People are becoming increasingly health conscious with every passing day. While every individual knows that it is important to remain healthy, media and society are also encouraging the trend through informative articles and telecasts and discussion forums. Lower medical bills, an improved sense of well being, a trim body, quality time spent with the family, more energy to focus on your job, and time and energy for indulging in hobbies are some of the positive results of the rapidly growing health consciousness.
Remaining healthy is good, and is necessary, but it need not always be a cakewalk. The hectic present day lifestyle, which forces you to juggle with workplace deadlines, social obligations, family demands, traveling schedules, and subsisting on sandwiches and fries that fast food joints churn out, is not a regimen conducive to good health. Weight gain and related illnesses are an inevitable byproduct of such a lifestyle.
So, how do we get out of this bottleneck?
Most of you who are struggling to lose weight are probably doing a tightrope walk between the plethora of weight loss products in the market, advice from dieticians and weight loss preachers, and your own ability or inability to stick to a chosen weight loss regimen. For those finding it difficult to focus on the right solution, a ready answer is opting for a healthy shake to replace a meal.
The calorific value of a typical breakfast of bagel and cheese, orange juice, and coffee will be somewhere around 720 calories, even if you use non-fat milk for coffee. As against this, a weight loss shake of fruit and non-fat milk will only be 240 calories, and will also contain much less sodium. So, if you use such a shake as a meal substitute, it will promote weight loss by saving calories, besides energizing your body and maintaining a healthy blood sugar level.
The difference between a McMuffin meal and a substitute shake is simply unbelievable. Besides the fact that a shake will have low carbohydrate content, a McMuffin meal plus a coffee and juice will have a sodium content of 1260 mg and sugar content of 44 gm, as against the 250 mg sodium and 13 gm sugar of a fruit and milk substitute shake. Fat content difference surpasses all these and is just 1gm in a shake as against the 23.5 gm in a McMuffin meal. And dietary fiber or roughage, the presence of which is absolutely essential for proper bowel movement and absorption of nutrients, is hardly one gram in a McMuffin meal against the nine grams in a shake.
A piping hot McMuffin meal of savory sausage and melt-in-the-mouth cheese would definitely be many people’s idea of a tasty meal. While there is no need to challenge the conviction since it is a fact, what weight watchers should understand is that its substitute shake does not taste like dishwater or bitter gourd juice. It provides all the nutrition that the body needs, tastes heavenly, and shakes off calories while letting the user enjoy every morsel of it. Finally, it is easy to mix so that you do not have to sweat it out at the stove to prepare it.
Go to the Harvest Nutrition Blog to read about whole food nutrition, blending and juicing.