Nutrition means nurturing the body to keep it healthy and functioning. Healthy eating is essential to your health and well being. We must provide our bodies with all the food, vitamins, and minerals they need in order to thrive. A good diet is important for good health. A healthy and varied diet can help to maintain a healthy body weight, enhance general wellbeing and reduce the risk of a number of diseases including heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and osteoporosis.
With our fast-paced lifestyles, we don't have time to devote hours or entire days to preparing healthy meals to nourish our families and ourselves. This has caused several problems, the major one being Obesity. To avoid or to cure this problem, people across the globe are part of some or the other diet and yet most diets fail sooner or later.
Why doesn't my diet plan work?
The reason of course is very simple, the entire focus of the diet program is to impose discipline by force using some motivational tool which could be anything ranging from fear (in heart patients or diabetics) to pleasure/happiness (new dress for an upcoming wedding). But the net result of all this is that once the pressure is off, the person goes back to imbalanced eating and regains much more than the previous weight.
What is the success mantra?
The success mantra of losing weight is to understand the eating pattern and eating choices; why we eat the way we do and ultimately how much of it are we willing to change.
Our bodies have a natural rhythm of hunger and satiety which we frequently override by emotional eating. Human behavior is closely affected by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain mechanism. So whenever we have to face unpleasant emotions like loneliness, fear, anxiety, doubt, guilt or pure pain like grief we are most likely to develop abnormal eating patterns to soften or numb those emotions. Similarly, celebrations also induce abnormal eating which is way beyond the normal appetite. Breaking or modifying these patterns requires a great deal of personal will and a desire to change!
How do I change?
The truth about change is that it should be in harmony with our body to be successful.
- The first step towards change is to motivate oneself with joy. Every week, you can introduce a delicious health food recipe in the meals to be aware of new tastes. The internet can surely help you with it.
- The second step is not to be an extremist in becoming healthy. If for years you have enjoyed junk food, leaving them instantly may not be possible. So the best method is to eat them once a week because agenda is not to leave eating for a short time goal but to make friends with healthy foods which give pleasure too.
- The third and the most important change is eating with awareness. A meal eaten properly, where your attention is on the food, will change the way you eat because that meal will be so incredibly delicious that you will be satiated for a long time.
Healthy eating is not about strict nutrition philosophies, staying unrealistically thin, or depriving yourself of the foods you love. Rather, it's about feeling great, having more energy, and keeping yourself as healthy as possible. All of this can be achieved by learning some nutrition basics and incorporating them in a way that works for you.
