How can I be a healthy veggetarian? ?!


Question: How can I be a healthy veggetarian? ?
I've been a veggetarian before for about 8 months but because of my lack of vitamin intakes and protein, I became sick and light headed a lot. I would usually eat just fruits and vegetables and sometimes junk food. How can I become one again but actually feel healthier ? Any tips on what to eat or how much I should eat or any vitamins or special beverages?

Answers:

Nutrition is not easy. It's the main reason people get sick and die early. You need to take it seriously and do some study before you implement a vegetarian diet. Here are my rules to follow for a healthy diet:
1) Decide on your target look by selecting a recommended healthy BMI. The range is from 18.5 to 25. I like 20 myself. see source #1 for BMI calculator.
2) Figure out how many calories you'll need to maintain your BMI from step #1. See source #2.
3) Spend a week to document your current diet. Store everything you eat or drink in a laptop or a website. You don't know where to go if you don't know where you are. See source #3 and 4
4) Replace the worst foods in your diet with more nutritious foods one by one.
5) Make changes slowly over weeks and months.
6) Once you're eating a nutritious diet with many healthy foods, the next step is to balance the macro nutrients in your diet. My favorite is 15% calories from protein, 51% calories from carbohydrates, and 34% calories from fat. This is mostly achieved by changing how much of each food you eat, not by changing all your foods all at once.
7) Next you need to balance your diet so that your getting the recommended daily intake of all vitamins and minerals. It's difficult to get steps 6 and 7 done at the same time, but keep at it and you'll get at least 95% on all vitamins and minerals and have a good balance on the macro nutrients too.
8) For long term health you need to balance the fats that you take in. Your Omega-6 fatty acids need to be balanced with your Omega-3 fatty acids so that the Omega-6 is 3 to 4 times bigger than your Omega-3 fatty acids. Your Omega-3 fatty acids need to be around 3g per day. Your Omega-6 fatty acids need to be around 9 - 12 g per day for the optimum level. Anything over 20 g per day Omega-6 and 7 g Omega-3 is asking for trouble. Don't worry, you don't have to go on a low fat diet. Just choose sources of Non Omega-3/6 fats for the remainder of your fats like extra virgin olive oil.
Edit: Also make sure your daily intake of saturated fats is around 10 g or less.
9) Cut back or add to your calories by reducing/increasing portion sizes of food so that you're maintaining the BMI you selected in step 1.
10) Supplement any vitamins that you need to get up to the RDI level. Don't take any extra vitamins that you don't need because these can lead to health problems. If you are a vegetarian remember to supplement with vitamin B12.

There are no shortcuts or quick fixes. Source #4 contains a diet that I created for a friend that is balanced in all the ways that I mentioned above. A quick way to make it vegetarian is to replace the meat with veggie burgers.

If you've done all this, you've got one of the best diets in the world. You should have lots of energy and you'll be healthier than most of the people around you. Use that extra energy to exercise, do more social activities. People will notice the difference.

http://scientificpsychic.com/fitness/die… Source #1
http://scientificpsychic.com/health/cron… Source #2
http://spaz.ca/cronometer/ Source #3
http://fitday.com/fitness/PublicJournals… Source#4



you need to eat starchy vegetables such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, yam, pumpkin, etc.
also, eat quinoa for a meal, oatmeal, bread is good too. Also, eat nuts--those are good for your body, brain, and overalll health.



Eat rice and beans. There's a specific word for the kind of beans but I can't remember. Rice and beans combined have a LOT of protein in them.

EDIT: Legumes are the beans. Those have a lot of protien. :)




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