A Healthy Diet...Making Lifestyle Changes

A Healthy Diet... it seems simple, eat right, exercise, and maintain your weight....

Yet...Statistics show 65% of people are overweight and 31% suffer from obesity.

Women's health is at a high risk for heart disease, high blood pressure, certain cancers, diabetes, osteoporosis, and other diseases.

The terms overweight and obese are often considered the same thing. They both refer to excess body weight, but the degrees are different.

The Body Mass Index (BMI) determines the degree of your excess body weight. The guidelines are set up to determine if you're under weight, fit, overweight, or obese. If you don't know what your BMI is, you can check it here.

A healthy diet and physical fitness are the key factors to maintaining good health and a healthy lifestyle.

Eating healthy is not always easy, but it is doable. The temptations of "what's easy to grab and fix" is always right in front of you, whether it's at the grocery or as you're driving home past the fast food places.

It's a matter of going back to the fundamentals of good nutrition. It will take some planning to start, but you can find a healthy diet that fits your lifestyle.

Achieving A Healthy Diet -
How Many Calories Do You Need for a Healthy Diet?

You need to know how many calories you need to consume to maintain your weight.

To maintain your weight you need to consume about the same amount of calories you burn every day.

If you need to gain weight, you need to consume more calories than you burn.

If you need to lose weight, you need to eat fewer calories than you burn. To lose weight you would need to reduce your daily caloric intake by 300 to 500 calories. However it is not healthy to go under 1,200 calories per day.

To determine how many calories your body needs to function, you can calculate your BMR - Basal Metabolic Rate.

What Foods Should you Eat on a Healthy Diet?

You need healthy foods and healthy snacks that are nutrient rich to make sure your body is getting all of the nutrients it needs to function right and be healthy.

If you are lacking the needed nutrients in your diet, you may want to consider nutritional supplements to maintain good health.

I personally believe that the foods we eat today have changed enormously from what our parents and grandparents consumed. You may want to consider organic foods, the benefits of organic food encompass our health as well as preservation of our planet in my humble opinion.

Healthy Diet Recommendations

It's easy to fill up on "empty calorie" or "nutrient-poor" foods. When you're making choices, consider the following:

- Choose fat free, low fat and one percent fat dairy products.
- Limit your fat intake and use hyrogenated vegetable oil sparingly to reduce trans fat in your diet.
- Choose foods lower in cholestorol and keep your intake between 200mg and 300mg daily.
- Meats should be lean with very little fat and poultry should have the skin removed.
- Cut back on added sugars such as glucose, fructose and corn syrups.

Healthy Cooking will give you great information on cooking tips and cooking substitutions.

Healthy Diets for Special Needs

Many people have health issues or allergies that require a special healthy diet. We will be adding to this list often.

Healthy Heart Diet
If you have heart disease or are at risk for heart disease, follow this healthy heart diet.

High Cholesterol Diet
If you have high cholesterol, this healthy cholesterol diet will help you reduce your LDL cholesterol.

You'll also learn more about your cholesterol level, cholesterol tests, cholesterol numbers, healthy cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and reducing your cholesterol.

Lactose Intolerant Diet
Are you or someone you know Lactose Intolerant? You can follow this lactose free diet.

Gluten Free Diet
Celiac disease affects 1 in 133 Americans. It's also known as gluten intolerance. Gluten is a form of protein found in wheat, barley, and rye.

Weight Management

You have worked hard, planned and maintained a healthy diet, have lost some weight or you're now at the stage of maintaining your weight.

What are the steps you can take to do maintaining your weight?

Weight Management seems to be the steps we often miss. After working so hard to change your lifestyle, eat right and accomplish a healthy weight, so many people fail because they don't make the commitment or they don't understand the issues that caused the weight gain in the beginning.

In order to maintain a healthy diet, a healthy weight and a health lifestyle, let's take a look at some of the issues we face today.

- Making a Commitment
- The Health Risks of Being Overweight
- Understanding your Body Mass Index
- The importance of Portion Control
- The confusion of Diet Myths
- Practical Dieting Tips
- Emotional Eating
- The Turmoil of Eating Disorders