Would you like to feel better, stop feeling hungry all the time and take control over your nutrition?
If the answer is yes, then a nutritionist can help.
A healthy, sustainable approach to nutrition is to focus on real food and its ability to improve our mental and physical wellness.
Assess your individual health goals
How does your current lifestyle stack up against your short- and long-term health goals?
Are you generally walking along the right path to achieving your goals or have you diverged widely from the safe and well-lit route home?
Remember, it is what you do most of the time which is the key factor here.
It has been said in business that:
Quality is doing it right when no-one is around, and culture is doing the right thing when nobody is watching.
Both of these aphorisms apply to you and your diet.
You will not be perfect: you will have both good days and bad, good meals and bad snacks, noble thoughts and crippling cravings.
Just accept it.
It is what you do the majority of the time that counts the most.
An empathetic nutritionist will explan that eating healthily and feeling awesome is realistic, sustainable and within your grasp. You can achieve your desire to be healthy now and to age well.
We are not talking rocket science here.
Intuitively, you already know the gist of what is right and wrong and good and bad when it comes to ‘real food’ and healthy nutrition. A nutritionist will reinforce what you already know to be true.
Minimise your consumption of processed foods and aim for what you see growing, grazing or swimming on visits to the country.
Carbohydrates
A nutritionist will explain the glycemic index and help you understand what it means to you.
It has been long thought that eating food low in fat and high in carbohydrates would produce the greatest health benefits. That it would give you the best chance of achieving and maintaining a body weight you are comfortable with and a body that has the best chance of remaining disease free.
It has now been shown that an alternative approach is where success is best achieved.
Yes, all three macronutrients (fat, protein and carbs) are important to health. What has been misleading is what we have come to believe these foods include.
Why has the misconception and flaw in education led to health problems?
Insulin – the ‘fat hormone’
Because most of the carbohydrates people eat are highly processed (bread, pasta, rice, pastries, dry and sweet biscuits, rice cakes, sugary drinks, chocolates etc …).
These types of foods cause large amounts of a hormone called insulin to be sent into your blood.
Insulin is vital for life but what happens to so many people is that they eat frequently, and have insulin coming into their blood in large amounts and often, throughout the day.
For people who gain weight easily, fat is stored in the presence of insulin. For good reason, it is sometimes referred to as the ‘fat hormone’.
But this is not just about weight management and an experienced nutritionist will know this.
Excess and frequent insulin also plays a significant part in chronic disease. It is not necessarily the case that being slim points to being healthy.
How to change poor eating habits
How can we change this?
It’s about adjusting your eating so that it is low in process carbohydrates, moderate in protein and includes ‘good’ fats.
This has been shown not only to help with weight loss but has also shown to reduce the likelihood of developing Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver, dementia, Parkinson’s, and some forms of cancer.
A nutritionist should be able to set you on the right path.
Tips to avoid diet fads
How does this sound?:
NO more dieting, NO calorie counting, NO weighing food, NO counting points
An approach to eating that is low in processed food and includes protein, good fats and real carbohydrates is a lifestyle approach to nutrition that is sustainable.
Lifestyle changes can be challenging and there is no hiding from that one.
Some of my key tips are:
- Motivation is an emotion and, like other emotions, it fluctuates
- Commitment is a decision that helps us move towards our goals
- Real food, unprocessed food is the key to good nutrition
- Cleanse your pantry, it is likely to be full of processed food
- Fill your fridge, this is where the real food lives
- Fresh is best
- Fresh food has a short shelf life. Processed food lasts a long time
- Ask yourself if it looks similar to what it looked like in its raw form. If there is no similarity then it’s probably been manufactured by a machine
- If you want to age well, keep the high GI food to a minimum
- Many chronic diseases can be linked to regularly eating foods throughout the day that are high GI. Keep these low and you will have better long term health outcomes
- There are no guarantees in life. The only thing we can do is work hard to reduce our risk
- You can make choices now.
Superfoods you should you know:
Related Articles:
An introduction to Nutritional Medicine
