WHAT DOES EATING HEALTHY REALLY LOOK LIKE?
We're all familiar with the basic rules... skip the chocolate cake and eat more veggies, right? But what about those ambiguous foods? And what the heck is a superfood, anyways?? Turns out, there are some foods and eating habits that have received a healthy reputation without being all that healthy for you.
Rule #1: Never ever skip breakfast! Your body has been fasting while you were asleep. Sure, your metabolism slows and you don't use energy while you're sleeping, but your body still needs to refuel itself. The key to starting the day off healthy is to eat! Eating in the morning starts your metabolism instead of letting it crawl to a halt until you do eat later, but by this point, your body is likely close to or in starvation mode. This means it will hoard whatever you feed it instead of converting it to energy. Think about it this way, when you have less in your bank account, you're more frugal with the money you spend. On the contrary, when you have a reliable cash flow, you don't mind dropping a little money here and there.
Rule #2: Eat more frequently in smaller portions. We are so used to sitting down to eat three large meals each day, if we even eat that many. However, this wreaks havoc on our bodies! After a large meal, our blood sugar spikes and our bodies scramble to release enough insulin to counteract the overdose. This insulin reaction acts to take the blood glucose and store it as fat for energy later. Because we ate so much at once, we don't get hungry for 5-6 hours later. Our stomachs are still full and, as a result, don't send a hunger signal to our brains. While we're still full, our blood sugar drops. Remember that insulin reaction from earlier? It worked a little too well. Now our blood sugar is too low, causing us to crave large amounts of unhealthy foods like carbs and sugar. This is the body's way of reprimanding you for not having eaten a smaller meal earlier. It's a vicious, self-driving cycle.
Rule #3: Balance your carbs and sugars with protein. This is where the faux healthy foods come in. Fruits, whole grain bread, brown rice, high glucose veggies like onions and carrots are unhealthy when eaten in the wrong proportions. We absolutely need the carbs from the rice, the bread, and the veggies as well as the sugar from the fruit and from the vegetables to function. The issue arises when we don't balance these sugar and carb components with the protein needed to utilize them properly. Left unbalanced, they elevate our blood sugar, creating the exaggerated insulin reaction described above. So piling the brown rice on your plate with a little meat and a few veggies doesn't magically create a healthy meal, nor does snacking on fruit alone in the mid-afternoon.
Rule #4: Not all calories are created equal. We get so caught up in counting calories that we forget to really thing about what we're feeding ourselves. 140 calories of soda and 140 calories of mixed nuts will have drastically different effects on your body. Furthermore, if you're seeking to lose weight, cutting calories to the bare minimum may actually have the reverse effect. Fewer calories does not equal healthier! Cutting calories too severely triggers your body to enter starvation mode in which it conserves every bit of energy you feed it instead of burning off your fat stores.
Rule #5: Eat more fat and less sugar. Many of us carry the misconception that to lose fat, we need to cut fat. This is extraordinarily false when you choose to consume healthy fats. Healthy fats like olive oil, avocado, nuts, flax seeds, and omega-3's from fish or chia seeds all carry extremely healthy properties including supporting your brain health! Healthy fats are so important because they act to regulate your insulin levels. Regulated insulin levels translate to less fat storage and less cravings. Furthermore, items labelled as fat free often compensate by adding more sugar, the component that reacts with insulin and turns to fat in your body.