HEALTH

Healthy Eating and Diet tips

Women have unique nutritional needs. By eating well at every stage of life, you can control cravings, manage your weight, boost your energy, and look and feel your best.
Trying to balance the demands of school and social life and also cope with media pressure to look and eat a certain way, can make it difficult for any woman to maintain a healthy diet. But the right food can not only improve your mood, boost your energy, and help you maintain a healthy weight, it can also support you through the different stages in a lady’s life.
Most of us are trying to stick to an extreme diet that leaves us short on vital nutrients and feeling cranky, hungry, and low on energy which makes our needs often neglected by dietary research.
Women’s nutritional needs differ from men’s, as children, boys’ and girls’ dietary needs are largely similar. But when puberty begins, women start to develop unique nutritional requirements. And as we age and our bodies go through more physical and hormonal changes, so our nutritional needs continue to evolve, making it important that our diets evolve to meet these changing needs. While women tend to need fewer calories than men, our requirements for certain vitamins and minerals are much higher. Hormonal changes associated with menstruation, child-bearing, and menopause mean that women have a higher risk of anemia, weakened bones, and osteoporosis, requiring a higher intake of nutrients such as iron, calcium, magnesium, vitamin D, and vitamin B9 (folate).
To make sure you get all the nutrients you need from the food you eat, try to aim for a diet rich in fruit, vegetables, quality protein, healthy fats, and low in processed, fried, and sugary foods. Vitamins and supplements can be useful in safeguarding us against occasional nutrient shortfalls, but they cannot compensate for an unbalanced or unhealthy diet.

There are some nutrients that are very essential during healthy eating diets; Calcium, Magnesium, Vitamin D and Iron.
Good sources of calcium include: dairy products, leafy green vegetables, certain fish, grains, and cabbage. This helps to build healthy bones and teeth, keep them strong as you age, regulate the heart’s rhythm, and ensure your nervous system functions properly. Calcium deficiency can lead to, or exacerbate, mood problems such as irritability, anxiety, depression, and sleep difficulties.

Good sources include leafy green vegetables, broccoli, cucumber, green beans, celery, and a variety of seeds. This helps to increase calcium absorption from the blood into the bone. In fact, your body can’t utilize calcium without magnesium.

You can get Vitamin D from about half an hour of direct sunlight, and from foods such as salmon, shrimp, vitamin-D fortified milk, cod and eggs. Vitamin D is also crucial to the proper metabolism of calcium.

One of the best sources of iron is red meat (especially liver) which also contains high levels of saturated fat, others include leafy green vegetables and beans, poultry, seafood, dried fruit such as raisins and apricots, and iron-fortified cereals, breads, and pastas.

In order to get the proper healthy amount of nutrients in your food during your diet, then you can research about healthy diets.