Healthy Eating Habits
Chapa De Indian Healthcare Auburn Grass Valley
Healthy Eating Habits – Maintaining a healthy diet is one way to help improve your family’s health throughout the year. Chapa-De wants to remind our patients of the many different ways you can maintain a healthy diet, while also ensuring you are getting the proper nutrients your body needs.
When building your new healthy eating habits, it is important to remember that all food and beverage choices matter. When choosing what foods and beverages to consume, keeps these tricks in mind:
- Focus on whole foods – use whole fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and minimize the use of processed foods.
- Drink water – liquid calories are a big source of calories for many that contribute to weight gain. Choose water as your beverage of choice. Add lemon or lime to give it an extra twist.
- Read your food labels – look for foods that are low in saturated fat, sodium, and added sugars. Look under the % Daily Value column: <5% is considered low, >20% is considered high. For sugars, look for no more than 6 grams per serving.
- Choose a rainbow of colors – make your plate colorful by adding a variety of fruits and vegetables to your meals. The more color on your plate, the more nutrients you are sure to get!
Healthy eating is a journey that has many influencing factors including access to healthy foods, culture, traditions, stage of life and preferences. Each persons’ journey may differ, but it is important to remember that healthy eating will have a lot of positive benefits.
Why is it important to eat healthier? Eating healthier foods can:
- Help make you more energized
- Improve your mind and brain function
- Help you and your family members maintain a healthy weight
- Help prevent mental and physical health conditions that can become early-onset with an improper diet
There are five main food groups in which you need to get your nutrients from. They are fruits, vegetables, grains, proteins, and dairy. Based on your age, sex, height, weight and physical activity levels, the number of calories you need to consume each day will vary.
Changing the way your family eats can seem difficult in the beginning, but it will get easier. Chapa- De recommends making small changes to your current diet to aid in the process of switching to a healthier diet.
Tips to begin your healthy eating journey:
- Commit to eating more vegetables every day. Consider adding a salad to your dinner meal or steaming frozen broccoli or cauliflower.
- Replace your dessert with fruit, like a bowl of mixed berries, or apple slices with peanut butter. Make it a healthy sweet treat!
- Eat more whole grains, like oatmeal, brown rice, quinoa, millet, amaranth, buckwheat, whole wheat bread, and corn tortillas.
- Transition to low-fat or fat-free dairy products (1% milk or non-fat milk, low-fat yogurt, low-fat cottage cheese).
- Vary your protein sources. Consider using plant sources of protein like beans, lentils, peas, nuts, peanut butter, and sunflower and pumpkin seeds.
Chapa-De offers many different resources to help you on your journey to eating healthier. Specifically, our Diabetes Prevention Program offers patients the chance to learn about healthy eating and how easy it can be to prepare meals that can promote your healthy lifestyle.
For more information on healthy eating and to learn how Chapa-De can help you achieve your health goals, call (530) 887-2800 for our Auburn health center, and (530) 477-8545 for our Grass Valley health center.
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Chapa-De Indian Healthcare Auburn Grass Valley