Healthy Eating: The unspoken truths. Part 1

During a webinar for Curlcast that I was on yesterday for a Q+A, a question was posed regarding diet tips for people during this Covid-19 lockdown. Although me and the other guys managed to cover this topic pretty well i thought i would break down some of the points in a more comprehensive manner here. Today we are going to initially discuss the question of what is healthy eating, as before we can answer if you're eating healthy or not, we need to know what we mean by that statement.

A very old definition of health by the world health organisation is "a state of complete physical, social and mental well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. This is an old definition and has its flaws but for the purpose of the discussion works well. Now when we talk about eating healthy we need to look at is the food and drink we are consuming benefiting our physical, social and mental well-being while also helping prevent us from falling ill or getting weaker.

When we look at healthy eating like this you can maybe start to visualise why perhaps most fad diets aren't considered healthy and how individualised a diet should be for everyone given the enormous width and potential of this discussion. Most short term diets are put in place for some form of weight change be it gain or loss, and usually we can already look the effect this can have on our physical health (are we losing weight too quickly, are we restricting certain food groups, is there a potential health concern with the calorie intake), a social impact (i cant eat out with friends anymore, i cant go for a drink), and the mental implications of the prior two on yourself.

As you can already see there is so much more to healthy eating than just eating fruits and vegetables and fresh food. There are numerous topics surrounding food that many people don't want to touch on and instead take the easy conversations.

I will be writing out the next part of this topic on Monday morning and we will look into calories, what they are, why they're important in relation to the above topics and also how you can work out your own BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) which helps determine your recommended daily allowance.

Until next time

Ryan

PT/Owner

AthleticFitness