Whether you’re looking to build muscles, lose weight or improve your athletic performance, a balanced and healthy diet plays a crucial role in your life.
Following a well-balanced diet provides your body with the required vitamins, minerals and nutrients to keep your mind strong and body healthy. If you diligently follow the diet, it can also help in warding off several diseases and health complications such as maintaining a healthy body weight, getting a good sleep and proper functioning of the nervous system. Hence it is equally important to not just take up a diet plan, but to also follow it on a daily basis with a healthy lifestyle routine.
Below are the benefits you get when you follow a guided, nutritionist recommended diet plan:
- Controlled Body Weight – When you eat a healthy variety of nutrient-rich foods, it leaves less room for the calories to cause unnecessary weight gain. Fatty or sugary foods provide less nutrients and the body will end up storing it in the cells, causing several health risks instead of using it for energy breakdown. Eating good carbs like wholegrains, oats, vegetables, fruits, pulses, etc have a low glycemic index which allows the body to stay full for longer durations. These carbs break down and release themselves into the bloodstream, preventing the brain from having sugar-sweet cravings, thus helping in controlling the weight.
- Defence against Diseases – The perks of following a balanced diet is to maintain germ-fighting cells in the immune system, which fights off diseases. The immunity of our bodies relies heavily on the blood flow, so a better vascular function will help in disease fighting cells. Several deficiencies in nutrients can weaken the immune system, nutrients like vitamin A, B C and E along with zinc and iron. When you follow a structured nutritive diet plan filled with all the food groups, your body increases the production of infection-fighting white blood cells and materials that prevents the bacteria from getting into the cells of the body, thus keeping the infectious diseases at bay.
- More Energy – the food and the nutrients that we take inside our body, has a major impact on the energy that we have throughout the day. Foods dense in nutrients will digest and release into the system over a longer period of time, whereas sugary foods get digested easily in a much short span of time causing the human to feel hungry again. This can cause spikes in the release of energy into the bloodstream. The main goal is to eat well so that the energy is sustained throughout the day. Protein-rich diet provides satiety much more efficiently than processed food items. Foods that are rich in iron like dark leafy greens can also provide an energetic boost to your day, keeping you hyperactive because iron helps deliver oxygen to muscles and brain.
- Sleep Better – There are few things our bodies need more than sleep. It allows our muscles to recover and replenish from the day’s activities and workouts. Sleep will rejuvenate the brain and its ability to function at a high level for the next day. Without it we feel sluggish, energy levels remain low, focus and concentration levels are affected, and cravings for less beneficial food are triggered. Poor eating habits often cause stomach and digestive issues due to the toxins that may be released into the blood system. Raised acidity can also put a strain on the digestive system, making it very difficult to get a good night’s sleep. It is important to not overeat at nighttime, which many people are guilty of due to poor eating habits during the day. Making sure meals are spaced out effectively becomes an important rule once again. We do not want our bodies starving by the end of the day and have to make up for a lack of nutrients with a large dinner. It makes it extremely difficult for the body to prepare for sleep when it is working hard to digest a large number of calories. Plan the next day out, so you don’t run into a situation that leads to a sleepless night.
