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How to Practice Clean Eating
When you’re used to one way of eating – especially if it’s the way you’ve eaten most of your life – change can be difficult. Fortunately, it’s not impossible to choose clean eating so that you have a healthier, long lasting life.
When you decide that you’re going to make changes in how you eat, there’s more to it than just staying away from foods that aren’t healthy for you. You need to know which foods you should eat in order to get the vitamins and minerals that your body needs to have in order to function properly.
Choose the majority of the foods that you eat from the way that nature made them. This will be whole foods like you would find on any healthy eating plan. You should eat plenty of whole grains along with fruits and vegetables.
Use only dairy products that are low in fat. When you do eat plant products – such as nuts – buy the brand that doesn’t use salt. Additional salt in a product can push your sodium level over the healthy limit.
You’ll want to stay away from as much processed foods as possible. Because life is what it is with time crunches, you might end up having to choose a processed food every now and then.
If that’s the case, choose the healthiest food from among your choices. For example, if you have to buy a boxed pasta, make sure that you pick the one that’s whole grain.
Look over the label carefully. The more ingredients listed on the side, the higher the odds there are some dangerous additives in the box. For the healthiest result, pick the foods that have short labels with a list of ingredients that you can understand.
Clean eating means that you need to watch the amount of sugar that goes into your eating plan. Foods that contain sugar can cause you to develop a sugar addiction.
Plus, the additional added sugar can lead to weight gain and health problems. How many times a day that you eat is just as important with clean eating as what you eat.
The number one reason that drives people to unhealthy eating is hunger. When you allow yourself to get so hungry that you feel as if you need to eat immediately, it’s easier to grab something that’s not healthy for you.
When you eat only three meals a day, you have longer periods of time to cause your glucose levels to fall. At the same time, your metabolism slows down when you space your meals out that far apart.
Instead, eat at least five meals a day. You’ll want these meals to be smaller than if you were eating a three meal plan. What eating at least five times a day will do for you is it keeps your glucose levels steadier and it also keeps your metabolism from slowing down.
What You Gain from Clean Eating
The way you eat should always give you nutritional benefits. If you’re not getting any health benefits from the way that you eat, that’s a good sign that your body is crying out for something better.
Any eating plan that makes you feel sluggish, causes you to gain weight or gives you health problems – such as high cholesterol or high blood pressure – needs to be changed.
The sooner you decide that you want to practice clean eating, the better you’ll feel and the more benefits you stand to gain from it. When you practice clean eating, you’ll feel better, plus you’ll be healthier.
Even if right now you’re experiencing some health issues as a result of the way you’ve eaten in the past, if you begin clean eating, you can eliminate those problems. With clean eating, you’ll be able to get rid of the extra weight that can lead to illnesses, diseases and pressure on your joints from the weight.
When your body feels better, you feel better. This will make it easier on you to want to get up and be more active than you have been in the past. Plus, when you do get rid of any extra weight, it will be easier to keep it off with clean eating.
You’ll be getting a better intake of vitamins and minerals with clean eating than you would with eating processed foods or foods that aren’t whole or natural. These vitamins and minerals can help keep your immune system healthier which, in turn, will allow you to be able to fight off illnesses.
One of the problems with eating any old way is that you can often feel hungry half an hour after eating a sugar or salty food. Because natural foods are bulkier, you won’t be as tempted to run to the pantry looking for a snack.
This means that you’ll not only have longer lasting energy with the better way of eating, but you’ll also be less likely to fall back into your old eating patterns. Clean eating can help you live longer.
When you have a clean eating plan, you can keep your heart healthier. This way of eating helps prevent cardiovascular diseases – and it’s a great way to fight back against diseases like diabetes, which can lead to heart problems.
Clean eating is a way of eating foods that have a lot more fiber in them. This means that you’ll be less likely to experience digestive problems such as constipation. Eating this way also helps you fight back against aging. It helps boost the cell growth within your body so that your skin looks smoother and you appear younger, too.
