How and Why Should I Maintain A Diet in 2021

Why should I diet ?

It’s important to have a nutritionally balanced diet for a balanced lifestyle and optimal health. Balanced eating will result in regular delivery of the essential nutrients to your body so that it can fight disease, boost the immune system and continue healthy development.

What is a balanced diet?

Balanced healthy diets contain nutrients that your body needs to function properly. Fortunately, perfect diet isn't something elusive as you can easily maintain a healthy and balanced diet by consuming fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grain, nuts, lean proteins, and legumes.

However, this is just one aspect of a daily balanced diet. You also need to think about how many calories you consume in a day.

If you are wondering how to create a healthy diet, keep reading as we explore components of a simple, healthy diet later in this article.

What’s it with calories?

How to eat a balanced diet?

If that question has been bothering you for some time, I’m sure you have learned about calories by now.

The number of calories determines the amount of energy in your food. If you are eating high energy food, then you are consuming a lot of calories, and your body might not be able to use all that energy. On the other hand, eating low-calorie diet could result in low energy that could disturb its growth and immune system.

You need energy (harvested from calories in your diet) to breathe, walk, talk, think, and do all other things that make up life. The number of calories you need to go through a day optimally depends on various factors such as your age, gender, the rate of metabolism, weight, height, and your daily routine.

An adult could need anywhere between 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day. As a general rule, men need more calories than women.

How many calories do you need to consume daily?

How to have a balanced diet? How many calories should I aim for?

Understanding your calorie intake is an important step towards eating a simple, healthy diet.

According to USDA guidelines, children need between 1,000 to 1,400 calories every day. Men who aged between 14 and 30 need anywhere between 2,800 and 3,000 calories while women of the same age need around 2,400 calories a day. Women and men over 30 years of age need anywhere between 2,200 and 3,000 calories.

Although calorie count is an important part of a balanced diet, it doesn't necessary mean you are eating a balanced diet if you are keeping the calorie count right. You could be eating empty calories or calories that provide little nutritional value.

If you are taking your calories from bacon, sausages, cookies, cheese, fruit drinks, ice cream, pizza, or doughnuts, you are consuming a lot of empty calories and not getting a balanced nutrition.

How to maintain diet

If you are wondering how to maintain a healthy diet, you have to think about making lifestyle changes. Start with these five simple rules to maintain diet and your eating habits will improve over time. Eventually, just by adhering to these rules, you will be able to maintain a healthy diet.

Want to know how to diet properly? Read these 5 simple rules of dieting.

Consume a variety of foods

One of the major problems with people reading healthy diet articles to figure out what to eat to attain certain goals forget that restrictive diet isn't going to do them any favor.

Eating something more by cutting on another important food is a mistake. You will deprive your body of certain nutrients, which could be bad for your long-term health and happiness.

To be sure that you are providing your body with all the important nutrients, be sure to eat foods from all the food groups. That means you should ensure a regular intake of dairy, grains, fruits, vegetables and protein.

You should also add some healthy fat to your simple diet as it is important for the health of your heart. Studies have indicated that healthy fats such as Omega 3 can play a vital role in long-term cardiac health.

Eat what you want and when you want

It’s important to eat what you want and when you want. However, it involves making healthy choices. Consider the scenario below.

If you are feeling hungry and you want to eat a burger, you have two choices to make.

For the first problem, you should eat a burger as that's what you want to eat. Making a healthy choice, in this case, would mean that you would make a burger at home instead of buying it from a fast food restaurant. Additionally, you will replace its unhealthy ingredients for healthy ones. You will also think about calories when making your burger.

The second problem is about ‘eat when you want.' You should not wait for the lunch time and eat your burger then. Eating balanced diet doesn't mean you have to restrict yourself when feeling hungry.

Understand and practice portion control

Although you can eat what and when you want, you should practice portion control to maintain the diet. You can't put three portions on a plate and eat them all, thinking they are one portion since they are on your plate for the meal.

