How to make your meals healthier
Everybody loves to eat. In our culture, it's just something that we like to do. It can bring happiness, ease sadness, soothe unrest, and add festivity to our lives. We eat at parties and funerals. We eat when we're hungry and when we're bored. We just love to eat! But unfortunately, eating unhealthily can have some negative effects. It can cause weight gain and medical problems. The way to get around this, however, is to eat healthy. And what better way than to start with healthier meals? Here are some tips to making your meals healthier.
|
|
- When you're grocery shopping, look for color. The more your grocery basket looks like a rainbow of color, the better. This usually means you're getting more fresh vegetables and low-glycemic fruits such as berries and cherries. It also means that your meals will look more interesting when you serve them.
- Become a food detective. To reduce any type of unhealthy aspects of your meals, you need to know what you're eating. Start reading the labels of the food you buy. If you notice that the white bread you thought was so low in fat is actually packed with sugar, it might be a good idea to switch to a nice, dark wheat bread. But you wouldn't have known that if you hadn't read the label.
- Try to reduce processed carbohydrates. Most processed carbs, such as breads, bagels and pastas, are loaded with flour and other ingredients that convert to sugar in the body almost as fast as pure glucose. That type of sugar gets stored as triglycerides- (that's just a fancy way of saying fat). This is not to say you should eliminate carbs from your meals. Just eat them in moderation. If you're going to serve pasta for dinner, be sure that it is accompanied by some protein and a couple of vegetables.
- Speaking of vegetables.eat a lot of them! If you or your family aren't terribly fond of veggies, try hiding them in your main dish. A pasta dish with broccoli included makes it much easier to eat the broccoli than plain broccoli. Stir fry or casseroles also offer good hiding places for your veggies.
- Don't add sugar to foods. This is the easiest and most basic way to immediately reduce the amount of unhealthy sugar you're eating. Major culprits of this sin include cereal, coffee and tea. If you simply can't handle eating cereal or drinking your coffee without sugar, try reducing the amount of sugar you put in each serving.
- Eat low-fat meat. Protein is a very important part of every meal. You can take everyday dishes that you already know how to cook and make them even healthier by simply using lean meat. And you might want to consider skipping the meat every once in a while. Try vegetarian dishes of beans or lentils that can fill you up just as well as meat does, but don't carry the fat or calories of meat.
- Revolutionize dessert. Instead of serving a heavy chocolate pound cake for dessert, try serving fresh strawberries drizzled with a bit of chocolate syrup. You don't always need to refrain from dessert, but try to get out of the habit of eating it right after dinner. When this happens, you're usually just stuffing your face with more food because it tastes good and not because you're still hungry. Serving fruit as a dessert is a delicious and nutritious alternative.
- Eliminate fruit juice and soda at dinner. Soda is pure sugar with no nutritional value. Fruit juice is often packed with sugar as well, but contains none of the fiber and even less of the nutrients found in raw fruit. Instead, try serving low fat milk. This will help to fill you up faster, as well as give you a needed boost of calcium.
