John Myers
Have you decided to change your diet? If so, then we congratulate you on this excellent decision! So now it’s just a matter of creating a healthy eating plan tailored to your needs? If there are any health issues to consider, you should of course look out for a competent nutritionist. Otherwise, you can easily create your own nutrition plan. In this article, you will find out what you should consider when planning this project and what such a plan could look like.
Need a healthy eating plan?
Do you also belong to those people who have been thinking about a healthier diet for a long time, but without a concrete change having taken place so far? Have you found out about different diets, but haven’t been able to decide yet?
Or were you simply missing a little support in the form of professional nutritional advice? Sometimes it’s easier than you think, especially when you’re just getting started – and the sooner you create an individually tailored and healthy nutrition plan, the better it will be. This can be used as a guide and relapses quickly become a rarity.
Of course, it should be clarified in advance to what extent you can imagine changing your current diet so that you don’t feel overwhelmed right at the beginning of the change.
Change your diet – with and without a nutrition plan
If you just want to “spice up” your diet with some healthy foods, you certainly don’t need a meal plan. In this case, it is sufficient to integrate fresh fruit, salads, crunchy vegetables, and whole grains into your diet every day.
On the other hand, if you’re willing to go the extra mile, you’ll also need to reduce animal-based foods, including dairy, and minimize processed foods and refined sugars. A nutrition plan would certainly make more sense now because it can make the changeover much easier for you. Can you even imagine doing even more for your health? Then a vegan base-excessive diet would be right for you.
Give the nutrition plan your direction
Before you start changing your diet, you should first think carefully about which direction suits you best. Of course, in addition to the diet we have described, there are many others. However, if possible, do not start with a diet that is completely foreign to you, e.g. B. with macrobiotics, Ayurvedic cuisine, nutrition according to the 5 elements, or similar exotic diets, if you have lived in the middle-class style of fries and schnitzel, roulades with rice and cold cuts and cheese for dinner.
Fancy diets don’t just involve the use of foreign spices and ingredients. Behind this is above all a very individual worldview, which you would also have to deal with in detail in advance.
Instead, make changing your eating habits easy by combining the familiar with the new. So you can start changing your diet straight away without any major detours.
The first step to healthy eating
If your diet has so far included a lot of animal-based foods, e.g. B. meat and dairy products, a change towards a healthy diet for you could start with the recommendation to reduce meat and dairy consumption to three times a week in the future.
An excess of animal protein can lead to numerous diseases. These include the u. Rheumatism, gout, arthrosis, cardiovascular diseases, and many other health problems. Therefore, reducing the amount of animal protein is particularly important on the way to a healthy diet.
The reduced protein intake gives your body the opportunity to break down disease-causing excess protein. Therefore, you will quickly feel the positive effects of your change in diet. Of course, these show up in different areas in everyone, but everyone can equally assume a significant increase in energy.
For you, switching to a low-protein diet would mean finding tasty alternatives to fish, meat, sausages, and the like four days a week. And that’s really no problem because the range of vegan recipes is now so large that you will receive many colorful and delicious suggestions.
Perhaps you will be so enthusiastic about the positive effects of your change in diet that you would even consider taking another step: the vegan diet, which is completely free of animal products. The decision is entirely yours.
Create a healthy nutrition plan yourself – this is how it works
If you have decided to change your diet in the direction of reduced protein or vegan and do not need a nutrition plan, simply select those recipes that suit your taste due to the ingredients and spices used. Be creative and swap out one or the other ingredient as you wish. The main thing is that you really like it!
However, if you are one of those people who prefer to work according to specifications at the beginning of the change, you can now create your own personal nutrition plan yourself. It should contain alternative breakfast, lunch, and dinner dishes for protein-free days. This means that neither meat nor fish, sausage, cheese, or dairy products appears on your menu these days.
With a vegan diet, no animal products are consumed at all. In order to loosen up this strict requirement, it is possible to choose a vegetarian diet and use butter and cream for your recipes, because the fat content of these products clearly outweighs the protein content. Although this diet is no longer vegan, it is still almost free of animal proteins.
Switching to an alkaline-excessive diet is a bit more complex than reducing or giving up animal protein. It is therefore advisable to draw up a nutrition plan at the beginning of the changeover to this diet. In the following, we will show you what such a nutrition plan could look like and what ingredients you could use to put it together.
