For some time I have been quite fed up with how all magazines, articles, and institutions keep informing us how important it is to exercise: exercise more, exercise more intense, exercise and you feel good exercise and you can, exercise and you lose weight – exercise exercise exercise! We do not have the energy to exercise if we do not eat right.
Why don’t we get the same wellness banging from nutrition topics like eating? Why is it that nutrition-related topics are always about diets, counting calories or avoiding calories, or wondering about good and bad fats, telling us to give up carbs, or to go gluten-free, to eat superfoods, or to go another extreme diet program that might be trending? Oh, why oh why oh why?
Food and sleep
I get this feeling that real health facts seem to get lost underneath all that exercise-wellness-crash-diets-avoiding-carbs-non-sense. Facts like: to survive one has to get two (2) things right: to eat and to sleep. These are the ultimate core pillars our health depends on. If you don’t get these pieces in the right places you might not wanna consider (hard) exercise routines. I know this from my personal experience. Our one-year-old boy has not let us get a good night’s sleep – for a year. It has been hard to imagine myself running joyfully to improve my physical condition. So I did not even bother to try.
Eat! Regularly!
On the other hand, eating has played a very important role in keeping up my energy levels. On top of all the bad sleeping, if I had been eating on an irregular basis, drinking sugary drinks, grasping for treats all day long, I would have made my days very heavy. As well as my body.
Eating regularly has been my secret weapon to optimize my energy levels for the day. The handy tool to remind me about it has been the app we developed: See How You Eat – Your easiest food diary ever. I entered the times I want to be reminded, and every day I am blown away by how quickly 2,5-3 hours run by. We hear from our feedbacks that this is the same learning experience our users get. Simple and effective!
Food gives energy!
Eat so you have the energy to play. This is what we keep telling children all the time. And true each word. For years I started my days with less than half a soy yogurt can and few cups of coffee. For lunch, I had light salad, no bread. Then in the late afternoon, I was hit by fatigue and spent a lot of money keeping up my sugar levels by eating candy. Honesty, I must say that it wasn’t till our nutrition app development project that I really started to learn about nutrition science. At the same time, I became more aware of my own habits, for the first time ever I guess.
My best and biggest aha-moments deal with eating processes: the process of eating every 2-3 hours and the process of composing your plate.
Food gives you energy when these 2 conditions apply:
- You motor = your body gets food regularly
- 4-6 times a day (every 2,5 – 3 hours)
2. You compose your plate balanced according to the balanced plate model
- Half of your plate full of veggies, low-fat protein ingredient, and quality fiber-rich carbs
Try to eat regularly for a week or two!
I bet soon you’ll have more energy to get things done. And all extra weight collected while eating irregularly will start to fall off. Eat and you’ll do better!
Our Nutritionist Marika wrote earlier “why is it so hard to eat regularly”. Read here Marika telling about eating.
Eat, pray, love,
Mia
founder of See How You Eat apps
PS. If you need a tool to guide you gently to get your plate filled with balanced food download the 80/20 Coach app.
Eat! Eat on regular basis. It gives you energy.