Are you disturbed about your food habits or food intake patter? To address it properly, let’s check your concerns that fall in one or multiple aspects of the followings-
- Your body weight,
- Your health and nutritional status,
- Meal frequency,
- Total amount of food taken per day,
- Food composition,
- Healthy foods and unhealthy foods,
- Whole foods and processed food,
- Water and other fluid intake per day,
- Food related diseases, etc.
One of the possible options may be a fixed amount (weight) of foods including diversified foods consumption per day. So, we need to calculate the difference/scopes for eating diversified foods (D) = Ideal or Expected Body Weight-Existing Body Weight.
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Then grab/collect that amount of food (D) for that day by weighing all types of food that are available, or that you want to eat in different times or meals of the day. As the amount would be equal to D. So, there is fair possibility of achieving or maintaining or reducing weight of an individual if assessed as underweight, normal and overweight or obese respectively.
Here we may need to consider following things:
- One need to include diversified foods all groups of foods those are recommended.
- If we do not see in any aspects such as gain or maintaining or decrease as need for underweight, normal and overweight or obese person respectively, then we may need to add or remove both calory dense or non-caloric foods including total water and other beverage intake. These would help us to regulate our food homeostasis in our body.
- Here we do not need to concern about total number of foods in a short period of time if your culture, economic conditions, etc. does not allow you to have access and available f foods.
- Any disease and physiological conditions need to be considered.
- One needs to avoid monotony foods.
- Food may be restricted or limited or prohibited due to some disease conditions.
What’s benefits expected?
- There is Less possibility of escaping or refusing specific food(s) if someone dislikes or avoids specific food(s) in a family setting.
- Less food waste,
- No forced feeding for finishing foods on a limited time period (1).
- Regular consumption of diversified foods as recommended.
- It may support appetite, satiety, and satiation.
- It may produce effective and sustainable benefits for long term instead of short-term benefits (2)
- We need to check wight-metabolic health benefits while considering this approach.
- It would also help calculate diet especially carbohydrate to regulate blood sugar: Instead of worried one may have small and frequent amount from the total foods for that day.
So, let’s enjoy taking or providing a fixed number of foods (D) to a person(s) to attain and maintain proper health and nutritional status gradually.
References:
- Time-Restricted Eating: Benefits, Mechanisms, and Challenges in Translation – PubMed
- 8-hour time-restricted eating linked to a 91% higher risk of cardiovascular death | American Heart Association (NHNES Data; National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey-CDC)
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