What Is Clean Eating?
Clean eating is something that many people are doing. You may have heard about it in the latest celebrity magazine. This way of eating is not some new fad diet that will be here today and gone tomorrow.
Clean eating just means that you’ve made the choice to get away from foods that are bad for your body and you’re going to choose healthy, whole foods instead. The best part about clean eating too is that not only is it healthy, but if you have some weight to lose, it can help you lose those extra pounds.
Plus, it’s a great way to detox if you want to a fresh start. You’ll have more energy and be in better shape than you would be if you were eating processed foods.
Some supposedly healthy eating plans will have you eliminating entire food groups such as not having any protein. But that’s not what clean eating is all about.
When you practice this way of eating, it means that you pay attention to the food that you put in your body. You make sure that the foods that you eat are whole foods that have limited or no processing at all.
One of the best ways to remember how to excel at clean eating is to eat foods as nature made them and nature doesn’t put things in cans. Clean eating means that you won’t be putting the extras into your body that are bad for you.
Foods that are processed contain a whole lot of additives to keep the food fresh enough to be eaten even years down the road. While that might make the food last, these additives can derail your health
Many of these foods will contain things like chemicals so that the food tastes better. Some of them will have a lot of salt, enough to fulfil a whole day’s sodium intake, to preserve the food.
There will also be artificial flavoring or coloring in the foods. For example, not all the roast beef that you buy packaged in the lunch meat area naturally looks that way.
Coloring is added to give it the look of roast beef. Every food that you eat that’s in boxes, cans or jars has been processed in some way. That means that it’s not the healthiest choice to put into your body.
Many of these additives contribute to health problems later in life. All you have to do is read the labels to see what some of these additives are. Look them up and you’ll see exactly what they are and how they can affect your body.
When you choose to follow a clean eating lifestyle, it means that you’re going to forego the refined foods and opt for everything natural from your breakfast cereals, to your breads to your vegetables, fruits and meats.
What Is a Clean Eating Plan?
A clean eating plan means that you look at the options available for you to eat and you choose the one that’s the most natural. All of the foods that you buy in cans, bags and in the frozen section of your grocery store started out in their natural state.
The reason that a lot of shoppers buy these processed foods is for the sake of convenience. But when you weigh this convenience against being healthier, then it really is no contest.
It might take you a little bit more time to prepare foods that are in their natural state, but it’s better for you physically and even emotionally in the long run. It’s better emotionally because there’s a link between processed foods and depression just like there’s a link between sugar laden foods and addictive behavior.
Choosing foods in their natural state for your eating plan means picking the apple over the applesauce. But if you have a choice between an apple turnover or applesauce, then you would take the applesauce because it’s the least processed.
If you had the choice between an orange, orange juice or orange soda, then you would choose the orange. If that option wasn’t available, then you go with the next natural choice.
If you need to eat fruit and the only option was in a can, then you would choose the fruit that was packed in water or in light syrup over heavy syrup. When it comes to buying lunch meat, if you have to have that, then you would choose meat from the meat counter first.
If that wasn’t an option, then it’s healthier to pick up deli lunch meat rather than buying the processed kind that’s already packaged. When buying meats, look for ones that are grass fed over grain fed.
Make bagged, frozen meats your last choice. In the dairy department, buy low fat milk and yogurt that doesn’t have any flavorings. The flavorings are additives that aren’t healthy.
If you need bread, always go with a whole grain first. Make white bread your last option because it’s packed with additives and is the least healthy. Choose natural peanut butter over any other kind for your clean eating plan.
Think of your clean eating plan as direct from nature to your plate. If you can pick whole foods such as fruits or vegetables, wash them and eat them, that’s the best choice.
If you need it cooked, then you would steam it or stir fry it over frying it or deep frying it. But if you had to something other than steaming it, to avoid the worst option of frying it, you would bake the food.
