12 Second Try » Healthy Eating » Top 10 Healthy Eating Tips
Top 10 Healthy Eating Tips
Healthy Eating
Top 10 Healthy Eating Tips
Article by Steve Robison
Healthy Eating Plans
Initiating healthy meal plans does not mean planning rigid, non flexible, bland and boring meals. It’s not about starving yourself to the point of tears, or staying unrealistically thin. Quite the contrary, it’s about feeling great, having energy that lasts all day long, sleeping soundly throughout the night, and being as healthy as you can be. It’s about reducing your risk of the diseases falsely considered to be part of the aging process. This can all be accomplished effortlessly by shifting gradually to a simple, healthy eating menu
10 Healthy Eating Tips
1 – Don’t Instantly Drop Your Current Eating Habits
Make your transition to healthy meal plans a gradual, step by step process. If you commit to making the change in small, manageable steps, you’ll be eating healthy before you know it.
Instead of being concerned with counting calories or measuring portions, think of changing your diet in terms of color, freshness, and variety. Find recipes that call for fresh fruits and vegetables. Little by little, your diet will become healthier and more delicious.
Remember, make this change gradual, not overnight. Start out by adding a colorful vegetable salad to one meal every day for a few weeks. Then, maybe add fresh fruit as dessert. Make the transition gradual.
Every change you make to your diet matters. You don’t have to be perfect or instantly eliminate foods you enjoy. Your long term goal is to feel good, have energy, and reduce your chances of diabetes, heart disease, or cancer.
Think of water and exercise as integral parts of your new transition.
Your body needs, clean, clear water. Not so-called fruit juice (unless it’s freshly squeezed), and especially not coffee. Many people go through life dehydrated because they drink very little water or coffee almost exclusively. Your digestive system needs a lot of water to function efficiently as do all body organs. These so-called fruit juices are full of sugar, flavorings, and preservatives that your body can’t digest so it stores them as fat. Coffee is nothing more than an addictive drug that dehydrates your body. Coffee is the biggest drug habit in the world.
Also, the human body was built for movement, not the sedentary lifestyle most people live today. Choose an activity you enjoy and make it a part of your daily routine, even two or three times a day.
2 – The Secret is Moderation
The key in changing to a healthy diet is moderation. Your body always needs a balance of carbohydrates, protein, fat, fiber, vitamins and minerals. Don’t think of some foods as being off limits, think of smaller portions and eating them less often.
3 – How You Eat
It’s not what you eat, it’s how you eat. Slow down, think about food as nourishment, not something to be gulped down while your rushing from here to there. And, eat breakfast. Get out of bed every morning, do some light exercising to escalate your heart rate and open up your lungs, then eat a light, healthy breakfast. Your body wants exercise and it wants breakfast. It’s gone without food for several hours so your organs need nourishment to wake up and start functioning.
4 – Color Is The Secret
Fruits and vegetables are the secret ingredient in a healthy diet. They are loaded with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber. You say you don’t like vegetables? Work fresh vegetables into your diet little by little. You will soon acquire a taste for vegetables because your body wants and needs them.
Green vegetables provide calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, zinc, vitamins A, C, E and K, and they help strengthen the blood and respiratory systems. Sweet vegetables help eliminate your craving for sweets. Corn, carrots, beets, sweet potatoes or yams, winter squash, and onions are all examples of sweet vegetables. A wide variety of fruit is essential to a healthy diet. Berries fight cancer, apples supply fiber, and citrus fruits are full of vitamin C.
5 – Eat Healthy Carbs
When most people think of carbohydrates, they think of breads, potatoes, pastas, and rice. It’s true, these are carbohydrates, however these are unhealthy, starchy carbohydrates. They break down to glucose very quickly making your blood sugar and insulin levels very erratic. Fruits, vegetables, and whole wheat grains are sources of healthy carbs. Notice, I said whole wheat grains, not whole wheat bread.
6 – Healthy Fats vs Unhealthy Fats
Fats are a necessary part of your diet, however there are healthy and unhealthy fats. You need healthy fat to nourish your brain, heart, hair, skin, and nails. Omega-3 and Omega-6 fats in salmon, herring, mackerel, and sardines are vital to your diet. Fats you need to start reducing from your diet are trans fats and saturated fats.
