You can receive a nutrition analysis from your physician, if you need a detailed description of what to eat, and how to much food to include in your meals during the day. If you have a special diet because of food allergies or other health conditions such as diabetes or hypertension, you should definitely get your nutrition suggestions from a doctor, at least to start you off. After you have a clear understanding of what’s good for you and what you should stay away from, you can maintain the results of your nutritional analysis on your own by keeping a log of the food you eat and visiting the doctor regularly in between.
Even if you don’t have a special condition for which you are forced to monitor your food intake, you should still analyze your nutrition in order to prevent possible health problems in the future. When you go to the doctor for your regular check-ups, you can ask for pamphlets or brochures explaining the benefits of a healthy diet, and how regular consumption of some food can prevent cancer, heart diseases, bone disease, and even increase your brain power. You’ll also find out which vitamins and minerals are more important for men, women, or children to consume, and which foods contain the nutrients you need.
After you get written information about how to go about setting up a nutrition analysis for yourself, it’s time to start monitoring your progress. You can keep a ‘food journal’ for yourself, in which you write down the foods in each meal you consume during the day. Make sure to mark down the daily allowances of nutrients each food item (not each meal) offers, so that you can see if you’re getting enough nutrients and calories for the day.
If you’re not good with paper, you may want to consider keeping up with your nutrition analysis online. You can go to http://www.ag.uiuc.edu/~food-lab/nab/nab.cgi to find a detailed and personalized nutritional analysis that will work for you.
First, you should click on your gender and age range, then you’ll go to a screen with a list of nutrients. You can click on the nutrients you know you need more of in your diet, or you can click on them all to get more details on what to eat with every meal. With each nutrient or vitamin, there is a small description of what the nutrient does for the body, how much of the nutrient is recommended for men and women, and which foods you can find the nutrients in. Then, you can type in the foods you want and results will show up to let you know how to make healthy meal combinations with your favorite foods. You can keep adding to your list until you have enough meals for the day, week, or even for the month. You should save all your results and print them out to keep track of your eating habits throughout the week.
Lots of dieting centers and weight loss programs also have nutrition analysis services, but these are based on the weight you want to lose or the features you want to enhance or improve on. Although these nutrition plans aren’t necessarily bad for you, you may be missing the opportunity to be healthy in totality. Once you start eating well, you can focus on losing weight afterwards, because your body will have become accustomed to necessary nutrients, and you can just decrease your meal portions for more dietary success.
For more information on nutrition analyses, visit the website mentioned above, or www.usda.gov or www.balanceyournutrition.com. Good Luck!
By Tamiya King