Many of us will know or have heard the prayer “Give us this day our daily bread.” In fact, we all need daily sustenance at least once or twice, but better yet, three times a day. Most animals, birds, and fish ingest food continuously. Many spend all their waking hours foraging for food, hunting, and foraging for food. Nocturnal creatures, of course, spend the hours of darkness on a similar quest.
Think of the daily sight of birds, squirrels, and other creatures constantly running, pecking, or foraging for food.
Think of us humans. Many seem to spend most of their time eating and snacking or at least thinking about food. Think about the advertising we see. Probably the second most prevalent advertising topic is food and it is in front of us at all times on television, radio, the Internet, billboards, newspaper and magazine ads, bus ads, and more.
FOOD, FOOD, FOOD! Is that all we think about?
Food is necessary, good tasting food is a bonus, but healthy food is imperative to continue living as healthy as our bodies were designed to be.
Is it possible to have nutritious, good-tasting, and good-looking food all together? Well, of course it is. That’s why we have world-renowned and not-so-famous chefs and food preparers who write a lot of cookbooks and cookbooks and recipe books for us to see and eventually smell and taste these culinary delights.
The bad news is that many times, the third nutritional criterion, nutritional goodness, is not always met by the delicious sights and smells of what we eat. Are we brave enough to look past the first two and focus on the third? So are we even more courageous to change our diet so that we can have healthy, eye-pleasing, and tasty food?
The good news is that yes, we can have it all, but we must delve into the nutritional value of food rather than the culinary ‘value’. They are not mutually exclusive!
Balancing the proportions of nutrients, vitamins and minerals in food has been greatly simplified with the tools of the Internet. I personally use a website called myfitnesspal.com * which I find is a great way to keep track of my daily intake. It allows me to adjust the fat, carbohydrate, and protein ratios to fit my dietary goals. It also tracks up to six nutrients at a time and generates reports from which I can easily see trends in my diet.
It’s imperative to first determine your caloric intake to match your age, weight, required weight changes (if any), and then find the foods that meet those goals. Personally, I haven’t greatly changed what I eat, but I have altered how much I eat in any food and how often I eat something.
A good rule of thumb that has been around lately is the ‘rule of thirds’ whereby you separate (physically if you like) your plate into thirds and make sure you have one third for protein, one third for veggies (salad) and one third for carbohydrates. It is the size of the plate and the serving size (total calories) that will determine whether you lose weight, gain weight, or maintain weight.
Although we live by having our daily bread, we must look at what that daily ‘bread’ offers us in terms of nutrition and nutritional value. If there are deficiencies, then we should consider supplementing our real food with readily available nutritional supplements.
Eat your daily bread more wisely, not more abundantly.
Note: * I do not make any profit whatsoever from the website mentioned above, but I offer it only as a suggested tool to use in tracking your food) GO
