8 Simple Ways To Eat Healthier
Many people, including the author of this article, have weakness for certain foods.
You may say "I like French fries and can't see my life without it! Continuous deprivation is not healthy." And you are right. But our body has also its disadvantage - it is not a garbage can. We eat to live, not the other way around.
Healthy eating is the answer to several modern day ailments. The key is not cutting out nutrients, but unnecessary calories, thans fats, chemicals and refined carbs. Here are some steps you may make to start eating a little healthier.
1 Eat slowly
Joy is a wonderful anti-aging remedy, so enjoy and savor your food! When you eat slowly, you taste the food more and you are satisfied with less. Eating slowly gradually reduces your appetite right from the time you start to eat. And recently Japanese researches confirmed this. They found that eating fast is strongly associated with obesity and increased body mass index (BMI).
Also it is well known fact that digestion begins in the mouth. Chewing food thoroughly promotes smooth, complete digestion.
However, people often don't think about food as a source of pleasure. It is quite common to observe people gulping down hamburgers and fries while typing on their laptops, talking on their cell phones, reading the newspaper or watching TV.
2 Control your portion size. Eat until you are sufficed, not stuffed
This is easier to achieve if you eat slowly. When you eat fast, you consume too much before you are fully aware of it. It takes the brain about 15-20 minutes to start signaling feelings of fullness, so give this time to your body. Satiety signals will begin to develop before your plate is empty and you end up eating less.
If you love food it doesn't mean you have to eat a lot of it. Get a smaller plate. Your perception of a reasonable serving size is based on the size of your plate. Large portions encourage overeating.
3 Limit processed meats
Most processed meat such as sausages, frankfurters, bacon, ham, and hot dogs are full of trans fats, sodium, and preservatives. You can find sodium nitrite, a toxic chemical, in nearly every packaged meat product imaginable. It's listed right on the label of products like bacon, breakfast sausage, beef jerky, pepperoni, sandwich meat, ham, hot dogs, and even the meats found in canned soups. This chemical is actually a color fixer, it turns meats bright red, and makes old, dead meats appear fresh and vibrant.
But if you choose to consume any processed meat products, you can reduce harmul effects from sodium nitrite by consuming antioxidants before your meal. The proven protection strategy is to consume fairly large doses of vitamins C and E before dietary exposure to sodium nitrite.
4 Red meat may be a part of a healthy diet
When chosen and cooked rightly, meat is a very good food. Red meat provides many crucial dietary nutrients, such as iron, zinc, vitamin B12 and protein.
Choose lean cuts of meat and trim any visible fat off the meat before cooking. Some researches believe the two primary culprits of harmful red meat effects are the heavy metals and toxins concentrated in the fat tissues. Lean red meat without visible fat, when consumed with a diet low in saturated fat, does not increase the blood cholesterol levels and the risk of heart disease.
5Cook at home
Home cooking provides a better control of food and noticeably reduces consumption of trans fat, sugar, salt, and numerous food additives. Commercially prepared foods like hamburgers, hot dogs, fried potatoes, chips, cakes, and crackers are probably the biggest source of trans fats in our diet. Make your own pizzas, burgers, cakes and other things you like. It takes more time, but your own health is worth it, isn't it?
6 Avoid high temperature cooking methods
Another very important thing is a cooking method. Cooking meat at high temperatures like frying and grilling produces harmful chemicals (mutagens and carcinogens) called heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Prepare meat with cooking methods that use less oil such as baking, broiling or stewing.
7 Eliminate soda drinks
There is absolutely nothing good in soda. The sooner you exclude it from your diet, the better. An average 325 ml can of soda has 10 teaspoons of sugar, 150 calories, 30 to 55 mg of caffeine, artificial food colors and sulphites. Moreover, there are no nutritionally beneficial components in soft drinks.
It is better to replace them with water, herbal tea or unsweetened fruit juice.
The soft drinks industry is the biggest user of artificial sweeteners like aspartame, acesulfame-K, saccharin. There is a fair evidence that regular consumption of soft drinks can contribute to numerous health problems such as excess weight, erosion of the gastric lining, tooth decay, metabolic syndrome. Do you really want to have such problems?
8 Self-discipline
Develop a habit of caution after a period of excess. If you eat more one day, be more careful the next day. It is better to trade off with a few lighter meals, than dieting.