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healthy eating habits

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There are a lot of scare tactics used on us when it comes to healthy eating. Doctors might scrutinize our diets during our annual physical, and tell us to cut out this, that, and the other thing, leaving us with what feels like little more than celery and egg whites. But, honestly, a lot of the time, I believe that doctors give us overly militant instructions, knowing we’re going to break their rules a bit, and understanding that where we land will actually be just fine. Your doctor tells you, who drinks 10 drinks a week, to stop drinking, knowing you’ll probably just cut back to five drinks a week. (Now, I am not a doctor so, if your doctor has said that you must absolutely stop drinking, listen to her, not me.)

 

Maybe we like these scare tactics, too, since they tend to leave matters as black and white, and in a world where things are so complicated, we like some rules that are clear cut. It’s easier to remember that you are just not allowed to do something at all than to remember that you can do it, this amount, and this often. But we have to remember that removing some food groups from our lives entirely can have the opposite effect of what we wanted. When the idea was just to remove problematic substances, we may also then be eliminating the good things that came with them.

 

Perhaps you’ve heard, throughout your life, that you should never touch this or that food, and it just stuck with you. So that food never makes it into your shopping cart. But perhaps you can loosen up a bit on those rules. Maybe some of the foods you’ve been taught to steer clear of got an undeserved bad reputation. Here are foods we’re afraid of, but shouldn’t be.

 

healthy eating habits

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Ice cream

Many of us may think of ice cream as just about the worst foods out there for us, perhaps because we associate them with the thing we binge on after a breakup. But the truth is that, on the Glycemic Index scale, ice cream falls on the low side, releasing sugar into your system quite slowly, and actually decreasing the odds you’ll want to binge on anything after.

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