How to eat a balanced diet every day

There is no need to dig into the details of every gram according to dietary guidelines. Ordinary healthy people eat more than 12 kinds of different foods every day and more than 25 kinds of different foods every week. They have staple foods, enough protein, enough vegetables, and control the amount of oil, salt, and sugar. They basically meet the core threshold of a balanced diet. There is no need to follow the "standard healthy meal template" that is circulated all over the Internet. Our body is like a small factory that needs to collect raw materials before it can start working. If you give it a complete range of ingredients, it can synthesize the various nutrients it needs. If you always give two or three raw materials, sooner or later the process will get stuck.

I used to help several friends adjust their diets who claimed that "the more they eat healthy meals, the less interesting they become." I found that they all fell into the trap of "too single food". They ate oatmeal + chicken breast + broccoli. In total, they ate no more than 5 kinds of food a day, which was far from meeting the variety requirements, and instead lacked a lot of trace elements. Take the three meals I usually eat a day as an example. In the morning, I eat multigrain soy milk (soybeans, black beans, millet, and peanuts) with boiled eggs and a small plate of cold shredded radish. At noon, I eat one or two rice with steamed pangasius, stir-fried lettuce and a thousand chopsticks in the company cafeteria. In the evening, I go home and eat half a corn with cold shrimps and cherry tomatoes. In total, there are 14 kinds of food in a day. There are rarely any nutritional deficiencies without the need for additional supplements.

Having said this, someone must ask, is it necessary to completely quit refined rice noodles as mentioned on the Internet? There are indeed different practical directions in this field. People with sugar control needs and a large body weight will replace all refined rice and noodles in three meals with whole grains and beans, which can indeed help stabilize blood sugar and increase satiety. However, the elderly with weak gastrointestinal function and patients who have just undergone gastrointestinal surgery should eat more refined rice and noodles appropriately to reduce gastrointestinal burden. There is no one-size-fits-all rule, and you still have to adjust according to your own body experience.

If you are busy ordering takeout at work, don’t panic. You can easily make small adjustments. For example, when ordering, you can ask for an extra serving of boiled vegetables, replace the white rice with half multi-grain rice as the staple food, order three-point sugar with less toppings when you want to drink milk tea, and replace red meat with fish or soy products twice a week. You can meet the diverse food requirements without spending extra effort.

Don’t regard a balanced diet as a KPI that must be strictly implemented. It doesn’t matter if you occasionally get greedy and eat two extra pieces of cake or a hot pot meal. Balance is calculated on a daily or even weekly basis. If you eat more refined sugar and oil on that day, you should appropriately reduce your intake of oil and sugar in the next two days and walk an extra half hour to burn off excess calories. It will not affect the long-term dietary balance at all. After all, in addition to nutritional supplements, we must also be happy when we eat, right?