Front loading your day with healthy calories like protein, fruits and dairy can help keep you full and energized.

Avoid eating heavy meals before bedtime and have nutritious snacks throughout the day.

These few tips go a long way to create healthy eating habits.

Eat several small meals during day and concentrate your most of your calories in the morning so you’ll have time to burn them off before going to sleep.

Breakfast
The Foods
Dairy, eggs, whole grains, and fiber. If you usually skip breakfast, start with a glass of milk or a slice of cheese with whole-wheat toast. Or, if you wake up ready for a meal, have walnut-flaxseed oatmeal with some yogurt and blueberries.

Lunch
The foods
Vegetables, beans, fruits, nuts, and whole grains. Think soups and salads.

Dinner
The foods
Leafy greens and other vegetables, lean meats, fish, beans, and legumes.

Snacks
The foods
Yogurt, berries, walnuts, red bell peppers with cottage cheese, whole-grain cereal with milk, and apples and cheese.

USA Today has a great profile of Ray Lewis leading up to this weekend’s playoff game. Lewis has had an incredible NFL career, and in this article we see why. He’s always been known as a workout warrior, but here we see how obsessive he is about his diet as well.

Stamped “P.M.,” the bag is filled with multicolored vitamin supplements. Before noon, the iconic Baltimore Ravens linebacker already had consumed a protein shake, egg whites, an apple, 2 gallons of water and a similar bag of “A.M.” supplements.

Lewis, 36, is explaining why he believes he has survived 16 NFL seasons — and still is playing at a Pro Bowl level as the Ravens prepare for Sunday’s AFC divisional playoff game against the Houston Texans— in such a physically demanding sport.

In addition to a relentless year-round conditioning regimen and aggressive therapy for the toe injury that sidelined him for four games this season, Lewis estimates he swallows 50 pills a day.

Then the veteran, hardly ready to declare this playoff run a prelude to retirement, reaches into the briefcase to show off his afternoon snack — another apple.

“I’m watching these guys, with their cheeseburgers and stuff,” he says. “And you’re going to compete against me? Even if you’re younger and faster, your fuel won’t let you beat me.”

His obsession for healthy eating is, well, notorious in the Ravens locker room.

“His diet is so ridiculous, even the people around him have to adjust,” linebacker Terrell Suggs says. “It’s crazy. Last week, I’m eating a bag of chips, and he throws ’em away.”

Lewis is a fish-and-vegetable man who hasn’t touched pork in 12 years and has eaten beef twice during that span. He also doesn’t drink soda or eat bread or sugar — except for scant exceptions. Like his cheat snacks, Twizzlers and Gummy Bears. “To keep living life,” he says.

I remember watching Chad Ochocinco several years ago describing how he ate mostly at McDonald’s. He was young and he could easily burn the fat and calories. Now he’d be wise to read this article and start emulating Lewis, as Chad isn’t the same player he was several years ago. Diet is a critical part of health and performance!

As we get older, we have to be more careful about what we eat. We don’t need to be obsessive like Ray Lewis since most of us aren’t pro athletes. But if you really was to get ripped, then you have to have the same devotion. Match your diet to your goals!

First Lady Michelle Obama launched a worldwide campaign to fight obesity. The White House launched a campaign that focuses on prevention and the weight loss industry is worth more than $61 billion. One would think that with all of the campaigns and billions of dollars poured into weight-loss products and plans, America would be well on it’s way to becoming the healthiest nation in the world. Not so. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), despite recent reports stating that the obesity rate for Americans has leveled off, nearly 34 percent of adults are obese, more than double the percentage 30 years ago. The share of obese children tripled during that time, to 17 percent.

So why is it so difficult for Americans to lose weight or stay healthy? Could it be the large number of food deserts across the nation? Or maybe the lack of grocery stores isn’t fully to blame. Maybe it’s the type of grocery stores that contribute to the problem. Maybe health food stores like Whole Foods, Mothers Market, and Wild Oats can help solve America’s obesity epidemic, or at the very least, help America develop better eating habits. Sure, traditional grocery stores do carry some healthy foods, but they also carry some of the unhealthiest foods you can find. Unless you’re committed to being healthy, it’s just too easy to choose Cocoa Puffs and whole chocolate milk over Kashi and rice milk. Health food stores don’t give you the option to choose one over the other. The only choice is “healthy!”

Health food stores rarely carry household names such as General Mills, Kellogg’s, and Wonder. You’re more likely to find health food brands such as Kashi, Muir Glen, Nature’s Path, Eden Organic, and Stonyfield Organic. Health food stores stock their shelves with foods that contain few to no chemicals, no additives, and no preservatives. Also, foods are mainly organic. Even the non-organic foods are made with healthy ingredients and without harmful chemicals. Meats, poultry, and dairy are usually organic, and the seafood is fresh and wild caught. If farmed, seafood is always antibiotic and hormone free, and raised in an environmentally conscious setting.

Health food store products can do more than just curb obesity. They can help those that are already healthy stay healthy, and they can help individual’s that may be an average weight, get healthy. Health foods stores are also the best places to shop if you have food allergies (peanuts, milk, gluten), if you are on special diet due to a medical condition (diabetes, heart disease, digestive conditions) , or if you’re a vegan, vegetarian, raw foodist, or follow a macrobiotic diet.

