Do you want to improve your health and feel more energetic but need help knowing where to start? This article serves as a launch pad for eating healthy for beginners.
A healthy diet is all about balance. Your diet should provide your body with all the nutrients it needs in adequate amounts. The ultimate goal of a healthy and balanced diet is to lower the risk of malnutrition. This technical term is used in scientific literature and is often confused with being underweight. Malnutrition also entails having extra body weight. Meanwhile, weight is a prominent symptom of an unbalanced diet and lifestyle. The early onset of chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and even cancers might be an outcome of unhealthy eating.
But this is only half of the story. A healthy and balanced diet should also satisfy your taste buds and help you enjoy your mealtimes. This is why eating healthy can be challenging, especially considering how packaged and fast foods are designed to stimulate the human senses strongly. Food scientists and technologists working for food companies dedicate significant effort to increase the appeal and, to some extent, the addictive nature of those foods.
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To make things overwhelmingly complex, the diet and wellness experts on social media and blogs provide information and advice on what to eat and avoid. Buzzwords like intermittent fasting, keto diet, and plant-based or vegan diets are jamming the stratosphere with seemingly conflicting points of data and anecdotal science, which makes it harder to get simple, clear, and actionable guidance to eating healthy. In many cases, the wellness industry is also trying to sell its products and services, which may create false perceptions that eating healthy is expensive, time-consuming, or too dull.
Alas, don’t worry about that. Eating healthy for beginners is simple. It can also be enjoyable and affordable. In this article, I will share some of the principles of a healthy diet. I will also show you how to make it work so you can get started today.
The Principles of a Healthy Diet
Before we dive into the principles, it is fundamental to understand that a healthy diet is not the same for everyone. Significant variations exist; some are obvious and expected, like age, gender, activity level, preferences, and goals. Others, like genetics, overall health status, metabolic rate, and microbiome, could be more obvious. In practice, there are general rules to follow, but you will have to dig deeper or go through a trial-and-error phase to customize those rules to your situation. But first, let’s go through the three principles of eating healthy for beginners: balance, variety, and moderation.
Balance
This means that to eat healthy, you should include a balanced amount of different nutrients. The primary nutrient groups are water, fats, proteins, fibers, vitamins, minerals & trace elements, and other carbohydrates. I have deliberately ordered the nutrients according to the degree to which they are essential to the function of your body. By essential, I mean that your body can’t produce it from something else. Hence, it is necessary to get it from your diet. Some of those nutrients are called macronutrients, and others are called micronutrients; I wouldn’t bother you with this detail. This is not valuable information; what matters most is understanding what is essential and what is not.
Water is an essential nutrient; it is required for your organs and cells to function. It makes up most of your body’s volume, and you can’t produce it from other nutrients. The same can be said about essential amino acids from proteins, essential fatty acids from fats, and dietary fibers essential for balancing our gut microbiome. Most vitamins, minerals, and trace elements are essential for our health, even though our bodies need tiny quantities. On the other hand, other carbohydrates like starches and sugars are non-essential; they all get digested and absorbed by our body as simple sugars like glucose, galactose, and fructose. The human body can manufacture those simple sugars from amino and fatty acids. Nevertheless, starches and sugars are a great source of fast energy for our bodies and should be consumed moderately and adequately to serve that purpose.
Variety
This is the part where eating healthy for beginners goes to the grocery store. Remember, the goals of a healthy diet are to have a balanced supply of nutrients and to provide the enjoyment that makes it sustainable. Variety means to supply the needed quantity of each primary nutrient through various food groups and ingredients. Each primary food group can provide multiple nutrients; for example, vegetables are a great source of water, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and starches. Fruits supply numerous nutrients like water, sugars, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Grains are the primary source of starches, fibers, and proteins. Dairy is a superfood group as it supplies almost all essential nutrients, especially if you drink milk, an excellent source of water, fats, proteins, sugars, and minerals. Fish, poultry, meat, and eggs are the primary sources of proteins and some fats.
Voila, these are the main food groups, and your mission, if you wish to accept it, is to mix and match them as much as possible to create a variety of delicious foods. To effectively do that, you will need to learn a skill that characterizes the human species, which is called cooking. You heard it right: cooking will be your friend if you aim to eat a sustainable, healthy diet and build the right relationship with food. Cooking is easy and fun; it is not time-consuming at all. On the contrary, it can be life-saving. Cooking will be a practical tool to help you add balance and variety to your diet and lifestyle.
Moderation
As obvious as it sounds, this principle is the most difficult to implement. Moderation can be tricky, especially when it comes to eating healthy for beginners. To be able to eat in moderation, you need to be very accurate and precise about two things.
