Improving My Diet

I have been using the Diet Power program for over two months now to record and evaluate my diet. I have made changes based on what the program tells me and what I know about good nutrition. The changes that I have made so far are eating less (I eat about 2000 calories a day and I was probably eating around 3000 before), eating less carbs (I eat around 150 grams a day now and I was probably eating around 300 grams a day before), supplementing with a calcium/Vitamin D/magnesium/zinc/copper/manganese supplement twice a day, supplementing with 400 i.u. of Vitamin E everyday, and greatly reducing the amount of added salt in the foods I eat.

There are some other areas of my diet that are not so great that I would like to improve on. The first is the ratio of saturated fat to polyunsaturated fat in my diet. Although I am not big on cutting one's saturated fats way down (which would be very difficult on a low carb diet anyways), I would like to see a better ratio in my own diet. A lot of research points to a correlation between replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats and a reduction in the risk of heart disease. How do I intend to accomplish this? Well I am working on replacing most of the butter that I use in cooking (mostly sauteing) with canola oil. Canola oil is high in monosaturated fats as opposed to polyunsaturated fats, but it is still a good choice. Then I intend to increase the amount of fatty fish I eat to boost my omega 3 levels. In the past we have supplemented with fish oil, but we really like fish, and I think for now it might be better for our budget to concentrate on the fish. My goals are to eat salmon for dinner (2 pieces) at least once a week, to have another variety of fish a second night each week, and to have canned tuna for lunch three times a week. On the other two days, I will have 1/4 cup of walnuts to mix things up.

Tomorrow I will talk about some of my other nutrition goals. I am working on building healthy habits one baby step at a time!