Nutritional diet and health lesson plan

The core goal of this nutritious diet and health lesson plan is never to require everyone to follow a unified dietary standard and accurately calculate the calories of each meal, but to help people with different physical conditions and dietary preferences find a healthy diet logic that can be adhered to for a long time and without burden, so as to avoid the more they eat, the more anxious they become, and the more they control their diet, the more physical problems they will have.

I have been doing community nutrition science popularization for almost 4 years, and I have met too many people who have taken detours. The most typical one is Aunt Zhang who came to attend the class last spring. After she retired, she read health-care posts every day and ate strictly according to the recommended amounts in the "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents". She drank 300ml of milk, ate 25g of soybeans, and 100g of seafood every day. As a result, she went for a physical examination half a year ago and found that the uric acid was 80 μmol/L higher than before. She was very aggrieved and said that she clearly did not eat indiscriminately.

In fact, I really can’t blame my aunt for this, nor can I say that the dietary guide is wrong. There are two mainstream nutrition guidance logics in the industry: one is the direction of public nutrition, and the Dietary Guidelines are the representative of this type. They are universal standards for the entire population, which is equivalent to drawing a safe baseline for everyone. Ordinary people without underlying diseases will basically not have any problems if they follow the diet. ； The other school is in the direction of clinical nutrition, which pays attention to individualized adaptation. For example, Aunt Zhang has a problem of weak purine metabolism. The amount of soy products and seafood recommended in the guide is too high for her, so she needs to make targeted adjustments. I often tell students that choosing a diet plan is the same as buying shoes. The unified size chart can only be used as a reference. Only you know best whether your feet are wide or fat, or whether you have flat feet. If you force yourself to wear someone else's shoes, you will wear down your own feet.

Speaking of this, some people may ask, are the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting methods that are popular on the Internet reliable? I get asked this question more than a dozen times every time I take a class. In fact, there is still no unified conclusion in the industry. Those who support it can provide evidence-based medical evidence: For example, short-term ketosis can significantly help the blood sugar control of some patients with type 2 diabetes. For office workers with normal metabolism and irregular meals, intermittent fasting can help them establish a stable eating rhythm and save them the trouble of cooperating for takeout. ； The opposing side also has sufficient clinical data to support it: if ordinary people insist on ketosis for a long time without the guidance of a doctor, it will most likely increase the burden on the liver and kidneys. People with hypoglycemia and chronic gastritis will not eat for 16 hours and will only send themselves to the emergency room.

Therefore, I will never recommend a certain "best diet" to students. I will only teach you a few little habits that you can do easily without using your brain. The feedback from people who have tried it is good.

Don’t underestimate the small act of eating two bites of vegetables before touching the staple food. Research has shown that for the same meal, if you eat vegetables first, then protein, and finally the staple food, post-meal blood sugar fluctuations can be about 30% lower than if you eat the staple food first. You don’t need to calculate your GI value, and you don’t need to specifically switch to cereals. It is especially friendly to people with abnormal glucose tolerance.

I also met a little girl who was doing Internet operations before. 996 was the norm, and she relied on takeout every day. She had followed the trend and quit carbs for 3 months, but her aunt stopped immediately and came to the class crying. I didn’t let her bring food every day, so I taught her a few tips on how to choose takeaway meals: for example, when ordering rice, note that 1/3 should be replaced with whole grains, pour some hot water to rinse off the oil on the surface of the dish when you get it, and buy an extra box of tomatoes every afternoon as a snack. With these three simple actions, she persisted for 5 months. Her hormone levels have returned to normal after a review last month, her weight has stabilized by 8 pounds, and she is not hungry anymore.

Oh, by the way, there is another pitfall that I have stepped on myself. When I first entered the industry, I was also superstitious about accurately calculating calories. I set a limit of 1,500 calories for myself every day. Every bite of nuts would be counted as half a day. As a result, within half a month, I got up hungry in the middle of the night and rummaged through the refrigerator to find red bean paste buns to eat. After eating, I felt so guilty that I was in a bad mood for three days in a row. Later I figured out that the premise of healthy eating is "you can stick to it for a lifetime" rather than "the absolute standard of what I eat this week", so I now tell students to set aside an "indulgence quota" three times a week. You can eat milk tea, hot pot cakes if you want. As long as you don't eat and drink for three days in a row, it will not have any impact at all. Instead, you will not feel guilty, and good eating habits will be easier to stick to.

At the end of the last community class, Uncle Li, who had always bought tens of thousands of health products, came to me and told me that he had done nothing complicated in the past two months. He just drank soy milk and a boiled egg in the morning, went to the senior citizen canteen to pick up an extra chopstick of green leafy vegetables at noon, and drank two ounces less when drinking with the old man in the evening. Recently, his blood pressure has stabilized at 130/80, which is much more useful than the imported health products he took before.

In fact, after all is said and done, there is no standard answer to nutritious diet. If you like to eat meat, there is no need to force yourself to eat vegetarian food every day for health reasons. Just change to more lean parts and add more vegetables. ； If you don’t have time to cook, you don’t have to worry about taking out food. You can still eat nutritiously by choosing the right type of food and cooking it with oil. After all, we eat to live comfortably, not to put a tight spell on ourselves and live by counting calories. What's the point in that?