Clean Eating to Maximize Your Bodyweight Training
Clean Eating to Maximize Your Bodyweight Training
You may have heard about clean eating and been a bit confused. Is it eating foods without pesticides? Eating only organic, home-grown fruits and vegetables? Eating foods that won’t wreck your health?
Clean eating can help you enhance your bodyweight training so that you get the most out of your exercises.
If you need clarification on what clean eating is all about, and some guidance on whether or not it’s right for you, you’ll find it easier to make that decision after reading this.
What Is Clean Eating?
Clean eating is a method of providing good health for your body that doesn’t require an exhausting array of technical calculations. Part of the reason many people quit dieting is because they hate the calorie counting, the food weighing, the percentages of fats and carbs and proteins, the BMI calculations and more.
They just want to live and eat and enjoy life without making everything such a hassle. Clean eating can do that for you once you learn the ins and outs of it. You’ll simply focus on adding as many whole food options as possible, choosing the best varieties that assist you in weight loss and maintenance, as well as gaining nutritional benefits.
You know how most diets allow a certain amount of “cheating?” Well clean eating is no different. You can make 50% of your diet clean, and 50% processed, or go all out and try to achieve a 100% clean eating regimen – the choice is up to you.
You can start with a light approach, maybe doing only 25% of your meals with clean foods. Pick one day in the week where you eat clean, and don’t worry yet about the rest of the days.
Continue adding days (or meals) until you reach a level of clean eating that you can live with. Some people go all the way, and that’s great! But it’s also harder to achieve and stick with than a more moderate plan that still offers some benefits.
When you start living a clean eating lifestyle, you’re looking for foods in their most original form. That means it hasn’t been processed, it hasn’t had pesticides on it, it hasn’t had anything added to it – it’s as close to picking it off the vine or tree as possible.
Your clean eating diet should consist of organic fruits and vegetables, raw, unsalted nuts and grains, and the best lean meat your budget can afford. Marbling might taste nice, but it wreaks havoc on your body.
Whenever you go into your kitchen to reach for food, look at the ingredients. Is it one ingredient, like “corn?” Or is it a whole slew of hard-to-pronounce ingredients that sound like they just came out of a science lab?
If it’s the latter, then that’s a good sign that this food source isn’t as clean as you would like it to be. It’s been processed. It’s had additives combined with it to form something that isn’t good for your health.
One of the great things about clean eating is that your body will experience fewer cravings and energy crashes throughout the day. Your fullness levels will stay intact and your energy will climb over time.
That means you learn to listen to your hunger cues and only eat when your body alerts you to a low level of food stores. You won’t feel like making a run to the vending machine to stave off a 3 o’clock slump in the afternoon at work.
Keep in mind that when you’re clean eating, that doesn’t mean you can cook the food in a way that ruins its perfect form. Frying lean meat after coating it with processed, white flour defeats the point of choosing it in the first place. …
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Top 10 Causes of Premature Aging
Getting older is simply part of living. However, you might have things in your life that are actually causing your body’s aging process to speed up. So you end up looking and feeling older than you really are.
A study performed on biological markers showed that there was more aging in people who suffered from certain conditions. To prevent premature aging, you need to avoid these top ten causes.
#1 – Drinking Other Liquids in Place of Water
Did you know that there’s something called lifestyle-induced aging? This means that what you do or don’t do can cause your body to age earlier than it should. You might be in your thirties or forties, but the age of your biological markers can be a decade or more older.
One of the ways that you can induce aging is by not drinking enough water. With all of the admonitions to drink between six and eight glasses of water daily, it can be easy to start turning a deaf ear toward the advice.
Everyone knows that water is a necessary part of keeping the organs healthy and is needed to help keep your skin moist. But it turns out there’s a valid aging reason that you need the water.
When you don’t get enough water – and instead, you replace that liquid intake with other fluids such as caffeinated coffee or sodas, you can cause premature aging.
