Healthy Eating Guide

What Is Healthy Eating?
Depending on whom you consult, healthy eating can have many different meanings. The macrobiotic diet consists mostly of heavily cooked grains and vegetables. On the other hand, raw food enthusiasts claim that it is unhealthy to eat cooked food. They maintain that most of the nutritive value is destroyed when a food is heated beyond a certain temperature. Many of us learned in school that a balanced meal must include meat to insure the proper amount of protein. But we have since learned that there are plenty of strong, healthy vegetarians walking around. The more you read about "healthy diets", the more confused you can become.

One common misconception is that the diet that improves your health will continue to support your health over a long period of time. For instance, an unhealthy person becomes healthy after sticking to a strict regime of raw fruit and fruit juice. He or she then decides that this is the healthy way to eat and continues to follow the diet for an extended period of time. Now some individuals may do fine on fruit for long periods of time, but chances are that most people will find themselves severely out-of-balance on such a severe diet. The point is that foods can be medicines and can bring an unbalanced condition into balance, but they can also cause an imbalance if overdone. If you are instructed to take a medicine to cure an illness, when you are cured you should discontinue the regime. The same is true when using diet to cure conditions. This does not mean you need to go back to the poor diet you indulged in that made you ill in the first place. Just learn how to be balanced in what you eat and always to use good judgment. Remember: The cure is not always the rule, and the rule is not always the cure!

Why Healthy Eating?
When you are young you have lots of energy. You can exercise longer without getting tired; your joints are more flexible; you recover more quickly when you are sick; and you will heal better when you are injured. When you come into the world you were equipped with a body that was designed to stay healthy.

A Balanced Diet:
Doctors often advise us to eat a balanced diet. A balanced diet gives us energy, it allows the body to repair itself, grow strong and stay healthy. In order to do all of those things different foods have to provide us with the following basic things:

• Carbohydrates – This give us energy.
  
• Proteins – we need these for growth and repair of body tissues such as muscles, skin and hair.
  
• Fats – these also give us energy, keep us warm and do lots of other things in the body that help to keep us healthy, although – not all fats are good for us.
  
• Fibre – This is needed to keep the food we eat moving through our digestive system. It also helps us to go regularly to the so that our bodies can get rid of the waste left over from the foods we eat. If this did not happen we would poison ourselves with our own waste products.
  
• Water – Most of our bodies are made up from water, so it is very important we get enough in order to function normally. This is why we can only survive a matter of days without water; however, if we have enough to drink we can last weeks without food.
  
• Vitamins and Minerals – These are substances that are needed by the body in tiny amounts. They are involved in lots of processes in the body.
  
• Minerals – Such as calcium, iron, potassium and phosphorous are all elements.
  Like vitamins they are essential to the body if we are to stay healthy and grow normally. A good example is calcium. This mineral forms an important part of bones and teeth.

Now then, here is the important point. Because foods contain different amounts of nutrients, we need to eat a variety of foods every day to keep us healthy. And this is why we need a balanced diet.

Conclusion:
You have read it from the beginning – well done. By now you probably know quite a lot about healthy eating – or at least more than when you started.