Right Nutrition to Manage Your Weight

The foods and drinks you choose are important to maintain a healthy weight. Getting right advice from a dietitian on making good food choices to manage your weight is significant.

For a balanced diet, you need to choose foods and drinks that offer good quality nutrition. This keeps your body healthy and your energy levels up.

To manage your weight right, you should know how many calories your body needs every day which varies as per the following factors:

• Age
• Sex
• Size
• Activity level
• Medical conditions

Here is some bunch of tips which you can keep in mind to help you manage your weight better:

• Know your portion size: Know how many servings of dairy, fruits and vegetables, proteins, and grains and other starches your body needs each day and a balanced diet also includes avoiding too much of some foods and making sure you get enough of others as well.
• Build more lean muscle: Maintain, or even increase, your metabolism by continuing to build lean muscle. Muscle has a higher metabolism than fat does. If you don’t yet train with weights, add exercises to improve your overall build. If you do, increase the amount of weight you’re working with to keep yourself challenged.
• Fight off hunger with more filling foods: Keeping that feeling of fullness can be done with foods high in fiber — think fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein.
• Stock up on healthy foods: Foods like fresh produce, lean proteins, low-fat dairy, and whole grains. Limit foods like chips and candy and other empty calories. “Empty calories” are foods that are low in healthy nutrients and high in sugar, fat, and calories. Focus on choosing snacks with fiber and protein like carrots and bell peppers with hummus, an apple or yogurt with fresh fruit.
• Include all food groups: Choose different healthy foods from all the food groups- Carbs, fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals. Eat foods from each group with every meal. Whenever you sit down to a meal, green vegetables should take up half of your plate and 1/4th should be taken up by protein.

All about protein
Protein is known to be most helpful food group to manage weight better, faster and in a healthier way. Avoid the fried options; baked, steamed, grilled, stewed, or broiled are lower in calories and saturated fat. Good sources of lean protein include eggs, and chicken with the skin removed. Eat plenty of fish, especially fatty fish such as salmon and sardines, at least 2 times per week. Limit varieties that are high in mercury, such as shark.

Beans are good sources of protein and fiber like black beans, kidney beans, lentils. Vegetarian proteins such as nuts and seeds are part of a balanced diet. You can also eat tofu, tempeh, and other soy products.

Healthy Eating Tips to manage weight better:

• Limit snacks that do not have any nutritional benefits, such as cookies, cakes, chips, or candy.
• Limit fried and processed foods.
• Make sure you are drinking enough water, at least 2 liters per day. Limit sugar-sweetened beverages such as sodas and sweet teas.

Over to you
For a balanced diet, you need to choose foods and drinks that offer good nutrition. This keeps your body healthy. Know how many calories your body needs every day. Consult a dietitian before following a particular trend or diet for weight management.