Registered dietician and Founder of Hale and Hearty Nutrition Limited, Fredericka Serwaa Doku, has shared her ‘SMART’ easy guide to eating healthy while enjoying one’s favourite foods.
In an interview with Eunice Tornyi on the African Women’s Voices show which airs every Wednesday at 9pm on eTV Ghana, she stated that Ghanaian foods like Jollof, Banku and others are not exactly bad in a weight loss journey but what matters is the quality of the food and the combinations.
She commented that people should be ‘SMART’ about the foods they eat, explaining her ‘SMART’ as an acronym for ‘Simple, Moderate, Attractive, Roughage and Take away bad things.
For instance, rice should be accompanied with fibre foods like vegetables to ensure that it’s a healthy diet.
Serwaa shared a story of herself about how she resorted to eating anything in unmeasured quantities at a point in her life just because she wanted to gain weight.
“There’s something about nutritional labels. When you buy packaged food, you should read labels, not only the expiry date or the manufacturing date. Read the nutritional value of the food. I bought a biscuit one time and I took everything at a go.
I later decided to check the nutritional content of the biscuit and I realized taking that biscuit alone gave me almost 500 calories and I took it with malt which also gives some calories so just sitting there, I had taken about 800 calories which I could have gotten from eating two bowls of fufu with palm nut soup”, she narrated.
The dietician advised per this, that people should be mindful of the quantity of their food, nutritional content and employ the ‘SMART’ guide to eating healthy.
By: Maureen Dedei Quaye