That’s because caffeine has the same effect on the body that a diuretic does. It forces the body to get rid of water. You end up with organs not being able to function properly as well as dry, sagging skin.
When you lack the right water intake, you end up dehydrated. Most people believe that if they reach that point, they’d feel thirst, but you often don’t feel thirst with dehydration until it’s pretty well established.
#2 – A Lack of Sleep
You know that when you don’t get enough sleep, you don’t feel like you’re at your best. You might even be aware of all of the studies that talk about how you don’t perform as well at home or at your job on less than the optimal amount of sleep your body needs.
Not getting enough sleep speeds up the aging process. When you don’t get enough sleep, it can cause anxiety, and depression as well. When you lose sleep, the body experiences a surge of cortisol, which is the stress hormone.
Under normal circumstances, this stress hormone is healthy and enables you to deal with situations, but a steady influx of this hormone actually causes your body to slow down the production of collagen.
Since collagen is necessary for healthy looking skin, your skin will begin to show the effects of this lack of collagen, caused by not getting enough sleep. Your skin begins sagging.
Plus, the extra cortisol causes internal premature aging as well. You’ll also develop lines and dark circles under your eyes. Besides the extra cortisol, you’ll experience a lack of growth hormone when you lose sleep. You need this growth hormone to keep your bones from becoming weak.
#3 – Bad Habits Cause Premature Aging
Not only can certain bad habits cause problems with the health of your organs and lead to life-threatening conditions, but they can also lead to premature aging. Smoking can cause a host of health problems that can shorten your life.
But it accelerates aging because it triggers the aging process within your body. It kicks enzymes into high gear that work against your appearance and health. That means that you’ll develop wrinkles, lines, bags and sagging skin.
The cause behind the sagging skin occurs because smoking works to inhibit the production of collagen – plus, nicotine thins the skin, which impacts how smooth the skin appears to look.
Not only is smoking a habit that can cause premature aging, but so is drinking alcohol. Besides causing liver damage, drinking alcohol speeds up aging. When you drink, the ingredients in alcohol destroys cells that your body normally uses in the detoxification process.
These toxins make your body age faster. Plus, alcohol can cause you to become dehydrated. As if that’s not enough, many drinks are packed with sugar, which leads to cell damage.
Drinking also causes changes in how your body is able to handle the blood circulation. This causes your body to age prematurely inside as well as out. One of the outward changes you’ll see from this impacted blood flow is the development of spider veins on your legs.
#4 – Stress Causes Premature Aging
Everyone on the planet is familiar with the effects of stress. There can be small stressors that you have to deal with on a day by day basis. These don’t last long and usually don’t cause a lot of harm to the body.
But on the other hand, there can be major stressors, which can lead to premature aging. Your body has DNA strands. These strands have ends on them known as telomeres.
These are what protect your DNA strands. It’s instrumental in enabling your cells to be able to divide. When cells can no longer divide, they die. In healthy bodies, these telomeres have a longer length.
In unhealthy bodies, the length is short. These telomeres can be shortened by stress, which can lead to premature aging, disease and even death. There are studies that link shortened telomeres to work stress, emotional stress, and chronic anxiety or worry.
If you’re under a lot of stress, to prevent premature aging, you’ll want to take steps to deal with this and eliminate it from your life as soon as possible. Use some self nurturing and counseling if you have to – whatever works to stave off the aging process.
Read on to learn more about Ridding Yourself of Chronic Stress
#5 – Low BMI Is Linked to Premature Aging
With so many articles focused on making sure you have a low BMI to stave off weight-related diseases, it can be easy to think that having a low BMI is a good thing.
That’s wrong. The leading cause of a low BMI is not carrying the right amount of weight for your body’s frame. While it might be tempting to think that the thinner a person is, the better it will be for their overall health, that’s simply not true.
A too-low BMI can lead to premature aging. What you need is a healthy range BMI, not one that’s considered too low. When you have a low BMI, it impacts the body’s soft tissue by causing a loss of it.
