Archive for the 'DIET & NUTRITION' Category

For optimum health, you should eat a varied diet and include nutrient dense foods.

Nutrient density is a ratio that compares how many nutrients are in a food versus how many calories that food provides.

The healthiest choices are food that give you a lot of nutrition when compared to their total calorie amount. These are nutrient dense foods.

Foods that are often said to provide “empty calories,” are not nutrient dense foods; they provide calories, but no real nutrition.

Not only can choosing nutrient dense foods help you stay healthy, it can help you maintain a healthy weight.

Nutrient dense foods contain a wide variety of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, protein, fiber, and healthy fats. Generally the less a food is processed, the more likely it is to be nutrient dense. When a food is processed, it generally loses much of its nutritional value.

Whole grains and whole grain products are more nutrient dense than products made with processed flour. Choose whole wheat bread over white or enriched bread.

Choose steel cut oatmeal over quick cooking oats. Choose long grain brown rice over instant white rice. Whole wheat pasta is better for you than pasta made with processed flour.

In order to get the muscular body that you desire consideration should be given to your diet.

Examine your current eating habits and work out what needs to be changed, remove bad fats and carbohydrates increase your intake of fruit and vegetables and replace processed and takeaway food for healthy home cooked meals.

If you don’t really know where to start consult a dietician or fitness trainer who will be able to set up a diet plan which you can follow very easily.

Regular, small meals during the period of a day is what works best when building up muscle mass. This stimulates your body into releasing insulin meaning it will use carbohydrates for muscle building.

Your carbohydrate intake must be increased because it is where the body gets its energy from. They also assist in the healing process, in between workouts, which is essential as the body needs it.

You will soon find out what the good carbs are and the ones to avoid, it is surprising just how quickly both the mind and body adapt to a new regime.

The three essentials that you need to become your own expert on are fat, protein and carbohydrates. All these are the basic nutrition of a bold builder.

Most parents today are concerned with providing a well balanced healthy diet for their children. With the skyrocketing rate of obese children across the world, this is a very real concern.

However, providing your children with healthy food choices does not have to be a battle.

There are many nutritious foods you can offer that your children will love to eat. Consider the following foods to offer for your children, and those you should avoid.

Skip the Fast Food Restaurants

While it may be more convenient to go through the drive than to cook at home, it is usually very unhealthy. If you avoid fast food your children will be much healthier.

Instead of hitting the drive through when it gets late, you can keep a few healthy snacks in the family car to tide everyone over until dinner.

Try keeping a box of granola bars on hand, or you can pack a cooler with fresh fruit for this type of situation. However, if the fast food joint is not to be avoided, make sure you are choosing the healthiest foods on the menu.

When you look into the mirror, you see many things that you like about your body.

Your arms are just the right length, legs are long and lean, and then you look at your mid section and ask yourself, “What went wrong?”

That stubborn belly fat that will not go away is staring you in the face. You really cannot remember what caused it. You are considering that maybe the cause of your lifestyle change, or maybe your lack of a good diet.

Either way, you would like it to go away. A big belly is not what you want, and you know that there has to be a way to solve your problem.

Diet to Lose Fat

Add fiber into your diet. It will help you to move food more quickly through your digestive tract. A diet that is high in fiber, such as fruits and vegetables, will help you fill up quicker, and it will keep you from eating fattening foods. High fiber foods take longer to eat thereby keeping your mouth busier.

Staying in shape is not always easy. Many people will put on a few pounds without even knowing what they did wrong.

After all, making the wrong food choices can greatly impact the size and shape of your body, in a very short time.

While most people understand that eating smaller portions of healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables will maintain weight easier, there are certain foods that can be very tricky. Avoid these foods if you want to maintain ideal body weight.

Avoid Bulk Foods

While buying in bulk can be cost effective, eating in bulk can be damaging to your waist line. If you don’t want to pay the extra cost for prepackaged foods, you need to divide the food into portion sizes, as soon as you get it home. Sitting down with a whole bag of chips will lead to eating more than you need.

Instead read your food labels carefully and determine which amount is healthy to consume in one sitting. This goes for cooking in bulk as well.

Cooking a large pot of chili or stew is simply easier. However, to maintain portion control you need to divide the meal into healthy portions, rather than just grabbing a bowl and hoping you get it right.

If you are cutting back calories in an effort to lose weight and become healthier, carefully consider the number of calories you are drinking.

Recent research has confirmed that in the long run, limiting your intake of liquid calories can have a bigger impact on weight loss than limiting your food calories.

