Nutrition and Cooking: Becoming a Healthier Person - Eat What You Need, Not What Want

Sometimes eating healthy isn’t easy, but there comes a time in your life (preferably sooner rather than later) when you realize you have to start eating healthier. This is what happened to me. In my journey to becoming healthier, I started by eliminating alcohol, sweets, saturated fats, white bread, and coffee from my diet as much as I could.

The truth is, the best thing you can do for yourself is make your health your #1 priority. Maintaining your long-term health is your best insurance for avoiding the costly, painful, and lengthy recovery if you were to get ill.

Variety and balance in your food are important. I began making changes to my eating habits by eating whole and well-balanced breakfasts, more fruit, organic vegetable salads, vegetable-based soups, and various natural supplements.

I found that a combination of healthy eating and going to the gym helped me lose 35 pounds - as a result, I had a fit and toned physique. It is generally believed that diet accounts for 70% of fat loss, while only 20% of fat loss is due to exercise , so there’s no excuse for not eating healthy.

As a result of my journey, I can teach you a few tips that I learned.

If you treat eating like a process that requires your full attention, you’ll be more aware of what you’re eating. This way, you won’t feel as inclined to snack and you’ll have a more formal approach to your mealtimes. When you are ready to sit down to a meal, you should:

· Wash your hands before eating
· Eat the most fresh and nutrient rich food you can
· Eat balanced meals (pay attention to a variety of colours on your plate)
· Bless the food (be grateful for it and its value)
· Eat slowly and chew each bite-think about eating

Here’s another tip about eating: To get the most nutritious value from your food, and to encourage proper digestion, chew your food up to 30 times before swallowing. If you don’t chew your food properly before swallowing, you won’t get the full nutritional value of the food. Further, if you haven’t chewed your food well in the first place, your body has to work harder to digest your food and you won’t feel good. You might feel sluggish and mentally unclear.

Another way to maximize the nutritional value you are getting from your food is by eating raw food. I learned that some minerals, vitamins, and amino acids are actually killed through the cooking process, which means if you’re only eating cooked food, you’re missing out on some important nutrients. Enzymes, which are important for your digestion, are destroyed too. When your body isn’t getting the nutrients it needs, you’ll feel hungry and more inclined to snack.

However, keep in mind that steaming certain vegetables actually increases their nutritional value. Carrots, beets, mushrooms, asparagus, cabbage, and peppers can supply you with more antioxidants such as carotenoids and ferulic acid when they’re cooked.

Although eating raw food is a healthy thing, I wouldn’t recommend moving away from cooked food completely. Having a balanced diet means you can have everything in moderation. I experimented with eating only raw food for a few weeks, but then I started to feel awful because my body was craving a hot meal. Cooking kills bacteria, makes food taste better and softer to chew, and warms up the insides.

I recommend eating hot soups such as Pho Ga, a (spicy) Vietnamese chicken soup, or the vegetarian alternative with tofu. Whenever I eat it, it clears up my mucus, sinuses, breathing, sleepiness, and my overall sluggishness.

Besides eating raw and hot food, breakfast is also important. Because breakfast is considered the most important meal of the day, I began to make an effort to incorporate healthier breakfasts into my overall diet . I found that it makes a huge difference during the course of the day in terms of your performance, effectiveness, and overall well-being.

For me, a healthy breakfast means an omelette full of vegetables such as peppers, broccoli, tomatoes, and mushrooms, or other ingredients such as cheese and oregano. You don’t necessarily have to have an omelette full of veggies to have a healthy breakfast, but just remember to have balance. Have varieties of vegetables, cheese, and light meat, but above all cut out the sugar.

An easy rule of thumb for creating healthy meals is by incorporating as many colours as possible into them. A variety of colourful foods that are red, green, orange/yellow, purple/black, brown, and white should be included in your meals. For example, consider adding red vegetables such as peppers, radishes, beets, or tomatoes to a dish, or green Swiss chard, beans, kale, spinach, or lettuce. Other colourful foods include cheese, eggs, carrots, ginger, pasta and rice, eggplant, and olives. Be open to a balanced variety; eating a wide variety of colourful foods ensures your body is going to get all the nutritional value it needs.

Cooking classes are actually a great way to learn about healthy eating and about incorporating those nutrient rich, colourful ingredients into your diet. From my experience, they are not only a great way to learn how to cook well, but they also teach you how to cook healthy meals. I ended up taking three cooking classes.

One course I took was the “Chef on the Go” course. Sometimes when you’re on the go, it’s difficult to eat nutritious meals, but through this course I learned how to cook my own healthy meals in 30 minutes or less. My favourite meal was a coconut chickpea soup, and I was shocked that I enjoyed a vegetable and mushroom side more than I enjoyed a chicken dish.

I also took a course called “Mediterranean Cooking ”, and a “Tastes of Thailand” class.

Through these cooking courses, I learned how to make light and healthy meals. The great thing about cooking your own meals is that you can control your ingredients and have as much variety as you want, while opening the door to healthy foods from other cultures.

As for cutting bad things from my diet, I reduced my coffee and alcohol intake. These days I drink 1 teaspoon of coffee a day from time to time, i.e. not every day. Occasionally I have a single espresso in the afternoon.

You shouldn’t have more than 5 coffees a week, but it is a good metabolism boost in the morning. Having coffee too often puts your body in to a state of anxious stress and your mind becomes foggy.

A good way to fill the void of coffee is by drinking herbal tea such as Chai, Green, and Earl Gray Tea, and decaf coffee, as well as Goji or Noni juice.

For alcohol, I completely eliminated beer and liquor. The only alcohol that has some antioxidant benefits is a vintage red wine, of which I only have about 3-4 glasses a week.

Eating healthy is extremely important. The most important things to remember when planning your meals is to create balanced meals with lots of colourful food, to treat eating as a process, and to reduce your alcohol, coffee, and sugar intake. If you can do all of these things, you will enjoy being a much healthier person.