Healthy food and exercise: are you ready for spring?

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If you could overhear the conversation about dieting in the women's locker room at a sports club, you would immediately lose all desire to diet and switch to healthy eating. For many, the link "healthy food - tasteless food" is firmly stuck in their heads. In addition, few of us can boast of excellent health (and for most diets there are many contraindications) and no less excellent willpower. But not everything is as difficult and tasteless as it might seem at first glance. You are quite able to independently choose healthy and tasty food for yourself.

“We are what we eat” - you could say that, right?

There is a particular revival in the gyms now! Still, after all, you need to put your body in order in just three months and shove it back into more or less decent frames. That is, we begin to torture ourselves with diets and exercises, hoping to fix in three months what we spoiled every day during the other nine.

We have already described one of the options to put ourselves in order at least a little in the article "We take care of the health of our back: we work while standing." And now I would also like to add a few tips from Leo Babauta (Zenhabits), who was able to choose the optimal diet for himself.

The first thing I would like to remind you is that one of your worst enemies is the office cookies and other sweets that many companies take great pleasure in supplying their employees. To make the work seem sweeter. And so cookie after cookie every hour add you not only energy for work (which quickly ends), but also a couple of centimeters at the waist.

If you have never been on a diet and are not used to limiting yourself in food, you should first try to simply limit yourself in the use of everything fatty, fried and sweet. And replace semi-finished products with normal food. Even sandwiches can sometimes be healthier than instant soup.

So, the first 5 tips:

1. Don't resort to extreme methods. What I wrote about at the beginning - do not try to immediately switch to a rigid diet. Just start gradually reducing your portions by replacing fried potatoes with salad, soda with plain water or juice, and donut with fruit or nuts and honey.

2. Eat slower. Firstly, you will chew food more thoroughly and it is better absorbed by the body, and secondly, the feeling of satiety does not come immediately, but only 20 minutes after the end of the meal. And swallowing in larger and larger chunks, you run the risk of indigestion plus overeating.

3. Try to eat natural foods. Fruits and vegetables, seeds, nuts and certain types of grains and preferably from the market.

4. Eat more plant foods. I cannot say that meat is bad. I myself sometimes like delicious meat dishes, but you shouldn't forget about vegetables either. As well as the fact that there are only raw vegetables is not so good for our pancreas and stomach. You need to know when to stop.

5. Enjoy the process. Don't just chew your meal like a ruminant, enjoy it! In one of the articles, I once wrote about one of the exercises - eating an apple in small pieces for an hour, enjoying each piece, savoring it and highlighting individual shades of taste. But seriously, your mood greatly affects the digestion process. Do it with pleasure, feel all the shades of taste.

Now let's move on directly to the diet itself. Leo has set aside one day a week for himself when he allows himself to eat some pizza, sweets, pasta, drink some beer. This is a light version of the Tim Ferris diet from The 4-houre Body. And the rest of the days he tries to stick to his diet.

1. Legumes. Beans of different types, chickpeas, lentils - all of this is quite edible and can be delicious! For example, beans in a creamy sauce or lentil soup with tomatoes - healthy and delicious!

2. Nuts and seeds. Almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, pumpkin seeds - I think that comments are unnecessary here.

3. Vegetables. Carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, bell peppers - you can list it endlessly. And what goodies you can cook from them!

4. Fruits and berries. I don’t know a single person who would not love at least some of this!

5. Whole grains. Sprouted wheat can be added to salad and soup, oatmeal, wholemeal bread with various additions in the form of seeds - all this is very tasty and healthy.

And now the most important thing is what is better to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner! But before that, a little digression. No wonder our grandmothers always told us that breakfast is the head of everything. You need to have a hearty and thorough breakfast, even if you do not feel hungry. Chocolate and juice for breakfast is not a good idea. Because in an hour you will be hungry again. Usually it turns out how? In the morning you manage to grab a cup of coffee or tea with something light, then after a couple of hours you start to feel hungry and start grabbing cookies in the office over tea or another cup of coffee. Of course, you get a boost of vivacity, but for a very short time. For lunch, if you're lucky, you eat a business lunch at the cafe, which includes soup. But there is not always time for a normal lunch and you get by with a snack of something like a bun or cake. And after all this, you come home at 7 pm (and often much later) with an animal feeling of hunger and throw yourself up for dinner, which includes the first, second, third and compote! And then you can also flavor everything with beer. And all this literally a couple of hours before bedtime … Well, it doesn't fit into the picture of a healthy lifestyle.

This is what Leo Babaut's food looks like

Breakfast … It could very well be oatmeal. But by itself, it is not all that nutritious. But you can add dried fruits, nuts, bananas, berries (if the season allows) and seeds to it. Then it turns into a fairly hearty and healthy breakfast.

Dinner … Large salad bowl with herbs, cabbage, vegetables, nuts and balsamic vinegar. Sometimes fried tofu with herbs.

Snack. If after a while after lunch you feel a little hungry, it is quite possible to have a snack with nuts, dried fruits or hummus.

Dinner. And again vegetables, but this time with beans, cooked in different versions. These can be Mexican, Indian or Oriental dishes. You can also add tofu and a glass of light red wine to this.

Of course, you will not be able to switch to such a diet right away. Personally, I would add soup to dinner. If the figure permits, something denser is also possible. Also, if you are active in the gym, you need to remember that muscles need proteins. Therefore, you can add marine life (squid, shrimp, etc.) and, of course, fish to the menu.

And so that everything does not seem so terrible, I want to share with you some recipes for delicious and healthy sandwiches. I tried the first one in a Turkish cafe. In general, it seems to me that one can and should take an example from the Turks - they are very active physically and eat healthy and fresh food (and this is not at all about "All inclusive" hotels). And I read the second one somewhere and decided to try my own version a little!

1. Take dark bread (you can with seeds), put in the following sequence: lettuce leaves, pieces of feta cheese, small slices of tomatoes and cucumbers, again a leaf of lettuce and cover with another slice of bread on top. Ideally, this should be a small bun that can be cut lengthwise to the end - it does not creep when trying to bite a piece from a sandwich. Can be sprinkled with lemon juice.
2. For the second, you will need lightly salted salmon (or smoked butter fillet), lettuce, wholemeal bread, cottage cheese, herbs and black pepper. Mix cottage cheese with finely chopped herbs and black pepper, spread on top of the bread, put a leaf of lettuce and a piece of fish on top. This sandwich can be easily wrapped in plastic wrap and taken to work for a snack if you know you're going to have a tough day. Of course, it is good if you have home-salted fish. But even if the fish is store-bought, you will agree that it is still better than a sandwich with sausage or ham!

And I also received an assignment from the editor: to compare a certain amount of office snacks and fast food in terms of calorie content with real food. I'll take it on next week. I think that after that, many will think about what they eat and that sometimes the speed and availability of food is not the best quality. What do you think?