Your diet plan for a low-protein diet
If you have already decided on various recipes and you only notice ingredients that you do not like at all when you read them a second time, then simply swap them out for others. As far as the spices are concerned, you don’t have to stick to the specifications here, of course. Simply change and spice up the recipes so that you end up loving them!
Now start creating your weekly schedule. It doesn’t matter whether you want to eat as usual for the first four days and do without animal protein on the following three days or vice versa, or whether you prepare protein-free meals every other day. Do it the way that suits you best.
For example, your meal plan could look like this:
Weekday
Monday:
- Healthy breakfast: Wholesome bread with a vegan spread and chives, along with tomato and cucumber slices seasoned with herb salt
- Lunch: A delicious vegan stew, such as B. lentil, bean, savoy cabbage, or vegetable stew
- Dinner: risotto with porcini mushrooms
You can now find vegan spreads in every supermarket. Homemade spreads taste particularly good. A selection of possible variants can be found under vegan spreads.
Tuesday:
- Healthy breakfast: Sugar-free muesli with a chopped apple and a banana, filled with plant-based milk, such as B. oat milk, rice milk, or almond milk
- Lunch: Spaghetti Bolognese
- Dinner: Cream of pumpkin soup with crusty flatbread
Wednesday:
- Healthy breakfast: fruit salad with soy yogurt or oat cream
- Lunch: Mushroom and potato casserole with endive salad
- Dinner: Coconut curry with peas
From Thursday up to and including Sunday you can eat as usual again, but after all the delicious delicacies you often no longer feel like it.
If, while changing your diet, you find that a vegan meal also tastes wonderful to you, we recommend taking a further step after this measure:
Now only one animal meal per day should be eaten on “normal days”. The rest of the meals are vegan. So you can include animal products in your diet either in the morning or at noon or in the evening. This means that if you eat eggs or a cheese sandwich for breakfast in the morning, there will be no animal-based meal that day. But you can of course consume other sources of protein, e.g. B. tofu, tempeh, legumes, lupine products, etc.
With this diet, you only provide your body with a very small amount of animal protein, so your digestive system will have no trouble metabolizing it. With this second step, the positive effects on your health will become even more surprising.
Even now, a nutrition plan would certainly be very useful, because it will help you to keep track. And if you like, you can, of course, do without animal proteins all together in the next step.
A base excess diet deacidifies the body
Many people today are latently acidic, which means their acid-base balance is out of balance. The acid-forming lifestyle that is common today is responsible for this imbalance. In addition to lack of exercise, lack of sleep, and stress, this also includes an unhealthy diet consisting primarily of acid-forming foods (animal foods, baked goods, pasta, sweets, soft drinks, alcohol, etc.). When they are metabolized, an excess of acids is produced. In the same way, stress causes acids to form, while lack of exercise prevents the acids that have formed from being eliminated.
Alkaline foods, on the other hand, are a food group that includes foods that are generally known to be very healthy, such as vegetables, fruits, sprouts, and salads. These would be necessary to reverse the acidification.
An alkaline diet does exactly that: intake of acid-forming foods is minimized while intake of alkaline-forming foods is significantly increased.
And that is exactly the basis of the so-called alkaline-excessive diet, which consists of about 70 to 80 percent alkaline and 20 to 30 percent good(!) acid-forming foods. We have explained the difference between good and bad acid-forming foods in this table, in which you will also find most foods – divided into good and bad acid-forming and alkaline foods.
The more the base excess diet differs from your current diet, the more we advise you to draw up an appropriate diet plan, because it makes the changeover much easier.
A healthy eating plan for an alkaline-rich diet
Before creating your nutrition plan, you should first take a good look at our acid-base table mentioned above and print it out if possible so that it is available when you need it. If you choose the foods to compose your meals with this table in mind, you can no longer go wrong.
However, once you have internalized the table, you will find that the recommended foods are nothing more than the known healthy foods, while the unhealthy foods are found in the bad acidifier category.
