Everyone wants to be healthy, but there’s no magic formula that guarantees good health. As a woman your hormonal makeup provides a natural protection from cardiovascular diseases and offers the potential for you to have a long and healthy life. But you need even more than that.

A long, healthy life is a choice. It doesn’t happen by chance or because you inherited excellent genes. But the good news is that optimum health can be the result of rather simple things: what you eat, what you drink, what you think, and what you do. By adopting a healthy lifestyle, setting worthwhile goals, and practicing a positive mental attitude it is possible to enjoy a full and active life well into your golden years.

Ordinary daily activities have a big effect on how you feel - whether energetic, healthy, and generally good about yourself or whether you drag through your days with little energy or enthusiasm. Even more important, how you live can actually keep you healthy or make you susceptible to serious disease.

As part of a healthy lifestyle you’ll want to have regular checkups, including tests that look for early signs of disease. This is important preventative medicine. Of course, some of us find it easy to pretend that serious illness can’t happen to us so we ignore or refuse tests that detect early symptoms. But early discovery of risk factors and/or potentially dangerous disorders allows you to better monitor the problem and to treat them. And that can add happy, healthy years to your life.

The science of nutrition has shaped the popular intuition demonstrating how balanced, responsible nutrition can benefit us. It can modify our moods, our concentration, or the quality of our sleep. It can help us get rid of discomforts such as headaches, drowsiness, and certain inflammatory conditions. The modification of eating habits requires getting hold of a mature, conscious disposition resulting from a hitherto missing groundwork, one that will gradually bring us closer to a more natural nutrition in order to help the body to become accustomed to a new diet. It is not necessary to keep on a diet that requires you to constantly count servings and calories, but it is indispensable to follow a varied, balanced nutrition depending on your specific needs, to pay attention to your own body’s signs, and to know the nutritional value of foods and learn to choose them. This is the sort of information that allows us to use foods that are beneficial, not just those from a diet  checklist.

Golden rules for a healthy nutrition

• Use different recipes as much as possible.
• Pay attention to the combination of foods you eat at any meal, and take care to have a balance from the different food groups.
• Reduce the amount of harmful fat in your diet by eliminating processed foods and those fats of animal origin. Use extra virgin olive oil instead.
• Restrict the use of foods rich in protein of animal origin (meat).
• Among dairy products, choose fresh skim milk cheese and natural yogurt.
• Increase the daily amount of plantbased foods (legumes, vegetables, fruits) you eat and the amount of water you drink.
• Rinse fresh fruit and vegetables thoroughly.
• Decrease the intake of sugars. Choose complex sugars, those rich in fibers, paying attention to hidden sugar (sweets, cakes, and pastries, canned foods, sodas, and fruit drinks).
• Substitute whole meal bread made with natural yeast for white bread made from bleached fl our. Better yet, choose bread made from a variety of grains. Read labels.
• Once a day, or every other day, eat one meal based entirely on whole grains: whole wheat pasta, brown rice (or other unprocessed varieties), barley, millet.
• Begin each meal with a salad packed with raw vegetables. Salads are an aid to better digestion.
• Control your use of salt. Make a habit of not salting your food—unless absolutely necessary. And replace regular table salt with unrefined sea salt.
• If you suffer from digestive disorders (colitis or gastritis), it is imperative that you overcome them before following these counsels.
• Do not use alcohol.
• Eat your meals in a relaxed, peaceful setting.
• Adequately chew your food. Don’t swallow it “whole”.

LA MARCA, Lidia. Feeling Good! Natural Medical Guide for Women. Madrid: Editorial Safeliz, 2015, pp. 15 - 16