In fact, cutting out just one sugar-sweetened beverage each day can make a difference.

While it is important to limit liquid calories, it is important not to restrict your liquid intake unless your doctor has instructed you to do so for some reason.

Sugar-sweetened beverages, such as regular soft drinks, iced coffee drinks, and fruit drinks or punch, contain a large number of calories and typically very little nutrition.

While some dieters replace sugar-sweetened beverages with artificially sweetened beverages, it is important to note that recent studies seem to indicate these beverages can actually affect the way your body responds to sugars and cause weight gain as well. [Exercise to lose weight]

For now, the best beverage if you are looking to lose weight remains that all-purpose hydration choice: water. If you find plain water boring, try adding a splash of citrus or even a slice or two of cucumber to the water for additional flavor.

Water, juice cleanses, herbal laxatives, probiotic supplements and a generally healthy lifestyle will go a long way towards detoxifying your body.

But despite your greatest efforts, many common foods can completely reverse your hardest efforts. Here they are.

White Sugar

White Refined Sugar has no nutritional value at all. Sugar will also adversely affect your body’s blood sugar levels, which forces the pancreas to produce insulin. This insulin causes an increase in tryptophan, which is used to manufacture serotonin.

These serotonin level imbalances can affect you for the rest of your life. Of course, you can cut all white sugar out of your diet and allow your body to naturally rebalance itself.

White Flour

Noticed how white bread easily sticks to the roof of your mouth? White flour has the same properties in your intestines as it does in your mouth.

Getting white flour stuck in your intestines could possibly cause clogging, which would make your intestines even less effective in absorbing nutrients and releasing wastes.

White flour also lacks fiber, which is necessary for proper digestion[Fiber diet]. Why eat white flour anyway? White flour is completely devoid of any nutritional benefits at all.

Unless you want to pay $6+ every day at the local juice bar, a home juicer is a fantastic investment.

Also, owning your own juicer is essential if you want complete control over how your fruits and vegetables are juiced.

And if you don’t have a local juice bar at all, you will be depriving yourself if you spend another day without a juicer.

Believe it or not, juicers can be more complicated than you might realize. The juicing equipment that you pick is absolutely necessary when you first start juicing.

Not only can some juicers be quite expensive, but these juicers might not give you the results you want when you’re juicing your fruits and vegetables.

There are actually six different types of juicers that are available:

• Citrus juicers: make juicing citrus fruits easy.
• Centrifugal juicers: use a spinning disc to juice your fruit.
• Manual press juicers: completely eliminate all the pulp in juice.
• Single gear masticating juicers: designed for juicing baby food products.
• Triturating juicers: extracts the largest amount of juice from a vegetable.
• Wheatgrass juicers: extracts juices from wheatgrass.

Everyone knows that watching too much TV is bad for us and especially bad for children.

Many parents worry about the effects of things like violence shown on TV and the resulting impressions left on young minds.

Now a new report published in the highly respected International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity claims that television can have another ill effect on young minds.

Researchers have found after studying the habits of 2000 schoolchildren, that there is a relationship between the amount of TV watched and their future diet habits.

The study conducted by scientists at the University of Minnesota claims that children who watch in excess of five hours of TV each day had poorer diets. They tended to eat less vegetables, calcium rich foods and fruit.

These heavy TV watchers also tended towards eating more “bad” food such as pre-packaged snacks, drinks with large amounts of sugar, as well as lots of fried and fast food meals as they grew older.

The study believes that at least some of the blame for this poor diet and in particular a tendency towards prepackaged and fast foods are related to the amount of advertising that the children are exposed to in long hours of TV viewing.

The Indiana state health committee has reached a consensus and has approved a bill, which will see eating establishments, be required to post relevant nutritional facts to give their customers the information they need to make healthy diet decisions.

A handful of the big chains in the state such as Subway already published the nutritional information in their outlets.

A handful of private establishments in Indianapolis have also adopted the idea ahead of legislation.

The state believes that diners now require the same kind of information about what they are eating as they find on packaging for food in the grocery store. The state also sees advantages for people who are trying to fight the rampant obesity problem found across the country.

They say that all people, especially those trying to improve their health by dieting, should be given the information they need to allow them to select the best meal to assist them in their weight loss efforts.

As it stands at the moment, the bill will only apply to food chains with more than ten outlets in the state.

It will require them to clearly display simple nutritional facts such as amount of proteins, carbohydrates, sodium and so forth in a meal.