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- Dietary Restrictions
Returning to Sensible Eating Habits
Healthy Diets Aren't Difficult
When you grow up on a farm, you learn many things about healthy eating. You collect fresh eggs every day, eat healthy vegetables freshly picked and enjoy milk and butter from the local dairy farmer. Enter commercialism with all of its trappings of so-called health restrictions on everything that has ever been grown. People worked hard, ate fresh vegetables and poultry and never suffered from the numerous illnesses that abound at present. Have we all become massive germaphobes to the extent that our lives are comprised of synthetically created food? Allergies to foods have risen unbelievably among adults and children whose bodies can no longer tolerate that which children and adults once ate in quantities without problems.
Healthy Diets Aren't Difficult
When a serious illness strikes, it mandates the need to rethink eating habits, it becomes abundantly clear that foods we labeled "health foods" actually can have maximum freshness and high quality. This, of course, precludes the possibility of buying produce at the local farmer's stand and buying dairy and eggs from the local dairy farmer.
Buying commercial fat-free, sugar-free, cholesterol-free products actually costs more than fatty, sugary, high carbohydrate foods. Sound peculiar? It is. If you remove sugar, that's one less ingredient in the content of a food product. So why does it cost 30% more? You'll no doubt be given the excuse, that removing sugar and fats costs the food manufacturer more because that reduction in ingredients isn't managed by the manufacturing equipment. And pigs fly?
Healthy diets aren't difficult to achieve. You can grow your own vegetables in a container garden that takes up very little space or venture off the beaten, tired old grocery store path to a farmer's market where you get produce from the garden picked that day. You will be amazed at the difference in the flavor, color and texture. You'll learn to crave a deep red farm tomato and loathe those half ripe grocery store tomatoes. Enjoy seasonal foods that are available at the peak of their crop. When you prepare vegetables, save the brine and freeze for soup. Then, just add quinoa or brown rice to this and whole vegetables like onion, carrot, beans and celery. Boil for a few minutes until the veggies are tender. Add a few spices or herbs like tarragon or fennel and you have fresh, homemade soup. Homemade isn't a dirty word. It's pretty amazing how the idea of making things from scratch has been converted to a long, grueling chore when it's anything but a few minutes of your time. Learn to bake your own bread. It will take practice; but once you get the idea of what bread texture is supposed to be like, you'll be baking fresh bread that will last for three to five days.
Return to the Days Of Yore
Thanks to freezers today, most of the farm produce you buy can easily be frozen for future use. Contrary to most opinions, frozen vegetables do keep longer than two weeks in a freezer. Healthy diets don't necessarily mean living as a vegetarian or vegan either. You can enjoy your favorite meats, fish or poultry. You just need to learn to create standard portions according to your body's nutritional needs. Reducing portion sizes is the biggest deterrent to eating a healthy diet. Add to this the fact that many people don't take the time to eat three to five smaller meals a day and the energy levels in the body go awry, especially if you have a sedentary job and get little exercise.
Walking and swimming are two of the best cardio exercises. Don't drive when you can walk. This means not parking your car two steps from an entry door of any building. Park at the far end of the lot to get you daily walk into your schedule. Another reason for lack of exercise is today's tendency to pay others to mow the grass, rake the leaves and mop floors. When you put healthy food into your body, your body needs exercise to digest it properly.
When starting a new healthier lifestyle, make a list of all of the things you can change easily. Then, practice one or two of them for a month or two until it feels like a second skin.