Good Health Check List II |
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Do you eat three balanced, nutritionally-sound and enjoyable meals a day?If you are skipping meals because you hope this will help you lose weight, you are misinformed about weight loss. If you are not sure whether your meals are balanced and nutritionally sound, put the question to yourself this way: Do you eat about the right amounts of each of the major food groups each day to meet your nutritional needs and to maintain a healthy and attractive weight? If you honestly don't know what the right amounts should be for you or what the major food groups are, you are not well-informed about nutrition.Do you regularly take a vitamin supplement because you believe you need to, or because you believe it will make up for skipped meals or a stressful lifestyle? A 'Yes' suggests you are again misinformed about nutrition and probably both wasting your money and risking your health. If you believe you are eating wisely but you are really not enjoying it, then you have probably been conned into the latest fad diet. A genuinely sensible eating plan is nutritionally sound, practical, affordable and, above all, enjoyable. Otherwise we ordinary people won't stick to it. Another possibility is that you are eating wisely, enjoying it and losing weight, but paying through the neck for it because you have joined one of the commercial 'weight loss read food sales' program. If you can really afford to have someone else prepare your food for the rest of your life, good luck to you and when are you going to invite us over? If, like most of us, you will eventually have to take responsibility for preparing your own sensible food. Do you dislike (and therefore avoid) exercise?Do you run 20 kilometers around the local roads every morning before breakfast, come rain, hail, sleet or snow? The poor image most of us have of exercise isn't helped by the `health' (read 'gymnasium') industry. They can't sell you health. What they do sell you is access to a gymnasium. To convince you it's worth the money, some of them tend to encourage people to do more than they need. Most people who start an exercise program stop. And that's a pity, because a sensible exercise program is not over-demanding in time or effort, should never make you feel very uncomfortable, and plays a key role in building good health and an absolutely essential role in weight loss (despite what the conmen will tell you). In brief, a sensible exercise program involves three 20-minute workouts a week, doing an aerobic activity of your choice, with a few minutes to warm up beforehand and cool down afterwards. It should only ever involve a moderate level of effort. That's all anyone needs to do for good health or weight loss, and doing more won't give you much extra benefit. Doing a lot more becomes a health hazard itself. Do you want to lose weight?The best way of answering this question is to look at yourself in a mirror. The chances are, if you look fat you are fat. If you want a more precise answer, look up a table of recommended weights for the ideal healthy and attractive weight range for someone of your height, body frame and sex.Do you want to establish a healthy lifestyle?Rather than tackling an obstacle to good health, is your aim a generally healthy lifestyle, with a view to being more able to enjoy life and to keep doing so for longer. These includes healthy and balance diet, stress free, regular exercise, detoxification and spiritually healthy.
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