How do you know whether you’re eating healthy?
If you are happy with how you look and feel–if you sleep well, if your energy level is almost always satisfactory–you’re probably eating perfectly well.
If, however, you crave sweets; if you’re always hungry; if you feel tired every afternoon a couple of hours after lunch; if you depend on caffeine or sugar to keep you going–you might want to take a closer look at what’s going on in your body, and consider making some changes. Less obviously, perhaps, most health issues are affected by how you eat. For example, gut problems, skin problems, joint pain, difficulty sleeping, and most degenerative diseases are affected by your eating habits.
You can, of course, keep a diet diary and hand it over to a health care professional, and take their advice.
However, eating healthy is by no means the same for everyone. There is absolutely no “one size fits all” in the world of nutrition, no matter what anyone tells you. And so when any health care professional offers nutritional advice based solely on your complaints and your eating history, take that advice with a grain of salt.
Here’s a list of what you should consider looking at in order to know how you stand nutritionally:
- Food sensitivity testing.(optional) There are a couple of labs that are reliable, including Immunolabs and KMBO. Even if you have no digestive issues, eating foods that activate an immune response can be creating problems for you.
- Body fat measurement. (optional) Look for a test with high accuracy and reliability, like the Bodpod or underwater weighing. This will give you an objective measure of how fat you really are. In case you aren’t aware, peoples’ definition of “too fat” is as variable as, well, their political views.
- CAC–coronary artery calcium screen. (optional) This is absolutely the best predictor of upcoming cardiac events(heart attacks). It’s cheap, it’s often covered by insurance, and especially if there’s heart disease in your family, it’s good to know where you stand.
- Blood labs: a metabolic panel as well as general blood count is essential. Not optional! For the purposes of understanding your metabolic status, always include fasting glucose, fasting insulin, and HA1C(hemoglobin A1C). Your doctor should conduct an extensive interview with you in order to determine any other tests that may be indicated. Because, after all, if you’re going to have a blood draw, do all the testing right then and there.
- While you’re waiting for the test results, keep an intake diary. This means a record of what, when, and how much you eat, for a period of at least seven days (two to three weeks can be more informative). All by itself, a history of what you’re eating does not tell you how healthy your habits are. However, your bloodwork and other test results are the effect of what you’ve been eating–and it’s looking at both sets of data that will indicate what you need to change, or what you don’t.