Healthy recipe design

Adapt to your individual basic conditions, match your current health needs, and allow you to persist for a long time without any burden - all other iron rules of "must eat xx" and "absolutely not touch xx" are essentially invalid requirements that are divorced from reality.

I have been doing public nutrition consulting for almost 6 years, and I have seen too many people come up and ask for the "seven-day diet to lose weight" and "universal diabetes diet". In the end, they either can't bear to order takeout secretly after only two days, or they insist on eating for half a month, and the indicators are not improved but new problems are added. Last month, I met a young man who had just been diagnosed with abnormal glucose tolerance. He found a low-carb recipe with 100,000+ likes in a book. After eating it for three consecutive weeks, his fasting blood sugar did drop by 0.3mmol/L. As a result, his uric acid soared to 580μmol/L. He had a gout attack in the middle of the night and had to go to the emergency room. Do you think that recipe is wrong? In fact, for simply obese people without underlying metabolic diseases, a low-carbohydrate diet can indeed help control weight. However, this young man has a family history of high uric acid. His diet includes salmon, avocados, and more than half a pound of soy products every day, which is full of purine. This is not called healthy, but he is just looking at the top and not the bottom.

Nowadays, there is a huge quarrel about healthy recipes on the Internet. In fact, each has its own applicable scenarios, and it is impossible to say who is right and who is wrong. For example, the Mediterranean diet, which has been stamped by major nutrition journals, has sufficient evidence to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. However, if you are an old man from the north who has eaten soup noodles and steamed buns all your life, you will be asked to eat lettuce salad and mix quinoa with olive oil every day. Mai suffered from acid reflux and stomach bloating within three days. I met an aunt a while ago and followed her daughter to learn to eat "internationally recognized healthy meals". After eating for half a month, she developed chronic gastritis. Finally, she switched to millet porridge and pickles every morning, and her stomach felt better. There is also the carbon cycle diet that has been very popular in the fitness circle recently. It is really efficient for people who have regular exercise habits and need to gain muscle and lose fat. However, if you are an office worker who works overtime from 9 to 5 every day and can't even squeeze in time to cook, you are just asking for trouble for yourself. When you get up hungry in the middle of the night and eat instant noodles, you will gain weight faster than eating normally.

Many people's misunderstanding about healthy recipes is that they must be accurate to the gram, count calories, and calculate the ratio of macronutrients. In fact, it really doesn't have to be so rigid. I usually make recipes for ordinary people, and the first thing I ask is never how many pounds you want to lose, but what you like to eat, whether you have any taboos, how much time you can spend cooking every day, and whether you have any underlying diseases. When I made a plan for an Internet operation that only had 10 minutes to prepare meals every day, I didn’t do any of the bells and whistles: for breakfast, I bought sugar-free soy milk + tea eggs + a stick of corn from the convenience store downstairs. When ordering light snacks at noon, don’t add the salad dressing that came with it. Instead, use the small bag of light soy sauce + sesame oil that I put in my bag. In the evening, I went home and cooked 10 frozen shrimp dumplings, and blanched a handful of spinach without even adding oil. She had never calculated how many calories a meal contained, so she persisted like this in a daze for more than two months. Her body fat dropped by 3%, and her aunt was not confused. She was much more comfortable than eating boiled vegetables for half a month following online tutorials.

There is another controversial point now: can we eat refined rice noodles? Should I give up sugar completely? The two sides were quarreling fiercely, but in fact it was not so absolute. If you run outdoors and do physical work every day and consume a lot of food every day, it will be no problem to eat white rice and steamed buns normally. If you usually sit for a long time and your fasting blood sugar has already stepped on the red line, then replace one-third of the white rice with whole grains such as brown rice and oats. You will not avoid eating it completely, but you will be so greedy that you want to eat. I usually leave about 10% of the "free quota" in the recipes I make for people: you can drink full-sugar milk tea once a week, eat hot pot or barbecue once a week, and as long as you don't eat haise all the time, it won't affect your health at all. After all, you design recipes to live a good life, not to sentence yourself to a "healthy prison sentence."

A while ago, I met an 82-year-old man for a physical examination. His indicators were more normal than those of many 50-year-old people. I asked him what he usually eats as a "healthy diet." You see, there is no perfect healthy recipe. If you feel comfortable eating, your body is not burdened after eating, and you can continue to eat steadily, then it is the best recipe for you.