Healthy Eating and You

A recent report showed that nearly 20% of teenage schoolgirls were deliberately missing breakfast because they thought it would help them lose weight. Around one in twenty skipped both lunch and breakfast and while 60% thought that they needed to diet, only 16% were actually overweight.

You should never intentionally miss the first meal of the day - it won't help you to lose weight - quite the opposite in fact.  Avoiding breakfast can even make you put weight on.  If you think about it logically breakfast means “break - fast.” Your body has been fasting (denied food) overnight, and in the morning you are almost in the first stages of starvation. You need to refuel and boost your metabolism to keep you going until lunchtime.

If you starve your body it will get its own back sooner or later. For example, skipping the first meal of the day might make you feel sick, shaky or irritable. You will probably find it hard to concentrate at work, college or school, and around 11am, you're likely to start craving sweets, biscuits and chocolate. This means you may start to binge on snack foods to stop the craving, and you then miss out on vital nutrients required for a healthy diet.

If you don’t want or have time for a full English breakfast every morning then you should start the day with a light meal such as cereal with milk, followed by some wholemeal toast and fruit or pure fruit juice. If you do however want a cooked breakfast then why not help yourself to a bowl of porridge, or a big plate of baked beans with poached eggs or grilled sausages and bacon.  Try it for a week and see how much better you feel!

• Do you really need to diet?  Instead why not aim to get active and follow a sensible balanced eating plan, which is an excellent basis for staying healthy for the rest of your life. This means eating enough carbohydrates like bread, pasta, rice and potatoes, lots of fruit and vegetables and moderate amounts of meat, fish and dairy foods.
• Like it said earlier eat breakfast every day! Skipping your early morning meal won't help you lose weight. It will just have you reaching for unhealthy snacks later on that day.
• Drink water, juice, milk or smoothies instead of fizzy drinks. The normal kind is crammed with sugar, and the diet kind has no nutritional benefits at all.
• Drink 8 glasses of water a day if you can – it is calorie free and good for your skin too! The symptoms of dehydration can also be mistaken for hunger pangs.
• Eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Even a glass of fruit juice counts as one of them !
• The odd treat is fine but remember don’t just base your diet solely around burgers and chips.
• Avoid any eating plan that restricts your intake of dairy products. Young, growing teeth and bones need calcium!
• Your body needs certain types of fats to look and feel healthy. However you must limit the saturated kind (found in crisps, biscuits, cakes) to an occasional treat.
• Faddy diets do not work in the long term and the weight will pile back on once you lose interest and give up. The best way to achieve lasting results is to change to a realistic healthy eating plan incorporating some exercise.