Eating a healthy, balanced diet is one of the most important things you can do to protect your health. In fact, up to 80% of premature heart disease and stroke can be prevented through your life choices and habits, such as eating healthy and being physically active.
A healthy diet can help reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke:
- improvement of cholesterol levels
- lowering blood pressure
- helps you control your body weight
- control blood sugar levels.
What you eat every day affects your health and how you feel now and in the future. Eating right plays an important role in helping you lead a healthy lifestyle. When combined with physical activity, your diet can help you reach and maintain a healthy weight, reduce your risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes or heart disease, and contribute to your overall health and well-being. Creating and maintaining healthy eating habits doesn't have to be difficult. If you start by making small changes to your daily habits, you can make a big impact on your diet and create strong, healthy eating habits. Try to incorporate at least six of the following eight goals into your diet, adding one new goal each week.
Reflect, replace and reinforce
Making sudden, radical changes to your eating habits, such as eating nothing but cabbage soup, may result in short-term weight loss, but it won't be successful in the long run. To permanently improve your eating habits:
- Consider. on all of your habits, both good and bad, and your overall unhealthy eating habits.
- Replace your unhealthy eating habits with healthy ones.
- Secure new, healthy habits.
- Keep a food diary for a few days to evaluate what you eat each day. Note how you felt when you ate - hungry, not hungry, tired, or stressed?
- Create a list of "signals" by reviewing your food diary to become more aware of when you are "compelled" to eat for reasons other than hunger. Pay attention to how you feel at those times.
- Circle the clues you encounter on a daily or weekly basis in your list.
- Ask yourself about the signals you circled; is there anything else you can do to avoid the signal or situation? If you can't avoid it, is there anything else you can do that would be healthier?
- Replace bad habits with new, healthy ones.
- Stick to your new, healthy habits and be patient with yourself.