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Exactly How Do I Eat Healthier?

It is one thing to say, eat healthier and another altogether to do it. What constitutes eating healthier? It begs to have a starting point at which to gage what is healthier eating. Where are you now in some kind of measurement of how healthy you are eating? What measurement tool are we using? A caloric measurement? A measure of number of nutrients we take in? Or, are we asking a person to follow guidelines for healthy eating set forth by the USDA? Healthy eating defined may be different to different individuals. According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, healthy eating is defined as "eating the recommended types and amounts of foods, nutrients and calories that are recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, while limiting low-nutrient, high-fat and high-sugar foods and beverages that will promote health and achieve and maintain an optimum body weight and energy balance."

The benefits of eating healthier are: improving your overall health, improving your well-being. You will feel better and have more energy. A healthier diet helps you to stay fit and active and can also help to fight stress in your life.

Healthier eating includes eating smarter. Here are a few ways to eat smarter:

Take smaller bites of food and chew the food for longer time periods because as we chew food, saliva mixes in which is the first step in digestion. Chewing our food slower and for longer periods of time now only is better for digestion but we taste it longer allowing us to enjoy the food more.

Stress can compromise digestion so avoid all stress while you are eating. This includes not rushing through your meal, avoid confrontations, do not partake in serious discussions at the dinner table, and relax if you are stressed out before you sit down to the table. Set a relaxed mood with music or candles and create a soothing atmosphere in which to eat such as a pretty tablecloth, nice dinnerware, and colorful serving dishes.

Healthy eating also means to stop when you are full. Eat slowly so that you can pay better attention to the signals that your body is giving you regarding when it is full. If you eat only enough food to satisfy your hunger and no more, you are more likely to get to or maintain the proper weight.

Eating more food earlier in the day gives your body more time to digest, so your biggest meal should be at the start of your day, a modest meal at noon and a smaller sized meal at night. Eating frequent smaller meals throughout the day is actually good for your metabolism.

You can also eat healthier by eating a well-balanced diet. Each day your meals should center on the six basic food groups - whole grains, vegetables, fruits, milk and other dairy, protein and oils.

All six-food groups are necessary for optimum health. Your body receives nutrients such as vitamins and minerals from all food groups when you ignore a group you are not getting the nutrients from that group in your diet and therefore will not be as healthy as you could be.