New Year, New Goals – Dr.dr. Luciana Sutanto, MS, SpGK

What are your goals for the New Year? Any healthy life goals? If you are planning to have a good healthy lifestyle this New Year, you have to look into your eating styles and find out whether they are healthy or not.

If you don’t yet have any goal for the year 2022, I suggest you to make a plan related to a healthy lifestyle, such as: achieving an ideal body weight, eating healthy for correcting abnormal laboratory results, or eating properly to get your body healthy and fit.

START NOW

Achieving the ideal body weight does not mean getting it instantly within 1 to 3 months, but we can plan it gradually up to 1 year.  For example, if you want to start losing weight of 1kg to 3kg a month, you will lose 12kg to 36kg a year. The important thing is, we have to take action soon. To achieve those goals, we have to maintain calorie intake and increase physical activity or exercise.

VEGETABLES ON YOUR PLATE

Maintaining calorie intake while staying full can be managed by increasing vegetable intake during the appropriate meal times, being breakfast, lunch and dinner. For your information, vegetables supply lower calories compared to carbohydrates protein, and even more to fats.  In fact, there are groups of vegetables that we don’t count calories for, such as kale, cucumber, tomatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, bean sprouts, and celery.

DON’T SKIP MEALS!

By limiting calorie intake and implementing healthy eating habits that include good meal schedules, our laboratory value will be better controlled. Eating not on schedule will result in eating higher calories, we will eat more when we are hungry, or too much snacking to deal with hunger. In addition to controlling calorie intake, eating regularly will make our body healthy and fit, and feel comfortable. Let’s start healthy eating habits at the beginning of this year.