If you are a busy professional hustling to make big in Dubai, you know how challenging it can be to strike a balance between your crazy schedules and health. However, it is also a universal truth that your body needs the energy to keep moving at that pace.
People who go hours without a break or skip meals, their bodies give up on them. Not just physically, but they also struggle to be mentally agile.
Moreover, things can become more challenging if you are trying to lose weight, have health issues such as diabetes, or alternate food choices like keto or vegan. There is no point in rushing after your dreams at the cost of your health.
However, you can have it all with a little planning and dedicating some time to your health. While pushing through your day, you can do a few things to maintain your health.
You can witness significant improvement in both your overall health and energy levels by making a few modifications.
1. Meal Planning
Meal planning may appear time-consuming or unnecessary, but it helps ease your worries for the rest of the week. Meal planning is crucial because it aids in the practical aspects of meal preparation, such as knowing what to cook, saving time, reducing food wastage, and more.
If you still feel it’s a hectic job, meal plans in Dubai are readily available, and any good nutritionist can customize one for you.
2. Meal Shopping
Once you have a meal plan handy, the next step is to shop for food. Stay away from the aisles that serve junk. The less junk food you store, the lesser the chances you consume them.
3. Meal Prepping
Meal prepping is 90 % part of cooking. If you are through with cutting, chopping, boiling, and steaming the food on weekends, that means you can cook a healthy meal in a jiffy on weekdays and nights.
4. Hire a Meal Delivery Service
Healthy meal delivery services in Dubai are life saviors to many busy professionals and health enthusiasts. These diet-friendly delivery services offer customized solutions and take care of your unique food preferences.
There are several benefits of healthy meal deliveries, such as reducing food wastage, keeping your food intake in check, better nutrition, it saves time and money, and many more.
Tips on How to Maintain a Healthy and Balanced Diet
A healthy and balanced diet aids in reducing the overall risk of diseases and improves health when you:
1. Eat a Good Portion of Fruits and Vegetables
You must aim to eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables every day. Fruit and vegetables are good sources of dietary fiber, antioxidants, plant protein, and vitamins and minerals.
Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some cancers are considerably less common in those whose diets are high in fruits and vegetables.
2. Eat Less Fat
Fats are the concentrated form of energy. Consuming excessive amounts of fat, especially artificial trans-fat and saturated fat, can raise your chance of developing heart disease and stroke. Instead of animal fats or oils high in saturated fats (butter, ghee, lard, coconut, and palm oil), you can consume healthier fats such as olive, soy, sunflower, and maize oil.
However, in the right amount, even the unsaturated fat will not do much harm. Make sure consumption of total fat should not exceed 30% of a person’s total energy intake in order to prevent unhealthy weight gain.
3. Avoid Sugary Beverages and Foods
Less than 10% of your daily energy intake should come from refined sugar for a balanced diet. You can reap additional health advantages if you cut it down to 5%. Cutting back on sweet treats like cookies, cakes, and chocolate and replacing them with fresh fruit is another way of switching to healthier calories.
Limiting the use of soft drinks, soda, and other sugar-rich beverages (fruit juices, syrups, flavored milk, and yogurts) also aids in lowering sugar intake.
4. Avoid Processed Food
People who eat processed foods are more likely to consume more sugar, salt, and fat than is advised. Process foods are ladened with high amounts of additives, which you might not know while purchasing and consuming. Due to the substantial amounts of added sugar or fat, they also have more calories.
5. Reduce Salt Intake
In adults, limiting salt consumption to fewer than 5 gm per day lowers the risk of heart disease and the possibility of stroke and helps avoid hypertension. Salt consumption can be decreased by limiting salt and high-sodium seasonings like soy sauce and fish sauce when making food.
6. Stay Hydrated
It’s important to stay hydrated every day for a range of reasons, which includes maintaining normal body temperature, lubricating joints, preventing infections, feeding cells with nutrition, and maintaining healthy organs.
Additionally, hydration enhances mood, cognition, and sleep. Make sure you hydrate your body with the right fluids, all-natural and without added sugar.
7. Develop Good Habits
Develop a habit of having an early breakfast, as it helps reduce snacking later. Also, make sure to keep yourself active. Young adults must include 150 minutes of moderate exercise every week.
Bottom Line
“I am too busy to eat healthily” is not a good enough excuse to avoid your health. A little bit of planning and cautious life choices can go a long way. Dubai offers a large variety of healthy food choices from cafes, restaurants, takeaways, meal deliveries, and much more.
Once you prioritize your health and understand only a healthy body can empower your career goals, you start taking corrective steps in the right direction.
