Eating properly shouldn’t take a diploma.

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“Get a frigging real life!”, “You’re not enjoying your life!”, “You seem fine. Why bother to eat all these things when you can get a nice food at the stall?” These are the probable comments from your friends and relatives when you’re trying to change your diet. Diet, not referring to starve or limit yourself in order to reduce your waistline, but diet here means the kind of foods that a person eats each day.  The year 2006 was the first year I began my diet plan and the first year I struggled with the plan. I started my diet plan according to my ‘feeI-plan’ and the plan was definitely erroneous and misguided. On the get go, I substituted white rice for the white bread which initially I thought there’s no limitation to how many pieces I should consume. I believed that the white rice was the culprit and the main cause to the growing waistline, without even considering the scoop of rice that I’ve scooped onto my plate. There’s nothing like bad foods but I believe in quantity. You consume much, you gain much. Consume less gain less. It’s as simple as that but why do we still having that bewildered helpless expression glued on the face? Attitude I’d say.

The first thing that you need to bear in your mind is that breakfast is the most vital meal of your day. Never leave the den without breakfast. You sleep almost 7-8 hours without food, and definitely your body needs to be refuelled. You may probably say that you don’t have time for that. Well breakfast doesn’t need hours to prepare, it takes just how much you take time when you brush your teeth. As for me, I’ll have 3 half-boiled/hard-boiled/scrambled eggs with a toast (wholemeal bread) which I usually dunk it in a tumbler of low-fat milk. It’s important for you to eat protein in your breakfast because it will keep you less hungry and help you to survive until your lunch hour. Breakfast is like any other meal; you need protein, fats and fruit or veg. 

There’s no such thing as too much veg. Regardless of what you’re eating, your plate should be about half-full of them. Remember green is good. People who refuse to eat vegetables I found very infuriating. There’s this one guy in my class, he is a brain of the class, fast thinker and ingenious, kudos to him for that but he hates veg so much, so much that he able to spare some time to remove the tiny little pieces of salad and shredded cabbage in his burger or even in his noodles soup, and bean sprout is also included, no chance. That’s what I call passion (eyes rolling)! Hey you people remember to include vegetables on your plate. Make vegetables the foundation of your diet, along with the two pieces of fruit a day. Vary them as much as you can.

Although most of us know that eating some fat is essential to a healthy diet, but still there are some of us avoiding fats totally. After all, it’s too easy to make mental connection between eating fat and getting fat, so you end up simply avoiding it. But what about those who aren’t giving damn about eating or avoiding fats? That’s the worst. My option of fats will be olive oil. It works wonder with the omelette and when it comes to marinate, olive oil is the best. My advice on fats, don’t go too much just take few fats that you’re familiar with like olive oils. Pretty good bet!

Have you seen any guy or girl counting their calories daily intake? Yes? No? Well according to an article in Men’s Health magazine that I have came across, calories are not a good indication of what a food is like and the effect it’s going to have on your metabolic rate. Not convinced ke? Do you know that two poached eggs contain the same amount of calories with a can of Coke. Not convinced lagi ke? Well think of it this way then, would you say that a couple of poached eggs are the same as a can of coke because they share a similar amount of calories? Definitely not. Poached eggs are clean and high in protein, but the Coke isn’t clean as it contains aspartame (a chemical substance to sweeten the drink instead of sugar). Think quality, not quantity. Eating nutritious food is much better than sticking rigidly to a certain-calorie-a-day limit that comes from crisps and crackers.

Last but not least, eat real food. Real food means only eat food that grows out of the ground. This is the key to eating properly I’d say. Whenever I go for groceries, and see something on the shelf, I ask myself if it would have existed 5000 years ago. If the answer is no, it probably isn’t anything that you should be eating. Avoid things containing preservatives that you can’t even spell or ingredients you wouldn’t keep and maybe impossible to keep in your fridge. Eat things that will rot eventually. We’re human and eventually we’ll rot too, so we don’t need all those super sophisticated, high-tech foods cause all we need is fresh food. Eat food, not products pretending to be food.

And you don’t need a diploma to eat properly. Have a blast!