First, you will need to know your exact daily needs for energy. Many online calculators will help you estimate your daily energy expenditure. They use well-established scientific equations and methods that consider your gender, age, weight, height, and activity level, like this one. The only caution is that those equations use population average data. This means the estimate will be less than 100% accurate, depending on how much you deviate biologically from the average population. This simple tool gives you a good starting point to practice eating in moderation.
Second, you will need to be able to measure the portions of foods you are eating accurately. Research shows that this is where most people go off track, as it is difficult to accurately estimate the weight of various foods using visual or volume estimations. Foods have specific and variable densities, making it hard to gauge weight accurately without extensive experience in the field. I recommend investing in a digital kitchen scale to get the best results and build your knowledge and skills in assessing food portions. It is an affordable and valuable tool for anyone who takes cooking and healthy eating seriously.
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Start Today: Eating Healthy for Beginners
Equipped with an understanding of a healthy diet, it is time to experiment with eating healthier. Here are simple behaviors that can help you make positive changes in the right direction starting today:
Quick Wins
Making sudden and significant changes to your diet and lifestyle is overwhelming and unrealistic. Instead, it would be best if you aimed to start with a few minor changes and gradually build on them. Let’s call them quick wins:
Replace your typical lunch at school or work with a salad (make sure dressings are sugar-free), and enrich your salad with lean protein like grilled chicken or chunks of tuna.
Stay hydrated and cut sugar at the same time by swapping soda with zero-calorie, flavored sparkling water
If you love white bread, pizza, and pasta, try swapping to their whole-grain counterparts
Eliminate snacks; if you can’t, replace chips and cookies with berries, nuts, or yogurt.
Cook at home more often instead of ordering ready food or eating out
Try intermittent fasting during weekends and explore different regimens; while intermittent fasting doesn’t work for everyone, it is mighty if you can adapt.
Create Lasting Habits
Humans are creatures of habit, this is why one of the most effective ways of adapting to a healthier diet and lifestyle entails creating habits in your life that you love and enjoy; here are some examples:
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When you go to the grocery store, choose one that has the best display and varieties of fresh produce and unprocessed food. Start your food shopping in this section, even if it’s not at the store entrance. Spend more time exploring the types of vegetables and fruits you haven’t tried before or don’t eat often. Challenge yourself to discover and make food recipes that include those ingredients. Take pictures and share them with your friends on social media. Make the shopping journey in the produce section fund enjoyable.
When you go to the kitchen to cook, make it a fun and engaging experience. Cooking together with friends and family always creates fun and memorable moments. Even if you cook for yourself at home, consider Facetiming with a friend or family member. Share and receive cooking and food preparation tips. It will make your food taste better with time and will create a sense of pride and confidence in your culinary creations. Share your recipes with friends on social media and get inspiration to explore recipes that use new and unfamiliar ingredients to surprise yourself and get out of your comfort zone.
When you sit at the table to eat, avoid being distracted by your TV or phone screen. Give your full attention to your food and how it tastes. Eat slowly, chew well, and savor every bite and moment. Observe for fullness cues. This practice, generally referred to as mindful eating, can help you enjoy your food more, eat less, and avoid overeating
Seek support
Embarking on the eating healthy for beginners journey is relatively easy; however, having the proper support makes it simpler and more enjoyable. Apart from having support and guidance, there is always a psychological component related to accountability; when we promise to make lifestyle changes and feel accountable for it, it leads to better outcomes and commitment. This is why sharing your goals and progress with a friend, partner, or family member is always a good idea, especially if they share the same goals or have gone through a similar transformation.
Professional support in this domain makes a big positive difference; you might want some support and guidance from a healthcare professional or a registered dietitian, especially if your healthy eating goals are linked or connected to managing a health condition or disease.
Conclusion
Eating healthy for beginners is simple, enjoyable, and affordable. It is essential to understand the fundamental principles that construct a healthy diet. We discussed the importance of balancing the primary nutrient intake, particularly emphasizing the essential ones like water, fats, proteins, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Variety is paramount; diversifying the sources of nutrients across various food groups is the insurance policy for adequate and balanced nutrient intake. We reviewed the concept of moderation and how critical it is to understand energy requirements and food portion measurement accurately.
Taking the first steps towards eating healthy can be overwhelming for beginners. This is why having quick wins will help you make progress and gain confidence in your ability to make significant and sustainable changes. Like many things in life, creating sound and lasting habits is essential; healthy eating entails building the proper habits, starting from food shopping, cooking, and ending with mindful Eating. To make sure you succeed in your journey, seek support from friends, family, and loved ones and professional help from experts.
I hope this reading helps you start your healthy eating journey; please share your experience with me and other readers in the comments below.
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