You Are What You Eat

As the saying goes... It’s not just about eating regularly, it’s about the food you consume.

Do you know that too much fast food will clog your arteries (and you’ll feel it!); while eating just salad every day won’t give you enough energy to keep up with the demands of work. This is why developing a balanced diet—with stress on the "balanced"—is important.

For the junk food addicts (and by junk, we mean food with high levels of sugar, fat, and salt), eating healthy isn’t easy. Besides being high on the junk food meter, these foods are made to be very soft to reduce the need for chewing. If you chew less, you eat faster. The faster you eat, the less you’ll feel full—thus boosting the need to consume more food.

The piece de resistance is this: the food provides increased levels of dopamine, a pleasure-inducing neurotransmitter that causes you to eat more precisely because it makes you feel good.

The result? Something akin to addiction.

Getting over an "addiction" is hard, but the switch to a healthy diet is a necessity if you don’t want to end up an overworked, malnourished mess. So take that first step and take care of your body.

Here are some tips to jumpstart your diet:

* Popcorn with a sprinkling of salt is a-okay, as long as it doesn’t have butter.

* Exchange sinfully sweet favorites like cake and chocolate for dried fruit, raisin toast, and low fat/low sugar fruit yogurts.

* Celery sticks don’t need to be boring and tasteless. Mix them with other fruit and veggie snacks, and put them into salads and sandwiches.