Five Meals Daily Blog

Before I started taking care of my health, there was one label that I was concerned with when trying to decide to buy food: the price tag. Sure, we all want to save a buck, but I was overlooking the most important label of all: the Nutritional Facts.

Reading nutritional facts label is not very tricky and should be common knowledge, so I won't spend too much time on describing what you need to look out for. If you want to explore nutritional facts in more detail, please visit this page from The Food and Drug Administration. To illustrate how to read a nutritional label, we are going to look at the nutritional facts for a potato, if your name is Dan Quayle, you may refer to it as a "potatoe."

Water is essential to sustain your life. Staying sufficiently hydrated can also help you to lose weight. Drinking too much water, however, can be fatal.

What's so good about water?

When you are dehydrated, metabolism, those chemical processes that keeps your body chugging along, provides you with energy, and keeps those calories burning, run less efficiently. Keeping yourself hydrated helps to keep those chemical processes running more efficiently, helping you to burn more calories and lose weight. However, if you are already drinking enough water and keeping yourself hydrated, drinking more water is not going to make much of a difference. Furthermore, at a certain point, excessive water consumption can be bad for you, very bad. 

Here are a few tips about water that you need to know:

Eating five meals a day can be very tricky, especially when it comes to preparing those meals and finding the time to eat them. That is where including a few healthy ready-made meals or snacks comes in handy.

While it is a good rule of thumb to avoid processed foods, there are some processed foods that are healthy for you. Foods like yogurt and protein bars are not only handy but affordable too. What's more, it only takes a few minutes to gobble one of those items. You can grab one and eat it while commuting or take them to work and have one while on a break. I like to go to see movies, and I almost always go to the theater with a protein bar in my pocket. That way I can get in one of my five meals while watching the latest action film. Protein bars go equally as well with indie films too!

I grew up in an Irish-American household. Dinner always included a vegetable, and whether it was fresh, frozen or canned, my mother boiled the hell out of them for twenty minutes before serving. It was like exorcising the demons out of the vegetables, but in the case of vegetables, it wasn't demons: it was nutrients. I don't blame my mom. She didn't know any better. She came from a long tradition destroying vegetables. Potato famine, anyone?