The Importance Of Nutrition And Having A Good Diet

By Author: Thomas Lindblom
Total Articles: 200
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Good nutrition is increasingly becoming a more and more complex topic, what with everybody claiming to be a diet guru and designing their own peculiar heath diets. If you check out diets online you would find that sorting out the wheat from the chaff is confusing at best.

However, if you think about it a balanced diet is exactly what it says- balanced. It does not mean starving yourself into thinness but implies that the diet that one eats should be mixed and include all food groups so as to obtain the requisite nutrition.

Maintaining optimum health and weight is simply a question of permanently sticking to consistent dietary guidelines. Forget everything you've read so far about dieting to lose weight and start afresh employing the time-tested Rule of Fours method.

Eat four meals a day

Eating smaller meals more frequently is far better than eating three large meals a day. The human is designed to only keep what it needs. The excess nutrients that are consumed are excreted out

without being absorbed, whereas the excess calories are stored as fat. This stored fat is not the primary ...
... source of fuel for the body and is very difficult to burn off.

Eating small-sized meals is advantageous to your metabolism and enhances its efficiency as it allows the body to extract and store the maximum nutrients from the food you ingest. This also means the body stores less fat and produces higher energy levels.

Eat at four-hour intervals

Metabolism that is now working at a more efficient level will make you hungrier faster than before. Eating four meals a day at intervals of four hours keeps your metabolism running constantly as it has to continuously absorb, distribute and convert the nutrients from food into energy. However, this rule is easier said than done. Planning and preparing your daily meals the previous night is more likely to keep you on track with your diet. If you have not prepared anything you are more likely to give in to temptation. When you skip a meal, the metabolic processes in the body immediately slow down so as to conserve energy.

This in turn will disrupt the kick-start that you have been trying to impose upon your metabolism.

Divide your food into four equal servings

Now that you have a better idea of how often you

should eat, you should also know exactly what to eat as well as how much to eat of it. Health diets include dividing your meal into four parts. Quarter of your food should be protein-rich food including poultry, lean meats, yogurt, tofu, fish, eggs and legumes. Another quarter should comprise unrefined carbohydrates, which includes assorted whole grains, brown rice, pastas, breads and whole grain cereals. The remaining half your food should consist of vegetables and fruits.

It is always a healthy choice to avoid fried foods and all kinds of foods that are known to have high levels of saturated fats. While it may be acceptable to treat yourself to some special food now and then, you should keep in mind that is should be in moderation. In fact when it comes to food, you should make sure that everything, even your meal size is best when enjoyed in moderation. Have smaller sized portions, after all its only four hours till your next meal.

If followed correctly, these three rules could become a healthy habit for a life time.