Eating the right vitamins and minerals will give you health, wellness, and longevity. So, short of seeing a nutritionist to help you balance your diet perfectly, what else can you do? A lot of people take a multivitamin but the truth is, when your vitamins come from food rather from pills, you’ll get the optimal health benefits. As a positive side effect, following a nutritious diet will also help you manage your waistline by default. How can you balance your diet?
Journal Your Food Intake
Fitday is a great free calorie and nutrition calculation tool for helping people journal their food to see whether they’re getting the right nutrients or not. At the end of each day, there’s a graph that can show you what % of daily recommended intake you’re getting. By assessing the deltas, you can tackle the issue. You can target foods that you might be missing.
After analysing the area that you’re missing, try adding foods rich in that vitamin or mineral to your diet. RealAge has a free tool that lets you click on a vitamin or mineral and see a list of foods rich in that vitamin or mineral: RealAge Vitamins and Minerals Tool. The tool also tells you what that nutrient will do for you and seeing that could help you improve areas of your health that are currently plaguing you.
For example, if you were vitamin K deficient, the tool would suggest some of the following foods: spinach, asparagus, kiwi, blueberries.
If you wanted to increase your zinc intake, it would suggest: turkey, sunflowerseeds, shiitake mushrooms, almonds
And looking at the above suggestions you can see that there are foods in most categories that can literally be eaten by the handful rather than being difficult to incorporate into your diet. So fitting in your daily recommended intake of Vitamin K and Zinc could be as simple as tossing some blueberries and almonds into your morning oatmeal.
The more you know about your health, the happier, healthier, and more youthful you’ll continue to be. Nutrition is the foundation of health and paying attention to what goes into your body can make a big difference.
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