What Did You Eat This Week?

What did you eat this week? Was it something healthy, or was it mainly fast and unhealthy? I'll admit that I had a few unhealthy meals this week (pizza, burger and fries, chicken strip basket), but they were so good! Most of the other meals I had this week were mainly salads and plain turkey sandwiches on toasted wheat bread, since I am trying to eat more healthy meals and ditch a lot of the foods in the parentheses above, along with ditching sodas, which we will discuss in a later post.

Going back to salads, how do you like your salads? Do you use lots of dressing and other goodies, such as real bacon bits? What many people don't realize is that these extras on our salads make our leafy meals just as unhealthy, if not unhealthier, than eating that double-bacon cheeseburger with large fries and a soda! Salads weren't meant to be this way! We eat them to try and get some leafy vegetables incorporated into our diet, but since we are a society that craves fatty foods, we decide to throw extreme amounts of salad dressing on to make it taste better. What happened to appreciating the real taste of a vegetable? For me, all I put on salads are a sprinkling of bacon bits, a few croutons, and a sprinkling of chow mein noodles, if I have them around. No dressing for this guy, but if it's a caesar, I'll take the dressing but go light on it.

My challenge to you is to eat a salad once a day, and don't put any dressing on it! Eat it as it's intended to be: plain, but so healthy for you. Try it and you'll eventually be eating salads with every meal, and you'll be feeling better also!

How Good Food Can Affect Your Mood

In the present day, many families and individuals don't find the time to cook good and healthy meals for themselves, as many decide to pick up the phone and order take-out or visit the local drive-thru for their dinner. What many people don't realize is that many of these options are high in fat and are not good to eat on a regular basis; foods that are fried or processed can be harmful to the health, causing heart disease and diabetes, to name a few. What we should do as Americans is set the example for the rest of the world by patronizing these establishments devoted to the convenience and gluttony we've gotten so used to over the years.

When we eat these foods, not only do they fill us up in a bad way, they can also affect our moods. Eating that double-bacon cheeseburger and fries, or even that large meat lover's pizza, makes us feel like we just ate something very satisfying--to the taste buds, anyway. Our stomachs don't always appreciate having these foods in them, especially if someone has gastrointestinal problems and requires the pink cement to ease the pain. Feeling sick affects our mood, which, at times, can be traced back to what we put into our bodies; the half-gallon of soda from the gas station doesn't help matters, either.

The foods we should be eating on a regular basis (fruits, vegetables, healthy meats such as chicken) are becoming an afterthought, in my opinion. I feel this way because we have become a nation that is filled with convenience and gluttony, and I, for one, feel that this should change. We have given the world McDonald's and Starbucks, which are two of the largest offenders of enabling obesity in not only the United States, but also in the other countries in which they have locations. Instead of having that greasy chicken sandwich, maybe have a grilled teriyaki chicken bowl with rice and vegetables while washing it down with a nice cold glass of water. Eating habits like these will get the country back on the right track: eating healthy.