Dieting Provides Benefits to Your Life
The habit of eating a healthy diet and exercising is very beneficial for your health. It helps to maintain your weight and avoids discomfort and diseases. Moreover, dieting provides other benefits too: more energy, a sense of happiness, greater self-esteem, better mood, and even longer life.
However, it’s not always easy to incorporate a healthy lifestyle into our daily life. First of all, it’s important to know what a healthy diet consists of and how to follow it.
On the other hand, there are innumerable fad diets that are definitely not healthy and can even put your health at risk. Up next, we’ll take a look at certain aspects to better understand what a healthy diet is and the benefits it can bring to our lives.
What kind of diet provides health benefits?
A healthy diet must be varied, balanced, and nutritious. It must include foods that are low in saturated fats, cholesterol, and sodium, as well as others that provide nutrients, vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, and fiber.
In this type of diet, there are certain basic foods. It can’t lack fruits, vegetables, whole grains, olive oil, nuts, dairy products, lean meats, fish, and seafood.
If you accompany these products with exercise, you’ll obtain great health benefits; especially in regards to the heart and brain. They also help to reduce the risks of suffering from certain types of cancer.
A healthy diet also contributes to achieving adequate weight, improving physical appearance, and increasing self-esteem and confidence in yourself. Nonetheless, it’s necessary to accompany it with exercise and to be consistent with those healthy habits.
Some diets can be harmful
When it comes to losing weight, lots of people are seduced by various offers of magical or miraculous diets. The promises to instantly lose weight aren’t lacking; from fad diets that recommend you only eat pineapples for three days, to numerous medications and products.
Very restrictive diets are difficult to maintain and most people give up on them after a short time. Additionally, they usually produce a rebound effect, which means that after an impressive initial weight loss, the body regains its previous weight or even increases it.
In reality, medicines, herbs, creams, and other products that promise to make you lose weight miraculously can put your health at risk.
We must bear in mind that the only way to lose weight safely with long term results is to have a balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle.
You probably won’t notice the effects immediately nor will they be drastic. Nevertheless, whoever adopts this lifestyle along with a good diet and exercise, will be guaranteeing their present and future well-being.
Diet and health
When you choose to eat healthily, you have to consider that the time and money you’ll spend on it are a great investment. In fact, that time and money will convert into great savings in terms of medical treatments, and hospitals.
A balanced diet accompanied by physical activity helps prevent many diseases. They include those related to the heart, high blood pressure, strokes, diabetes, etc.
Eating healthy foods helps reduce your levels of bad cholesterol (LDL), and contributes to increasing the good cholesterol (HDL), which protects the heart.
This type of nutrition also helps strengthen the immune system, allowing the body to recover much faster from injuries and illnesses. Certain foods that are part of a healthy diet are also able to moderate the production of cortisol; a substance that causes stress.
Longevity and quality of life
A healthy diet and lifestyle will provide longer life and, above all, a better quality of life. The Mediterranean diet, for example, (considered one of the healthiest in the world), delays the onset of aging.
Cognitive functions benefit from a healthy diet as well. Consuming fruits, vegetables, fish, and nuts, such as hazelnuts or almonds, help prevent and reduce memory deterioration. They also have a beneficial impact on your ability to concentrate and several other brain functions.
Dieting should actually amount to maintaining balanced nutrition. This will have a very healthy impact on your health.