Eat a balanced diet and not be picky about food

The essence of a balanced diet without being picky about food is never to "force yourself to eat all the foods on the dietary pagoda and eat enough grams of each category", but to cover the intake needs of the seven major categories of nutrients as much as possible on the basis of one's own food tolerance and taste preferences. There is no need to swallow foods you hate for the sake of "health", and there is no need to copy other people's recipes. This is the dietary principle that ordinary people can adhere to for a long time and will not rebound.

To be honest, I recently received a consultation from a girl born in 1995. In order to meet the "balanced" KPI, she forced herself to eat half a broccoli and a piece of boiled chicken breast every day for three weeks. Finally, she felt nauseous when she saw green vegetables. She couldn't help but eat two meals with her family bucket on the weekend. She gained three pounds in one go. She cried and told me, "I'm not picky about food as I'm told, but why am I getting fatter the more I eat?"

In fact, many people have misunderstandings about "not being picky eaters". They think that as their parents said when they were young, they have to eat both fat and lean meat, including vegetables, radish, and lean meat. Now there is actually no unified standard answer to this matter in the nutrition field. Researchers in the field of traditional public nutrition also recommend trying to match the recommended types and intakes of residents’ dietary pagodas and calculating the ratio of macronutrients. This is highly accurate but also has a high threshold for ordinary people. ； In recent years, the popular school of mindful eating advocates following the body's feelings, eating whatever you want, and stopping as long as you are seven to eighty percent full. It is relaxing and stress-free, but it is easy to accidentally fill up your stomach with high-fat, high-sugar, empty-calorie foods that have no nutrients.

I used to be a complete "pork liver rejecter". I always felt like vomiting after swallowing the fishy smell. A few years ago, my physical examination showed that the heme iron was low. The doctor told me to eat more animal liver, but I didn't force myself to boil pork liver in plain water. Instead, I looked up a lot of recipes, soaked the pork liver for three hours to remove the blood, chopped it up and mixed it with pork stuffing to make dumplings. I cooked about a dozen of them over the weekend. I couldn't taste the pork liver when I ate it. I checked again after a month and the indicators were normal. Look, where is the food that must be eaten? As long as you can get the nutrients you need and eat it in a way that is acceptable to you, don't overwhelm your taste buds.

There are still many supporters of niche diets on the Internet, saying that a vegan diet is the healthiest, or that a ketogenic diet is the fastest to lose fat. These claims cannot be beaten to death with a stick. A friend I know who has been vegan for five years regularly supplements vitamin B12 and often eats fermented soy products and chia seeds to supplement Omega 3. Every year, his physical examination indicators are much better than those of his peers. For him, this is a balanced diet suitable for him. ； There are also friends who are fitness coaches who use cyclic ketosis to maintain body fat all year round, and regularly monitor blood lipids and liver and kidney function, and there are no problems. But these are not suitable for ordinary people to copy homework casually. If you have hypoglycemia yourself and forcefully imitate other people's ketosis and not eat carbohydrates, you may faint on the street.

In fact, you don’t have to be so tired when eating. You don’t have time to cook when you catch the subway in the morning. You can buy a multi-grain bun and a cup of sugar-free soy milk at the convenience store downstairs. It contains carbohydrates, protein and a little dietary fiber. It is much more practical than having to get up half an hour early to make a beautifully posed avocado toast.； If you usually like to eat white rice but not whole grains, you don’t need to switch to brown rice all at once and get gastric reflux. When steaming the rice, grab a handful of broken corn kernels or mix it with half a handful of quinoa. The steamed rice will have a sweet aroma and you won’t be able to taste the roughness of whole grains. Just adjust slowly.

To put it bluntly, a balanced diet is like putting together Lego. You don’t have to use all the parts given by the merchant to make it right. You can choose the color you like and the parts you have on hand, as long as the final model is complete and what you want. There is no need to forcefully put in the parts you don’t like just to make up the numbers. The final piece will be annoying to look at.

Anyway, eating is a very happy thing. Don’t eat yourself into a frown just for the sake of the reputation of being “not picky” and “well-balanced”. As long as you feel comfortable after eating for a long time and all the indicators during physical examination are within the normal range, you don't need to compare how many super foods you eat with others, that is the healthiest balanced diet for you.