How to Eat Healthy?

What is healthy eating?
What is clean eating?
Where do calories come from?
What the heck is a calorie?

Here's a simple, easy to understand definition of eating healthy...

Our body needs fuel and it needs nutrients.  

Fuel = Calorie
     Calories come from Carbohydrate, Protein, and Fat.  No where else!!! Only those three macro nutrients!

Nutrient = Macro/Micro
     Micro nutrients are vitamins and minerals.  They don't provide energy but they do provide the necessary items that make our body work and grow well.  

Your body needs ALL three macro nutrients (carbohydrate, protein, fat) in order to function the way it was meant to.  

Have some of all three at each meal.  

Look at your labels and notice how much of each macro is there.  Make this your first step.  Work to have a portion of each macro with each meal/snack.  

We need vitamins and minerals to keep our body's cells functioning properly so choose macro nutrients that contain a lot of micro nutrients.  In other words....
     Choose carbs, protein and fat that have a lot of vitamins and minerals.

I think we all know by now, today's foods do not contain as much nutrients as they did many years ago so find a high quality vitamin/mineral supplement that you can trust and add it to your diet.  (Ask me if you want to know the best!)

You will be amazed at how good you can feel just doing these two things...

Eat all three macros at a meal and take a high quality vitamin/mineral supplement.

Currently, the USDA recommends somewhere in the vicinity of
50-60% carbohydrate
10-15% protein
20-30% fat

I personally like to follow...
40-50% carbohydrate
20-30% protein
20-30% fat

I change my macros depending on how active I plan to be.  Remember, carbohydrates are meant to be energy and the typical human body uses over 1000 calories a day with just basic functions like breathing and digesting.  

One step at a time...you can make changes that last a lifetime!

Nutrients...Specifically Carbs

While I realize the American people eat way too many processed foods (primarily processed carbohydrates), I have at the same time watched so many people take this carbohydrate eating completely the opposite way and not eat enough carbohydrates.  

There's a reason we are told to take two aspirin and not 1/2 and not four! It's because two are meant to take care of the average pain for a certain amount of hours. (You get the drift of the analogy)

Do you want to save money by only putting in 5$ worth of gasoline? You won't get very far! Same with carbohydrates.  

How do you know how much to eat?
We'll talk about that next time!

In the meantime, if you are active you need a certain amount of carbohydrate for energy....I'm enclosing an article I recently read for some clarity.

..."More recently, studies have returned to investigating the influence of carbohydrate on fat loss and weight-loss maintenance in overweight and obese subjects. While some data support faster weight loss in carbohydrate-restricted diets, this result and the ability to maintain the weight loss only applies to those who can sustain the diet over time.

Every study has shown diminished athletic performance from a carbohydrate-restricted or KD compared to a carbohydrate-rich diet in athletes (Kleiner, 2015). Moreover, very-low-carbohydrate dieting has a profound influence on health, especially in highly active individuals and in women. Immune function (Gleeson and Bishop, 2000), insulin sensitivity, inflammation (Asrih et al., 2015), gut biome changes (Duncan et al., 2007), carbohydrate and brain activity (Rattray et al., 2015), and the peripheral metabolic pathway (Cooper, 2014) are all compromised when high demands are made on energy systems without adequate carbohydrate substrate availability. Under these circumstances physiological processes are suppressed by severely low energy availability, and measurement of total or resting energy expenditure will underestimate energy requirements (Loucks et al., 2011)."...