Welcome to week seven of my ten week Healthy Eating Series, to Kick off 2012!
To date, you have learned the importance of slowing down your eating, eating in a relaxed setting and meal cadence. You’ve also learned how all three of those things will boost your metabolism.
Just to recap your first six focuses, they are:
1. Slow down when you eat.
2. Create a relaxed environment while you eat
3. Create an eating rhythm with your eating times, (meal cadence)
4. Feel pleasure as opposed to stress with your food choices
5. Eating for nourishment
6. Awareness at Meals
Here is your eating focus for the week. Work on this every time you eat, and you’ll start to create new habits. Enjoy!
Focus #7 – Quality of Food
It is important to make sure you are eating high quality food! By quality food I mean food that is nutrient dense. This nutrient dense food helps to regulate your appetite and prevents overeating. Food dense in nutrients includes fresh food with no added chemicals or preservatives.
Nutrient dense foods signal the brain that we’ve received our nutritional requirements sooner than non-nutrient dense food. Therefore we are satisfied before we start to over eat. These nutrient dense foods naturally regulate our appetites, because our bodies are inherently accustomed to eating them.
Eating foods that are processed or not fresh leads to:
Decreased nutrient density of food
Decreased nutrition for the body
Increased food cravings
Increased appetite