You know you should eat healthy food. You also know that doing so is often hard or expensive or inconvenient or a combination of all three.
As you get older though and we all are unless you’re Benjamin Button in which case why are you reading this? Go watch YouTube Kids or something. Anyway, eating healthy is important for people of all ages, and becomes more of a necessity as you grow older.
Your body becomes less able to fight off diseases, your organs get weaker and more nutrients are needed for your body to function properly. You also often need fewer kilojoules (energy in food) because you are less active. These pretty much show that eating healthier is vitally important and so we have a few tips to start you off and keep you on track:
- Eat dark green leafy vegetables such as bitter leaf, water leaves, basil (efirin), afang and ugwu. Throw in some orange vegetables such as carrots and sweet potatoes and you’re in business!
- Balance how much red meat you eat i.e. beef, pork, lamb etc.with other sources of protein like poultry, fish and eggs
- Eat fibre-rich foods such as beans, oats, avocados, eba with those vegetables above, and fruits in general etc.
- Make the fats you eat healthy ones – so eat nuts, fish, avocados, unsweetened yoghurt olive or coconut oils, eggs etc.
- Avoid ‘empty calories’ as much as possible like cakes, sweets and biscuits
- Choose fresh (even iced) foods as much as possible over canned or processed foods
- If you have allergies or other health issues, you may need to get dietary supplements for some hard to get nutrients
Along with these simple diet recommendations, always remember to drink a lot of water, be active every day and exercise three times a week and if you choose to drink alcohol, drink in moderation.
Once you have all these things in place, and even if you don’t, a regular health check is very advisable and who can bring you the best package to get these tests most affordably? That’s Hygeia HMO, that’s us. Get on our HyCheck plan and get your check-ups done for only ₦25, 000 or ₦60, 000 for the advanced tests. Details here.
