5 Guidelines to Starting a New Diet

Below are links to Andrew's other nutrition/diet/exercise articles:

Changing your eating habits Part I

Carbohydrates

Proteins

Losing weight with diabetes

Eating well in a school cafeteria

Changing Your Eating Habits Part II

Effective Cardio Exercise

Lately I have been getting a lot of private messages on how to begin a healthy dietary regimen. Most of the questions I have been getting are from people who feel like they don’t know where to start and don’t know what foods they should be consuming. Changing unhealthy habits to healthier ones takes a little time, but you've got to start somewhere.

Here are 5 dietary guidelines I suggest everyone should follow regardless of whether they have diabetes or not. The nutritional guidelines for a person with diabetes is very similar to that of someone without diabetes if you're looking to lose weight and improve your health; a person with diabetes will see the benefits of this nutrition plan much more clearly in their blood sugars and overall energy throughout the day.

 I don’t recommend the 55% carbohydrate, 30% fat and 15% protein diet that the USDA recommends because I believe that that is the reason that America is facing the obesity epidemic that we are in. A diet higher in protein is much better suited for our bodies because it was the diet that our early ancestors followed when humans first inhabited the earth. I believe that it’s not just the total calories we eat that determine our health and weight management, but also the type of calories that we consume. With that in mind, here are my meal guidelines. 

• Eat at least 5-6 small meals a day. This means basically every two and a half to three hours. Eating smaller meals on a schedule leads to a greater amount of calories burned due to the thermic effect of food. Yes, it burns calories to eat, digest and transport the food we consume. Eating smaller meals at regular intervals also ensures that you don’t overeat at any one meal. Our bodies are like a sponge in that we soak up nutrients just like a sponge soaks up water. Once the sponge reaches its holding capacity the rest of the water stays there. In our case that extra water is calories and unfortunately they get converted to fat. This is true with micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals as well. Our body only takes what it needs at that point in time and the rest is converted to fat or excreted. In the case of a type 1 diabetic, extra glucose stays in the blood stream and can lead to serious health consequences if you are not monitoring your blood sugar before and after meals. 

• Eat protein with every meal. This is crucial. Protein is the single most important nutrient we can take in. In terms of nutrient thermogenesis (the process by which the body generates heat from burning calories), protein costs more energy to digest and transport than carbohydrates or fat. If you ate 100 calories of carbohydrates, 100 calories of fat and 100 calories of protein, you would lose about 4-7 calories to digest the carbohydrates and fats. With the protein you would burn about 23 calories to digest and transport the amino acids (building blocks of proteins). This is a huge reason I recommend high protein diets. If you are doing this all day by eating 6 small meals with protein as the main component in each one, your body is literally a heat producing, fat burning furnace.