Unlock the Secret to Healthy Eating: Your Ultimate Guide to Balanced Diets and Freedom from Food Obsessions!

It’s a great time to remember that eating right doesn’t have to be complicated. A balanced diet is essential for maintaining overall health and well-being. However, the concept of dieting can often be misunderstood and lead to unhealthy obsessions. This article aims to provide a comprehensive guide to healthy eating habits, explore different dietary approaches, and address the potential pitfalls of obsessive dietary practices like orthorexia nervosa.

Embracing a Healthy Diet: Starting with Small Changes

Simply beginning to shift to healthier food and beverage choices can make a big difference. These recommendations from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans can help get you started:

Emphasize fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat or fat-free milk and milk products.
Include lean meats, poultry, fish, beans, eggs, and nuts.
Make sure your diet is low in saturated fats, trans fats, salt (sodium), and added sugars.

Making Your Calories Count

Think nutrient-rich rather than “good” or “bad” foods. The majority of your food choices should be lower in calories and packed with vitamins, minerals, fiber, and other nutrients. Making smart food choices can help you stay healthy, manage your weight, and give you energy to be physically active.

Focus on Variety

Eat a variety of foods from all the food groups to get the nutrients your body needs. Fruits and vegetables can be fresh, frozen, or canned. Eat more dark green vegetables, such as leafy greens and broccoli, as well as orange vegetables, such as carrots and sweet potatoes. Vary your protein choices with more fish, beans, and peas. Eat at least three ounces of whole-grain cereals, breads, crackers, rice, or pasta each day.

Know Your Fats

Look for foods low in saturated fats and trans fats to help reduce your risk of heart disease. Most of the fats you eat should be monounsaturated and polyunsaturated oils. Check the Nutrition Facts panel on food labels to know the amount of total fat and saturated fat.

Savor the Flavor of Eating Right

Part of maintaining a healthy diet means taking the time to appreciate the pleasures, great flavors, and social experiences food can add to our lives. It’s easier than you think to make healthy eating a habit. Remember: even small changes can make a big difference.

Start Small, Start Now

This week, try incorporating at least six of the eight goals below into your diet:

Make half your plate fruits and vegetables. The more colorful you make your plate, the more likely you are to get the vitamins, minerals, and fiber your body needs to be healthy.
Make half the grains you eat whole grains. Read the ingredients list and choose products that list whole grain ingredients first.
Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk. Almond milk and soy milk are excellent substitutes for milk.
Choose a variety of lean protein foods. Lean meat, poultry, seafood, dry beans or peas, eggs, nuts, and seeds are good choices.
Compare sodium in foods.

Uncovering Your Eating Habits

When it comes to eating, many of us have developed habits. Some eating habits are good, such as drinking water instead of sugary drinks. However, some are not so good, such as rewarding yourself with dessert after a hard day of work. Making sudden, radical changes, such as eating nothing but cabbage soup, can lead to short-term weight loss. However, such radical changes are neither healthy nor a good idea and won't be successful in the long run.

For a few days, write down everything you eat and drink, including sugary drinks and alcohol. Write down the time of day you ate or drank the item. This will help you uncover your habits. Note how you felt when you decided to eat, especially if you were not hungry. Were you tired?

Look at the habits you highlighted. Identify triggers that cause you to engage in those habits. This will help you become more aware of when and where you eat for reasons other than hunger. Note how you typically feel at those times. While the Thanksgiving holiday may be a trigger to overeat, focus on cues you face more often.

Strategies for Healthier Choices

Is there anything I can do to avoid the cue or situation? This option works best for cues that do not involve others. For example, could you choose a different route to work to avoid the habit of stopping at a fast-food restaurant?
For things I can't avoid, can I do something differently that would be healthier? If you can't avoid the situation, evaluate your options. During work meetings, could you suggest or bring healthier snacks or beverages?
Minimize distractions, such as watching the news while you eat. You may realize that you eat too fast when you eat alone. If so, share a lunch each week with a colleague. Or, have a neighbor over for dinner one night a week.
This will help you avoid eating when you are tired or anxious. Try to find a non-eating activity to do instead. You may find a quick walk or phone call with a friend can help you feel better.
If you engage in an unhealthy habit, stop as quickly as possible and ask yourself: Why do I do this? When did I start doing this?

Remember to pat yourself on the back for the things you're doing right. Maybe you started eating more vegetables or drinking low-fat or fat-free milk. Be careful not to berate yourself or think that one mistake blows a whole day's worth of healthy habits.

