5 Tips for Your Healthy Eating

Having consumed more than your fair share of sweets and savouries over the past month, you may be greeting the New Year, as always, with a need to shed a couple of pounds and trim your waistline, or with resolutions to finally lose weight. Apart from hitting the gym and/or regularly engaging in some physical activity, a healthy diet is essential in keeping your body weight within range. This however does not imply that you follow fad diets which often times do more harm than good. On the contrary, by following some basic principles, controlling what you consume needn’t be unbearable or painful. The following five tips seek to help you in adopting a healthy diet without succumbing to cravings or going long hours without food.

1. Eat small meals at regular intervals. Instead of eating three large meals a day, consume six smaller sized meals at regular intervals. Doing so causes the body’s metabolism to remain active, hence increasing the body’s rate of burning calories and thus avoiding cravings and increases in appetite.

2. Don’t skip meals. Skipping meals causes hunger cravings which eventually lead to over-eating. Since the body tends to crave sweets and salts, one ends up consuming a large amount of sugars and sodium, both of which add to the body’s store of fat. When the body thinks that it is starving, it reacts by lowering the metabolic rate and increasing appetite, leading to overfeeding.

3. Avoid High Fructose Corn Syrups (HFCS) & trans-fats. HFCS and trans-fats contribute significantly to fat storage as well as a host of other health issues. Recent studies have shown that trans-fats, in the form of hydrogenated oils and saturated fat, are the most harmful form of fat introduced into our body. They are present in deep fried foods as well as soft drinks and thus these should be avoided at all cost. HFCS are present in most sweetened products in the market such as sodas, fruit juices, ketchup, sauces, etc.

4. Eat slowly. Studies have shown that the brain takes twenty minutes to receive the signal from the stomach when the latter gets full. If you eat too fast, you end up overeating before the brain has enough time to realize that the stomach has become full.

5. Make sure you have breakfast. As is often times said, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Studies reveal that those who skip breakfast are more likely to gain weight than those who don’t. Not only does skipping breakfast deprive the body of important nutrients necessary for the rest of the day, but also leads to hunger pangs later in the day, which often times results in overeating, leading to weight gain.

Coupling these simple eating habits with some form of physical activity will help in maintaining your body weight without having to resort to crash diets. Incorporating these principles into your daily lifestyle would lead to an improvement in overall bodily health and fitness.

Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

By: Kya Grace