If you could overhear conversations about diets in the women's locker room of a sports club, you immediately had no desire to go on a diet and switch to a healthy diet. Many people have a bunch of "healthy food — tasteless food" firmly stuck in their heads. In addition, few of us can boast of excellent health (and for most diets there are many contraindications) and no less excellent willpower. But not everything is as difficult and tasteless as it may seem at first glance. You are quite able to choose healthy and delicious food for yourself.
"We are what we eat" — you can say that, right?
Now there is a special revival in the gyms! Of course, after all, it is necessary to put your body in order in some three months and put it back into a more or less decent framework. That is, we begin to torture ourselves with diets and exercises, hoping to fix in three months what we spoiled daily for the other nine.
We have already described one of the options to put ourselves at least a little in order in the article "We take care of the health of our back: we work standing up." And now to this I would also like to add a few tips from Leo Babauta (Zenhabits), who was able to choose the optimal diet for himself.
The first thing I would like to remind you is that one of your worst enemies is office cookies and other sweets, with which many companies are very happy to supply their employees. To make the work seem sweeter. And so cookie after cookie every hour adds to you not only energy for work (which ends quickly), but also a couple of centimeters at the waist.
If you have never been on a diet and are not used to limiting yourself to food, you should first try to just limit yourself to eating everything fatty, fried and sweet. And replace semi-finished products with normal food. Even sandwiches can sometimes be healthier than instant soup.
1. Do not resort to extreme methods. What I wrote about at the beginning — do not try to switch to a strict diet right away. Just start gradually reducing your portions, replacing fried potatoes with salad, soda with plain water or juice, and a donut with fruit or nuts with honey.
2. Eat slower. Firstly, you will chew the food more thoroughly and it will be better absorbed by the body, secondly, the feeling of satiety does not come immediately, but only 20 minutes after the end of the meal. And swallowing in larger chunks, you risk getting indigestion plus overeating.
3. Try to eat natural food. Fruits and vegetables, seeds, nuts and some types of cereals and preferably from the market.
4. Eat more plant foods. I can't say that meat is bad. Sometimes I like delicious meat dishes myself, but you should not forget about vegetables either. As well as the fact that eating only raw vegetables is not so useful for our pancreas and stomach. You need to know the measure.
5. Enjoy the process. Don't just chew your portion like a ruminant animal, but enjoy it! In one of the articles I once wrote about one of the exercises - eating an apple in small pieces for an hour, enjoying each piece, savoring it and highlighting individual flavors. But seriously, your mood greatly affects the digestive process. Do it with pleasure, feel all the shades of taste.
Now let's go directly to the diet itself. Leo has set aside for himself one day a week when he allows himself to eat some pizza, sweets, pasta, drink some beer. This is a lite version of the Tim Ferris diet from the book "The 4-hour Body". And the rest of the days he tries to stick to his diet.
1. Legumes. Beans of different types, chickpeas, lentils — all this is quite edible and can be very tasty! For example, beans in cream sauce or lentil soup with tomatoes — healthy and very tasty!
2. Nuts and seeds. Almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, pumpkin seeds — I think that comments are unnecessary here.
3. Vegetables. Carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet bell pepper — you can enumerate indefinitely. And what goodies you can cook from them!
4. Fruits and berries. I do not know a single person who would not love at least some of this!
5. Whole grains. Sprouted wheat can be added to salad and soup, oatmeal porridge, bread made from coarse flour with various additives in the form of seeds — all this is very tasty and healthy.
And now the most important thing is what is better to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner! But before that, a small digression. No wonder our grandmothers always told us that breakfast is the head of everything. You need to have breakfast tightly and thoroughly, even if you do not feel hungry. Chocolate and juice for breakfast is not a good idea. Because in an hour you will want to eat again. Usually it turns out how? In the morning you manage to grab a cup of coffee or tea with something light, then after a couple of hours you start feeling hungry and start intercepting cookies at the office over tea or another cup of coffee. Of course, you get a boost of energy, but for a very short time. For lunch, if you're lucky, you eat a business lunch in a cafe, which includes soup. But there is not always time for a normal lunch and you make do with a snack of something like a bun or a cake. And after all this, you come home at about 7 pm (and often much later) with an animal feeling of hunger and rush to dinner, which includes the first-second-third and compote! And then you can spice up everything with beer. And all this literally a couple of hours before bedtime… It does not fit into the picture of a healthy lifestyle in any way.Breakfast. It may well be oatmeal porridge. But by itself, it is not so nutritious. But you can add dried fruits, nuts, bananas, berries (if the season allows) and seeds to it. Then it turns into a fairly dense and healthy breakfast.
Lunch. A large bowl of salad with herbs, cabbage, vegetables, nuts and balsamic vinegar. Sometimes fried tofu with herbs.
Snack. If after a while after lunch you feel slightly hungry, it is quite possible to have a snack with nuts, dried fruits or hummus.
Dinner. And again vegetables, but with beans cooked in different versions. It can be Mexican, Indian or Oriental dishes. To this you can also add tofu and a glass of light red wine.
Of course, you will not be able to switch to such a diet right away. Personally, I would add soup to dinner after all. If the figure allows, you can also do something more dense. Also, if you are actively engaged in the gym, you should not forget that muscles need proteins. Therefore, you can add marine life (squid, shrimp, etc.) and, of course, fish to the menu.
And so that everything doesn't seem so terrible, I want to share with you a few recipes for delicious and healthy sandwiches. I tried the first one in a Turkish cafe. In general, it seems to me that it is possible and necessary to take an example from the Turks — they are very active physically and eat healthy and fresh food (and this is not at all about hotels like "All inclusive"). And I read the second one somewhere and decided to try my own version a little!
And I also got a task from the editor: to compare a certain number of office snacks and fast food by calorie content with real food. I'll take it up next week. I think that after that many people will think about what they eat and that sometimes speed and accessibility in food is not the best quality. What do you think?
