HoserLife|Want to live life like a true Hoser, read on.

Being a healthy eater requires you to become both educated and smart about what healthy eating actually is.  Being food smart isn’t about learning to calculate grams or fat, or is it about studying labels and counting calories.

Healthy eating is all about balanced and moderate eating, consisting of healthy meals at least three times per day.  Healthy eaters eat many different types of foods, not limiting themselves to one specific food type or food group.

Eating healthy requires quite a bit of leeway.  You might eat too much or not enough, consume foods that are sometimes more or less nutritious. However, you should always fuel your body and your brain regularly with enough food to keep both your mind and body strong and alert.

A healthy eater is a good problem solver.  Healthy eaters have learned to take care of themselves and their eating with sound judgement and making wise decisions.  Healthy eaters are always aware of what they eat, and know the effect that it will have on their bodies.

When someone is unable to take control of their eating, they are also likely to get out of control with other aspects of life as well.  They could end up spending too much, talking too much, even going to bed later and later. 

You should always remember that restricting food in any way is always a bad thing.  Healthy eating is a way of life, something that you can do to enhance your body or your lifestyle.  If you’ve thought about making your life better, healthy eating is just the place to start.  You’ll make life easier for yourself, those around you, and even your family. 

I have been thinking that I am going to start keeping track of what I am eating this year. I want to be able to figure out exactly what I am doing good and bad. I think that I am doing pretty good, but I have found in the past that sometimes you can cheat yourself without even thinking too much about it.

So I was talking to a dietician friend and she told me to check out the Dietitians of Canada website, and on there I found EAtracker. I used a couple of other services like this before and was dissapointed, I am going to give this one a go for a month and see how it stacks up. Already I have found a couple of issues where you have to “search” for every food and there isn’t something like a directory that you can simply browse. Not sure how it is going to work as I have had bad expeiences with this sort of thing before since there doesn’t seem to be a lot of time spent on the search function.

If you have tried this before please let me know how you liked it.

Later

There may be a case that in “first world” countries that more and more food is being eaten more for the pleasure and less for the nutrition.

Abundant Delicious Food Could Result In ‘Food Addiction’, Analysis Suggests

This could be a very important factor in the reason why people are getting so much bigger.  They simply can’t stop eating.  They are getting addicted to the feeling of and pleasure of eating.  You have seen people eating a piece of chocolate and seem to love it. 

“The combination of an environment filled with highly palatable foods, and cultural norms that make these foods ‘psychologically available’ around the clock may paradoxically be a perfect recipe for the generation of both epidemic obesity and widespread hedonic hunger,” said Lowe.

I am pretty sure that everyone has felt this before. The smell of freshly baked cookies, or having to work late and you are stressed so you pick up some chips on the way home. Nothing special you tell yourself, you simply want to have something to eat and “calm” you down, not because you are hungry or didn’t eat enough during the day.

So what is your addictive food? And how to stay away from it so that it doesn’t start to hurt your waistline.

Mens Health Blog has a great post about the attributes of wine, red wine, well they reference here which is the original article.

The jist is that polyphenol helps to prevent the body from digesting fat. Polyphenol is found in various foods including red wine, fruits, and vegetables. The study however included using concentrated wine followed by a glass of wine as the source of polyphenol. They didn’t however distinguish if it was better to have the concentrated amounts added to the food during or after cooking, or even if the glass of wine is beneficial.

There is many studies stating the benefits of a glass of red wine, so I figure it is a good idea to have a glass with the meal anyway.

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I think that this is a known.  If you are snacking on chocolate or salty snacks it is not the best on the waistline.  However like this article TheSpec says, it is not really just about snacking, but what you are snacking on.

However even if people know what the “healthy snack” is they are not necessarily going to eat it.  Snacking, if done right, is a great way of helping your body out of the feast/famine cycle and in the process elevate your resting metabolism.  The reason being that your body will realize that is does not have to save food energy for later because you are always going to have access to food energy.

However if you are snacking on high fat/ high sugar foods the calories that you are consuming are going to be too high, and any benefit that you gain from the higher metabolism is going to be negated by the amount of energy available for your body to use.

The best meal plan would be to take the amount of food that you eat now in 3 meals and spread it out over the day and into 5-6 meals.  The “middle” meals can be smaller “snacks” and you will find that you will raise your energy level and have much better appetite control.

If you have tried doing this for an extended period, make sure that you sign up and post a comment