9 Tips for maintaining a healthy and balanced diet:
1. Stock your pantry and kitchen with a variety of whole foods and nutrient-dense foods. Foods such as fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, greens, a variety of spices, Himalayan salt, healthy fats, and oil.
2. Eat home-cooked meals at least 4-5 days of the week. This practice allows you to be in control of what you cook and eat, and the ingredients used in your food.
3. Avoid sweetened drinks like soft drinks, juices, and sugar in coffee and tea. This is a simple way to significantly reduce your refined-sugar intake.
4. Always read ingredient labels before purchasing packaged foods. Most packaged and processed foods are made with a variety of artificial and unhealthy ingredients, such as refined sugars, oils, sodium, bleached flour, food colouring, and the list goes on and on. A simple tip, if you don’t know what the ingredients mean it’s probably not going to benefit you. This is how you become a conscious consumer. These practices allow you to consciously choose if you want a product or not, instead of purchasing out of habit.
5. Eat a warm breakfast that is filling but also easy to digest. Digestion is at its peak between 10am-2pm. Meals eaten outside of this time frame should be easy to digest meals. Meals like soups, porridges, oatmeal, stews, fruit etc.
6. Eat wholesome meals that will keep you feeling nourished and satisfied. Meals made from whole foods, grains, legumes, greens, and spices give our bodies the nutrients it needs to feel satisfied. Highly processed foods are usually nutrient-void foods and therefore leave us feeling unsatisfied and wanting to eat more.
7. Leave a minimum of 3-4 hours between eating to ensure proper digestion of your last meal and to give your body time to absorb the nutrients. Digestion takes a lot of energy from our body, energy that you need for other activities. Therefore, leaving a significant amount of time between meals will allow your body to perform at its best. This also promotes weight management and discipline. Fun fact- It takes our body approximately 3-4 hours to digest a meal.
8. Avoid mindless snacking. Having snacks in between meals are not necessary. If you feel like you need something to eat in between meals try eating fruit, or drinking teas such as herbal teas, butterfly pea teas, or golden milk etc. The easier to process and digest, the better.
9. Try to avoid eating after 7pm and 8pm. This helps maintain a healthy weight and gives your body enough time to digest your food before liver detoxification happens between 10pm and 2am.
These mindful eating practices have allowed me to build incredible amounts of self-control. You can ease yourself into a routine like this and you will see that overtime it will become natural for your to eat like this. Remember highly processed foods with lots of sugar, oil and sodium are very addictive foods. When you eliminate them from your daily diet, your tastebuds will naturally alter themselves to enjoy clean, wholesome, nutritious foods. Experiment with this so that you can become in tuned with your food and your body. You will see how much your body will love and thrive on nutritious, wholesome food.
You can find a variety of easy-to-make wholesome meals on my website blog.