How To

A HEALTHY EATING LIFESTYLE

Healthy diet practice starts at infancy, when a mother breastfeed her baby. This improve the child’s growth and development.

Cultivating the habit of eating healthy, helps to prevent malnutrition and diseases like stroke, obesity, underweight, cancer and so on.

Modernization, change in people’s lifestyle and the increased production of processed foods have tampered with the dietary pattern (WHO 2020, healthy diet). People now eat foods with high energy, fats and sugars contents but less of vegetables and fruits.

Recommended healthy diets may vary depending on age, gender or lifestyle of an individual as well as other factors, yet the basic principles of healthy diet remains the same.

The big question is what are involved in healthy eating? How can we eat healthy? Here are some recommendations:

Add Vegetables and Fruits to your diet. Even elementary school told us the importance of vegetables and fruits. These two contain lots of vitamins and minerals which not only fight diseases but also helps us in maintaining healthy weight (it keeps one full, that you don’t feel the urge to eat).
Reduce your consumption of processed foods. Pre-prepared meals or processed foods are those foods whose original forms have been altered, the main nutrients in such foods have been removed and replaced with things like sugar and salt (most people prefer these foods because they are easy to prepare) examples are cookies, noodles, hot dog, chips and lot of others.

However, there are foods that are minimally processed, that is, they were slightly altered, they still have most of their natural essential nutrients and contains little additives. If you must eat a processed food, go for the minimally processed ones. Examples are cheese, milk, packaged salad and others.

Consume proteins. Foods classified as such are known as body building foods. They help repair worn out tissues and help in maintaining the muscles and bones. Fish, eggs, legumes, poultry, milk and so on are in this class of food.

If you don’t like them, start developing a likeness for them if you want to start eating

healthy.

Take lots of water. Make water your preferred drink instead of consuming sugary drinks like energy drink, soft drinks and fruit drinks. They contain a lot of sugar and can cause weight gain.

You might be wondering why it is not advisable to consume fruit drinks. You should know that fruit drinks, though they contain some benefits of fruits, they also contain more sugar than the normal fruit.

So fruit juice should never be an alternative to whole fruit.

Learn to cook your own food. This habit would not only help you save money, you’ll also be able to know exactly what you are eating. Since you made it yourself, you won’t have any reason to worry about hidden or unhealthy ingredients or even to worry about the environment the food was prepared.
Practice a healthier cooking method. There are many healthy cooking methods to adapt, so do not fry or grill your food. Frying or grilling your fish or meat poses potential dangers to your health.

Boiling, simmering, roasting and stewing are some of the healthy cooking methods. If you must grill or fry, do it sparingly.

Exercise whenever you can. Good diet and exercise go hand in hand. It not only strengthen your muscle, it also help in weight loss, reduce feelings of stress, anxiety and depression, it improves ones mood also. So, if you can’t hit the gym, take a walk.
Get a good night sleep. Lack of sleep endangers the human body. It affects concentration, productivity, immune function and so on. It is important to get adequate amount of good sleep.

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While eating, eat slowly and chew more as it may help you eat less and consequently, aids weight control.

Having gone through all these and deciding to start eating healthy, do not completely or totally change your diet at once. It might be destructive.