Ways to tell if you’re eating right
- There’s whether or not you’ve gotten enough of the vitamin and mineral nutrients that your body needs.
- There’s whether or not you’re getting your calories in the right ratio of proteins, carbs, and fat.
- There’s whether or not you got a complete set of proteins during the day.
- There’s whether or not you are spiking your blood glucose levels too much during the day.
- There’s whether or not you’re causing inflammation.
- There’s whether or not you’re getting too many calories (getting fatter), or restricting the number of calories (losing weight).
- There’s whether or not you feel good after you eat.
- There’s whether or not you’ve got a special health condition than needs special attention and whether or not you’re addressing its needs.
Of course, this is too much to keep track of by ourselves. That’s why the brain immediately looks for a “just ____ and it will all work out okay”. Hence the success of the dieting industry.
I’ve been on a nutrition crash course this weekend. I’ve fallen in love with whfoods.org and nutritiondata.com. I hand-entered nutritional data for about 200 different whole foods, and it was a great exercise in paying attention to the specifics of something that I usually just skim over. Nutritional information is information overkill, and it’s tough to find the mind trick that helps me just “get it”. I think if I just keep immersing myself in the data, some general understanding or instinct will emerge to help combine it all in my memory for me.
September 5th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
If you’re looking to track calories and nutrients (and calories burned in exercise), I can’t recommend Spark People (.com) highly enough. For me, at least, Health Month provides the motivation, and Spark People provides the specific info on whether I’m meeting my goals. I’ve had to hand enter a few foods, but almost everything out there is in the database (or at least a close enough approximation). It was really an eye opener for myself for certain foods – like (white) pasta, which I always sort of thought of as a rather neutral food until seeing how many calories are in the portions I was eating! I definitely still have pasta sometimes, but I work it into my daily calories a lot better.