What is a “Good” Diet? Part 1 – The Definitions
Defining a “Good” Diet -Literally
There are so many things I can talk about eating a balanced healthy diet, so to help you guys parse through all of the information I have I’m breaking this into a mini-series. This first post is just a quick introduction to some terminology. Please feel free to take a look at the rest of my posts on this topic.
I went online and decided to pull a bunch of definitions of a “good diet.” Here’s what I found:
- From a Breast Cancer.Org article “Healthy eating means eating a variety of foods that give you the nutrients you need to maintain your health, feel good and have energy.”
- From Wikipedia “a healthy diet is one that helps maintain or improve overall health. A healthy diet provides the body with essential nutrition: fluid, adequate amino acids from protein, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, fiber and adequate calories.”
- Dictionary.com defines a Diet as “food and drink considered in terms of qualities, composition and its effects on health.” It also defines a balanced diet as “a diet consisting of the proper quantities and proportions of foods needed to maintain health or growth.”
These definitions all have a couple of things in common; they reference the composition of a diet and they are extremely vague.
How do I define a “Good” Diet
My personal definition of a “good diet” is as follows:
Eating food that is nutrient dense, gives you energy, and is a composition of protein, carbs, fats that result in you feeling happy in healthy.
Though this is also pretty vague, however, when asked what a good diet is the variation from person to person is so high that it makes sense to give more details outside of a single sentence. I’m hoping this post will give people the start they need to find their best diet.
A healthy diet all starts a the basic nutrient level with these things called macronutrients.
Macros – Magic Nutrients
Macronutrient (aka macro) as defined by Webster’s medical dictionary: “a substance (such as protein, carbohydrate or fat) required in relatively large quantities for growth, energy, and health.”
Basically, these macros determine the nutrient density of the food you eat and can help you understand how healthy of a diet you are actually eating. Eating the right macro split not only can be healthier for you overall but will absolutely change the amount of energy you have for the better! Say bye-bye to hangry you!
My Personal “Expert”
I’m going to introduce someone to you guys in this post because I’m hoping to reference her in the coming articles. Hillary Iantosca is one of my best friends in the world and I admire her greatly. She is talented in everything she does, a stunningly strong woman, and a health nut like me. Here’s a quick bio of how she got started to put her advice in the next few posts into context:
“From a relatively early age, I familiarized myself with basic concepts of healthy eating and making regular activity a part of my daily lifestyle. I became so drawn to it that by the time I started my undergraduate career, I know that I was destined to study nutrition and fitness at the collegiate level. This by no means made me an expert, but the topics were so second nature to me by then that I lost all perspective of what everyone else was doing with their lives. I think my assumption that everybody ought to be in touch with maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle stemmed from the consideration of, ‘most people eat three times a day, so there are plenty of opportunities for them to take into account how that supports their life and health.’ But that’s really not the case, and unfortunately, most of us are in the dark from a pretty early stage in life without much nutritional coaching after we learn what foods we like and dislike as kids. How much have you been taught about nutrition and food? Do you have the information and tools you need to create and maintain the healthy lifestyle? No? You may think this is a silly comparison, but YOU EAT EVERY DAY! Something that is that important that you must do it every day, it would only make sense that you had at least some vocational training on the topic. But that’s not part of the education system these days, so unless you search out extracurricular studies on nutrition, chances are you’re just as minimally educated as the masses and you might think that eating fat
isn’t bad for you or that you can blame genetics for all of your physical issues.”
As always, thanks for reading!
Love,
Francesca Nicole
