By María Angelina Téllez Reyes
This is surely one of the most often-heard phrases at the beginning of a new year, but as a nutritionist, I believe your health should be a priority every day the year. My greatest wish is that if you decide a healthy lifestyle is a goal, it will be one you will stick with for the rest of your life. The greatest advantage of healthy eating habits is that they will enable you to be organized and free of negative feelings. As a consequence, you will be able to enjoy celebrations throughout your life.
Undoubtedly an important base for everyone is peaceful coexistence and good experiences with family and friends. These are completely achievable as long as your state of health is not compromised. How do we accomplish this? Through healthy eating, exercise, and good mental health.
First, your weight is not the most important factor; the number of kilos is simply a number. What actually defines your state of health is the proper distribution of those kilos. Our bodies are made of water, muscle mass, fat mass, visceral fat, and bones. The latter are the only ones we cannot modify. This fixed number grows throughout childhood and adolescence to their maximum size, and do not change until after age 65. For a health professional to qualify you as healthy it is necessary for your muscle mass must be in the correct percentage range.
A nutritionist can carry out an anthropometric evaluation to assess these numbers and set clear and achievable objectives for the short or medium term. A key point is to generate muscle memory, which helps your body easily reach the appropriate percentages. When we want to gain or lose weight, our body tends to act in a way that affects all our percentages, not just those that we would like to change. The good news is that by generating muscle memory, we help the body remember the distribution we are looking for.
The best thing about starting a regimen, both in terms of physical activity and nutrition, is being able to motivate yourself and those around you. Human beings require approximately 21 days for an activity to become a habit. The beginning is always the most difficult; generating a habit is not easy. The sooner you decide to start, the sooner you can get used to getting up early, exercising, taking care of your diet, meditating, and other activities that will be part of your new life. At La Clínica we want to guide this change; we want to take care of you and discharge you as soon as possible. We invite you to meet our multidisciplinary team—physical trainers, psychologists, nutritionists, doctors, physiotherapists, chemists, and other professionals—in the Wellness Department. We will be able to guide you to the best strategies to suit your needs.
