Level Nutritionist

DIET AND LIFESTYLE BASICS FOR A HEALTHING LIVING

DIET AND LIFESTYLE BASICS FOR A HEALTHING LIVING

By Oliver Eden, MS HDN, Certified Wellness Coach, Gut Health Expert and Registered Dietitian.

Reviewed and edited by Team Level Nutritionist

In this post:

  • How to gently nourish your body
  • Guide on selection of food type
  • Importance of movement and exercise
  • Development of healthy relationship with food
  • Insight on what you don’t eat is more important

In this blog our CDNs have shared their views on lifestyle and diet modifications for healthy living. By working on these root steps on can lead to the fitness pathway. Here is the description of each:

Honor your health with gentle nutrition

This principle of encourages you to make food choices that taste good and bring you joy, as well as honor your health and nutritional needs.

Rather than following unnecessary food rules and rigid eating patterns, the idea is to choose foods and engage in eating habits that make your body feel good.

There is no “perfect” diet, and no one meal or snack will make or break your health.

An effective approach is to think about positive nutrition.

In other words, what can you add in to confer nutritional benefit, instead of always focusing on what you should take away. 

For example, perhaps you could benefit from adding more fiber to your meals to help ease digestive issues or better manage cholesterol levels. Or, you might seek out sources of omega-3 fatty acids to help with cardiovascular health. Speaking with a registered dietitian can be a great way to learn more about how food can best provide nutritional value in ways that work for you.

Select your food type wisely:

Challenge the food police and encourage yourself to consider the value in all foods.

Sure, some foods are richer in nutrients than others. Food, however, can serve a variety of benefits in your life.

Some foods are more about taste, pleasure, and celebration. Meanwhile, others are about honoring your culture and traditions. Others still are convenient, and maybe the only option you have available at times. You might even eat certain foods to help you relax and unwind, while consuming others to ensure you have energy for the day ahead.

All food has value.

By Challenging the food police, you will be challenging unnecessary food rules.  Sometimes these rules can be hard to spot, as they are often deeply ingrained in how we think about food and eating.

Examples of food rules that you might consider challenging include:

  • “Eating carbohydrates will make me gain weight”
  • “I should clean my plate, even if I’m already full”

Many of these types of rules are rooted in diet culture and disempower you to make mindful choices that best serve your body. 

Honor your hunger and make peace with your food

It’s a common misconception to assume simply eating whatever you want, whenever you want. Frequently, this misconception wrongly assumes Making peace with food means eating with disregard to health.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Respecting your hunger and making peace with food is about eating in a way that best serves your body, mind, and soul. It doesn’t mean eating foods based only on taste, without considering the other aspects of how that food will make you feel.

Eating ice cream, for example, can taste fantastic. But you probably wouldn’t feel great if you ate it for 3 meals a day, day after day. In fact, you’d probably start to feel sick. Eating to the point of feeling ill would not be a pillar of making peace with food. Remember, taste is just one of the many benefits of eating.

You might also make food choices that are palatable as well as based on digestive comfort, or to optimize your energy, or with religious or cultural considerations in mind. Plus, it’s not practical to eat whatever you want, whenever you want. There are many situations in which the foods you desire may not be readily available to you or may not be good for your health. This is especially true for individuals living with food insecurity or suffering from disease. The idea is simply to make choices that appeal to you and meet your needs, as best you can, without feeling guilt or shame around what you are eating.

 Movement

Just like eating should be an act of self-care, so should physical activity.

Rather than forcing yourself through unenjoyable forms of exercise, try to focus on movement that feels good and brings you joy. Humans tend to follow the path of least resistance. The more enjoyable something is, the more likely we are to engage in it.

On the other hand, the less pleasurable an activity, the less likely we are able to achieve intrinsic motivation to take part in it.

Finding pleasure in movement, in other words, can help it to become (and remain) a more regular part of your life. All forms of movement “count” towards physical and mental health, so find activities that work for you. Focus on how activity makes you feel, rather than simply its calorie-burning effect.

The importance of exercise

Exercise is no doubt incredibly important for a number of reasons:

For these reasons our sports nutrition professionals and I feel that exercise should form an integral part of a healthy lifestyle, as it is in mine. There is no doubt about that.

Learn more about the sports and athletic nutrition

Feel your fullness

Recognizing the signs of ‘comfortable fullness’ can be challenging. This is especially true if you often only eat when you’re ravenously hungry, or while distracted.

Fueling your body regularly and consistently will allow you to avoid feeling overly hungry. This, in turn, can help you slow down, think about what you want to eat, and focus on enjoying your food.

Eating more slowly and mindfully can help you cue in to when you feel as though you’ve had enough to eat. Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat allows your body to learn to trust that you will give it enough to eat.  Eventually, this makes it less likely that you will feel out of control around certain foods and eat to the point of discomfort.

Related: how to avoid emotional eating

What you don’t eat is more important.

This a question that’s probably on most people’s minds, at least those who are ready to make positive, lasting changes to their eating habits.

But here’s an important idea to keep in mind: what you eat is less important than what you don’t eat.

We cannot begin to tell you how many people regularly and inadvertently sabotage their own nutrition, health and wellness goals by not adhering to this principle.

You can eat all the healthy food you want and attending the gym may be a well-embedded habit, but you can seriously undermine your fine effort by habitually giving in to unhealthy temptations.

A donut or two on your coffee break, a handful of cookies in the evening while watching your favorite Netflix show and a couple of Margaritas on a sunny summer day are insidious, and lead to the consumption of many extra-calories, let alone mounds of sugar, preservatives, trans fats et al.

All these small indulgences add up fast and, as mentioned earlier, are difficult to burn up through exercise. Over time, extra, unburned calories can contribute to weight gain or at least the difficulty in maintaining a healthy, desirable weight.

This often leaves those who feel they eat generally healthily and exercise regularly frustrated and baffled. Some even resort to strict diets that revolve around deprivation in one way or another, in an attempt to rectify the situation. But that’s getting away from the root of the problem.

This is not to say that you cannot indulge a little here and there. But make sure your treat is, as the definition says, a treat, or something out of the ordinary.

Of course, matters pertaining to weight management are complicated, multi-layered and fraught with weight loss obstacles. There’s a great deal more to the issue than just calories in and calories out. And this is typically what we delve into in our weight loss program.

Related:  Weight management

Conclusion:

It’s all about building trust with and learning to respect your body, making peace with food, and removing the stress and shame from eating. When food doesn’t take up so much mental space and energy, you are free to enjoy all the other wonderful aspects of your life.

If you require personal support in your wellness journey, you can contact us to book a free consultation. We offer in-person appointments in selected cities, as well as online nutritionist and dietitian services.