There have been a lot of discussions about healthy eating. To take it one step further, healthy eating is about choosing the right food in the right proportion. Few questions need to be answered while considering healthy eating.
- What type of foods to put on your plate?
- How much should be the portion size?
- How often should you eat?
While it is important to ensure to provide your body with the essential nutrients with every meal, one also has to take care of the food groups and portions of each of these food groups. And it all starts with your plate.
While following a healthy eating plan, what food you take on your plate is an important consideration. So, when it comes to filling your plate, think quality over quantity. Building a meal centred around nutrient-dense, wholesome fruits and vegetables are important.
How to create a healthy eating plate
Fruit, vegetables, whole grains, legumes all provide vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre and nutrients. Fill half your plate with fruits and vegetables and the remaining half with fibre and protein to create a healthy foundation for every meal. Besides, ensure one serving of low-fat or fat-free dairy to round out each meal.
Fruits & Vegetables
Fruits and vegetables are low-calorie foods with tremendous health benefits. They are an important source of nutrients, including potassium, dietary fibre, folate (folic acid), vitamin A, and vitamin C. Choose from a variety of colourful fresh fruits and vegetables. Make sure to include a variety of different colours like greens, reds, and oranges to get a wider variety of nutrients and health benefits.
Whole Grains for Healthy Carbs
Carbohydrates should be your body’s main source of energy in a healthy, balanced diet. Starchy vegetables and whole grains are rich in healthy carbs. Besides, they also provide many other nutrients, including dietary fibre, several B vitamins, and minerals, like iron, potassium, magnesium, and selenium.
Lean Protein
Proteins play a crucial role in metabolism, immunity, fluid balance, and energy. Foods that provide high levels of protein include dairy and plant proteins. These foods provide not only protein but B vitamins (niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, and B6), vitamin E, iron, zinc, magnesium, and calcium.
Healthy Fats
Healthy fats provide essential nutrients and can come in lots of shapes and sizes. It could be part of your protein or part of your vegetable intake in the form of nuts or seeds. Oils derived from plants provide essential fatty acids, mono- and polyunsaturated fats and vitamin E.
Step up to Supplements
While creating a balanced meal plate can get you the essential nutrients, due to certain health conditions or food allergies, you may at times have nutritional gaps that may need to be filled by supplements. The supplement can help ensure you are getting all the nutrients you need. However, it is important to talk to a nutrition expert before taking any supplements.
Healthy food choices vary from person to person, depending on age, gender, overall health, and physical activity. Though it may seem difficult to make every meal perfectly divided into food group portions, taking small steps can make a difference and lead to healthy lifestyle choices. Talk to our nutrition expert at 8 Fitness Tips to learn more about balanced nutritional meals.
Food systems can deliver numerous biological functions through dietary components in the human body. Our body needs different types of nutrients to perform different functions. The more variety of food you have on your plate, the more types of nutrients the body gets from it. And that’s where Indian food wins. The inclusion of various spices, pulses, rice and grains, makes it one of the most wholesome foods in the world.
What does the Indian diet offer?
Indian Food Offer Variety
Typical Indian meals consist of dal (a legume dish) and rice, vegetables, salad, and fruit. This supplies the body with major nutrients including minerals, vitamins, iron, carbohydrates, proteins, calcium and fats. They are derived through a combination of the five major food groups – fruits and vegetables, cereals and pulses, meat and dairy products and fats and oils.
How does an Indian diet help healthy living?
Here are the reasons why you should stick with an Indian Diet.
Preparation of Indian food
The way Indian food is prepared contributes a lot to its health benefits. Sprouting, fermentation, malting etc enhance the functional properties of foods. Indian cooking style retains the nutritional aspects of the food and optimizes and also enhances the benefits provided by that.
Medicinal properties offered by herbs and spices
The use of herbs and spices has been incredibly important throughout history. Spices like turmeric, garlic, chillies, black pepper, cumin, fenugreek and many more offer exceptional medicinal and healing properties. The Indian cuisines make optimum use of these spices and herbs adding a healing property to the dishes.
Loaded with proteins and dietary fibre
Indian food consists of a variety of grains that are high in dietary fibre and enhances the body’s health and functioning. Besides, pulses that are high in protein are also an important part of Indian meals.
