Healthy Eating Tips - Simple Ways To Better Health.

These healthy eating tips can make a big difference to your health. When you start eating right your overall health quickly improves. Indigestion will be a thing of the past. You’ll have more energy. You can lose weight and reach your ideal healthy weight without dieting. These 10 tips to healthy eating are simple ways of working with your body rather than against it.

Rather than trying to change all at once, aim to gradually introduce new, healthier ways of eating to your family. Look through these healthy eating tips and see which ones you could adapt to most easily. If you’re interested in looking after your health, you probably follow some of them already.

· Eat a light breakfast. First thing in the morning your body is still trying to clear out the wastes from yesterday – not just through your bowels, but also through skin, lungs, liver and kidneys. It can do this better if you don’t divert all your energy to digesting a big breakfast – when you eat, blood flow to your stomach is increased and to everywhere else is decreased.

Breakfast is important, but make it a light meal. Fruit is ideal as it gives you quick energy and is easily digested. Meusli is o.k., or porridge if you really need something more warming and filling than fruit, but definitely avoid high protein or very fatty foods for breakfast – so save the bacon and eggs for another time.

· Eat little and often. Several small meals are better than a few large ones. This helps to keep your blood sugar level from getting too high or too low. It also helps with appetite control – if you have frequent small meals you’ll never get so hungry that you want to over-eat.

· Don’t eat late at night. Finish your last meal before about 8 p.m. Anything you eat in the last few hours before sleep is going to sit in your stomach over night fermenting – giving you bad breath and poor digestion. Your stomach goes to sleep when you do, so let it rest empty.

· Don’t drink with meals. You need plenty of water - 1½ to 2 litres a day – but not at meal times, or immediately after. Water will dilute your stomach acid and wash the food out of your stomach before it’s ready. Drink a glass of water about ten minutes before a meal, and wait at least half an hour after before drinking again. If you need water with a meal, keep it to a few small sips.

· Eat protein and carbohydrate foods at separate meals. Protein needs acid to digest it, so don’t dilute your stomach acid with starchy foods. If you can’t manage this, at least have the protein part of the meal first, to make the most of the acid.

This may be the most important of the healthy eating tips. It’s the basis of Dr Hay’s system of food combining, and has helped many thousands of people to better health. It’s also possibly the best of all weight loss tips.

· Chew your food really well – particularly starchy foods. Digestion of starchy foods (carbohydrates) starts in your mouth. Saliva contains enzymes that begin the breakdown of starch, so it’s really important to break the food up with your teeth and mix it thoroughly with saliva before swallowing. Nothing much happens to starchy foods in your stomach - the digestion process starts up again in your small intestine. (This is the other reason for food combining - see the previous tip).


The next two healthy eating tips might seem a bit obvious to many of you, but there are far too many people trying to live on a diet of white bread, without sight of a vegetable from one end of the week to the other.

· Make vegetables your main food. A balanced diet should be based on vegetables with smaller amounts of fruit, carbohydrates and protein foods (whether meat or vegetarian). Vegetables and fruit generally are alkaline ash foods and help to keep your body pH down. This juice suggester is an intriguing way to select juice recipes using available fruit and vegetables in the home.

Vegetables are also good sources of fibre, vitamins and minerals. They are better sources of usable calcium than dairy products.

· Carbohydrate food should be wholemeal – i.e. wholemeal bread, wholemeal pasta, brown rice. Refined carbohydrates such as white flour and white rice have most of the goodness taken out. Don’t be fooled by labels telling you that they’ve added 4 or 5 vitamins – they’ve taken out 28!

· Avoid artificial additives. These are largely man-made chemicals that do not exist in nature. Our bodies have not evolved to deal with them. Tartrazine is one example of a widely used, harmful additive. Aspartame is another – possibly the worst of them all. Though there are some additives that are natural and harmless, even beneficial, too many of them are not good for you. Get in the habit of reading labels carefully.

· Eat organic where you can. I know it’s more expensive (usually) but it’s often worth the extra for the better taste and higher levels of nutrients in organically produced food. Better yet, grow your own. You know exactly what goes into it, and you can’t get fresher.

Follow these 10 healthy eating tips and you’ll soon feel the benefits of healthy eating. Try to follow at least some of them most of the time. You’ll notice the difference within days.


Find out how a gluten free diet could help you.

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