Your Healh - The Long Haul

Nutrition is life-long

I used to hear a lot of elders telling - "Why are you dieting? You are still young. You can eat anything you want until you are 40."

How many of us believe that we can eat anything and still enjoy good health life-long? Chances are you will be looking at some lifestyle issues before you are 40. Treat your body as a temple and feed it properly always - irrespective of whether you are 20 or 60. Otherwise you will be forced to go on fat-free, sugar-free and salt-free diets in the later part of your life!

Good health means a life without medicines. Nowadays its ok to pop a pill for your diabetes, another for your pains, another for your thyroid etc... That is not healthy.

The problem with nutrition is the effects of it are not immediately visible. You have a fever, you take a tablet - and the fever goes down in half hr. Thats not the case when you eat a lunch / dinner without vegetables - your hair doesn't fall immediately or you don't develop immunity issues the next day. Thats why people abuse their bodies and eat only for taste instead of for nutrition.
I thought I would explain my take on nutrition using a sample menu for a day. This is a 1200 calories meal plan and includes only the main meals and not snacks or beverages.

My Sample Meal Explained...

Breakfast  was Overnight Oats with chia seeds and almond milk. Reason for choosing was because of its convenience, fibre content and nutritionally balanced. It is ok to skip breakfast as long as you meet the nutritional requirement of the day. If you end up eating very few calories, that is also equally bad for the body.

Lunch was 2 rotis drizzled with ghee, with Channa masala and carrot salad along with cucumbers and curd. Again I tried to make it a balanced meal by including protein and good fat sources along with vegetables to get the added fibre. A lunch high in fibre and good fats will keep you away from those fried evening snacks! 
Try a meal high only in carbohydrates and you may be reaching out for a sweet after the meal!

Dinner was a lettuce salad with beans, cucumbers and feta cheese. Reason for choosing was it would be light in calories and heavy in nutrition. Dinner should be the lightest meal of the day and it should be no later than 9pm. Night is the time when your body likes to use its resources for healing and fat burning instead of digestion.

The breakup of my day was as follows:

My observations:

1. We require around 1g per kg of protein everyday. That comes to roughly around 50-60g per person. Protein is the most likely nutrient to be deficient in our food leading to tiredness, hairfall, muscle loss, immunity loss and a lot of other common ailments seen nowadays.
2. It is very easy to exceed our calories by 500-800 calories everyday with just a couple of beverages and snacks
3. The total fibre was close to 90% of the recommended intake. This was because of including foods like chia seeds, oats, lettuce, cucumbers and carrots. A lot of us would not be taking so many raw foods everyday.
4. Vitamin and Mineral dosage was only around 50% of the recommended intake even with the vegetables included. I could have included a banana or a watermelon bowl or pomegranates etc..still I would not have met the required amount.
5. I included good fats like coconut oil, olive oil, ghee etc instead of just sunflower oil.

Empty calories vs Nutrition

Empty calories are those hidden foods which do not add any nutrition to your body. They might contain only sugar calories or calories from harmful fats and simple carbohydrates (e.g Coffee, Tea, Sodas, Donuts, savouries etc).

Lets say you are on a 1500 calorie diet. Your coffee & snacks (empty calories) account for 300 calories.
Thats 300 less calories available for your nourishment - which you could have used for providing valuable protein or essential fats to your body!

A simple eating plan can look like this:

1. Stop Sugar in its many forms( White sugar, brown sugar, jaggery, honey, cane sugar etc)
2. Don't eat anything from a packet - chips, biscuits, cakes etc. We know TRANS fats are bad. But we should also avoid foods with anything "partially hydrogenated"
3. Avoid eating fast foods. The biggest causes of lifestyle diseases are because of inflammation which comes from reheated oil or smoked oil.
4. Do some physical exercise or yoga everyday.
5. Avoid eating foods without any nutrition in them like refined flour.
6. Distinguish between snacks and treats. Treats are for indulging and should be rare while snacks are had everyday, so it should be healthy.

Its never too late to do something about your health. Look at food as a means to heal your body and not just for sustenance. Don't settle for a life dependent on medicines. Your body will heal itself if you provide it good nutrition.