By Sensei Serge Sognonvi and Carmen Sognonvi
Originally published at http://www.urbandojo.com/blog
The human body is an amazing vehicle, including organs, muscles and many other factors, all working in harmony to keep us perking along with vitality. And we all know how important it is to eat healthy, well-balanced meals. As with any other vehicle, what we feed into our body’s “tank” to keep it moving matters – a lot!
But just because eating healthy is important doesn’t mean we always do it. There are many reasons for this: We’re busy all day – working, learning, studying, playing, interacting, and all the rest. It can be so easy to just stop by a fast food place on the way home or on the way to work, shell out a few dollars, and keep going. Food preparation can seem too time-consuming or too technical, and unless we love to cook, cooking can be a real chore. It’s just often so much easier and quicker to buy what’s available when we’re hungry than it is to take the time to do what’s right.
Especially at dinnertime, it’s so tempting to grab something fast on the way home and then chill out for a while in front of the TV. We’ve worked, played, or studied hard (or all three!) and this is our time to relax and decompress.
The problem with this unwise decision is that when we sit down with a meal in front of the TV, we tend to eat more than we otherwise would. We keep shoveling it in without paying attention to the physical cues that remind us, “Enough.” And then we rarely take appropriate steps to burn off the calories we just ate.
To be sure our bodies are getting the right kind of nutrition to power us through the next day, it’s important that meals revolve around three main food groups: fresh vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains. Unless you have an underlying, specific medical condition that a nutritionist is helping you resolve, most meals you eat should ideally consist of 50% vegetables, 30% protein and 20% grains.
Here are 3 ideas for fast, easy, and healthy dinners:
- Grill or sauté a lean protein (see list below) with salad
- Stir-fry a lean protein with lots of veggies
- Pack a whole wheat wrap or a pita pocket with protein and veggies
Sound boring? You can vary above basics in numerous, mouth-watering ways by mixing and matching ingredients from the following list.
Lean proteins: chicken or turkey breast (remove the skin or buy skinless brands), oven-roasted rotisserie chicken (remove the ski) tuna or salmon filets, turkey bacon, Canadian bacon, top round beef
Fresh vegetables: salad greens including romaine, baby spinach, and mesclun; leafy greens including spinach, kale, and mustard greens; other vegetables including broccoli, brussels sprouts, asparagus, and bell peppers
Whole grains: brown rice, whole-wheat breads, whole-wheat pastas
In just moments, you can create a variety of healthful, nutritious meals that won’t weigh you down or trip you up when it comes time to step on the scale.