food week

Nutrition, diet and recipes. These are the topics I will be covering this week, three very important aspects of getting fit.  It seems to me that proper nutrition is something that has a habit of easily evading us all. The single most frequent thing I hear from friends and family is that they are trying to eat better. 

I think one thing that can be confusing when addressing nutrition, especially for women, is what the hell do we really need to be eating and how much. Women go through such

drastic physical changes in their lifetime, including menstruation, pregnancy and menopause, that it can be really confusing and hard to determine if we are doing it right. There are so many options out there and we hear about all these different kinds of diets and eating programs, food services, packaged meal systems, supplements, food preparation techniques, it boggles the mind. 

Personally I find it kind of overwhelming so I am going to stick to basic terms, concepts and definitions. Let's start off with what nutrition actually is. Wikipedia states that "nutrition (also called nourishment or aliment) is the provision, to cells and organisms, of the materials necessary (in the form of food) to support life. Many common health problems can be prevented or alleviated with good nutrition."

So what does this mean? It means that nutrition is the process of giving bodies, on a cellular level, the food and energy it needs to survive. Proper nutrition keeps us healthy, helps us grow efficiently and prevents many diseases. We receive nourishment from the foods that we eat which are then broken down by the digestive system into forms which can be absorbed by the body.

When there is an imbalance the body is effected, when there is change like pregnancy, menopause, weight loss, increased exercise your nutrition must be adjusted in order for the body to make changes it need to function optimally. 

So what nutrients do we need and how do we get them? More on this later.

xoxo

martha