Balancing Your Diet

A balanced diet is not a fad, it’s been around for many, many years. When it comes to portion sizes, your goal should simply be to get the balance right. Remember the good old food pyramid? It was designed to help people understand what makes up a healthy, balance diet. If your goal is to have a healthy diet, then your portions should reflect what is suggested in the food pyramid. Let’s review.

Although there have been a few variations of the healthy food pyramid, the basic concept has been the same. Your goal should be to include lots of plant-based foods, include a little bit of lean meat and limit the consumption of fats, oils and added sugar.

You will notice that you don’t find chips, chocolate, crisps, cakes etc on the healthy food pyramid. Why do you think that is? Because they don’t fall into the healthy food category. This is not to say we should neglect ourselves from these food items all together, just aim not to include them as part of your regular daily diet, save them for special occasions, or as rewards for positive performance.

Let’s quickly review your diet. It’s a good idea to write the answers to the following questions down so you can identify where you're going wrong.

Your Diet

• What would you normally have for breakfast?
• What would you normally have for lunch?
• What would you normally have for dinner?
• What foods do you snack on or have for dessert?

How does your diet compare to the healthy food pyramid?

• Do plant-based foods make up the majority of every meal?
  (Note vegetable oil or olive oil does not class as a plant based food.)
• How many serves of vegetables do you eat a day?
• How many serves of fruit?
• Additionally how many foods do you eat that aren’t represented on the food pyramid?

Incidentally the healthy recommendation for combined fruit and vegetable consumption is to get at least 7 serves a day, how many do you eat?

Why is it that plant-based foods are so heavily recommended? Because of basic nutrition, they help to provide the body with the nutrients it requires to maintain health. Nutrients like, vitamins, minerals, fibre, essential fatty acids etc. Additionally plant-based foods predominately provide energy in the form of carbohydrates, the body’s most ideal source of fuel. Eating a predominately plant-based diet also ensures that we don’t over indulge in calories. This is not to suggest that you become a vegetarian, as meat and dairy products also supply the body with very important nutrients, it’s simply a matter of getting the balance (portion) right.

There are many diet plans out there that suggest you need to cut out carbs, or eat more protein, the truth is that any diet plan that focuses on eating only one particular food group, or eliminating a food group altogether is general not going to be a healthy approach. The healthiest approach is to add variety and balance your portions right.

The healthy food pyramid incidentally was not designed as a weight loss plan, it was created as a tool to help demonstrate what makes up a balance diet, one that would assist in maintaining health and preventing weight gain. Taking this into consideration to improve health (or lose weight) we need to make some modifications.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28