“I know what I should eat. I just don’t do it.” This familiar statement tends to be among many of my clients’ first words.

Although food is important for fuelling the body and investing in overall health, many of my clients sleep through breakfast, work through lunch, skimp on meals, and then feed themselves not-so-healthy snacks.

Students, parents, business people, casual exercisers and competitive athletes alike repeatedly express their frustrations with trying to eat high quality diets.

The stress and fatigue associated with long work hours, well-intentioned attempts to lose weight and efforts to schedule exercise can all mean that food becomes more of a stress than one of life’s pleasures.

One key to eating well is to prevent yourself from getting too hungry. When people get too hungry, they tend to care less about what they choose to eat and more about rewarding themselves with a treat because they’ve survived yet another hectic day.

By preventing hunger, you can curb your physiological desire to eat excessive treats, as well as tame your psychological desire to reward yourself with, let us say, a gorgeous chocolate brownie.

When you fuel your body appropriately, you have the mental energy you need to choose the healthful foods that support your exercise program and invest in your health. When choosing these meals and snacks, try to base your nutrition game plan on these three important keys to healthful eating:

Variety: the more different types of foods you eat the more different types of nutrients you consume. For example, although oranges are an excellent source of vitamin C and carbohydrates, they fail to provide iron or protein. Beef offers iron and protein but not Vitamin C or carbohydrates.

The combination of an orange consumed for dessert or after a lunchtime roast beef sandwich may be a more powerful and health-protective combination than each food eaten alone, a concept known as synergy.

Many people eat the same 10 to 15 foods each week. If you find yourself eating a repetitive menu, at least try to eat different brands of cereal topped with different fruits for breakfast, different types of sandwich and breads for lunch, and lots of different, colorful vegetables in the salad.

I recommend to my clients that they target eating three different kinds of food at a meal and 35 different types of food per week.

Count them!

Wholesomeness: choose whole or lightly processed foods as often as possible. For instance, choose wholewheat bread rather than white bread, apples rather than apple juice, baked potatoes rather than potato chips.

Foods in their natural state usually have more nutritional value and fewer questionable ingredients.

Moderation: rather than thinking about food as being bad or good for your health, think about moderation.

Even soda pop and chips, in moderation, can fit into a nourishing diet, if you balance them with healthier choices during the rest of the day.

For example, you can compensate for a greasy sausage and a biscuit by selecting a low fat turkey sandwich for lunch.

Healthy choices make healthy bodies: just as the right foods can be powerfully health protecting, the wrong foods can be powerfully bad for your health. That is, eating excessive portions filled with saturated fats and refined sugar can contribute to obesity, heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, kidney failure, and other disease associated with excessive eating.

Having a nutrition based on wholesome grains, fruits, vegetables, dried beans, lean proteins, low-fat dairy, nuts and olive oil –  in addition to an active lifestyle – invests in optimum health. Conveniently, the same wholesome foods you eat to enhance your health also enhance your athletic performance.

The trick is to choose more of the best foods and less of the rest, so that you will be able to enjoy lifelong health and high energy.

Confusion abounds about foods that are good or bad for your health. Concerned individuals repeatedly ask me, “What foods should I avoid?”

My answer is that the only bad foods are foods that are moldy or poisonous or foods to which you are allergic; all other foods can be balanced into a healthful food plan based on moderation and variety.

The purpose of this information is to help you make wise food choices and tip the balance in your favor for lifelong good health Better nutrition begins with breakfast: just as you car works well when it has gas in its tank, your body works better when you give it adequate morning fuel. Yet many people push their bodies through a busy day with an empty gas tank.

The result is low energy, craving sweet foods, a high intake of cookies and treats, and often un-desired weight gain.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Eat up!

Of all the nutritional mistakes one can make, skipping breakfast is the biggest. Many individuals learn this the hard way: Miss X, a group exerciser at a fitness club, fainted from low blood sugar one morning after one of her morning workouts simply because she had no fuel to feed her brain.

That is a typical example of how skipping breakfast can hinder your workouts and leave you drained for the rest of the day.

In comparison, a high-energy breakfast sets the stage for a high-energy day. Nevertheless, many active people come up with familiar excuses for skipping the morning meal: I don’t have time; I’m not hungry in the morning; I don’t like breakfast foods; I’m on a diet; if I eat breakfast, I feel hungry all day...

Excuses, excuses, excuses!

If you skip breakfast, you are likely to concentrate less effectively in the morning, work or study less efficiently, feel irritable and short-tempered, or fall short of energy for your afternoon workout.

For every excuse to skip breakfast, there is an even better reason to eat it.

Written by Meloney A. Martin, a Certified Weight Management Specialist. CINBA welcomes feedback by emailing to the following address: cinba345@yahoo.com or mhnc@candw.ky.