Flexitarian Diet Healthier | Add Years To Your Life | The Flexitarian Diet |
What does being flexitarian involve?
Becoming flexitarian is about more than simply eating fewer animal foods and more plants. It’s also about optimizing health. The quality of your food choices is also important. Here are the main principles to follow:
Eat mostly vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds plus minimally processed oils.
Choose plant sources for most of your protein needs. You can also use protein powders made from pea, rice, hemp and soya combination of different plant proteins is best.
Secret Anabolic Recipes | Cook Healthy | Muscle Building Meals
Incorporate some or all the following animal-origin foods into your diet from time to time: red meat, poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy products including milk, cheese, and yogurt. I’ll look at this in more detail later.
Eat the least processed, most natural form of foods. As an endurance athlete, you might want to look at switching to sports nutrition brands that use natural ingredients and are vegan. In the UK I recommend Tribe and 33 Fuel.
Limit refined carbohydrates like white bread and white rice, as well as cakes, biscuits, pastries, and confectionery. Do this in the context of your sporting life, of course, sometimes low fiber foods are just what you need. And there may well be a time and place for a good quality cake!
Avoid junk food, poor quality fats too much added sugar, and highly processed meal options.
Plant sources of key nutrients
Flexitarian Diet Healthier | Add Years To Your Life | The Flexitarian Diet |
Protein: needed for strength, muscle recovery and to support almost every system in your body. Plant sources: beans, lentils, chickpeas, tofu, quinoa, nuts, and seeds plus the proteins found in wholegrain foods. Choose a wide range as not all plant proteins contain the full range of essential acids needed by your body.
Lifestyle Changes to Improve Your Cholesterol
It is generally recommended that endurance athletes consume 1.2-1.6g of protein per kg of body weight per day, compared with 0.8g/kg for the general population.
This should be spread across your various meals or snacks each day, so the smaller amounts of protein found in plant foods can help you to do this. You can see the amounts of protein per 100g in various plant foods and compare this with foods of animal origin here.
Iron: needed to make red blood cells for oxygen transport and for energy production. The iron in plant foods is called non-haem iron, which is harder for the body to absorb than the haem type found in animal foods. But iron is found in a wide range of plant foods.
Belly Fat in Women
Some of the best sources are tofu, beans, lentils, chickpeas, cashew nuts, various seeds, dried apricots, dried figs, and green leafy vegetables.
Eat or drink a source of vitamin C (found in most fruit and vegetables) with these foods to improve how much iron you absorb.
Calcium: essential for bone health and also plays a role in muscle function. Plant sources include nuts, seeds, chickpeas (including hummus), tahini (made from sesame seeds), tofu, beans, lentils, green leafy vegetables, and seaweed.
Plant “milk” is usually fortified with calcium as they contain much less than cow’s milk. Check for this when choosing a brand.
Zinc: Important for the immune system and a healthy gut, as well as many other processes in the body.
Meat and dairy are the primary sources of zinc, but it is also found in the nut, seeds, beans, lentils, tofu, and chickpeas so some of these foods should be included in a flexitarian diet every day.
Omega 3 fats: these anti-inflammatory fats are found in certain plant foods but unlike those found in oily fish, the fats must be converted by the body to a form that can be absorbed.
This means that quite large quantities are needed. Sources include chia seed, hemp seed, flaxseed, seaweed, walnuts and pumpkin seeds.
What Is The Paleo Diet
If you are going to follow a flexitarian diet but exclude fish and seafood, I recommend that you take a vegan omega 3 supplement made from marine algae, such as this one.
Flexitarian Diet Healthier | Add Years To Your Life | The Flexitarian Diet |
a great option for anyone who wants to adopt a healthier lifestyle because it emphasizes plants without being anti-meat.
Belly Fat in Women
Lowers Risk of Insulin Resistance and Type 2 Diabetes..
74 participants consumed the same number of calories for six months. Some went on a vegetarian diet, and others went on a diet that emphasized reducing sugars, refined carbs, cholesterol, and saturated fat.
Interestingly, people on the vegetarian diet lost more subcutaneous fat (the fat under your skin), subfascial fat (the fat that lines your muscles), and intramuscular fat (the type stored inside your muscles themselves).
The fat stored in your muscles can impact your metabolism and lead to insulin resistance (and even type 2 diabetes).
A study published in Diabetes Care cited specifically, flexitarians had a lowered risk of type 2 diabetes compared with nonvegetarians.
In addition, being overweight is one of the biggest risk factors for type 2 diabetes, and this same study showed that flexitarians had lower BMIs than nonvegetarians.
Helps With Weight Loss..
If you’re trying to lose weight, there a seemingly infinite number of eating plans and diets to choose from, and the Flexitarian Diet can be considered one of the most credible.The simple lifestyle shifts in the Eat Sleep Burn ugly belly fat…
For one, if you emphasize the plant-based component of this diet by eating lots of fruits, veggies, and whole grains, you’ll likely feel full on fewer calories than you’re accustomed to, which makes shedding pounds almost inevitable.
