Balance | How to Keep Your Diet Healthy

Balance is important in any diet, especially one that has restrictions. When I first started eating a vegan diet, in 2015, that word didn’t crop up very often. Words and phrases like HCLF, 80/10/10 etc were everywhere.  These days it would appear that more people are realising there’s a difference between a healthy fat and becoming overweight, I mean avocadoes are everywhere…

Back then the internet was bombarded with people like Freelee saying if you eat enough you don’t have to worry about getting enough protein or fat because there just is enough in your diet. Quite frankly, that’s not true. In the beginning I didn’t care too much about what I was eating. I was just looking to try new foods, get meal ideas, looking for new food combinations I would like and trying to make the best of it; making sure I was enjoying my food to make it a maintainable lifestyle.

Now I’m not saying this was a bad move in any way, but it did have consequences. For me eating the foods I loved meant I was eating a lot of vegetable based meals, a bit of quinoa and the occasional potato. I didn’t even know what a chia seed was back then. While this is all healthy food, my diet had limited amounts of protein and very little fat. The result? Although I had good skin, three to four months in, my hair started to thin*.

This was around the October/ November time (my diet changed in mid-June). It was at this point I properly started to look the nutritional value of what I was eating – full of micronutrients, B vitamins galore, barely scraping by on the protein and fat.  I had discovered chia and flax seeds in late August so I was already working on boosting my omega 3 intake and my Nakd bar addiction was starting to develop so I was getting healthy fat again.

What is balance?

I’m giving you this very long winded introduction in an attempt to explain where my food philosophy came from. Obviously, everyone has a different idea of what a balanced diet entails, but for me it simply means a good mixture of healthy fat, protein and carbs.

Meeting my nutritional needs shouldn’t be hard, I’m only 5ft tall and I’m thin, at that point I didn’t do any exercise so I didn’t require heaps of protein. I love chickpeas, beans, lentils, nuts and seeds. Not only should it not have been hard, it should have been easy.

After planning my meals a little better, and using cronometer for a while, it turned out it was easy. But my point here is that if it wasn’t for the fact I used to have really thick hair, and my own vanity caused concern, I could have been eating a ‘healthy’ diet and be developing numerous deficiencies without ever realising because my diet wasn’t balanced.

Finding balance

Whether you’re a meat eater, dairy free, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian…whatever, we all need balance. Most of us have been on some sort of low fat or low carb or low something diet, intentionally or not. Even if you haven’t, you definitely have someone close to you who has.

While that may seem like a great idea to lose weight, and it probably works in the short term, it’s not healthy. And it certainly isn’t maintainable.

Now my food philosophy is try to have a good balance of each macronutrient in every meal. Whether that’s a protein smoothie with nuts and seeds on top or a salad with quinoa and toasted seeds, adding cashews to a curry, in most cases it’s possible. Personally, I find my meals more filling and satisfying when I eat a macro balanced meal as well, making me less likely to snack later.

This isn’t some sort of strict regime, obviously not every meal meets the criteria and some nights all you want is a big bowl of carbs. But it’s a good routine to try to stick to the majority of the time to ensure your healthy diet really is healthy and balanced, whether you’re trying to lose weight or just live a healthier life.

Easier ways to get there

As is said previously I like to add nuts or seeds to my meals to try and keep them balanced, but if you’re lacking in these areas and need more than a few nuts to meet your needs, there are some easy swaps you can make.

• Chickpea flour – when making savoury meals using chickpea flour gives you a protein boost without having to make changes to the meals you want to eat and not compromising on the taste.
• Black Bean Spaghetti – Now I love this stuff. I’ve never actually eaten it as spaghetti but it is my preferred noodle for all stir fry dishes. Cooks in 5 minutes and contains 22g protein per portion so it’s great when you’re in a hurry.
• Pea pasta – Much like the above option with very similar macros, cooks in about 7-8 minutes and a great gluten free option as well.

*Now to digress slightly I’d just like to say now it is easy, I always meet the required intake of my omegas and protein without having to think about it and after about three months my hair did start to come back. This is in no way supposed to put people off a vegan diet

 

To see my latest recipe post, click here

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