Top Wellness Tips for Healthy Weight Management
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How do we stay well and manage a healthy weight?
Staying well, includes both our emotional and physical well-being. To stay at our optimal wellness, what we consume emotionally such as our work or home environments, thoughts, sleep habits and lifestyle all have the ability to help or hinder our emotional wellness.
Just like our diet, the food we eat is more than just simple calories, it can nourish, restore and revitalise us when we may need it most of all, and provide us with essential nutrients, energy and heaps more.
Why wholefoods help us achieve whole well-being?
Eating processed or enhanced foods makes it harder on our bodies to break down and is easy food, this usually means we may consume more of it as it has what we call empty calorie, low nutrition value but is tasty so encourages us eat much more. Once you start including more whole foods in your diet, it becomes easy to do more, they give us energy, make us feel good and you will notice that they help your well-being, simply by being more restorative and nutritious.
The easy way to healthy weight management
Recent research shows that it is not necessarily how much we eat that determines our weight or health but what we eat that does. Not every food is made equal. Higher calorie foods contribute more to weight gain than higher portion sizes of lower calorie foods such as vegetables and fruit or fibre rich foods.
The secret weight management effect of fibre
Including more fibre in our daily diet is not only good for our gut health but is a great way to help with healthy weight management. Fibre can come in many forms, some common examples are, grains and seeds, think buckwheat, quinoa, almonds and pumpkin seeds also fruit with skins, berries, apples or pears are classic examples here. Our dense vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, pumpkin, kumara and greens all can act as a natural fibre boost.
Fibre acts a beneficial prebiotic for our gut health, helping provide more of a lasting effect for probiotics as it acts a main source of fuel, enhancing any probiotic effect. As a prebiotic, fibre helps provide short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) for our gut and these help our gut microbiome by encouraging more super friendly gut bacteria that benefits our health in many ways, helping us sleep well, energy levels, support a healthy mood and immune health.
Also, we are now finding out, our gut flora is a vital part of healthy weight management. Certain species of gut bacteria help maintain a healthy weight by having a supporting effect on food metabolism in the body.
The whole wellness effect
Healthy weight management encompassed both emotional and physical health, including both in our approach will help in maintaining a healthy and total weight management for every day. What we eat, how we eat and movement are all essential starting points for setting ourselves up for easy to follow and healthy habits. Including our daily wellbeing in such as down time, relaxation, sleeping well and favourite past times all support an optimal lifestyle and metabolism.
Alongside nutrient dense whole foods for both mind and body health, using fibre rich foods that suits you, helps healthy gut health for naturally boosting metabolism. Using the 80/20 rule can help in adopting better habits.
This commonly aligns with eating well and being fairly stringent about eating 5 days or so of the week with all your super nutrient foods, greens, seeds, nuts, vegetables and what suits you best in regards to meat options or plant-based. Then for 1 or 2 days having a more relaxed approach, this can be used for your physical movement or exercise routine as well.
Finding what works best for you can take time, but starting and setting up good habits for both emotional and physical health will help optimise your daily healthy weight management for a more total well-being effect.