Decreases Your Risk for Heart Disease..
The researchers concluded that substituting some of the meat in your diet with vegetables may be a simple way to lower the risk of heart-related death.
However, it’s worth noting that this study was not published in a peer-reviewed journal, and therefore credibility is limited.
It’s also worth noting that one case report and literature review published in the Journal of Geriatric Cardiology found that plant-based diets may be effective in preventing and treating heart failure.
Best Diets Weight loss Diet plans
Contributes to a Longer Life..
Research also suggests that Flexitarians may live about 3.6 years longer than their carnivorous counterparts, likely as a result of the reduced risk of disease.
Adds to Feelings of Fullness..
Keeps You Well Nourished..
What is the Flexitarian Diet?
Before getting into the specific benefits of a flexitarian diet, it’s important to be clear on what it actually is.
The flexitarian diet was devised by a dietitian called Dawn Jackson Blatner, and the name is a combination of the words “flexible vegetarian.” This tells you the key fact about the diet: it’s similar to being a vegetarian but much less strict. You limit your consumption of meat but not entirely.
There are really no hard rules to follow or anything like that; it’s a more general approach that keeps some key principles in mind.
Mainly eat fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes.
Get most of your protein from plants rather than animals.
Eat meat from time to time.
Stick to the most natural form of foods, avoiding overly processed foods.
Try to keep any added sugar to a minimum.
This is really the core of the diet, but what it boils down to is that you’re essentially a vegetarian but you eat meat when it takes your fancy. In theory, this should offer many of the benefits of a vegetarian diet while being much easier to stick to in the long-term.
Flexitarian Diet Healthier | Add Years To Your Life | The Flexitarian Diet |
The Benefits of a Flexitarian Diet
1 – Reduced Risk of Type 2 Diabetes Research has found that vegetarian diets are better for reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes than “diabetes-friendly” diets. This is expected to carry over to flexitarian diets to some extent, and indeed the review article mentioned above confirmed that there is a reduction in the risk for type 2 diabetes for flexitarians.
Since the classification of “flexitarian” is relatively new, there hasn’t been too much research on it specifically, but the results so far are strongly suggestive of a benefit.
2 – Better for the Environment Livestock is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions, and going vegetarian or vegan is one of the best things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. While this would undoubtedly be better, switching to a flexitarian diet still provides some of the same benefits to the environment, depending on how much you reduce your meat consumption.
When you do eat meat, avoiding beef and lamb is a particularly good idea because farming these animals contributes the most to greenhouse gas emissions.
3 – More Affordable Although there is a lot of variation in how much people spend on food shopping, flexitarian diets don’t rely on special, hard-to-find ingredients or anything more expensive than what you’ll ordinarily buy. If you currently eat meat, it’s likely that you’ll actually save a bit of money by switching to a flexitarian diet, because you’ll be replacing the most expensive part of most meals with something more affordable.
Research has backed this assumption up, too, with vegetarians saving up to $750 per year on food. Of course, as a flexitarian, your savings won’t be quite this big but you will still save money.
4 – Benefits for Weight Loss Losing weight can be very challenging to achieve, and this difficulty has spawned a whole industry of fad diets and “one simple trick” type claims to help you get the body you want.
A flexitarian diet is an ideal solution in a lot of ways, though. The basic reason for this is that plant-based foods tend to be lower in calories, so incorporating more into your diet helps you feel full but still keeps your calorie count low.
Studies have confirmed this too, although the focus is ordinarily on vegetarians and vegans. For example, one review of existing research found that people who cut out meat lost 4.5 pounds/2 kg more than people who didn’t, over an 18 week period. Another review found that people with plant-based diets weigh about 15 percent less than meat-eaters on average.
The review article on flexitarian diets mentioned earlier also covers weight loss and finds suggestive evidence of benefits for weight loss. As expected, vegetarian and vegan diets were associated with lower weights and more weight loss, but flexitarian diets were better than ordinary omnivorous diets.
5 – Potentially Reduces Risk of Heart Disease As with many of the entries on this list, there isn’t much evidence on the benefits of a flexitarian diet for your heart, but there is a lot more research on vegetarian diets. The studies looking at vegetarians tend to find a reduced risk of heart disease.
- Women’s Health
- Nutritional Needs During Pregnancy
- Health and Pregnancy
- Pregnancy Tips on Health, Your Body
- Preparing for A BabyWeight Loss Tips
- Diet Guides
- Diet & Weight Management
- What is A Healthy Weight loss
- How To Naturally lose Weight Fast
- Science-Backed Ways To lose Weight
- What’s The Best Diet
- Healthy Weight loss
- Tips To Help You lose Weight
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق