What makes a diet healthy?
So many diet plans focus on how much weight you can lose. And they often highlight just how quickly you can do it. However, diets shouldn’t just be about what the number shows on the scales. And losing weight too quickly can often be unhealthy. A healthy diet should provide you with a good balance of essential vitamins and minerals.
In addition, it should provide the required quantities of macronutrients. In fact, diets should be as much about what to include as they should be about what to exclude.
Let’s dig deeper.
3 healthiest diets
Which diets to be wary of
Pretty much any diet that is focused heavily on one type of food group. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on a plan known as the cabbage soup diet. Mono-focused diets or very restrictive diets potentially deprive you of what your body most needs.
Food is fuel for the body. It helps to give us the energy the body needs to function. But, food and specifically the various properties within the food, do much more besides that.
For example, a lack of vitamin C has long been known to be a cause of scurvy. That much we know from our history lessons at school. But many other vitamins and minerals perform vital functions that many people are acutely unaware of.
For instance, let’s take Vitamin D. It’s instrumental in keeping bones, teeth, and muscles healthy. And at the time of writing, the clocks have recently gone back in the UK. Hence, there is little chance of getting enough Vitamin D from the sun.
Oily fish, red meat and egg yolks are some examples of sources of Vitamin D. If you’re not getting Vitamin D from one of these sources, you need to be clear on where you are getting it from.
And there are numerous other Vitamins and nutrients your body needs. Hence, this is why a balanced diet is so important.
Choosing the 3 healthiest diets
You need to be confident that your diet is providing an adequate balance of nutrition. This ensures that you are optimizing health as well as losing weight. We believe that this is a safer and more sustainable approach.
Two diets that include a good range of healthy foods are the DASH diet and the Mediterranean diet. They are too long to discuss in detail in this short blog. But we have provided links to both above to get you started on the fundamentals.
The third recommended diet focuses more on when you eat, rather than what you eat. It is a dieting principle known as Intermittent Fasting. Again, click on the link to get you started.
The beauty of all these 3 diets is that they allow you to maintain a balanced eating plan. And without lop-sided eating patterns or forbidden foods. If, for example, you’re interested in trying Intermittent Fasting, there are apps like DoFasting that might of great help but you must first learn if DoFasting is really that good here.
There are plenty of resources available online for all 3 of the diet plans. But taking sound advice from an expert always tops Google!
A final word
Of course, finding the optimal diet for you is a highly individual thing. Your choice of foods may depend largely on ethical values, intolerances, food allergies and lifestyle. (Among other things!)
The 3 healthiest diets recommended above are meant for a general population. But to get the most out of your diet we highly advise consulting a professional nutritionist.
If you need advice or have any questions about our treatments, please contact us. You can find us in Mill Hill Broadway and Islington. We are always happy to help!
We hope this information is useful. If you like this blog, please share!
