On the Plate!

Don’t Under Estimate What You Put On Your Plate

Diet might be a word people don’t like to hear. But, the word diet doesn’t mean starvation or boring foods. A diet is anything you eat. It can be a healthy diet; lean meats and complex carbohydrates, or an unhealthy diet, fatty foods and sugars. Understanding what your body needs and what it does with what’s left over, is the starting point to making good decisions about what you put on your plate. Here are some simple steps and information to help you make good choices when it comes to your diet.
All foods basically break down to proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Your body needs all of these to function properly. If you are not use to looking at the nutrition labels on the back of your food, and think it’s unnecessary that might be the first thing you’ll need to change. Finding out what you’re eating is the first habit that you should develop.
Next, a good rule to remember when choosing a meal or idea to eat would be proteins 40%, carbohydrates 40%, and fats 20% of your total caloric intake. What that means is if you are looking at a hamburger which has 300 calories and 50 calories from fat, just simply divide 50 into 300 and you get .16 or 16% fat. That means this hamburger is a good choice to eat, because it is under the 20% guide line.
When choosing sweets, remember sweets are high in sugars, and sugars are a carbohydrate. Usually items high in sugar do not have very much protein; therefore you will need to supplement protein with that meal. Protein’s slow down the process of breaking down carbohydrates in the digestive system. Carbohydrates get broken down to glycogen and stored in the form of glucose inside the muscle cells. If too much glycogen is in the blood stream and the body doesn’t have room to put it into the muscle cells, your blood sugar levels will raise and your body will then release insulin to convert glycogen to fatty acid. Then the body stores it into fat cells, and that is how you put on excess weight.
To manage this from happening, replace simple carbohydrates with complex ones. Such as, brown rice, oatmeal, or yams. Complex carbohydrates take longer to break down and therefore slowing the amount of glycogen into the blood stream.
If this sounds a little too much to take in, seeing a nutritionist is a step in the right direction. They have the knowledge and tools to help anyone enjoy their favorite foods and optimism their personal health. By making just a few changes to the way you look at what’s on your plate will result in a healthier and more enjoyable life.