Understanding Different Eating Styles

Eating in public can be exposing. It is one of the few intense physical pleasures that we can enjoy with just about anyone. But when you observe someone else attack a plate of food, subtle quirks, neuroses and vulnerabilities become apparent. This is why dining with a new boss, or watching a first date devour a plate of food can be both intimidating and levelling.

Some chefs are "fork stackers", they prioritize that perfect final forkful with a bit of everything on it. Others keep the special bit until last, just so I remember that flavour and texture.

You know, one of those people who ask for items to be served on the side. “I, much like my three-year-old son, like the different food items on the plate to be kept separate,” he says. “Possibly even served in a sequence and not all together. I love tasting each item and then moving on to the next one.” It seems odd that a chef could be even mildly brumotactillophobic (the impressive technical term for fear of different foods touching each other). “A typical Christmas dinner sends shivers down my spine,” Ottolenghi says. “A bunch of meats and vegetables crammed together, rendered indistinct by a uniform coating of gravy. It’s wrong!”

This debate has been studied by actual psychologists from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. Among Americans, delayed gratification was the more popular approach, thus supporting the psychologists’ hypothesis that Americans prefer a rising sequence in life. Only 5% gobbled the best first, à la Wareing; 35% saved the best till last, and 36% were fork stackers (go, team!).

There are, of course, external forces that dictate how we clear our plates - a subject that Julia Hormes, food behaviour expert at the University of Albany in New York, knows all too well. “I was brought up in Germany, so I’m very aware of cultural differences.” (In case you hadn’t noticed, Americans do both their cutting and their forking with one hand, often eating with their other hand in their lap.) She also points out that the acceptability of slurping or eating loudly depends on national traditions. “Slurping in Japan is good,” she says. “China considers using a knife at the table to be improper, which is why you eat with chopsticks and the knife is relegated to the realm of the kitchen.” Table manners are arbitrary. “There are rules, but they don’t necessarily make a lot of sense, and they evolved to define the upper social class and exclude the lower classes, so they had to become increasingly elaborate to identify who had access to that upper segment of society.”

I should imagine, however, that there are soppers and dunkers the world over. There is a childish delight to be had in going for the dunk, be it digestives in tea, bread in dripping or biscotti in vin santo.

And then there are those irritating people (OK, me) who think food tastes better when nicked from a loved one’s plate. The writer Howard Jacobson is also a coveter of his companion’s food. My fella and I now address this issue by swapping our restaurant meals halfway through.

Tempting as it is, you can’t read too much into people’s food traits.

Weight Loss: Finding What Works for You

It's no secret that America has a weight problem. According to the CDC, nearly three-fourths of us are overweight or obese. Yet more than 160 million Americans are on a diet at any given time, and we drop more than $70 billion each year on commercial weight-loss plans, supplements, and other pound-shedding measures. That suggests that losing weight is not easy - yet it is entirely possible when done right.

There are two keys to success when it comes to weight loss. The first is to find an approach that works for you specifically, one that makes you feel good and keeps you motivated. Before you set out on your effort, make sure you know exactly what you're trying to achieve. Ask yourself, "How much weight do I need to lose to be healthy?" Then set personalized goals in achievable increments, and introduce lifestyle changes to gradually lose weight and keep it off.

Instead of embracing fad diets, people who have lost weight - and kept it off - usually have made a permanent shift toward healthier eating habits. Simply replacing unhealthy foods with healthy ones - not for a few weeks, but forever - will help you achieve weight loss while also offering numerous other benefits. So a better set of questions might be, "What is a healthy diet?

A healthy diet favors natural, unprocessed foods over prepackaged meals and snacks. It is balanced, meaning that it provides your body with all the nutrients and minerals it needs to function best. It emphasizes plant-based foods, especially fruits and vegetables, over animal foods. It contains plenty of protein. It is low in sugar and salt.

Here are a few examples of healthy meals for weight loss. For breakfast, a bowl of bran flakes with sliced strawberries and walnuts with nonfat milk. For lunch, a turkey sandwich on wheat with vegetables and an olive oil and vinegar dressing. You don't have to cut out snacks in order to eat a healthy diet, either.

Before you begin your weight-loss journey, do some brainstorming about the kinds of healthy foods you enjoy so that you can have lots of choices as you plan your meals and snacks.

Exploring Various Dietary Approaches

There is no single diet that nutritionists have deemed "the healthiest." However, there are several styles of eating that experts either have designed for optimal health or have observed to be healthy when consumed traditionally by different people around the world.

