Article at a Glance:
- Healthy Eating Habits
- What is Healthy Eating?
- Why is it important to develop healthy eating habits?
- 4.1 Healthy eating can help prevent disease
- 4.2 Eating habits affect your mental health
- 4.3 Healthy eating helps in your weight loss journey
What you eat reflects on your health and quality of life. And vice-versa, our health goals decide our eating habits.
If you want to lose your belly fat, change the way you eat. If you want to build muscles, eat accordingly. Moreover, the most common advice to be healthy is to eat a healthy diet.
But, what does healthy eating even mean?
- Is it shunning sweet potatoes and quinoa in favour of cheese and coconut oil?
- Is it avoiding sugary foods like ice cream and candy at all costs?
- Or is it avoiding all dairy and nix gluten?
Although eating healthy can be fairly simple, the popular “diets” and dieting trends may confuse.
These diets and dieting trends which prompt people to try unsustainable and unnecessarily restrictive diets can become confusing, overwhelming and exhaustive and may not give any long-lasting result.
But worry not! Healthy eating is far simpler than you may think.
What is Healthy Eating?
Healthy eating necessarily means eating nutrition-based food. Food items that offer more nutrition to the body.
According to studies, consuming nutrition-based diets lowers the risk of all chronic diseases possibly because these diets tend to include more heart-healthy fibre and nutrients like potassium while limiting the intake of saturated fat and cholesterol.
Foods need to hold on to its fibre, vitamins, and minerals to stay healthy and nutritious. Besides, it should be free from harmful preservatives that are added to it to keep the shelf life longer than natural.
Why is it important to develop healthy eating habits?
Healthy eating habits are important since they are the tools for a life lived well — and long. When you make healthy decisions about your eating habits, you are at a lower risk for many diseases including cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and even anxiety and depression.
Here are some of the listed reasons for the importance of healthy eating habit:
Healthy eating can help prevent disease
Healthy eating leads to a healthy disease-free life. Whereas unhealthy habits like poor nutrition, lack of exercise, and excessive alcohol are the top causes of chronic disease including heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes.
Eating habits affect your mental health
Food choices affect our physical and mental health equally. When we prioritize a healthy diet, our mental health sees an equal boost as our physical health.
A diet rich in vitamins and minerals lowers the risk for mental health disorders including anxiety, depression, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Healthy eating helps in your weight loss journey
Having a healthy eating lifestyle in which due attention is given to portion sizes will help in achieving a healthy weight.
Eat mindfully:
- Stop eating when you’re full.
- Don’t eat too fast
- Don’t eat for emotional reasons.
Healthy eating does not require you to make huge changes. Set small goals and change your eating habits a little bit at a time. Gradually, small changes will make a big difference in your health.
Developing healthy habits, setting small goals are not that difficult. Since the benefits of good nutrition are fairly obvious to most of us. You have more energy, better health conditions, and a healthier state of mind.
We have been learning since ages that healthy eating plays an important role in maintaining a healthy weight, decreasing the risk of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart problems, high blood pressure, cancer and a host of other health ailments.
And if there are so many good reasons for healthy eating, why is it so difficult to do?
