How to Have a Good Diet
from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit
So you want to keep a healthy weight, but don’t know how? Here’s a good range of suggestions for you to try.
Steps
- Start at the beginning. Write down everything you would eat in a week and question how many fruits, vegetable & protein serves you have a day.
- Compare on the other side of the ledger the low nutrition but high energy foods you take. Try to reduce these and increase the healthy food range.
- If you have time, estimate how many calories or kilojoules you consume per day. There are varied recommendations, but over 2000 calories per day could be too high for you. See a dietician or physician to advise you how many calories are healthy for you.
- Evaluate how much exercise you get and find out how much it burns off. Some high intensity exercises might not burn off as many calories as would be desired as they are for strengthening & building muscle groups as opposed to burning fat.
- If you wish to lose weight, the goal is to reduce current calorie intake and replace unheathy foods with healthier alternatives. Extra calories lost through exercise should not feature in equations at this stage because you may be tempted to consume more, because you lose it through exercise. This way, exercise helps lose weight faster and won’t affect your diet plan if you can’t attend a gym session.
- Keep a varied meal plan. Often the diets are so hard to stick to because they are often very different to what we are used to and sometimes feature very plain and bland foods. Many seasonings can improve the appeal and can be low fat (ideally choose low salt ones too).
- Evaluate if you need to reduce the portion size. If you enjoy sitting down to a big plate full of food, fill the gaps with a tasty salad or steamed vegetables instead, providing it does not affect your calorie control plan. Or reduce the plate size.
- Reduce your intake of junk food. Eating too much junk food is an easy way to gain weight as its calorie content can be very high.
- Examine the fat that you have. Fat goes to many different places and fat around the waist can be dangerous to your health. A dietician would advise if you have an excess or if parts that feel fat might actually be OK.
- Slow down when eating. If you take 20 minutes or more to eat your meal it will make you feel more full. Play music in the background, talk to someone or read a book while you eat to slow down.
- Avoid going back to the kitchen after eating something apart from cleaning up. If you have eaten a meal then go back to get more food, it will add to your calorie intake. The goal would be to cook what you need and any surplus food is put away, frozen or refrigerated as quickly as possible to avoid the temptation to have “just a little more”.
- Find time for exercise. Before breakfast for example go outside and take advantage of some exercise time before you feel too tired after work. Running, cycling, swimming, snowboarding, tai chi etc are all good examples
- Find yourself non-food rewards. Reward yourself with a nice massage or bath instead of food or buy yourself some flowers for your home. Find ways to make exercise & dieting fun.
- Keep motivated and practice positive thinking. Don’t take notice of anyone who says you can’t do it. If you want to keep yourself in a good weight, always say “Yes, I can!”
- Join a gym or health club that you would like and go with your friends. If you want your weight to stay the same or better, increase your exercise to other feilds such as martial arts, soccer, baseball, long distance cycling etc. Something that gets you moving and you can have fun with and meet new friends.
- Drink healthily. Sodas and all kinds of energy drinks often contain far more calories than you would need on low key exercise so can add to weight gain. Water, low sugar fruit drinks (many fruit drinks sound healthily but are actually full of calories). Avoid alcohol as an excess can also affect fat proportion (such as the “beer belly”).
- Monitor, Compare and Act. Keep an eye on how well you are going and compare if you have improved or are struggling. Seek support from a dietician or a friend to keep you motivated and imporve your diet health.
Tips
- Water and juice are good, but consider what goes in. In a glass of orange juice might be 5 or 6 oranges worth of juice, but you wouldn’t eat that many oranges in one sitting.
- Fruits, vegetables, grains or pulse proteins contain very little fat, but offset the carbohydrate content which is a good source of energy, but potentially fat.
- Have fun and find ways to make it enjoyable.
- A healthy diet is a lifetsyle and lifelong choice, not a month period. Improve your diet now to develop familiarity in reducing fat as that makes it easier in the near future. In a years time or less, you might not feel a high fat pizza is as attractive as its low flat, high flavour home made version.
Warnings
- Don’t overwork yourself. Often we try to push ourselves harder to lose that weight now, but it causes heart strain if you are not used to it.
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