When this happens, your collagen production slows down and you’ll develop sagging skin and wrinkles at a younger age than someone would that has a healthy BMI range.
It’s not all about appearances, either. A BMI that’s considered too low can weaken the immune system as well as cause anemia. It can also lead to low levels of energy.
#6 – Your Diet Can Lead to Premature Aging
You’ve heard the phrase, “You are what you eat” – but what you might not realize is that what you eat can lead to premature aging. Eating healthy gives you more benefits than simply keeping your weight at a healthy level.
When you eat right, you can stave off premature aging. When you don’t, you can hasten the aging process and some foods will bring it on faster than other foods. Whenever your body has an inflammation issue, you don’t feel well and you don’t look well.
Inflammation impacts the body because it can make you appear to be older than you are. Some types of foods are worse than others. You might have heard that you should keep the sugar-laden foods to a minimum, but there’s a good reason for that other than weight gain.
High carbohydrate foods – even foods that aren’t considered junk foods – cause a break down in the body’s ability to produce collagen. Without the right collagen production, you can see the effects of premature aging on your skin.
But inside the body, your diet can lead to premature aging among your organs. You can develop a fatty liver, which is directly tied to the kinds of foods that you eat.
A diet that’s high in carbs and low in protein can lead to premature aging. So can fad diets, crash diets, yo-yo diets and diets that are seemingly healthy, but call for you to extremely limit one of the food groups.
#7 – Being a Couch Potato Leads to Premature Aging
When your lifestyle is mostly sedentary, your risk of premature aging doubles. There’s more to exercise that helping to ke
There’s more to it than making sure that your muscles and bones can remain strong. Exercise can help keep diseases at bay that can be caused by an unhealthy weight or a sedentary lifestyle.
But one of the top reasons that exercise can prevent premature aging is because exercise protects your telomeres. When your telomeres become shortened, it means that your cells can’t divide as often as they would normally be able to.
This lack of division causes aging due to the death of the cells. What exercise does is strengthen the telomere, which has a preventative, anti-aging result. When you engage in regular exercise, not only are you helping prevent cell death (which is linked to premature aging), but you’re reaping all of the other benefits as well.
You’ll be improving your blood circulation and helping prevent the development of certain heart disease and other conditions that are linked to a lack of exercise. Plus, you’ll boost your immune system and help stave off inflammations that can cause premature aging.
#8 – Depression is Linked to Premature Aging
There are times that everyone can experience periods of feeling down. But usually, these periods don’t last. In someone like that, depression usually doesn’t cause premature aging.
However, when you’re dealing with chronic bouts of feeling down or have been diagnosed with depression, this is tied to premature aging. Depression can cause the body’s cells to age faster, which can then cause inflammation and other health problems.
People who experience depression can develop health issues that you would normally only see in people who were much older. These issues can include cognitive problems, cardiovascular disease, weakened bone strength, tremors and muscle weakness.
Another reason that depression can cause premature aging (besides faster aging cells) is that it can cause the length of the telomeres to shorten. To prevent this, you can engage in actions that boost your telomerase level, which work to protect you from premature aging.
The top three ways to boost this level is through regular exercise, eating a healthy diet and learning how to manage anything that might be causing you a lot of stress that becomes chronic, and turns into a depression situation.
#9 – The Sun Causes Premature Aging
There are lotions and makeup on the market today that claim to give you sun protection. However, many of these products fall far short of protecting your skin from premature aging from sun exposure.
That’s because most of these products don’t contain enough of the preventative ingredients against damage. Being in the sun can cause sagging skin, fine lines, and wrinkles.
When you’re out in the sun, when there’s a bright glare, you automatically squint. This produces the wrinkles and lines as well as the sagging around your eyes. If you have to squint outdoors, wear sunglasses – even in the winter – especially if you live in an area that gets snow.
The sun can damage your skin and cause premature aging even in the cold months. The sun causes damage to the collagen and hastens premature aging of the skin.