Then it’s just a matter of turning healthy foods into delicious meals. For this purpose, your nutritional plan could be composed of the following ingredients. Of course, these are just suggestions that can be varied as desired:
Breakfast options for your nutrition plan
Fresh fruit as you like, fruit salads with tigernut flakes, freshly squeezed juices (e.g. apples and carrots with tigernut flakes), fruit smoothies, green smoothies, or mueslis with excess base. So far we are moving to the basic area.
The following variants are slightly acidic but still very healthy: spelled bread, e.g. B. with avocado spread, green spelled pie or vegetable jelly, soy yogurt with fruit and tiger nut flakes, warm millet porridge, or gluten-free muesli with almond milk.
Lunch variations in the nutrition plan
Salads:
Crunchy seasonal salads enriched with fresh herbs and sprouts represent a completely alkaline meal. Garnish with crispy smoked tofu, and enjoy with vegan burgers or with wholesome bread.
Vegetables:
Eat fresh vegetables every day. Almost every vegetable is alkaline, so you can use a slightly acid-forming grain as a side dish – as long as you let the alkaline foods predominate in quantity. There are a variety of basic vegetable dishes. Be creative and try out your own recipes.
Grain:
You can combine your vegetables e.g. B. with alkaline-forming potatoes or with alkaline konjac noodles because it remains a completely alkaline meal. But millet can also be used as a side dish, as can the gluten-free pseudocereals buckwheat, quinoa or amaranth.
Of course, you can still eat rice (albeit the whole grain version) or use whole grain pasta made from spelled, Kamut, or whole grain rice. Pasta made from lentils or other legumes is also a great side dish.
The evening variants for a nutrition plan
In the evening, the digestive system has far less energy than at noon, because from around 6 p.m. the system, which is usually overburdened anyway, is already preparing for the well-deserved nightly rest phase. Therefore, foods that are difficult to digest, such as foods rich in fat and protein, smoked foods, fried foods, or simply too large meals – if eaten in the evening – can prevent a good night’s sleep.
People who are used to raw food can usually eat vegetable sticks with wholemeal bread or other raw food dishes in the evening without any problems. However, if you are not used to it, you could experience digestive problems after a raw food meal in the evening, such as B. Bloating or stomach ache. In this case, a meal of steamed vegetables or vegetable soup is ideal.
If you have a sensitive digestive system, make sure that you don’t eat any flatulent vegetables such as beans in the evening. B. cabbage use. Otherwise, you can eat your fill of stewed or steamed vegetables.
If you like to enjoy a fine vegetable soup, you should puree it every now and then. It becomes particularly creamy and filling if you enrich it with oat or rice cream or with a spoonful of almond butter. If you want to lose weight, you can also add alkaline konjac noodles to your soup. They are very filling, high in fiber, and almost calorie-free.
Would you like some easily digestible spelled crackers, rice cakes, corn cakes, or crispbread with your soup? Then grab it! And even a slice of gluten-free whole grain bread with butter or a vegan spread is unlikely to overwhelm your digestive system.
Nutritionists will help and create a healthy eating plan for you
But if you want to change your diet with a very specific goal, e.g. For example, to lose weight, lower your cholesterol, regulate your blood sugar, relieve your heart, relieve your allergy, improve your skin condition, or whatever, you may find yourself overwhelmed with creating a meal plan feel. In this case, a nutritionist can help you.
Even if you have inflammatory diseases such as If you have arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, chronic thyroiditis, etc., and want to use an anti-inflammatory diet rich in antioxidant foods, the nutritionist’s office may be worth a visit.
You may also want a nutrition plan that will help you correct a vitamin or mineral deficiency and therefore need the vital substance values of your daily meals in your nutrition plan. If you’re trying to lose weight, you may be interested in knowing how much food you eat, and how many calories you eat. In this case, too, it should be easier to have your personal nutrition plan drawn up by a nutritionist.
If you are looking for a holistic nutritionist, you can contact the Academy of Naturopathy. Inquire here about a holistic nutritionist in your area.
A competent nutritionist can help you with a well-thought-out nutrition plan to noticeably improve your health situation. By the way, this will also bring you closer to the generally completely underestimated healing power of food. And once you get to know this power, you won’t want to go back to ready meals, fast food, and the like anytime soon.
We wish you a lot of fun creating your nutrition plan and of course also with the subsequent change in your diet!
