People often underestimate the essence of healthy food. It is not so easy to implement new habits, but with new recipes, you can understand the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. Proper nutrition starts with positive thinking and understanding of what our body really needs.
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Sometimes, we have emotional hunger and think that we need a full meal. Usually, people make mistakes when replacing the glass of water with drinks with sugar and carbohydrates such as coke and other kinds of fast food. This food fills quickly but not for a long time. The real benefits for your body are gone because you don’t get enough energy and nutrition, only extra calories.
Today, students are interested in this essential subject and the research on nutrition. Every healthy food essay is supported by individual experience. If you want to improve your knowledge of a healthy lifestyle, read healthy eating essay samples and visit our blog for more info on nutrition.
Healthy Eating Essay
In this essay, I intend to demonstrate and illustrate the reasoning behind the feeling of well-being usually associated with junk food, but in fact is really connected to healthy eating and a healthy lifestyle. In simple words, there must be a change in the perspective of eating from the search of health to the search of well-being. According to Wahl et al., “recent research suggests that healthy food choices, such as eating more fruits and vegetables, have not only physical but also mental health benefits” (1).
It has been proved by various researches that “healthy eating” is not only the way to a good, healthy lifestyle, but is also deeply connected to the immediate feeling of well-being we often search for in junk food, but rarely find. In Australia, a major survey took place with an estimated population of 1,200 adults, and it showed a direct increase in happiness, life satisfaction, and well-being over two years related to the consumption of vegetables and fruits (Wahl 1). This is something that could alter the way we perceive healthy eating, as it opens a new perspective on “feel-good food,” making it possible for people who tend to bury their negative emotions in food, usually not healthy food, only because that is what we have been taught over the years. In this notion lies the main reason behind the high rate of binge eating after a few weeks on a healthy eating regimen and under a hard restrained diet. The reason is because we have been trained to believe that only through these extremely unhealthy options, such as cookies, or ice cream, just to name a few, and we are able to reach this feeling of pure ecstasies and well-being, when in fact there are options such as fruits that will lead to, if not exceed, the same feeling.
The reason underneath it all is pretty easy to understand, as it resides in the tool perhaps more used to make us decide. The media and the marketing mold our minds and awaken our desires, so if every time we see or read something about healthy food, it only brings us back to the choice between being happy by eating what we want, or being content and responsible by choosing what we should eat. Our mind is going to see the trick and when we lower our guard, there we are again, eating something that will not add up to our plan of having a healthier life. This is a generational fact which can be equally applied, but in the last decade research has supported the fact that eating fruits, vegetables, and others of this kind has direct (immediate and long-term) effects of well-being and happiness, which is the motive behind the notable increase in the consumption in a “substantial number of individuals (‘emotional eating’) of unhealthy food (‘comfort food’)” (Wahl et al. 2). This assessment has already demonstrated that the consumption of unhealthy food does not lead to happiness, nor works as a real mood-booster, and comfort food has as much of a mood-boosting effect as healthy food, or even neutral food not associated to comfort. Keeping this in mind, it is even easier to accept the challenge to better nutrition. Lately, tools such as the Healthy Eating Index, which work by examining “the relationship between diet quality and health in the population,” have illustrated once again the relation between unhealthy dieting and obesity (Guo et al. 1).
It is time to break the common beliefs around food and what it represents and fills in our minds. It is time to expand and renew the approach we have towards a healthy lifestyle and what healthy eating could mean in our everyday life.
Works Cited
1. Guo, X, et al. “Healthy Eating Index and Obesity.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 19 May 2004, www.nature.com/articles/1601989.
2. Jiao, J, et al. “Health Implications of Adults’ Eating at and Living near Fast Food or Quick Service Restaurants.” Nutrition & Diabetes, Nature Publishing Group, 20 July 2015, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4521173/.
3. Wahl, Deborah R., et al. “Healthy Food Choices Are Happy Food Choices: Evidence from a Real Life Sample Using Smartphone Based Assessments.” Scientific Reports, vol. 7, no. 1, 6 Dec. 2017, pp. 1–2. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-17262-9.