5 Tips to Make the Anti – Inflammatory Diet a Lifestyle

The Contents

Know Which Foods Are Good Choices
Call the Restaurant to Ask Questions or Review Their Menu Online
Pay Attention to Serving Size
Watch for Hidden Sources of Unhealthy Ingredients
Supplements That Fight Inflammation
Curcumin
Ginger
Watch a Relevant Video

5 Tips to Make the Anti – Inflammatory Diet a Lifestyle

Introduction

Changing your diet can be an overwhelming experience. It seems like there’s a lot you need to learn in a short period of time, but this doesn’t have to be the case. A change in diet should instead be seen as a change in lifestyle.

Failure to have this mentality often leads to many people falling off of diets or losing all of the progress they have made so far. You need to start looking at your diet as a new way of life.

This can only happen if you embark on the journey with ease; don’t be too hard on yourself because you’ll be bound to fail if you are. The simpler a lifestyle change is, the easier it is for it to blend well with your current needs.

Know Which Foods Are Good Choices

A great way to start an anti-inflammatory lifestyle is by identifying your good food choices. Your diet doesn’t have to be dull for it to be healthy. If you were thinking that you’ll be confined to eating bland salads every day, think again.

You can still maintain a good range of variety in your diet by learning about all of the ingredients you can eat. There are a lot of anti-inflammatory ingredients that you can include in your new lifestyle.

When you come to know all of them, your diet will become much more appetizing. Perhaps one of the greatest mistakes people make is limiting the range of ingredients they buy for their diets.

This usually leads to their failure to adhere to the diet because they feel that it’s too hard or constricting, whereas they could simply commit to learning more about the path they’re taking.

It’s important to note that listening to just one source regarding a lifestyle change you want to try isn’t a good idea. Spread your wings and read up on as much as you can about the journey you want to take. More specifically, spread your wings to gain information about the foods that you can eat in a particular diet to make sure it stays interesting to you.

You need to know the difference between pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory foods, which I’ll get into in more detail in the next chapter. With this knowledge, you’ll be ready to take on any food-purchasing task that comes your way.

With chronic inflammatory diseases, it’s far better to know too much than to know too little. Sometimes it can be that one pro-inflammatory food you didn’t know about that’s causing so many of your health problems.

Call the Restaurant to Ask Questions or Review Their Menu Online

So, you’ve gathered a list of all the foods you can and cannot eat? Now it’s time for you to find out whether your favorite restaurant can accommodate your diet change. With your list in hand, you can call the restaurant and ask to speak to the manager or the chef.

The assistant chef is also a good alternative should either of the two be too busy to take your call. Politely mention that you’re a regular customer at the said restaurant and have begun to make changes in your eating habits.

Tell the individual you’re talking to that you would love to continue to frequent the restaurant, but for health purposes, it would be helpful if you knew more about the ingredients they put in your favorite meals.

Of course, asking for a step-by-step guide on how they prepare every meal wouldn’t be convenient for them. Instead, you can ask about the specific dishes you’re interested in.

Once you have the information, you can ask if they would be willing to tweak this or that dish to fit your health requirements in your order. If you’re polite, this shouldn’t be a problem. After all, all it would take is omitting certain ingredients from the menu.

If you’re lucky, you could find that they may be willing to add certain ingredients that you’d like as well, but this may come at an extra cost.

In the event that this process doesn’t go well with the restaurant you like, don’t lose heart. Try to approach other restaurants that would be willing to accommodate your needs.

The key is to look for the restaurants that prepare meals on purchase. As you can imagine, visiting your local fast-food place that sells food at high volumes wouldn’t be wise in this case.

Pay Attention to Serving Size

One other thing I cannot stress enough is the importance of controlling your portion sizes. Eating out on a regular basis is one way to change your personal eating habits.

Earlier I spoke about how many of us were raised to finish all the food on our plates; now, think of a situation where you’re at a restaurant with portion sizes that are much larger than what you would normally eat at home.

I think you would agree that most of us who were raised with that mindset would do our best to finish what’s on our plates, but considering the fact that restaurants usually offer foods that contain a lot more calories than the foods we eat at home, this could be detrimental to your diet.

