I want to be on diet
Dieting is defined as a controlled intake of food and drink designed for weight loss, for health or for religious reasons, or to control or improve a medical condition (Microsoft Encarta dictionary).
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It is common to see people doing one thing or the other with their food in a bid to achieve one or more of the following; a perfect body size or figure, enhancing performance in a sport, reducing stomach size among others.
This may lead the person involved to stop eating a certain kind of food ingredients or in some cases stop eating certain foods entirely.
The question I want to ask at this point is “Is it good to diet or not”. The answer to this question could be yes and no depending on the one that is involved in this act of dieting.
What some people do by way of dieting may not be necessary at all whereas some may be necessary.
To a very large extent, dieting becomes problematic when it is done without expert advice from a dietician who is a specialist in food and nutrition in relation to health. These people know the implication of every subtraction and addition that you may have to do to your diet.
They are well qualified to suggest appropriate replacements for any nutrient that may be adversely affected by a decision to stop taking a certain type of food.
This is a very complex thing to do anyway. That is why it becomes more dangerous when the person doing the “dieting” is not assisted by an expert.
Some people feel they are too fat or too big and so want to lose some weight. The way they choose to do it is to restrict themselves to eating once or less in a day.
And this meal, oftentimes, is taken somewhere in the afternoon. Studies conducted among people who have skipped their breakfast over a long period of time have shown raised levels of blood cholesterol and other lipids.
This is one problem that you can land yourself in if you skip your breakfast. If you want to lose weight, intake of the foods that are very high in energy or calories has to be modified.
Meal times have to be regular and exercise has to be done in a more consistent and continuous manner. All these are based on individual needs of nutrient and energy, weight, height, body mass index, fat mass and muscle mass.
There are some religious and cultural beliefs that force some people to remove certain foods from their menu.
Say meat from certain animals because those animals assisted their forefathers during wars in the past or during their settlement in the land that they occupy.
Care, therefore, has to be taken not to eat a nutritionally inadequate meal in such cases.
If the food that a certain group of people hold as taboos happens to be the most dominant source of a particular nutrient, there may be a problem with that nutrient.
When it happens like this, children, pregnant women and the aged in those societies become victims.
I must mention here that every meal that we take needs to contain some carbohydrate from say yam, banku, rice, kenkey among others and some protein from fish, meat or egg and some oil or fat and some vitamin and mineral from fruits and vegetables.
Whatever the eliminations may be, appropriate substitutes should be taken to ensure optimal nutrition.
To be continued...
The writer of this article is a Dietician at Trust Hospital & Clinics. He is also the Author of “Your Diet & Your Health Magazine.”