[LifeStyle] Five tips for a healthier life

[#Steeven.™]

Losing weight is the goal of many people, especially at this time. The so-called bikini operation brings every year a numerous set of methods to lose weight, miracle diets and express diets, the objective of which is to quickly lose several kilos, but not to improve our health or adopt healthy lifestyle habits. If no diet is more effective than another to lose weight even in the medium term, the most sensible thing for our goal is to change habits and bet on a good diet. The dietitian-nutritionist Julio Basulto offers us five keys that will help us improve our life and our health.

 

How to improve your health (and your habits)
1. Diets can be risky in the long run. "Going on a diet" involves an opportunity cost: the time dedicated to them could have been spent learning to eat well forever. But it can also pose a danger. A study published in 2017 by the Helsinki Department of Public Health found an increased risk of long-term weight gain and waist circumference in people who "diet" compared to those who do not. That same year, another research, published in the Journal of Obesity & Metabolic Syndrome, found a greater cardiovascular risk in people than fluctuations in their weight due to the yo-yo effect. Although it sounds like a paradox, dieting can make you fat.

2. Improve our lifestyle. There are habits that harm our health and that must be changed. Julio Basulto sums them up with the acronym SKIP: Sedentary lifestyle, Alcohol (the less, the better), Artificial breastfeeding (always bet on the mother), Smoking (ask for help to quit smoking), Unhealthy eating (stop eating badly) and Relationships harmful (those people who prevent you from changing your habits).

3. Base our diet on foods of plant origin and few processed ones. Or, in other words: more vegetables, fewer animals and few or no processed meat or superfluous foods. Eating better also means stopping eating badly. Interventions focused on trying to get the po[CENSORED]tion to reduce their consumption of unhealthy foods have been shown to be more effective than those aimed at increasing their intake of healthy foods.

4. Ask for help from a registered nutritionist and, if necessary, from a multidisciplinary team. Weight control programs should include lifestyle modification with the aim of improving behavior, always working towards achievable goals. You can also ask your GP for guidance and find out what options exist.

5. Do not forget that health is not defined by our kilos but by our habits. Do not obsess over the number on the scale, the important thing is to follow healthy habits.