The 5 Main Food Groups

Key to remedying bad eating habits and help to create your healthy, balanced diet

Using the 5 main food groups to structure your diet can seriously help curb any bad eating habits you have by making it simpler to create your healthy, balanced diet.

How do the food groups work?

In their nature, the food groups balance your diet by splitting up all food types into 5 main groups:

• Grains
• Fruits and Vegetables
• Fats and Simple sugars
• Milk and Dairy
• Meat and Beans

Since everything we eat comes from these food groups, understanding how they affect your blood sugar levels can help you feel more in control of your diabetes and your eating habits.

So to remedy your bad eating habits and create your healthy, balanced diet, keep reading for the food pyramid and your eating habits guide.

The groups are... (Each group below is linked. Click on any group to see how it affects your diet).

• Grains
• Fruits and Vegetables (generally seen as one group but in the food pyramid above, it is split)
• Fats and Simple sugars
• Milk and dairy
• Meats and beans

So why are the food groups important?

Knowing that all foods can be foods can be grouped is useful in structuring a BALANCED diet, something that most overweight people don't have.

Benet Middleton, Chief Executive at Diabetes UK said, "80 per cent of people are overweight when they are diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes".

Yes I know it's SHOCKING! Generally this is because they eat far too much food from the yellow section than they should. So they don't have a BLANACED diet.

So let's assume you are NOT of normal weight. You try a low-fat diet to combat your weight. You almost totally, cut out the foods from the yellow group. Surely you have the right idea in mind? And yet 1 month down the line, little has changed.

You see the trouble with 'low-anything' diets is that you can easily end up making dramatic changes to your diet. It's very easy to focus on the little details of a diet, like cutting fat, but there are many essential fats (EFA - Essential Fatty Acids) that you may be cutting from your 'low-anything' diet, causing you to fail!

This among other key factors can cause your dieting to fail and FAIL and FAIL.

Done that already? It's well worth checking out as there are many simple, yet overlooked reasons why diets fail and I provide solutions to each on the Why Diets Fail page here.

By now, reading each food group page should better your understanding of what makes a healthy, balanced diet. But before you construct your diet, it's time to find out if you have any bad habits.

Take a good look at your eating habits. You might want to right this down! Ask yourself...

1)How many times you go out to eat - and more importantly - where.

2)What you generally eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

3)What you drink when you eat.

4)And how you often you do this every week.

Done? Keep that info safe for now. We'll refer to it later

Please go through this page carefully. This information forms the basics of what a healthy, balanced diet should be. Diabetic dieting is more likely to succeed with this in mind.

So how bad are your eating habits?

If you have any fizzy drinks put them in the fats and simple sugars section. If you have fruit juice that is pure or a smoothie (be it concentrated or not) put them into the fruit and veg group.

Otherwise they should go in the fats and simple sugars group.

Don't worry about the fat group unless it is obvious that it should only go there.

It doesn't have to be perfect. Don't worry too much about the measurements or portions. You just need a rough idea of how much you have. This is simply to show you how unbalanced your current diet is.

If you are good with numbers this'll help you to see how unbalanced your diet is:

• Grains = 33% (A 1/3 of your diet)
• Fruit and Vegetables = 33% (A 1/3 of your diet)
• Fats and Simple sugars = 7% (less than 1/10 of your diet
• Milk and Dairy = 15% (less than 1/6 of your diet)
• Meat and Beans = 12% (just over 1/10 of your diet)

1) The majority of your food should be in the grains and fruit and veg sections.
These should have similar amounts of food in each (as it'll never be perfect).

2) The rest of your food should be split similarly into the milk and dairy & Meat and beans groups.
Again it won't be perfect. This is merely to show you what you eat in a day (a bit like they do on those diet shows on TV).

3) Don't worry too much about the fat.
You should already know what is fattening or not so don't confuse. If you are overweight or obese the fats and simple sugars group is likely to be unbalanced. We'll fix that soon enough.

How bad is it?

You should now be able to see how unbalanced your diet is by comparing each food group. If you are struggling let me know. Click here to get my contact details.

If you can see how bad your diet looks now, it'll be easier to notice improvements. This way you can stay motivated, working towards your goals with your diabetic diet.

Time to move forward?

Click here to exit the Food Groups page and discover the Diabetic Diet.

Or use the NavBar (the navigational bar on the left of the page) for more options.

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