But it can also cause a breakdown in the cells that lead to the development of skin cancers. Exposure to the sun’s rays can give your skin a dry, weathered appearance.
If you’ve ever noticed people who practice years of tanning, you’ll see that their skin tends to make them look a lot older than they really are. This is a direct result of the sun hastening the aging process.
#10 – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Premature Aging
PTSD can be caused by either physical or mental stress. This can develop because of having experienced a physical or emotional trauma personally or having seen a trauma occur.
There are many reasons that PTSD can develop. Events such as being robbed, being physically assaulted, experiencing a car accident or a major event such as fire can cause PTSD.
The underlying cause of PTSD in any event that triggers it is a massive stressor or a series of stress long term. Your brain can only handle so much trauma at once. Your body can experience such an amount of stress at any given time that it can be an overload.
When you have PTSD, you can experience, depression, insomnia, have a higher inflammatory marker and have telomeres with shorter lengths. How long or how short your telomeres are is directly linked to accelerated aging.
Studies done on PTSD and premature aging found that besides shorter telomeres and higher inflammatory markers, that there was also a link between diseases that are normally associated with people who were much older.
These diseases included heart disease, intestinal problems, cognitive ability and even dementia. People who struggle with PTSD were shown to have higher mortality rates due to the premature aging process.
Aging is going to take place for all of us. But there are many things we can do to inhibit the speed at which it occurs. Some of that is physical, such as applying sunscreen – but a lot of it is a mindset and mental fortitude that you also have to work on achieving so that you live a peaceful life and age at a slower pace.
Give Your Body a Boost in Chemistry During Detoxification
Give Your Body a Boost in Chemistry During Detoxification
Everything that you put into your body and all the places that you go impact your body’s health. That’s because everything that enters the body, whether through eating it or absorbing it through your skin or lungs can cause changes to your chemistry.
Even if you’re the type of person who regularly exercises and you practice a healthy way of eating, you’re still exposed to toxins that hurt your body. Getting rid of these toxins can give you a much needed boost in health.
You gain many vitamins that you may have been deficient in. Vitamins have many different ways that they help your body. Your bones need vitamins to help them stay strong.
Vitamins work to repair damage inside and outside of your body. They create a stronger immune system to help stave off disease, and they help you process the food that you eat.
There are two kinds of minerals your body needs. These are trace and major minerals. Major minerals are ones like calcium, sodium, potassium and magnesium.
Calcium is instrumental in keeping your bones healthy. Sodium works to help balance the water content in your body. These major minerals work together in harmony.
When one of them gets out of balance, it can throw your body for a loop. For example, people who eat too much salt can end up with a calcium deficit because the body gets to work trying to keep your sodium level from staying high.
Trace minerals are ones like iron, fluoride, and zinc. You need iron to help transport oxygen. Zinc is needed to help your body stop bleeding because it clots blood.
Fluoride helps keep bones strong. When trace or major minerals get out of balance by the toxins, you won’t feel well and it can have an impact on certain bodily functions.
You must have essential fatty acids for healthy cells. You need them for proper brain function, for healthy adrenal and thyroid performance. In order to have good blood pressure, you need essential fatty acids.
You need the omega 6 and 3, specifically. When your body is full of toxins, it impacts how well your body can or can’t utilize these acids. Amino acids help your body with many major functions.
They’re responsible for getting nutrients where they need to go. They help your tissues and organs work the way that they should. They’re essential for healing. But unlike essential fatty acids, toxins in the body can make it difficult for amino acids to work the way that they’re supposed to.
When you detox, all of your chemistry gets a boost – including antioxidants. You can get antioxidants from food and from supplements. Some sources of antioxidants are vitamin A, C and E.
But these antioxidants have to stay in balance within the body or they end up doing harm. You need to detox to keep your chemistry in balance. It’s good for everyone, but especially for those who do use vitamin supplements.