How to Locate Health Food Stores

If you live in a major city, chances you have a number of health food stores to choose from. Even some smaller cities have a local health food store. In some areas, finding a health food store may be a bit more challenging. Fortunately, several directories can help you search for health food stores by state. One of the best is GreenPeople.org. You can search for health foods stores by zip code or city, state, and country. The site lists thousands of health food stores. A search in Illinois alone returned more than 100 results.

For a weight loss program to be successful long term, it must be customized to fit the individual. According to renowned personal trainer Angelo Sorrenti, who charges around $10,000 for a personalized diet, supplemental recommendations, and 30 training sessions, “There’s no such thing as a diet for everyone.” This may be the reason why 90 percent of the people that go on diets regain the weight, plus a few pounds, shortly after the program is over.

Sorrenti’s success is based on simple science. He states, “Your metabolism is different than mine; your needs are different. There are diets that can be good for 10 people but can harm 10 million people.” And it makes sense. Not just the metabolism part, but also because people have allergies, ailments, and other issues that dictate what they can and cannot eat. So a diet that calls for a boiled egg, grapefruit, and coffee for breakfast could be harmful for an individual with egg allergy and/or interstitial cystitis.

For this reason, Sorrenti, and other successful weight-loss experts, will not recommend a diet and exercise program until they have thoroughly analyzed your blood work, medical history, and current physical condition. Sorrenti states that once a client has been analyzed, he can then create an all-encompassing diet and exercise plan calibrated for the individual’s needs.

So when searching for a weight loss program, consider taking a personal, not a packaged, approach. Contact several trainers, weight-loss experts, and weight loss centers and interview them. The goal is to find a program that is made just for you in order to avoid a devastating failure shortly after the program is over.

To recap, make sure the weight loss center or expert:

·Requires a physical exam
·Evaluates your blood work and physical condition
·Asks about ailments or allergies
·Evaluates your metabolism
·Will work with you one on one to create a safe and effective weight loss program

Successful weight loss programs always include exercise. You may start out with light exercise while your body adjusts, then the exercise regimen will gradually increase as your weight and energy levels increase. A weight loss program that claims to help you lose weight without exercise is a program that should be avoided if you are interested in permanent weight loss.

If you want to seek out Mr. Sorrenti, we wish you all the luck, but if you have trouble signing with the most sought after trainer in New York City, don’t worry. There are literally thousands of trainers and weight loss centers and experts around the world. It really doesn’t matter how popular they are. If they take a custom approach to individual weight-loss and former clients have walked away (and stayed away) with good results, it’s worth giving it a try.

Nutritional and Physical Degeneration is one of the most ground-breaking books ever written on the link between nutrition and health. Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist from Cleveland, became very disturbed by what he saw in his patients. He started to see a link between the decay he found in the mouths of his patients and pathologies found elsewhere in the body like diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, gastrointestinal complaints, and more. Dr. Price also found that crowded, crooked teeth were becoming more and more common, along with facial deformities like overbites, narrow faces, lack of well defined cheek bones, and underdevelopment of the nose. Dr. Price did not believe these problems to be in any way normal; He believed they were the result of poor nutrition. The worse a person?s diet was the more decay he found in their mouth. The more decay a person had in their mouth, the higher the rate of pathologies in other areas of the body.

More than 70 years ago Dr. Price decided to search the world for primitive people who lived entirely on indigenous foods. His travels took him from islands in the South Seas to Alaska to Africa and many places in between. He visited Australian Aborigines, Swiss villages, Eskimos, traditional American Indians, Amoazonian Indians, African tribes, and more. Dr. Price and his wife Florence traveled for ten years during the 1920’s and 30’s when groups of people completely isolated from civilization could be found.

Throughout his travels, Dr. Price kept a record of his findings with pictures and detailed assessments. What he found, to be called astounding, is an understatement. Dr, Price discovered that primitive people untouched by civilization, who subsided on a diet of indigenous food, had outstanding physical development with little to no dental problems, heart disease, diabetes, or any other diseases we know believe to be a normal consequence of life.

Dr. Price?s findings were not surprising to other investigators and explorers. However, the excepted explanation at the time was that primitive people were ?racially pure? and that the maladies we see in civilization were due to ?race mixing?. This theory was untenable to Dr. Price who found that the individuals in groups he studied who abandoned their traditional diets for foods provided by traders or missionaries, or who moved to a more civilized area were found to develop tooth decay and degenerative conditions.

The diets of these primitive groups of people were vastly different. Some were mostly cooked food while in others most of the food was consumed raw including animal sources. Some diets were based on sea food, others on domestic animals and others on wild game. Some diets were based on dairy while others consumed a variety of fruits and vegetables and grains.

The common thread between all the groups Dr. Price investigated was none of them contained any refined devitalized foods like white sugar, flour, pasteurized or skim milk, and refined or hydrogenated vegetable oils. All the diets contained animal foods of some type and some salt. Dr. Price analyzed the primitive diets and found they all contained four times the amount of water soluble vitamins and minerals, and ten times the amount of fat soluble vitamins compared to the modern American diet.

Unfortunately, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, the permanent record of his travels, is nonexistent to today?s modern medical community. This book is more important to our health and welfare today than it was 60 years ago. Our food supply, if it could be classified as food, is devoid of almost all nutritive value. We need to incorporate the fundamentals of primitive nutrition and return to nutrient dense whole food. We need to get back to local farming and turn away from manmade supermarket garbage that is destroying our health.

Anyone interested in becoming truly healthy needs to read Nutrition and physical degeneration