Mediterranean Diet: The Mediterranean-style diet gets its name from the foods available to various cultures located around the Mediterranean Sea. It heavily emphasizes minimally processed fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and whole grains. It contains moderate amounts of yogurt, cheese, poultry, and fish. Olive oil is its primary cooking fat. Red meat and foods with added sugars are only eaten sparingly.
DASH Diet: Experts developed the DASH diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) specifically as a heart-healthy regimen. The combination of food types contained in the diet seem to work together especially effectively to lower blood pressure and decrease risk of heart failure. The key features of DASH are low cholesterol and saturated fats; lots of magnesium, calcium, fiber, and potassium; and little to no red meat and sugar.
MIND Diet: As its name implies, the MIND diet (Mediterranean-DASH diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) was designed by doctors to take elements from the Mediterranean and DASH diets that seemed to provide benefits to brain health and stave off dementia and cognitive decline.
Nordic Diet: In recent years, the Nordic diet has emerged as both a weight-loss and health-maintenance diet. Based on Scandinavian eating patterns, the Nordic diet is heavy on fish, apples, pears, whole grains such as rye and oats, and cold-climate vegetables including cabbage, carrots, and cauliflower.

What do all of these diets have in common? They're all good for your heart, they all consist of natural unprocessed foods, and they all contain plenty of plant-based dishes.

Intermittent Fasting: A Time-Restricted Eating Pattern

You've probably heard some inspiring success stories about intermittent fasting. Fasting - abstaining from eating for some period of time - is an ancient practice that is safe when not taken to extremes. Traditionally, the benefits of fasting have been both spiritual and physical. People who fast for religious reasons often report a stronger focus on spiritual matters during the fast.

Intermittent fasting means dividing one's time between "eating windows" and periods of abstention on a regular basis. But there is no specific, prescribed schedule. The science behind intermittent fasting is based on altering the body's metabolism. During a period without eating, insulin levels drop to the point that the body begins burning fat for fuel.

Numerous studies have demonstrated the benefits of intermittent fasting for weight loss. However, it's not clear that it is any more effective than simply restricting calories and following a normal eating schedule. One possible reason for the success of intermittent fasting is that most practitioners have quit the habit of eating during the late evening and night hours. Restricting eating to earlier in the day aligns better with our bodies' circadian rhythms, and is less likely to cause us to store our food in fat cells.

Intermittent fasting is a very lifestyle-intensive dietary pattern, meaning that it is challenging to maintain in the face of normal social relationships. If the rest of your family is eating while you're fasting, you might be tempted to indulge or to surrender to the family-meal ritual. If your job requires you to dine with clients or colleagues, you'll find an intermittent fasting schedule difficult to maintain.

Ketogenic Diet: High-Fat, Low-Carb Approach

It sounds counterintuitive, but many people find success losing weight, especially initially, by eating more fat, not less. Called a ketogenic or Keto diet, this method requires shifting the main source of calories over to fatty foods - between 75% and 90% of what you eat, with only 10% to 20% of your calories coming from protein and a mere 5% from carbohydrates.

Research does show that keto is an effective way to jump-start weight loss and improve blood-sugar levels.

The Harvard Healthy Eating Plate: A Model for Balanced Diet

Because both weight loss and overall health are tied to some basic eating patterns, we have developed the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate as a model for meal planning and for your overall balanced diet.

Imagine a round dinner plate with a line running vertically down its center dividing it evenly in two. One half of the plate should be taken up by equal portions of whole grains (not refined grains like white bread and white rice) and healthy protesuch as fish, nuts, beans, and poultry (not red meat or processed meats). Two-thirds of the other half should be filled with vegetables, with the remaining portion consisting of fruit. To one side of the plate, picture a glass of water, since that's the best drink for weight loss and for overall health (at some meals you can substitute coffee or tea with little to no sugar). To the other side of the plate, imagine a vessel containing healthy oils such as canola or olive oil.

Remember the Healthy Eating Plate when you're contemplating what to eat for a specific meal, when you're grocery shopping, or when you're strategizing about how to lose weight and keep it off.

Orthorexia Nervosa: When Healthy Eating Becomes an Obsession

In general, it’s good to follow a balanced diet. But sometimes, being so focused on your health can swing in the opposite direction - and become harmful to both your body and mind.

Psychologist Kasey Goodpaster, PhD, explains what orthorexia nervosa is and what treatments may help.

What is orthorexia?

Orthorexia nervosa is a pathological obsession with eating “clean” or “healthy” foods. People who have this condition focus on their diet so strictly (and so restrictively) that it takes both a physical and mental toll.

The name comes from the English ortho, meaning “proper,” and orexia, Latin for “appetite.” Nervosa is Latin for something that relates to the nervous system, causing mental and emotional distress.