Fewer and safer preservatives
Traditional Indian cooking involves cooking fresh vegetables from scratch making the food healthier and preservatives free. Even if there is any use of preservatives in any of the preparation, it is done by using natural preservatives like salt, lemon, spices etc.
Use of good fats
Indian cooking is believed to make use of oil and ghee more as compared to other cooking methods. However, it involves the use of a variety of oils and ghee which contributes to fulfilling the body’s healthy fats requirement. Besides, the oils which are used in cooking are made from mustard seeds, peanuts, coconut, and groundnut which again is healthier choices an individual can make for cooking food.
It is normal to feel tired, exhausted and low on energy when you have been sick and down with any viral infection. This tiredness is a part of the healing process which can linger for weeks or months.
This lack of energy that you experience while recovering from any viral infection is known as post-viral fatigue. It can make you sleep more, feel unsteady on your feet, make standing for long periods difficult and also affect your ability to concentrate on work.
Post-viral fatigue mostly continues for some time after the infection has cleared. However, it is important to recover from this fatigue in the due course of time. Because, if not addressed in time, it can make you susceptible to other viruses and infections.
Symptoms of Post-viral Fatigue
While lack of energy is one of the significant indicators of post-viral fatigue, one might also experience other symptoms including:
- Poor concentration
- Headache or pain in muscles and joints
- Muscle stiffness or weakness
- Sore throat and swollen glands
- Breathlessness and heart palpitation
- Weak immunity
- Sleep disruption and depression
Addressing Post-viral Fatigue
So what should you do if you’re suffering from post-viral fatigue?
While there are no precise treatments, there are many things you can do to ease your symptoms and aid your recovery.
Nutritional Support
It is important to provide some extra nutritional support to enhance mitochondrial function. Some herbs and supplements can help restore energy. They can help in overcoming the effect of the virus on the immune system, liver function and digestive tract.
Good Rest
Getting a good night’s sleep is one of the most important activities you can do for your health. When you sleep, the growth hormone is produced which repairs the tissue, regulates immune function and detoxes the brain and organ. Besides, sleep produces serotonin, the hormone that is responsible for regulating mood.
Moderate Activity
Moderate levels of activity like walking and stretching will increase circulation and improve lymph flow. The body takes time to recover and regain strength and stability. To engage in some moderate exercise, but don’t overdo it.
Sun Therapy
Soaking in the sun helps get the body Vitamin D. Since low levels of Vitamin D have been associated with a low performing immune system, it is important to take your dose of Vitamin D to recover faster.
The Bottomline
The recovery time from post-viral fatigue varies from person to person. Some people are back to normal within a few days to a week, while others experience the symptoms for long. However, getting an early diagnosis may improve recovery.
As your body gradually recovers from the illness, remember to keep a balance of diet, rest and exercise.
Another diet in trend, vegan diet focusses on plant-based foods and beverages and excludes all animal products. Vegan diet has garnered immense popularity in last few years.
Veganism means the completely removing all animal and animal-based foods from your diet. Apparently, if followed correctly, vegan diet can prove to be highly nutritious, effective weight loss diet which can also reduce the risk of chronic diseases.
However, it is not easy to go 100% vegan even for Indian vegetarians. Besides, there are many nutrients which lack in this plant-based diet like calcium, vitamin D, vitamin B12, fatty acids, iodine etc.
So, it is important to research and understand the pros and cons before shifting to vegan-only diet.
Advantages of vegan diet
- It aids weight loss
- It reduces the risks of serious diseases
- It is environmentally sustainable diet
- It encourages mindful eating
- It has more variety of foods
Disadvantages of vegan diet
- It may lead to nutrient deficiencies
- It is difficult to dine out with vegan diet
- It requires dedicated efforts
- It is difficult to meet the requirement of proteins
- It can prove to be complicated in following
Bottom line
You cannot expect miracles from vegan diet. It takes its own time to show its benefits according to your body.
Talk to a nutritionist before shifting to vegan-only diet. They can suggest you to take dietary supplements to avoid any nutritional deficiencies.
Not every diet works for everyone. So everyone needs a diet customised according to their own body requirement. Similarly, following a vegan diet can also go wrong for some individuals.
Besides, any diet that involves eliminating a certain type of foods can be difficult to follow. Think and process!