Healthy Eating Habits

I believe good health is the most important thing in life - because it gives you freedom. Freedom to pursue your dreams and do all the things that poor health won't permit. Any significant health problem, chronic or acute, will bring your life balance out of order. Not just your own bodily balance but everything and anybody you normally interact with will be affected. Many of your relationships and activities will suffer in some way.

I think anybody who seriously tried living healthier through a better diet, proper physical activity, adequate rest, and by addressing mental and spiritual factors have experienced a vast range of natural health benefits. Common benefits are overall better health and a sense of well being, better sleep, improved physical endurance and strength, sharper mental abilities and lower sleep requirements.

What constitutes a healthy diet?

Unfortunately, there are more opinions about this than there are health experts. To further complicate the matter, dietary concepts change over time, leaving most people confused and uncertain about what or whom to trust. Along with personal experimentation, such approach will enable you to establish healthy eating habits that work especially well for your body. This takes time and energy, but considering the long lasting benefits a healthy diet can provide, the effort is more then well worth it.

For 99.9% of human existence, our species lived on foods that were either raw or minimally processed. The technology needed to increase food processing did not exist until very recently. It is therefore reasonable to assume that our bodies are best adapted at utilizing and dealing with the raw or minimally processed foods which sustained us, and our predecessors, for millions of years: fruits, vegetables, meats, nuts and seeds.

A good diet is based on natural, whole or minimally processed foods. A large portion of it should consist of foods that can be eaten raw, such as fruits and vegetables. Fermented or cultured, unpasteurized foods such as kefir, yogurt, cheeses, miso, sauerkraut and pickles are considered highly beneficial in many cultures. Cooking should be minimal and only applied to foods that must be cooked in order to be edible. Ancestral heritage also plays an important role as certain foods may need to be excluded or emphasized.

Maintaining healthy eating habits can make enormous improvements to ones health, it's only one essential part of healthy living. The other parts are proper and adeqaute physical activity, mental and spiritual well being, and adequate rest. All need to be addressed in order to achieve better health.

An important thing I learned while experimenting with diets and other health related approaches is to always pay attention to the signals from the body. It's essential to do this - in order to maintain good health - and adjust accordingly. As one gets better at reading the body, it becomes natural to self diagnose a lot of minor problems (which can become major if not paid attention to) and remedy them by simply adjusting the diet or other aspects of life. Finally, we are all different - what works for one person may not work for another - thus it's important to learn about and experiment with nutrition to find out what works and what doesn't.

Guide To Vegetarian And Natural Food --------------

Tomatoes Promote Robust Health

The tomato is now grown worldwide for its edible fruits, with thousands of cultivators having been selected with varying fruit types, and for optimum growth in differing growing conditions.

Tomatoes are a great addition to a healthy diet—low-calorie, fat-free and a good source of Vitamin C. But what propels them to nutritional superstar status is their abundant amount of lycopene, an antioxidant in the carotenoid family with cancer-fighting properties. In this instance, the cooked product is better for you than the raw—lycopene is concentrated in cooked products, like tomato sauces, soups and ketchup. Add a little fat, like olive oil, and our bodies absorb lycopene even better. For lycopene-rich fresh tomatoes, choose the reddest ones you can find, make sure they haven't been refrigerated, and drizzle them with olive oil or add or a slice of fresh mozzarella.

Botanically, a tomato is the ovary, together with its seeds, of a flowering plant: a fruit or, more precisely, a berry. However, the tomato is not as sweet as those foodstuffs usually called fruits and, from a culinary standpoint, it is typically served as part of a salad or main course of a meal, as are vegetables, rather than at dessert, as are fruits. As noted above, the term "vegetable" has no botanical meaning and is purely a culinary term.

A simple tomato salad is so delicious.

Ingredients:

1/4 red wine vinegar,

3 rounded tablespoons brown sugar,

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, eyeball it,

1 teaspoon coarse black pepper, eyeball it,

1 cup canned tomato sauce,

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, eyeball it,

3 tomatoes, sliced 1/2-inch thick,,

large Vidalia onion, peeled and sliced into 1/2-inch thick slices,

Salt,

2 tablespoons chopped parsley leaves, to garnish.

Method:

In a small saucepan over moderate heat combine vinegar, sugar, Worcestershire and pepper. Allow sugar to dissolve in vinegar and liquids to come to a bubble. Remove sauce from heat and whisk in tomato sauce, then extra-virgin olive oil. Let dressing stand.

Arrange sliced tomatoes and onions on a serving platter. Season tomatoes and onions with salt, to taste Pour dressing over the tomatoes and onions and garnish with chopped parsley.