What are you eating?

Some people eat to live and some live to eat. I believe in eat healthy and live happy. As a Nutrition and Dietetics Major, I hope to write and convey about nutrition, eating habits, dietary guidelines etc., without making it a boring piece of just any other article. So, let’s start with the most basic and common question that comes into our mind, ‘what is Nutrition?’ to define it most scientifically: Nutrition is the science that interprets the interaction of nutrients and other substances in food in relation to maintenance, growth, reproduction, health and disease of an organism. It includes food intake, absorption, assimilation, biosynthesis, catabolism and excretion. Everything went over your head, right? Okay let me put it into simple terms, Nutrition is basically what goes into your body when you eat a certain type of food. For ex, pulses provide abundant protein, proteins help in maintaining growth. So, the nutrition you are getting from the pulses you eat is helping in your growth. Now that you know what nutrition is you should have also understood that the most important part about getting right nutrition is eating right food. Consuming the right amount of carbs and proteins along with enough amount of fats is the first step to have a proper diet.

I know how tempting the cheese melting away from the pizza slice is or the juicy deep, fried chicken patties in your burgers are but too much of these can make you stop eating them at all for a very long time. It’s better to eat them just in the right quantity and at right time intervals if you want to continue eating them for the rest of your life.

Now how do you know that you are eating right?

    You know you are eating right when your body is happy with what you are eating. Your body reacts accordingly to what you eat. For ex. You skip proper dinner and bite into some munchies and call it ‘dinner’ that’s when you suffer from gastric or constipation, this is your body telling you that you should have had that dinner which mom made.

If you are not eating healthy and you get to know of it, how to correct it?

   So as to correct it, to correct your diet you need to make sure you are consuming balanced amounts of all the nutrients. Proteins, carbs, fats and energy. You don’t have to go all  head hunting into the labels, reading about the nutritional contents, just eat the right amount of food made at home, not too much not too little. Eat until you feel that your hunger is curbed and keep yourself hydrated. Best way is to always have a ‘timetable’ and routine as to what and when you eat.

Nutrition and Medicine are the two sides of the same coin. They go together hand in hand. No medicine can work if there is no proper nutrition to support the body so as to, accept the medicinal intake. For ex, when you take calcium tablets for certain bone conditions you need sufficient amount of vitamin D or vitamin A in your body to absorb the calcium intake and that vitamin you get from fruits and veggies. There will be no need of any medicine in the first place if there is proper nutritional intake, but as body ages or encounters some disease conditions there will be need of additional medication along with proper diet.

Not just medicine and nutrition go together but also nutrition and physical exercise walk the same path, physical exercise is nothing but distributing all that you eat uniformly in your body. So, when you eat more or less than what is needed for proper distribution, there will be non-uniform distribution in the body which will lead to conditions like being skinny or obese. To avoid such things please read what I have written above.

Let’s see how do we correct our diets in our busy running lives where we have no time to think twice before eating anything or to even move our muscles other than our fingers to scroll on our mobile screens. Only if we would run as much as our fingers run on our keyboards and smartphone screens. Coming back to correcting our diets, it’s just few additions and subtractions you need to do. No big deal. Add a lot of greens and minus all the empty calories (fried chips, aerated beverages and everything you love). As I said no big deal.

So as for my conclusion I would like to say just one thing, the only thing that you have as truly yours is your body. Our body is with us through everything we go through, from cradle to grave. And the only thing that our body ever wants is for us to keep it healthy, and we shouldn’t hesitate doing so and moreover keeping our body healthy gets us a great deal, we get an amazingly healthy old age and our body can rest peacefully knowing that its owner that is us kept it healthy throughout its life span. So, eat healthy and live happy!
                                                                                                       -Gulsha Mariam,2nd year BSc. FND