Behaviors associated with orthorexia typically include:

Engaging in restrictive or ritualized eating behaviors.
Creating and strictly following rules about which foods are and are not healthy.
Feeling guilty and anxious when confronted with foods that don’t fit these rules.

“These behaviors share many characteristics with anorexia nervosa,” Dr. Goodpaster says. “The difference is that people living with anorexia restrict the quantity of the food they eat, whereas people living with orthorexia focus on the quality of the food.”

Though orthorexia is often referred to as an eating disorder, it isn’t listed in the DSM-5, the manual that mental health providers use to diagnose mental health conditions (including eating disorders). More and more research is being done on this condition, though, and it’s acknowledged by the National Eating Disorders Association.

Orthorexia symptoms

Because it’s not an officially recognized eating disorder, it’s hard to define where, exactly, healthy eating ends and an obsessive fixation on nutrition begins. But based on existing research compiled by the National Eating Disorders Association and others, here’s a look at behaviors that may point to orthorexia:

You won’t (or feel that you can’t) eat anything but the foods that you deem pure, clean or healthy.
The list of foods you’ll eat keeps getting shorter as you increasingly nix entire food groups, like all sugar, carbs, dairy, etc.
You grow more and more worried about certain ingredients or products.
Before eating anything, you compulsively check nutrition labels and ingredient lists.
You become distraught when foods you perceive as healthy or “safe” aren’t available to you.
You spend a significant amount of time worrying about what food will be available at events or in other scenarios where you don’t have control over the menu.
You’re highly interested in what others are eating and how healthy you perceive it to be.
You obsessively follow “healthy lifestyle” news and accounts on social media so that you can keep up with new developments and information.
Your obsession with food starts to have social consequences, like causing you to feel anxious or panicky around other people and avoid social activities.
You have body image concerns, like struggling with a negative perception of your body.
You frequently do “cleanses” or “detoxes” to rid your body of perceived toxins.

“The line between a commitment to healthy eating and orthorexia lies with the ability (or inability) to practice moderation, and whether the drive to eat healthily creates distress,” Dr. Goodpaster explains.

How orthorexia can affect your life

Living with an eating disorder can be both physically and emotionally damaging, negatively impacting your quality of life. Some of the effects of orthorexia can include:

Malnutrition: Eliminating entire food groups and severely restricting the types of foods you eat can lead to malnutrition, like an overall lack of calories or vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
Medical complications: Malnutrition and extreme weight loss from orthorexia can cause issues like bone density loss (osteopenia), low levels of healthy blood cells (anemia and pancytopenia), low sodium levels (hyponatremia), slow heartbeat (bradycardia) and collapsed lung (pneumothorax).
Overeating: “Eliminating entire food groups, like sugar, only increases cravings,” Dr. Goodpaster points out. “Then, when a person living with orthorexia inevitably breaks their restraint and eats the food they’ve restricted, they often feel such intense guilt and shame that it prompts them to overeat.”
Feelings of guilt and shame: Restricting and overeating can become a vicious cycle that brings a constant battery of self-destructive emotions. “After overeating, the cycle begins all over again,” Dr. Goodpaster says, “because breaking your food rules causes even more guilt and shame.”
Loss of time and energy: Constantly thinking about and preparing “safe” foods can take up a significant amount of time and effort - leaving you with less time for other important parts of your life.
Social consequences: Sharing meals is a universal way that humans spend quality time with each other. Following overly strict eating rules with no flexibility can cause social isolation and emotional distress.

Causes and risk factors

Anyone can develop an eating disorder. But you may be at higher risk for orthorexia nervosa if you have a history of:

Other eating disorders
Disordered eating habits
Picky eating
Certain personality traits, like perfectionism or a need for control
A mental health condition like generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
Obesity

“The obsession with ‘clean’ eating seems to be another manifestation of our diet culture, in which there is a heavy emphasis on thinness often masked by a desire for health,” Dr. Goodpaster notes.

Research agrees. As one study puts it, “Constant exposure to curated images of seemingly ‘perfect’ bodies and ‘healthy’ eating habits can create an environment that normalizes extreme dieting and reinforces that adhering to strict dietary rules is the key to achieving health and success.”

How to overcome orthorexia

There aren’t many studies that evaluate the effectiveness of treatments for orthorexia. But experts say cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) may help, especially an approach called “exposure and response prevention” that aims to reduce eating-related obsessions. It has been proven effective for conditions like OCD.

This type of therapy involves slowly reintroducing you to foods you fear, while a trained therapist helps you learn to recognize and redirect your intrusive thoughts about food. They can also teach intuitive eating principles and mindfulness strategies.

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