| Nutrition |
 |
Nutrition is the science of nourishing the body and the art of
making tasty what you consume.
Good nutrition is first and foremost a lifestyle. Just as lifting weights for the
first time won't instantly give you a huge muscular frame, eating a nutritious meal won't suddenly make you feel happier and healthier.
The first step is to become aware about how
whatever you eat affects your body. Once you've made a conscious connection,
the rest follows easily.
The next and most important step is to start looking carefully at the
nutritional value (or lack thereof) of what you're eating and drinking.
Nutrition and Exercise are two very closely-related fields. No matter what
your goals are - to lose weight or to keep healthy, exercise, like proper nutrition needs to become a part of your daily routine. It is somewhat hard
to get into, but the benefits definitely make it worth the hard work.
The food pyramid is a graphic tool designed to convey the important dietary concepts of
variety, proportion, and moderation. It is designed to be useful; it builds on familiar food groups as an organizing framework. Foods
are grouped not only by their nutritional content but also by how they are used. Let's meet the food pyramid:
The Most Dangerous Time of Day for Dieters
When is it? Evening. But if you learn to control your appetite during these key hours, you'll drop five pounds by next month without feeling
deprived.
It's 5:10 P.M., and you're awfully proud of yourself as you step out of your office building. You've eaten a small breakfast and a sensible, low-cal lunch, and you just know you'll finish off the day with a light, nutritious supper. If you keep this up, by month's end you'll fit into your favorite suit again. Then it happens: Within 10 minutes of walking in your front door you've virtually inhaled that leftover hunk of cake you swore you wouldn't touch. Your diet's shot, and you haven't even had dinner yet.
"Consuming most of your calories at night and being overweight often go hand in hand," says Allan Geliebter, Ph.D., a research psychologist at the Obesity
Research Center at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York. For one thing, your metabolism — the rate at which you burn calories — is lower when you sleep. "This suggests that much of what you eat late at night could end up stored as fat," says Dr.
Geliebter. What's more, once you start eating, you may have trouble stopping, explains Anne Dubner, a nutrition consultant in Houston. Bingers can easily down 500 calories — that's five slices of cheese, half a bag of potato chips, or 3/4 of a pint of ice cream — without paying much attention. If you're really
overindulging, you get a double whammy: Not only do you take in excess calories, but by stretching your stomach you may later require even more food in order to feel full — which will set you up for further binges, according to Dr. Geliebter's research.
But if you can get those evening eating sprees under control, you can easily cut 500 excess calories a night — for a loss of about five pounds in a month. The secret is to know the prime times for P.M. bingeing — and the ways you can then break the pattern.
|