One thing you can do when visiting these restaurants is to ask about their portion sizes and calorie levels; you would be amazed to learn how much you were actually overeating at your favorite restaurant.

You can then simply request that your portion be sized down, or you can leave some food to take home. Either way, you won’t be wasting food. Maintaining a healthy weight can be challenging for many of us, but sometimes we tend to be our own enemies on this journey.

This, I should mention, is due to a lot of ignorance on our part. In the case of some chronic inflammatory diseases, it isn’t ideal for you to be overweight. Not to place too much pressure on yourself, but if you have wondered for a while now about why you haven’t been able to lose and keep weight off, perhaps eating out could be one of the prominent perpetrators.

That being said, many restaurants on the market sell foods you can eat on your new diet. You just need to do a lot of research about the ones you choose to visit in particular. To give you a head start, here’s a list of some of the types of restaurants you could search when you feel like eating out:

Italian
Asian
Indian
Mediterranean

Pay close attention to their menus and look out for dishes that don’t have a lot of unknown ingredients. You should stray towards grilled fish and vegetables at Italian restaurants.

Asian restaurants are by far one of the tops few that pride themselves on clean eating but don’t take everything at face value. Carefully scrutinize the menus while you’re ordering those complex servings.

A great ingredient added to many meals in Indian cuisine is the use of curries and spices. And yes, you can eat some of the curries and spices on offer in fact, you will find that many of them have anti-inflammatory properties. Such spices and curries include cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and turmeric.

Watch for Hidden Sources of Unhealthy Ingredients

Often, food becomes unhealthy due to the sauces and dressings we put in them. Food isn’t the enemy in this case, but the manner in which we prepare it is.

Many of us have gotten used to the taste of fats and sugars. We simply cannot imagine some foods without these additives.

Think about fries or grilled potato wedges, for example; most of us would probably like to put ketchup on the side to go with these, but what we fail to understand at that moment is that we can’t trust the ingredients that are in ketchup or the process through which it was made.

You see, starting a healthy eating lifestyle will take time for you to fully understand and master. You could go the route of eating unseasoned, bland foods, or you can access books like this one with recipes that have been tried and tested for health and taste.

The latter option is a better way to learn about the many seasonings you can add to anti-inflammatory dishes. After all, you don’t have to subject yourself to tasteless food, and I want you to succeed. The easier this process is for you, the better.

Supplements That Fight Inflammation

There are various ways in which a person can treat chronic inflammation, some of those ways being eating anti-inflammatory foods, exercising, sleep, and stress management.

These four listed strategies can help you reduce your inflammation substantially. That said, another way you can help treat your inflammation would be to use supplements. These are some naturally occurring substances that you can add to your meals or smoothies.

Curcumin

First on the list is curcumin, a compound found in the spice turmeric. It’s often used in Indian dishes and is the culprit behind the yellow color of turmeric.

This compound has been found to have substantial benefits in treating chronic inflammatory diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and rheumatoid arthritis (Panahi et al., 2016).

A controlled trial also found that people with metabolic syndrome who took curcumin were found to have reduced levels of c-reactive protein and malondialdehyde compared to those who were given the placebo (Panahi et al., 2015).

Something important to note is that curcumin does not easily absorb into the bloodstream. However, if taken in conjunction with black pepper, the absorption rate increases to a certain degree.

Supplement companies that produce curcumin also add piperine to the supplement. To reap the benefits of this supplement at home, use turmeric and black pepper when preparing your meals.

Ginger

If you had the idea that ginger would make it onto this list, then you were correct. Ginger has a long history in traditional medicine.

For centuries, people have been using ginger to treat ailments like nausea and indigestion, just to name a few. It’s by far one of the most commonly found root herbs in grocery stores, so we’re fortunate to learn of its anti-inflammatory properties.

The two components of ginger responsible for the anti-inflammatory benefits are gingerol and zingerone. A study has shown them to be especially helpful in patients with type 2 diabetes (Arablou et al., 2014).