Tikachu's Kitchen: The Right Healthy Menu: How to Design Your Diet Combo Without Starving!

3/22/10

The Right Healthy Menu: How to Design Your Diet Combo Without Starving!

5:18 PM |

Postedby Kartika Christensen |

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Like many nutritionists and diet experts would teach you, cutting back a large portion of your daily meal is not going to make you lose a lot of weight in long-period, because you’ll just be left wanting for more at the end of the day. Besides, starving can’t be healthy >.> Human body is a complex bio-mechanism and starving is an alarm system triggered by your brain when it detects that it is time for your body to take its regular feed. Starving yourself = torturing your system, causing the chemicals in your body react to cope with the deprivation of food (a.k.a the “Survival mode”) such as shutting down the “least important” systems in your body like nutrition supply to your skin and hair, pushing brain activities and making you prone to stress, changing the output of hormones, and other chemical adjustments. Sounds terrifying, huh? O_o But it does happen. So how can you do your diet without starving? Be vegetarian? Hmm, not necessarily. I’ll teach you an important lesson about healthy, balanced diet.

Like so many things in our life, there are three parameters which must be fulfilled in doing a diet: balance, fulfillment, and quality.

1. Balance means that you have to find the perfect combination of nutrition for your body. Eating vegetables at all time and depriving yourself of protein, high contents of calcium and unsaturated fat is not recommended. Eating high protein without fiber and vitamin to go with it is also a sure way to catch lots of sickness later on. You have to remember that human body is composed of lots of chemicals called hormones, triggered by the brain to adjust your body with your surrounding environments and internal physiology. A balanced diet, which means taking a bit of everything but NOT EXCEEDING your recommended calorie intake, will enhance your body’s chemical and physical performance. ;D When it comes to food, the balance is between the calorie and the content. Why did you think they call burgers and hot dogs “junk food”? Because it’s extremely loaded with calorie with no nutrition in it. So take notice of your daily calorie intake. The recommended calorie intake for those who want to maintain their body weight is 2000-2200 calories a day, whereas for those who want to lose body weight must eat no more than 1300 calories a day. When you buy a package food, take a look at the calorie level AND the serving size on the nutrition table, and multiply it to get the right amount of calorie per package. Counting calories is a pain, but it’s the key to healthy and fulfilling meals. To know how much calorie your meal has, take a look at the simple calorie table on http://www.soystache.com/food-table.htm. For a more complete database on calorie counting, visit http://www.calorieking.com/foods/ and key in your menu.

2. Next, fulfillment, meaning that in order to fight off the craving for unhealthy food, your diet menu must fulfill your need for taste and texture. This varies for every person, but basically there are several rules that you can follow to ensure that every meal is satisfactory and won’t leave you wanting for more.

- Diverse your meal. This is important, because research shows that 95% people are not satisfied with only one type of food per meal. An ideal meal should be composed of something hot, something cold, something crunchy and something chewy to satisfy your craving. For example, an ideal lunch would be a grilled tuna (something hot and chewy) with slices of fresh carrots (something cold and crunchy).

- Take it in slowly. Experts found that chewing actually releases endorfin in your system, the body’s natural anti-depressant chemical. Slow eating also gives you an early feeling of full, making you reluctant to eat a lot of food in one meal. It is also the ideal way of treating your digestive system, enabling it to give a timely warning when your body stops craving, or if a toxic substance has made its way to your body.

- Stick to your eating schedule. Be it a half-portion-6 meals a day or normal portion-3 meals a day, you have to be strict when it comes to eating. Just like every complex mechanism, human body cope best with regular, scheduled meal and sleep hours. You can diverse your menu, but not your eating schedule.

3. The last parameter is quality. In case you haven’t noticed, eating is not that very different from sleeping. What matters is not the quantity, but the quality. Quality in meal means the number and amount of nutrition it has. There are five main elements of food that you can normally find in food packaging: vitamin & minerals, fat, carbohydrate, protein and fiber. The ideal count of daily intake of these nutritional elements are:

- recommended daily fat intake: 20 grams of saturated fat or 50 grams of total fat
- recommended daily fiber intake: 20-25 grams for women, 30-35 grams for men
- recommended daily vitamin and minerals intake can be found on http://www.lenntech.com/recommended-daily-intake.htm
- recommended daily protein intake: around 40 to 70 grams a day, depending on your gender, age, health condition and daily activities.
- recommended daily carb intake: 180-200 grams if your not trying to lose weight, or 120-180 grams if your trying to :D

Knowing all three parameters, now is the time to buff up your diet menu. Remember, eat full but quality meal! ;)