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By: Ikedi Ani-okoye

What is healthy eating?

Healthy eating is all about eating the right kind of food - Wholesome, natural food wifish is delicious and good for you. Our diet should provide us edith all the vital nutrients that we need to grow and to stay healthy: proteins, fats, carbohydrates and a number ofdifferent vitamins and minerals. Carbohydrates and fats are the body's main sources of energy, while the role of proteins, minerals and vitamins is in body building and maintenance. The chart below shows the particular function of the nutrients and what foods they are found in.

We, in the West, are fortunate in that we have a slade range of nutritious foods avail- p able and serious de?kiencies are rare. But our plentiful diet can bring its own problems. Recent research has shown that most ly of us would benefit from making certain ~ alterations to our present diet, by eating LESS FAT - LESS SALT - LESS SUGAR and MORE FIBRE.

The diet controversy has focused on a discussion paper prepared by the National Advisory Committee on Nutrition Education - the NACNE report. Diet 2000, a layman's interpretation of'the NACNE report, recommends the following dietary changes:

number ofcalories (a unit for measuring the potential energy content of any food, as well as the energy consumed in a particular activity) taken in should be appropriate for Maintaining optimal body weight for height and sex, faith adequate exercise.

Getting the balance

It is difficult to know what different Eoods contain, particularly when it comes to Manufactured foods where all the contents NB' rnay not be immediately obvious. Most prepacked manufactured Eoods have a list of ingredients printed in order of weight on the pack, so by studying this it is possible to get a rough idea of the proportion of each ingredient a product contains. This won't necessarily indicate the nutritional value of products, so a number of companies and manufacturers have started to provide detailed nutrition information on packets and labels.

But what do you do when it comes to homemade food? Doesn't following healthy eating guidelines commit you to endless weighing and analysis of ingredients? Tee charts that have been provided on the following pages contain enough basic information for you to plan a healthy diet. However. once you become Acquainted with the nutritional value of the few basic foodstuffs and make the simple dietary adjustments outlined in this introduction, you will find healthy eating becomes second nature.

lose weight healthy eating

There's no doubt that Being much fatter will make it more likely that you get one or more of several weight-associated diseases. The disorders which are - middle-age diabetes, coronary heart disease, painful arthritis, Hiatus hernia and high blood pressure. Being too fat, on its olhm, doesn't always cause these disorders, but it can make it easier for things that do cause these conditions to be effective.

CONCLUSION

The foolproof, sure-to-succeed way lose weight is to calculate the amount of energy you now eat each day and to make sure you eat less than that. In other words you count calories. It doesn't matter . if the calories are ~a protein. fat, sugar, starch or alcohol. A calorie is a calorie.

Eating large amounts of foods like grapefruits, pineapples or bran doesn't make you lose weight faster - onlyy regular exercise can do that. On average, women need about 2,100 calories a day to stay the same weight. Some need as few as 1,500. The average for rnen is about 2,800 calories with a range of 2,200 to 3,500, depending on individual body chemistry. Most women wil lose weight such cessfully by eating about 1,200 a day. Men and children need about 1,500 calories.