General Dietary Guidelines for a Healthy Lifestyle! Part One!!

Healthy lifestyle includes a balanced diet and active physical life. Active physical life does not merely mean exercise. It’s about staying active all through the day along with a piece of exercise.

Let’s talk about healthy eating here.

Healthy eating includes

• Eating the right type of foods and right quality foods

• Eating the right quantities of foods

• Eating the right foods at the right time

The meal timing is very important as it can affect the human metabolism. The meal timing has got a role to play in the energy balance and weight maintenance.

Large meals’ taking twice a day is not so advisable. Short and frequent meals are good for health. To understand this concept we need to understand the process of digestion and energy release. The food when enters the stomach takes around 2-3 hours time to digest and this solely depends on the type of food that we take. A heavy fatty meal may take up to 4 hours where as a simple meal may take up to 3 hours. 

The time of meal and the time that takes for digestion and the timing of energy release are important in the management of weight. 

Early breakfast, followed by lunch and early and light dinner are idealistic with in between mid meals. Small and frequent meals helps in slow and sustained release of energy which further helps in easy disposal of the released energy without depositing into fat stores as the small portion of released energy is easy to spend.

One more important point is our physical activity should be matched as per the food intake. For example, take the case of typical housewives who start their day’s activity early in the morning and tend to work long hours and majority skip or have a late breakfast. The logic here is as long as they are working there is no energy supply as there is no intake and once they have their intakes there is no further activity. This pattern of days plan may provoke a person’s body to store more of unused energy as fat or adipose tissue. 

So, planning the meal frequency has a critical role to play in weight management along with the type and quantity of foods that are consumed. 

Another most commonly observed cause of weight gain is late dinners, which we can observe in all major fields of work. Because of the work demands and raising stress levels, managing healthy eating and maintaining active physical activity has become a challenge. Late and heavy dinners result in increased energy supply. People usually have late dinner and plan to sleep immediately or may be within a short while. Whereas the food that they had, takes some three hours minimum to digest and metabolize and release the energy. By the time the energy is released the body will be in resting phase and then what will be the fate of this released energy? 

The tendency of our body is when the muscles are in active state (when we work or physically active) the released energy is disseminated and used up by the muscle groups. Whereas when the body is in resting state, the released energy i.e. glucose can’t just remain in blood as it also has got its normalcy values. Blood cannot hold more than 80-120 mgs of glucose per deciliter of blood. If it’s more than that (expect in post meal state) then we are called Diabetics. So now this excess glucose has to find an alternate route when the body is in idle state. Here the only alternate source is the excess energy gets converted into fat and gets deposited at the various parts of the body. There is no limitation to store fat in the body. This excess fat in terms of triglycerides gets stored in the body and the increases the risk of various disorders and diseases.

So to avoid all these negative consequences one has to manage the meal frequency timings and meal quantities and also keep oneself active throughout the day. 

Human body is an intricate mechanism combined of various systems. All these systems have a systematic functioning to achieve the efficiency of performing their duties. Imagine disturbing our digestive system daily with a different pattern of food intake with different quantities, with different timings how can we expect that system to function efficiently? Not only that, each system is dependent on others for overall functioning. Disturbing one system by us does not stop there, that in turn disturbs the functioning of the other coordinated systems also and similar kind of pattern in long run results in the onset of a diseased state. 

So, timely quantified meal intake is very important and this aspect requires immediate attention to draw from each one of us. So check your food and activity patterns with a simple assessment from a certified nutrition counselor to help and serve yourself better.