You’ve heard the expression that you are what you eat. We all know that processed foods and too much of any one food can make us unhealthy. Consuming excess sugar is associated with a higher risk of developing diabetes due to insulin resistance. Too much fat intake is known to clog up your arteries with cholesterol and increase your risks for a stroke or heart attack.
We also know that eating a balance of healthy protein-rich foods, natural carbs in moderation, and foods packed with essential vitamins and antioxidants can ward off the effects of aging, sickness, and disease. Therefore, if you want to feel young, energetic, strong, and fit for a lifetime, you should concentrate on building a healthy foundation by maintaining a proper diet combined with exercise. Let’s consider the virtues of a healthy diet below.
1: Energy and Stamina
When you have a habit of craving foods that have natural sugar and carbs like bananas as opposed to banana cream pies, you will not go through the crash and burn that leads to fatigue. Consuming a healthy diet of natural sugars and carbohydrates that your body can slowly metabolized without blood sugar spikes opens the door for a day full of stamina and energy. And you will feel the difference immediately if you wean yourself off the sweets and move to fruits that are naturally sweet and not processed. There is something about the natural balance of natural foods that our body finds more desirable than any concoction that man can whip up.
You can prove this test in your children as well. Stubborn children who don’t want to wake up for school in the morning and get ready are generally suffering dietary problems. If they eat a breakfast cereal that is loaded with high-fructose corn syrup or lots of sugar, they will just crash and burn after they hit that breakfast table. If they don’t feel alert and energized in the mornings to go through their daily routine with joy, then they will not look forward to waking up each morning. Let your good eating habits rub off on youngsters by starting the day with a bowl of fresh gourmet rolled oats, a little milk, butter, and just a touch of brown sugar. Have bananas and fresh fruit ready and some fresh eggs for protein instead of processed cereals.
2: Improved Sleep Habits
Although it is important to make sure that the shades are closed tightly at nighttime to produce ideal melatonin levels for a night of deep sleep, a proper diet will also help you relax at night. This relates back to the energy that you exhausted during the day. When you get your heart rate up and have a challenging daily exercise schedule, then you will deplete your oxygen supplies. This afterburn effect helps you sleep like a log at nighttime, as your body naturally drifts into sleep mode to rebuild oxygen levels. The beauty of this is that you will also be burning more calories at rest and will wake up feeling leaner. If you were running down all day, on the other hand, from crashing and burning due to diet, you may feel restless at night and unable to sleep.
3: A Healthy Weight
Maintaining a healthy weight is only possible when you eat a proper and balanced diet with the recommended moderation of carbs, sugars, fats, nutrients, and proteins. If you switch to eating junk food, you will notice in just a few days how easy it is to start blowing up like a balloon in your thighs or stomach. These processed foods do not have the right balance for your body to run efficiently on and tend to store in fat reserves as dead weight and excess energy that your body simply can’t metabolize. And if you are foggy about which foods are known to improve metabolic rates, then feel free to check out this list of natural foods that also feature the additional benefits of a lowered calorie count.
Eating healthy and natural foods under 500 calories a day creates the perfect package for your body to metabolize the calories stored as fat in your body. This is why eating diet foods do very little to improve your weight. Because it is not the raw number of calories but rather the ideal proportions of all things that helps us maintain a safe and healthy weight. For example, if you ate a diet that was mostly processed diet foods full of artificial sweeteners, you may not lose a lot of weight because it doesn’t stimulate your energy levels like a banana. In fact, artificial sweeteners may trigger your body to release excess insulin, which, in turn, makes you feel tired while simultaneously building up insulin resistance.
3: Sharper Mental Focus
If your body is tired physically throughout the day, you can bet that your brain is also tired. Your brain runs on glucose just like your body and can literally shut down when you are experiencing crash-and-burn cycles. If you don’t consume the right balance of natural foods, you will find that your mental clarity is simply not there. This may be in part due to your mood. If you are on a sugar high followed by a bout of boredom, you may find it hard to focus and concentrate on work without getting distracted and looking for something more mindless and entertaining like television. Because a healthy body leads to a healthy mind, and lack of sleep alone can manifest as symptoms of schizophrenia, it is a major benefit to eat healthily and maintain natural energy rhythms each day.
4: Protection Against Aging, Disease, and Sickness
All the natural antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and metabolism benefits of a healthy diet altogether protect you against the effects of aging. Scientists now know that there are two different age numbers. You have an immutable chronological age that counts the years from your birth and a mutable biological age that can be reduced by eating healthy, exercising, and expressing the best facets of your genetics. Scientists now know that certain stresses like exposure to carcinogenic chemicals, for example, will bring out negative gene trains. The same effect occurs when our genes are expressed negatively from a bad diet and we suffer countless diseases.
In summation, my friends: if you are struggling with fatigue and feeling old, the number one cause is from failure to maintain a healthy diet. A healthy diet increases your energy and builds up the strong desire to exercise and do everything right. Don’t bother trying to diet with manufactured dietary foods and empty calories. Simply eat a low volume of natural and healthy foods to start burning off those excess pounds and feeling like a kid again in no time.
