Three Part Perfect Diet

So to create a diet that works for your body and more importantly for your brain, you need to look at three areas. Balance, Quality and Output.

Balance

This is one of the trickier parts of the equation because everyone has a slightly different way to keep the balance. You need to have the right types of food at the right time of day. For the vast majority, that means we need to turn our eating plans upside down. Our biggest meal of the day needs to become breakfast, with our smallest meal becoming lunch.

Many of us are consuming too much sugar, salt and alcohol (Let’s not mention caffeine JUST yet.) We often don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables for our daily fibre intake and don’t get enough high quality protein.

We need to find the right balance for our own bodies. In one household there maybe on person who needs a high protein diet, another who needs a high (good) carb diet and another who needs a true mix. We all have different needs. While we all need to reduce the junk aspect, we need to find our own tweaks to a general diet to find the one that fits best for us.

Supplements in today’s diet can really help. A good multivitamin, particularly if you are in a stressful period of your life can really help with any part of your diet you may be missing.

How do you know if you are eating the right diet? You have plenty of energy and vitality. If that doesn’t describe you, your intake is probably out of balance.

Quality

It used to be that much of our food was picked directly off trees, came straight from the vege garden or direct from the farm to our door. Of course for some pf us that was several generations ago, depending on age and where we grew up, but that is the sort of food our bodies are still used to eating. Homegrown, natural foods are what makes our bodies work best. Now of course the easiest foods to find are processed foods, that often have a lot of taste for our tongues, making us want to eat more, but are low on important nutrients and minerals.

There are many nutrients we need that are not present in our diets. Missing out on these can prevent our bodies form working to their optimum rate, and cause our brains to slow or feel muddled.

We need protein to feed our muscle, to repair cells and organs and to form antibodies that fight off ill health. Even though they have received a bad rap, carbohydrates are also important, to give us energy and fibre to aid digestion. If we choose good carbohydrates, they’ll be low in sugar and in fat, and have a lot of important nutrients.

Many people, particularly women are so worried about fat in their diet that they try and cut it out completely. In fact we need good fat to keep our body working. Essentials fats, particularly those with omega threes and omega sixs have been proven to help with thought processes and sharpness of though. Good fats also help us absorb some vitamins we need such as A, D, K and E.

If we were to sit and work out the most important nutrient our body needs, it would have to be water. Water helps us to not feel so hungry. It helps us digest the food we do eat, and gives us great skin.

Energy

The best way to know whether you have got your energy input right is to look at your weight. If it falls into a healthy weight range, you are probably eating the right amount of food to maintain your correct energy levels. If you are overweight, or have too much body fat, you can increase your energy and make your body work better by losing the excess fat.

Our bodies store fat as an efficient storage tank that is there for lean times. Often our bodies don’t really want to give up the fat stores as our bodies think it needs them once they have got them. To get rid of if it we need to eat less calories (or kilojoules depending on your preferred method of counting.) A calorie is around four kilojoules. If you have ten excess kilograms of fat, you will need to dispose of 80,000 calories or 320 000 kilojoules to drop it off. Most people need around two to two and a half thousand calories a day, so as you can see, it takes a fair amount of both time and effort to drop our intake enough to lose that eighty thousand.

The best way to get your body to get rid of its extra fat stores is to look at portion sizes, the type of food you are eating and track how many calories are popping into your mouth. While exercise is important, people often over estimate how much they are actually burning off, and will overeat to compensate.