How to Reset Your Body with Basic Nutrition

How to Reset Your Body with Basic Nutrition

Jessie Wallace
By Jessie Wallace
We are constantly bombarded with advertisements and images of delicious and satisfying foods that lack any real nutritional value. We see people on television chowing down on unhealthy options and maintaining unnatural levels of energy while never gaining weight. None of this is a true example of what a consistently unhealthy diet leads to. The food we consume is the fuel our bodies use to function, and if we consume poor choices of fuel we will feel the effect. Many of us have grown up with less than ideal dietary habits. We want our tasty meals that we are used to. When we try to be healthy, it’s met with obstacles and challenges, such as becoming financially costly or being impossible to maintain while in different environments.
Many of us need to reset our health, but how can we change the way we think in order to live healthier and happier lives when we’ve become so accustomed to our current eating habits? There are countless diet fads out there and they range from completely ridiculous, making sense but being extremely difficult to stick to, or seeming reasonable but requiring a lot of planning or forethought.
What we always forget is that it doesn’t need to be complicated. Nutrition is the most basic aspect of overall health, yet it seems the hardest to achieve for many. It can be overwhelming and intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. If we focus on those fundamental basics, we can achieve our dietary goals.

It May ‘B’ Time to Pay Attention to Your Vitamins

We know that there is no magic pill that will help us lose weight and feel better, but the 1B vitamins get pretty close. These vitamins include thiamine (B-1), riboflavin (B-2), niacin (B-3), pantothenic acid (B-5), pyridoxine (B-6), biotin (B-7), folate (B-9), and cobalamin (B-12) and they do great things for our bodies. They help us to have a healthy metabolism, making it possible for us to change carbohydrates into energy and digest proteins and fats. There are a lot of foods with B vitamins including milk, beans, and lean meats. Along with vitamin B is vitamin D. Most of us get our D from the sun, but for a lot of us, especially in the northern hemisphere, we don’t get enough. This vitamin is not as easy to get from foods, so taking a vitamin D supplement is a good idea. In 2011, a 2study linked taking vitamin D with weight loss, making it essential for those who are trying to trim down for health reasons.

Use Your Family History to Your Benefit

The first thing to remember is that there is not a one size fits all option when it comes to our nutrition. Each of us is different, and we each prefer different tastes and need various amounts of vitamins and nutrients. Some people seem to thrive on high protein diets and some do better keeping to a vegetarian diet. There is an area of study called 3nutritional genomics that looks at the correlation between genomes and diet. It offers a far more in depth look at nutritional needs than what most dietary advice can give. Throughout the world, people have lived in vastly different conditions and because of that, they have had to live on varied foods. It makes sense that we would have developed nutritional needs based on past generational lifestyles. Try more than one diet until you find your niche. Pay attention to your body. It helps to start with healthy diets from your ancestry. You should be able to enjoy the taste of your food while still eating right.

Go Ahead and Count Those Calories, But in Conjunction With Other Things

Something else to consider is understanding your 4target calories. While there is so much more to healthy eating than just calorie counting, it’s a good place to start. Seeing how high some foods are in calories and how others can be so much more filling with far fewer calories will help you understand just how much more important what you eat is rather than how much you eat. While you don’t need to plan out your entire week’s lunches and dinners, it’s good to know more about the food you’re eating. Before you eat anything, think about whether it is going to help your body or if it’s just a bunch of empty calories that won’t satisfy your nutritional needs.

Having 5variation in what you eat is also important. There is no magic food that has all the vitamins and nutrients you need, and you shouldn’t try to get it in supplements alone. You need to eat different vegetables and fruits, meats and grains in order to have the most well-rounded and sustained diet. What we lack in our nutrition is just as important as what we get too much of. We need to get all of our requirements to be at our best. Having that variation will keep us from growing bored and from seeking out the unhealthy options that we’re used to. If we’re willing to try new things and we have multiple flavors and textures in our lives, it will keep us satisfied.

Brighten up Your Plate

Enjoying a 6colorful diet will help not only make your plate more interesting, but it will also add a great deal of vitamins to your diet. Naturally pigmented foods look that way due to substances that have been linked to reducing the risk of cancer and of developing chronic diseases. These pigmented foods are usually fruits and vegetables. We all know that we need more fruits and veggies in our diets. Using those beautifully colored foods will create a nice presentation and interesting meals.

Schedule Time to Enjoy Food

Speaking of interesting meals, something else that will help us all be healthier is to make time to sit down for meals. Slowing down increases our ability to recognize when we are full and to put more thought into what we eat. We often take meals on the go with our busy family schedules and work lives. It seems that eating has become something we do just to keep going. For many, it’s not a time to enjoy the food we’re eating, and that often leads to those fast-food meals and prepackaged snacks. We should be fitting a sit-down meal into our schedule. This will give us time to reflect, to center ourselves, and to connect to our families. These precious moments not only will help us make healthier eating choices, but also will improve our emotional health and lower stress levels.

Don’t Forget to Supplement When Needed

Sometimes getting a certain vitamin or nutrient can be difficult. It may be that the foods that contain those vitamins are not palatable for us or there may be simply too hard to get enough from what we are eating. When this happens, we should look into supplements in order to get what our bodies need. The use of supplements can seem like the easiest way to accomplish our nutritional goals, however, it’s always easier for our bodies to absorb these vitamins from food. Supplements should be used like their name implies, to supplement an already healthy diet. When we decide to take supplements, we should put some thought into which ones we take. There are few regulations, so being mindful and talking to a doctor or doing a little research is important for this.

Eat New Things

If we really want to be healthier, we need to be willing to learn. While it doesn’t have to be difficult, we do need to know where to look for those vitamins and nutrients. If you don’t know which fruits have the most vitamin A, how will you make sure to supply your system with enough of it? This doesn’t have to mean becoming a nutritionist. This just means to be more mindful and receptive to the information easily and readily available for us to use. I knew someone who hated bananas. Yes, I know that’s crazy, but they did. However, they would eat them because they knew bananas were good for them. What I never understood was why didn’t they eat something else that had those same vitamins and nutrients they were looking for? We don’t have to stick to the most well-known foods. We can branch out to things we enjoy eating.

Take the Time to Learn

While learning what foods are higher in certain vitamins and nutrients, it is important to remember that this is almost pointless if you’re not willing to try new foods as well. We are busy, and as such we don’t have the time to research new dietary options. For most of us, we need to adhere to a strict budget for everything, including our grocery shopping, so we don’t want to spend money on something we may not like. What we can do is talk to people we know. Find out new things that friends and family enjoy and what those foods taste like. When you’re lying in bed and perusing the internet on your phone, go ahead and do a little research. Then, keep a list of all the foods you want to try and work it into your budget. Maybe one grocery shopping trip get one of those foods, then the next try another.

We need to shape our thinking to prioritize our diets. Yes, we are busy and we are often on the go from waking to going to bed, but getting all the vitamins and nutrients we need to make ourselves happy and healthy should be something we put more focus on. We can be healthier without changing too much in our day to day lives, but we need to change the mindset that anything to do with healthy diets is hard.

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