7 – Protein
Protein supplies the necessary amino acids we need for building muscle tissue, strengthening our immune system, our heart, and respiratory system. Protein also helps in stabilizing blood sugar levels. When we think of protein, we commonly think of red meat, make it lean red meat. Other sources of protein to work into your healthy diet are salmon and other fresh fish, and turkey.
8 – Your Body Needs Calcium
Of course dairy products are the obvious source of calcium. However, leafy green vegetables are an excellent source of calcium. Beans are also rich in calcium.
9 – Sugar and Salt
Sugar and salt are necessary for our survival, however they must be taken in moderation. Sugar and salt are hidden in many of our processed foods today. Foods like bread, canned soups and vegetables, spaghetti sauce, margarine, instant mashed potatoes, frozen dinners, fast food, soy sauce, and ketchup. Again, for a smooth transition, ween these foods from you diet gradually.
10 – Plans Meal Ahead
Plan your meals by the week, or even by the month. Planning your meals removes the impulse to grab something simple and easy, and unhealthy.
Conclusion – Your Healthy Eating Menu
Remember, healthy eating does not mean being saddled to a strict, boring regimen. It means having more energy, sleeping better at night, and reducing your risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other ailments erroneously attributed to simply growing older. Make your transition gradual and you’ll be enjoying healthy meal plans before you know it.
The Tao of Healthy Eating: Dietary Wisdom According to Traditional Chinese Medicine
Healthy Eating – click on the image below for more information.
Healthy Eating
Chinese dietary therapy is one of the most important aspects of Chinese medicine. The Tao of Healthy Eating illuminates the theory and practice of Chinese dietary therapy with emphasis on the concerns and attitudes of Westerners. Commonsense metaphors explain basic Chinese medical theories and their application in preventive and remedial dietary therapy. It features a clear description of the Chinese medical understanding of digestion and all the practical implications if this for day-to-day die
The Tao of Healthy Eating: Dietary Wisdom According to Traditional Chinese Medicine
Click on the button for more Healthy Eating information and reviews.
Dairy Council of California Encourages Families to Eat Better, Eat Together!
Healthy Eating
Healthy Eating Made Easier® About Meals MatterMaintained by the registered-dietitian moms with Dairy Council of California, MealsMatter.org is a free family-nutrition and meal-planning website dedicated to helping families improve their eating habits …
Healthy Eating question by Nithya: Is there really an age limit to healthy eating?
You can eat healthy at whatever age right? Im 14 and my mom thinks Im too young to be eating organic/healthy.
Healthy Eating best answer:
Answer by emma, :]
=|
no you have to eat crap food, get obese until your 20, then you can start eating healthily (;
lol
NO there is no age limit!!!!!! maybe shes just worried your getting too concerned about what your eating? i dont know, but by all means, eat healthilyy!! (=
xoxx
Filed under: Healthy Eating · Tags: Eating, Healthy, Tips
Best book on healing I’ve seen in a while,
In this world of fluff and sound bites, this book says it all without sacrificing space. For those that need the big picture in order to grasp a concept, this is your “in” into Chinese dietary rules, as well as being the answer to most of what ails us. This is the book you read BEFORE you go see an accupuncturist, and the one that keeps you going back to measure your progress.
It takes quite a book to knock my socks off, and this one left me standing naked. This is the book that I want to put the in the hands of all those people who get on the Atkins diet and within a year later hit a wall, from the excess of cold and damp foods. This book stresses the importance of balance and the problems that excess or lack of restraint can cause to health. Even though there’s not a recipe in the book, it’s the important book that brings understand to the quality of the energy of food, that’s perhaps of greater value even than it’s carb or protein content. After reading this book, I immediately took all the other Chinese books out of the bookcase combing them for recipes. With my internal lights switched on, the importance of various foods stood out and made sense as they never had before.
