Even when you try your best to eat healthy, it’s hard to know everything about nutrition. People often think they’re making good choices and don’t realize a few mistakes might be blocking their path to ideal health. Here’s a list of the top 10 common nutrition mistakes that are easy to fix.
1- Adding whole flax seeds to your breakfast
Flax seeds are full of omega 3, fiber, and lignans (antioxidants) which all help heart health, but whole flax seeds are hard to digest so you’ll miss the health benefits inside them.
Instead, buy ground flax seeds or grind them in a coffee or spice grinder
2 - Making a healthy smoothie but it’s loaded with calories
It’s easy to add a mix of healthy foods to a blender like berries, cashew butter, chia, kale, banana, and coconut milk, this is pretty much an ideal breakfast.
But this mix can quickly turn into a calorie bomb.
To avoid this, make your juices around 300 calories by using smaller amounts, adding more veggies than fruit, and not overdoing nuts and seeds which are high calorie.
3 - Take your supplements with coffee
Caffeine in coffee can block your body's ability to absorb some vitamins and minerals in supplements, like calcium, iron, vitamin B, and vitamin D.
It's not just coffee, some drinks like tea and cola also have caffeine.
Enjoy your coffee about an hour before taking supplements and swallow the pills with water instead of caffeinated drinks.
4- Use regular canned beans in your meat-free meals
Beans are great for fiber and protein but canned kinds can have nearly 1000 mg of sodium per cup, which is two thirds of your daily needs.
Instead, look for cans with no added salt or labeled "low sodium."
If you can’t find them, rinse and drain canned beans to remove about 40% of the sodium.
5 - Stop eating sugar or cut out fruit
One of the main sugar sources in some diets is sugary drinks, not fruit. Sugary sodas don’t have nutrients while fruit has fiber, vitamins, and antioxidants. Plus, we usually don’t overeat fruit but we do drink lots of soda. Remember how easy it is to cut down soda because 500 ml of soda equals eating six bananas at once. Both have 16 teaspoons of sugar.
6 - Trust 'low fat' or 'fat free' labels
For years many people relied on labels telling us fat, sugar, and gluten content. But it’s more important to check what the food actually contains. Processed foods may be fat-free or sugar-free but full of preservatives or refined ingredients.
Read ingredient lists and choose natural foods as much as possible.
7 -Drink almond milk without shaking the container first
Calcium and vitamin D are often added to milk substitutes made from soy, almond, cashew, rice, and so on. But these added nutrients don’t stay mixed well and tend to settle at the bottom of the container.
If you drink it without shaking the bottle first, you won't get the benefits of the added vitamins and minerals.
8 - Not adding dressing elements to the salad
Vegetables have vitamins (A - E - K) that dissolve in fat and some antioxidants that need fat to be absorbed.
If you don't add oil or vinegar, you'll lose the key nutrients in the salad.
Serve vegetables with an oily dressing or nuts, seeds, or avocado to boost your body's absorption of the good nutrients in veggies.
9 - Not getting probiotics by buying the wrong kind of yogurt
Yogurt is fermented milk and fermented foods have probiotics (these are supplements with live bacteria or yeasts). So you'd think all yogurt is rich in probiotics, but sadly it's not. If the milk is heated or pasteurized, the probiotics get killed and can't be added back.
Check ingredient lists for specific probiotic names like (lactobacillus acidophilus bulgaricus, etc) to make sure you get these helpful bacteria that aid digestion and support the immune system.
10- Stocking up on sports drinks
Sports drinks aim to replace fluids lost from heavy sweating and are good after endurance sports like soccer or marathons.
But the extra sugar and salt in sports drinks aren't needed for workouts that don't cause a lot of sweat.
After a walk, just drinking water is the best way to stay hydrated.
A healthy diet is key to losing weight but many people make simple mistakes that hurt their success. To get the best, steady, and fairly quick results you should watch your eating closely. Fitness Garage gives you nutrition specialists to follow up with you all the time.
