One thing I’d like every woman to understand is the true meaning of diet. I cannot emphasize enough how much potential harm comes from our society’s insistence that diet simply means restricting caloric intake to lose weight.
The current trend in maintaining a healthy weight is the non-diet approach for health, and although I say trend, it is more than just trendy. It is not like the dozens of fad diets that have had brief popular appeal over the past fifty years that promise quick weight loss and often don’t deliver.
In my book—A Woman’s Guide to Healthy Aging- I look at some of the problems associated with our modern diet and consider some common-sense solutions that can help reduce your health risk for the long haul, I call this the non-diet diet.
The non-diet approach is a more balanced, realistic way to lose weight and maintain good health with nourishing foods, daily physical activity, positive thinking and smart life-style choices. This includes:
- Making fibre your friend. Fibre keeps our digestive system running smoothly and also keeps us feeling full and satisfied longer.
- Get cooking! Make healthier versions of your favorite take out—save time by buying pre-cut washed veggies.
- Eat your fruit and veggies and your leafy greens
- Boost vitamin B intake: Folate B12 and B6
- Boost vitamin E intake
- Add polyphenol-rich foods-brain foods that are powerful anti-oxidants: blackberries cherries plums, walnut halves
- Reduce your fat intake
- Increase your Omega 3-fatty acids
- What your cholesterol
- Get your daily calcium
Any way we look at it, regardless of our personal inclinations—whether we’re trim or we tip the scale, whether we live to run or we balk at running, whether we sleep like babies or get nothing better than a series of catnaps through the night—nutrition, exercise, and sleep are among the major factors that affect our health.
One very important thing to realize about these factors is that they are within our control.
Sure, other factors beyond our control also affect our health, including family history and genetic inheritance, sex, and age. We cannot modify those, but we can modify how we eat, how active we are, and how well we sleep. And for many of us, some modification is necessary if we want to live a long and healthy life.
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