Prospero's Kitchen

Why exercise in a Healthy Eating plan?

You eat to provide energy to your body and nutrients to keep your system working at the optimum level. The calories that you put into your body should match the calories that you burn through your daily activities. That's one of the reasons you need to exercise--to burn calories. But there are even more compelling reasons.

Exercise is linked to your cognitive functions helping you to be more alert, to your emotional well being leading you to become more positive and less depressed, and to a healthy body that works smoothly and efficiently . Exercise, too, lowers blood pressure and eases the effects of diseases on your system a thing of the past.

All you need to do is choose the exercise that suits you best. That could be a walk, gradually working up to the level till you're walking twenty to thirty minutes a day. Or a swim. Or sit ups in your bedroom. Or any activity that allows you to be committed to doing it everyday.

Some tips for making Healthy Eating easy

Tips for making your commitment to healthy eating easier:

Start out with adding fruit to your diet.

When you want something sweet, eat a banana, grapes, an orange, or another piece of your favorite fruit.

Don’t let yourself get starved before eating. This is not a deprivation diet. It is a Healthy Lifestyle. Go to your snack food that you have on hand and try to eat on schedule. If you’re starved, you eat much more to satisfy both the physical and emotional needs.

If you get the urge to eat an unhealthy food, try distraction. Take a walk outside. Call a friend.

Learn to read nutrition labels on what you buy at the grocery store. Soon certain restaurants will be required to post nutrition labels on menu items

The Healthy Eating, Healthy Lifestyle Plan

Our lives these days are filled with activities, responsibilities, and things that must be done. We probably don’t get enough sleep. We don’t exercise. And we don’t eat right because who has the time to cook and because we’d rather go out to ea or buy food already cooked. We combine eating with meetings and work, and ultimately, we think, save time and energy. Yet paying attention to a healthy lifestyle pays dividends far beyond the time and effort expended.

The cornerstones of a healthy lifestyle are exercise, rest and stress relief, and healthy eating. And the benefits far exceed the effort to gain a healthy lifestyle: more energy, feeling good about ourselves and our lifestyle, longer life spans, freedom from many diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and even depression. We feel more in control of our lives.

Each of those factors is in your control. The decision to become healthy only seems difficult because it requires your commitment. It requires you to make decisions instead of automatically eating the way you’ve always eaten. Stopping by the bakery to buy cupcakes, picking up a quick meal at a fast food joint, eating all the goodies in the gifts you’re given, and being tempted by so many lures. But soon the old way will feel wrong and the new way seem natural, easy, and good..