How to eat right

Home

Beauty & Fitness

Fashion

Men's Club

Romance

Women's Corner

Fit to eat
How eating can change your metabolism, or at least keep it working properly

By Denis Faye, Beach Body

Starting Fast.

Fasting may be second nature to our more religious readers, but to others this practice can seem abhorrent. But when done properly, it's a great start to your new diet. It starts flushing the junk you've been consuming out and it shrinks your stomach.

Choose two days when you have nothing to do, typically a weekend. Avoid physical Activity. Maybe rent a bunch of movies you've been meaning to watch. What you consume may vary. If you are hardcore, try it with water and lemon. If that unnerves you, do it eating only vegetables. Two more middle-of-the-road approaches are fruit/veggie juice or Fast Start, Beachbody™'s fasting formula.

Unprocessed Makes Perfect.

Despite thousands of years of effort, humankind has yet to improve on the food that was here in the first place. Okay, so maybe cooked meat, tea, and yogurt are all pretty neat innovations, but for the most part, the closer food is to its natural state, the better it is for you.

A few cases in point:

White rice versus brown rice. For some reason, we like to "refine" the nutrients out of food, then "enrich" it back to a supposedly health-giving state. It doesn't work. White rice is brown rice with the outer layer removed. It may go better with curry, but it also lacks the nutrients and fiber that aid digestion.
Juice versus fruit. Again with the fiber! You still get the vitamins when you drink juice, but you lose most of the fiber, which is important because it enables the slow release of fructose (fruit sugar) into your system, so that you can digest it better.
Veggies versus Cheetos. It seems like a no-brainer, but, for the record, there's nothing good about eating any kind of chips, even the health food store variety. Eat a carrot instead.

Eat More of Less.

Just as going back for seconds, thirds and fourths should be a non-option; so should skipping meals. Think of your body as a steam train, like the ones in the old westerns. Engineer Ted had to add a small, constant supply of coal to the furnace to keep Old Number 6 chugging away. He couldn't skip half a day and he couldn't overfill. Because your body constantly works, the best way Healthy breakfast, yogurt, granola, fruits, photo to feed it is with a constant supply of smaller meals. That means three meals a day, plus two snacks, especially if you are on a fitness program.

That doesn't mean three trips daily to Sizzler's All-You-Can-Eat Salad Bar, accompanied by two soda-and-donut stops at the Quicki Mart. It means three balanced, healthy meals and two similarly healthy smaller snacks.

If you feel full after a meal, that's bad. Throw everything your mom said about finishing your dinner out the window. Eat until you are no longer hungry, then stop. Also, it helps to eat slowly. Often, you'll eat all you need and not know it because it takes a few minutes for your stomach to catch up with your mouth. Hang back for 5 minutes before serving up seconds; you probably don't even need it.