The Healthy Eating Pyramid is an excellent guide to help you eat well and lead a thriving life.
Finding a Balance A healthy lifestyle change begins by developing an intelligence and consciousness about your body and what you’re putting in it. Being aware of the food you’re consuming is important to being healthy. “Having good health and being a healthy weight is a choice, so the first step is to commit to making healthier choices as much as possible,” says Kim. However, this doesn’t mean that you can never eat another piece of chocolate cake; it does means you can’t have it every day or for every meal. As Rory puts its, “When you live a healthy lifestyle you can have your cake and eat it.” Daphne Oz, the daughter of famous TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz, says that finding a balance is key to sustaining a healthy lifestyle. However, Daphne knows all too well how difficult it is to be healthy, especially in college. Growing up, Daphne struggle with her weight, but decided to take charge of her health after she entered college. By transforming her diet and exercise, Daphne lost 30 pounds and was inspired to write The Dorm Room Diet, a popular 10-step guide to healthy living designed specifically for college students. One of Daphne’s best tips to avoid the dreaded “Freshman 15” is the rule, “substitution where you can and moderation where you
can’t.” Daphne uses this rule to help keep her eating habits in check by substituting fresh fruits and vegetables in place of greasy foods and processed items. But on those occasions when Daphne is craving a highcalorie, low nutrition item such as chips or cookies, she allows herself to have some, but only in moderation. “If you eat healthy for five or six days during the week, then you have a little wiggle room to indulge in those sweet treats on the seventh day,” says Daphne. Rory shares the same mindset and says, “If eating well is who you are, then having an occasional drink or greasy meal isn’t going to kill you.” Learning the Nitty-Gritty “Not all foods are created
equal,” says Daphne. Although a handful of carrots and a handful of crackers contain roughly the same calories, they do not share the same nutritional value. One option is far healthier than the other. But knowing what foods are healthy and what aren’t can sometimes be difficult to discern, especially with all the garbage on TV and products in magazines claiming instant weight loss results (five pounds in five days!) for a very high price, of course. Luckily, the faculty from the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health created a simple, easy to follow guide to healthy living called the Healthy Eating Pyramid. Modeled after the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s
Food Guide Pyramid and its 2005 sister version called MyPyramid, the Healthy Eating Pyramid offers new, up-to-date information on eating and exercise that the two USDA versions lacked. Most importantly, the Healthy Eating Pyramid “sits on a foundation of daily exercise and weight control.” The Healthy Eating Pyramid, which was created in 2008, is structured on the concept that food groups at the bottom of the pyramid like whole grains, fruits, and vegetables should be eaten more abundantly than foods at the top of the pyramid, such as red meats, butter, and refined grains like white rice, pasta, and potatoes. Some of the major differences between the Healthy Eating Pyramid and the USDA’s MyPyramid are their approach to refined starch, dairy consumption, and protein intake. Unlike MyPyramid, which allots half of our daily grain intake for refined starches, the Healthy Eating Pyramid suggests a much smaller quantity for such starches. Recognizing that refined starches behave like sugar and only add empty calories while at the same time draining the body of vitamins and minerals, the Healthy Eating Pyramid positions refined starches at the top of the pyramid as a recommendation to eat them only sparingly. Additionally, while the Harvard researchers >>