As Chinese medicine dictates, each food and emotion enters a channel in the body, not unlike a river. And like salmon that swim out to sea for years only to return to an exact spawning ground located in a tiny freshwater creek, so do our foods and emotions nourish our bodies in very specific and necessary ways. Excessive use of cooling foods is brought home in his section on Spleen Vacuity and dampness. For those dealing with long term food allergies, candida, and obesity (that should cover about 4 out of 5 people, if the current polls mean anything), there’s salvation in this book. The quality of the food in creating a energy in the body is far more important to healing, than it’s perhaps it’s protein values. Reading on you’ll find that even reducing protein due to inabsorbtion is probably lifesaving.
My big epiphany came as I realized that what The Tao of Healthy Eating suggests, is a heart happy diet. In fact, all that is suggested to reduce spleen dampness in Chinese remedial therapy, is exactly what produces a happy heart. And as I thumbed through the now famous by Ophrah’s endorsement Perricone Promise, a book on Beauty and Longevity by an expensive MD, I had to laugh to myself. All the dietary recommendations of the Perricone diet, can be found within this tiny book of Bob Flaws, the Tao of Healthy Eating! I even renamed Perricone’s book, the Happy Spleen diet book, with a new label that I made and taped to the cover. Because for those that chase beauty creams and wonder herbs, the shortest way to tighter, firmer wrinkle free skin, is simply this: Reduce stress and take care of your spleen. Nothing ages you faster than our fast food, modern, highly cooling and phlegm producing diets in solidifying and packing on the inches of girth. If truth matters as much as beauty, then learn the Tao of Healthy Eating and change your life, and your appearance too!
Was this review helpful to you?
|Invaluable dietary advice,
Bob Flaw’s book “The Tao of Healthy Eating” applies Chinese wisdom to modern Western eating habits and food-related health problems such as food allergies, candidiasis, cholesterol, and obesity. Included is a list of 150 foods with their characteristics in terms of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The strength of this book lies in its explanation of how and why certain foods are healthy, not healthy or have certain effects. After reading this book you will certainly think twice before reaching for a cup of coffee! I would, however, have liked to have seen a few examples of case studies of how to apply this valuable information.
One reviewer complained that the author self-promotes his other books. That is true. And the reason is that in his books Bob Flaws takes one topic within TCM and focuses on that to help readers new to this vast field appreciate one small aspect without being overwhelmed. And a natural consequence is to point the reader to books on related areas, which he has written about – and we should be very grateful for this because Bob Flaws is a very experienced and successful TCM practitioner. If I have one complaint about his books, it is that they seem a little dry. It would be nice to see a more user-friendly page design including a few illustrations here and there, with summaries as appropriate to help the reader consolidate the information in their heads.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Great Text for General Readership,
Personally, I found this book extremely well written for the audience it was intended and the purpose its author set for it. I liked its conversational tone. It made a complex subject clear and simple to understand. In fact, I think Bob Flaws is one of the best writers out there on Chinese medicine, especially for lay people. I often recommend this book to my patients with questions on Chinese dietary therapy. This book was not meant to be an exhaustive professional discussion of this topic. I also think the author covered the types of health care issues American patients most frequently ask about. If another reviwer has a problem with such popular diagnoses as candidiasis, take that up with the American public. In short, I would strongly recommend this book to any Westerner who wants to understand the distilled essence of Chinese medical dietary therapy.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Why would you be too young? You have an opportunity to eat healthy and make it a habit at such a young age, when change is easier. Starting early is the best time, then you can avoid any issues like being unhealthly or overweight later in life. Your mom is wrong!!
>> 14 and my mom thinks Im too young to be eating organic/healthy. <<
Wow… just… wow!
Of course you should eat healthy at any age! It is especially important for children to eat healthy. It really breaks my heart when I see obese mothers feeing their obese toddlers cola and junk food… argh!
You need healthy, wholesome food for your growing brain and body. What you do now plays a role in your health as an adult, especially when you become old. Do you want to be sick all the time? No, of course not! That’s why you have to eat healthy!
Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t have “junk” once in a while. Moderation is the key.
lol yah!
go organic!
)
my family thinks i’m weird cause of it
im just like eff you bro0o
no you have to eat crap food, get obese until your 20, then you can start eating healthily (;
my son who is now 4 has been eating healthy is whole life. i started in high school and my mother also thought i was strange. i say if they will buy the food get the good stuff. let them read what the bad ingredients are doing to them.
My mom thinks that too! Just do it, it’s good for you and watch her be fat ha