You should make a wise choice and eat only what you need, in terms of calories and nutrition. Save the rest for the next meal.

Eating too much or too little can cause health issues. Be sure to learn about how much of each food you need to eat to maintain a good diet.

Reduce the intake of animal fat

Animal fat is known to boost LDL cholesterol, which is bad for your health. When trying to keep a healthy diet, keep red meat and processed meat to a minimum. Instead, opt for lean meats and skinless poultry. For dairy, insist on low-fat or nonfat products.

As explained earlier, you don't have to restrict yourself from consuming fat. You can replace ‘bad' fat with ‘good' fat that usually comes from vegetable oils, fish, and nuts.

Reward yourself

It's important not to reward yourself with food when you are trying to maintain a healthy diet. Some people get into this habit of doing some healthy activity and then eating something unhealthy as a reward for the activity. This is unwise, and everyone should stop doing it. Even if you have to reward yourself with food, be sure to consume only a perfect nutrition diet as a reward.

Instead of rewarding yourself with food, try to find an alternative. There should be something that excites you. For example, if you are an athlete, how about you reward yourself with a relaxing massage at the end of a tiring training session.

Still not sure how to keep a healthy diet? It’s all about making healthy choices.

Importance of a balanced diet

A balanced diet delivers vitamins, minerals and other essential nutrients to your organs and tissues. They need these nutrients to function properly.

If you fail to provide essential nutrients to your body, it will be unable to fight infection, disease, and fatigue. Your overall performance will suffer from lack of productivity as your body will not have enough energy and nutrients to go through the day.

Children having poor diet will suffer from malnutrition, which could easily result in growth and development disorders. Moreover, children suffering from lack of nutrition would perform poorly in academics and sports.

One of the major problems that we see in the world these days due to poor diet is obesity and diabetes. According to USDA, four out of ten major causes of death in the USA are related to poor diet.

Components of a balanced diet

A balanced diet consists of vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients. It's low in fats and sugar and provides enough energy for your body to function properly.

If you want to know how to maintain good health, just explore the components of a balanced diet below and be sure to include them in your diet.

Fruits

Fruits provide important nutrients for your body. Eat a variety of them throughout the year to be sure that your body receives ample supply of these nutrients.

As a rule of thumb for a healthy diet, eat seasonal fruits and eat them fresh to harvest the most nutrients.

Vegitables

Fresh vegetables are a great source of essential minerals, vitamins and other nutrients that your body need to perform optimally. Make sure you include a variety of vegetables in your diet, especially leafy green ones such as spinach, green beans, broccoli, and kale.

Dark and leafy green vegetables are also known as super foods because of the number of nutrients they provide.

Whole grains

Whole grains provide essential nutrients for your body, and you should include something from this food group in your everyday diet. It’s a simple healthy diet.

However, it’s important to note here that refined white flour isn’t a great way to consume grains. It has poor nutritional value. If you want to consume grains, be sure to consume them with their outer shell as it contains most nutrients, which is removed in case of refined white flour.

Consider adding some whole grains to your daily diet.

Proteins

Proteins are building the block of life. You can't survive for long if you stop serving proteins to your body. However, it's important to consume only low-fat meats and beans for proteins.

When eating meat for proteins, be sure to trim the skin and remove any visible fats to keep cholesterol levels low. Moreover, try to eat only meat that comes from healthy and grass-fed animals for maximum benefits.

Although meat is rich in proteins, you can get them by eating lentils, beans, peas, almonds, sunflower seeds, tofu, and tempeh in large quantities.

Proteins

Dairy products provide important minerals and vitamins for your body to function properly. Dairy is one of the major sources of calcium and vitamin D.

Unfortunately, a lot of people include dairy in their everyday meal without thinking about the fact that dairy is also a major source of fat. It’s important to choose wisely. Eat only small portions and opt for fat-free milk.

If you don't want to consume dairy from animals, you can easily replace it with plant-based milk, which is fortified with essential nutrients to ensure it provides similar dietary value as does animal dairy.