrimp. Fish have healthy fats, such as omega 3’s, that do not regularly make it into our diet because we usually prefer a nice, juicy steak. The next time you go out to eat, try swapping that 16 oz sweating slab of beef with a nice 6 oz peppered salmon. Your body will thank you for the nutrients, especially since they are known to help reduce your waist circumference, help counteract against bloating, and help lower triglyceride levels.
Make Your Plate Colorful
If you struggle at home with what might be viable to put together for a healthy dinner, take this rule into account: make your entire dinner table colorful. No, I am not talking about putting yellow mustard and red ketchup on the table. I am talking about making the food in your serving dishes colorful: red and yellow peppers, orange and green melons, a nice white or dark meat, some leafy green vegetable, and maybe even some bright red beets. Those kinds of colorful nutrients that find their way into the pigments of these fruits and vegetables fuel your body with all of the right things that it needs. Your kidneys won’t find what they are looking for in the colors of that greasy slice of pizza, and your heart will not find what it needs buried beneath the colors of that hash brown casserole. Make your table, and your plate, as colorful as you can get it, and you will never be able to go wrong.
Use Your Spices!
Spicing up your food not only has metabolism-boosting tendencies, but there are studies being cultivated right now that are looking at the capabilities of certain spices, like capsaicin, to have cancer-treating and cancer-fighting agents. Not only that, but capsaicin is also used in treatments for arthritis and pain-causing inflictions, because the endorphin rush that your body produces because of the heat is in reaction because they heat is triggered in your body as pain.
Therefore, the endorphin rush that happens to counteract it does not just help the affected area, it helps the entity of your body because it is rushing through your system attacking all of your firing pain receptors to try and keep it at bay. Spicing up your food not only has metabolic benefits, it has medical benefits as well.
Stop Demonizing Individual Foods
All of these “miracle diets” want to put on display a particular food or ingredient that they propose is “the cause of all of your suffering.” Do not buy into it. Always try to follow natural methods. Example lose weight fast in 2 weeks. It is habits that get you to a particular place with your weight or your lifestyle, not just one particular food. At one point in time, it was proclaimed on the media that the main source of obesity was the calories that we drank, and that is when we saw a whopping 30% drop in revenue in the fruit juice market as well as “the diet soda boom.” And guess what?
Obesity continued to rise. After that, it was processed breads, and we saw a massive tank of 18% in the market of bread and pasta products on the shelves and a massive uptick to the tune of 21% in healthy foods like quinoa and cauliflower as bread and rice replacements. But, guess what? Obesity continued to steadily rise. It is not any one particular thing that you eat or do. It is the lifestyle that you lead, which is a combination of what you eat, how much you sleep, your mental health, and what you do.
If a diet proclaims that any one particular food has gotten you to a certain point, you can pass it on. Stick to looking at diets like the hCG low calorie diet that do not demonize food, but rather teach you through healthy supplements how to clock your intake of particular foods.
Calories Are More Important When You Are Out
At home, it is easy to clock your calories. You can turn over every bottle, can, and box to see the nutrition information, you know what you are cooking your own food in, and you are in charge of how much seasoning you use on everything you put on your plate. However, eating out is a different story. Here, you have no idea how much butter they put on that slice of bread or what kind of oil they used to pan-sear that luscious steak. You do not know how much salt they sprinkled on those steamed broccoli spears.
Taking a look at the restaurant’s healthy menu and asking questions about what your food is cooked in could save you a serious amount of calories. On average, a meal that you cook in your own home, with seconds, will cost you about 800 calories. Eating out, the average meal is around 1200 calories. 1200 calories! It pays to ask what your food is being cooked in, and it pays even more to go straight for their healthy menu and take a look at their lighter options. If you need a little bit of help with your calories, look into a weight loss pill like Phen375. It will help keep your appetite down and give you the energy to help make better choices by staving off your hunger pains.
Do Not Fret About Treating Yourself
Sometimes the way to keep cravings in check is to give yourself a small portion every day of what you really want. Part of counting your calories is being meticulous about what you cook with, and part of calorie counting is understanding that everything is just fine for you in moderation. Are you craving ice cream? Get you a scoop and put it in a small bowl! Shake a few sprinkles on it! Craving a cooke? Grab yourself one out of the jar. The problem is when you decide on four scoops instead of one and you decide to eat an entire sleeve of cookies instead of only three. Treat yourself to what you want, just stay within the serving size.
Watch Your Plate Size!
If you struggle with figuring out portion sizes, here is a good trick: eat off of a salad plate instead of a dinner plate. Filling up a salad plate with the food you have cooked it going to yield a lower overall intake of food than if you were to fill up a dinner plate and stuff yourself full. Part of it is a self-control game, and part of it is a mental game. If your mind sees a full plate, it is going to forgo seconds because of your prior eating habits. Use your own mind games for your benefit!
Do Not Punish Yourself
If you fall off of the wagon, or shoot above your caloric intake goal for the day, don’t be so hard on yourself. Don’t punish yourself by forgoing your favorite snack for the week or going on an extra-long run. You are trying to cultivate healthy relationships with food and exercise, not bad ones. Living a healthy lifestyle is not a punishment, so do not treat it like one. Instead, treat it like every other endeavor: if you fall down on day, sleep it off and get back up and keep going.
Now that you have these 9 wonderful tips for helping you with your nutrition, go out and find the eating lifestyle that is right for you! Whether you decide to drop meat altogether, invest in a high protein diet, or decide to add many more leafy vegetables than before to your diet, any improvement is better than none. Use these tips to guide you if you feel lost, and you will never be able to go wrong.
Author Bio
Gracy Liura is a dedicated and qualified nutritionist with over six years of experience i the Indian food industry, currently blogging at Besthcgdropswebsite.com. She has earned a MSc degree in Human Nutrition at Chinmaya degree College (BHEL) in Haridwar, Uttarakhand.
You can contact her any time you’d want if you’ve got any questions regarding her guest posts.
Ken Weiss is a health blogger who is passionate about natural and holistic cures for men’s health issues. He is the founder of menshealthcures.com
Great read! I love how you said we should stop demonizing certain foods. These days people are just so quick to say that a certain food is bad because they read it somewhere. :(