Smart Diet – How food is related to health and fitness.
Understanding your diet and not considering it the enemy is crucial if you want to enjoy innumerable options for the palate, while maintaining your weight at a healthy optimum. The word “smart diet” conjures up images of cabbage soup, celery sticks and near starvations. It doesn’t have to be this way! In fact starving yourself into your new dress will only lead to a lowered metabolic rate (as the body perceives famine around the corner). This sluggish metabolism does you no good when you get back to eating even near normal food at which point you find, to your disgust, that you have begun to gain all the weight you have lost and more.
Fitness and Weight on the scale alone is not an indication of exactly how things stand with your health. It gives you no suggestion of what you are carrying around as weight – fat or muscle mass. To identify this we need to focus on the body fat percentage along with inches and with weight on the scale.
Older individuals, who haven’t exercised, but managed to stay at the same weight as when they were in their 20s perhaps, beware! Your fat percentage would have crept up while you lose muscle mass, thereby giving you a false sense of security. Obesity, with a significant fat percentage, is closely related to type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and heart disease besides appreciably decreasing the quality of life. Therefore the fight against Obesity of life.
Therefore the fight against obesity seems justified. Healthy eating is only one part of the solution. Exercise is the other.
Soups and Salads: vegetables and fruits provide all the minerals, vitamins, photochemical and antioxidants. High protein; low carbohydrate; high fat; low fat; – the variety of available diets is breathtaking not to mention confusing. Every once in a while a new diet comes along promising a miracle cure to your weight woes.
Smart Diet Tips
- A small cup (or two servings) of rice or two slices of whole wheat bread should suffice when eaten with adequate amounts of vegetables, protein as lentils or meat protein.
- A minimum of two fruits and 3-4 servings of vegetables a day is required to provide the required amount of minerals, vitamins, photochemical and antioxidants.
