A healthy dinner is the best way to cap the end of a long day.
However, your concept of what a healthy dinner consists of may be upside down.
Healthful Food Choices
Making healthful food choices for dinner foods may run afoul of what you were taught.
Breakfast is the first meal of the day. Therefore, it must prepare you for the rest of your day. By design, it must be a hearty meal because it will give you energy to start your day. That is why it is the most important meal of the day.
If you start your day in an energy deficit you are setting yourself up for a cascading descent into a dismal existence. Physiological mechanisms kick in to begin burning fat for energy. This may sound like a good idea if you want to lose weight but there is a better way to slim down.
Such a cascade effect takes extra energy and release toxins which were stored in your fat. Both of these situations can cause fatigue. The accompanying mental fog will not only make you feel bad but it will decrease your ability to think clearly and enjoy life.
Eat a good breakfast to start your day off on the right track.
Lunch is the second most important meal of the day. It is eaten during your busiest time of the day and must nourish your body when you are most active. It must be a hearty meal just like breakfast was earlier in the day.
However, dinner is at the end of your day. You are beginning to slow down and relax in preparation for a long sleep period. Because of your reduced activity levels, dinner should be a much lighter meal.
Unfortunately, it is usually not the lightest meal of the day. It is often the heaviest meal of the day. Eating a huge evening meal so you are stuffed full of food and lapse into a lethargic state of consciousness is not the best route to take so late in the day.
Does this mean you have your meal planning backwards?
Whoops! You do.
You’ll have to work on correcting that.
Natural Healthy Diet
Dinner seems to be the highlight of the day.
We spend a tremendous amount of time planning, purchasing, preparing, and cooking the foods we will consume. It is time well spent.
Dinner is also a time for social interaction.
Friends, family, and sometimes even unexpected guests make dinner a special event. Camaraderie with our dining companions is as important as the meal itself. Great memories often spring from these gatherings. The food and other aspects of the meal itself may be forgotten but the good times will always be remembered.
Because of its significance we usually make dinner an elaborate, heavy meal.
That’s not the way it should be as far as the physiology of our body is concerned. In reality, it should be a light meal.
Why?
Because our body must be able to easily digest dinner before bedtime.
A full belly can cause heartburn if it is stuffed with food and you lie down to sleep. The sphincter muscle that is supposed to hold the food in your stomach (the actual organ holding the food you ate…not your belly hanging over your belt) may be lax because of nutritional deficits. Stomach contents (which includes acid) can leak up into your esophagus (the tube food travels down to get from your mouth to your stomach). This is the most common cause of heartburn.
Eating a small dinner of easily digested foods will often stop this very uncomfortable situation from occurring.
A natural healthy diet plan for dinner should consist of a raw vegetable diet and good health foods such as soups, salads and whole grains. Such wise eating habits are easy to establish.
Many tasty and healthy recipes are available that use these lighter foods. Quite a few delicious healthy recipes can be found on the Internet and in cookbooks you probably already have in your home.
A healthy dinner using healthful food choices will yield a natural healthy diet that will benefit you in many ways. There is nothing quite like a healthy dinner to end your day so you can have a restful night of sleep to begin your next day well nourished and fully rested.
