100 Healthy Recipes for you to try

Do you like cooking? I am a fair cook. I learned how to cook during Kemahiran Hidup cookery classes. My mum is a good cook and so are all my three sisters. Cooking can be a good hobby. Many good cooks are men. I wonder why. I know Malaysia has several celebrity chefs like Chef Wan and Chef Ismail.Do you know Chef Ismail owns a Malay restaurant called Rebung, located in Bangsar? And do you know his business partner is none other then our Angkasawan Negara, Dato' Dr Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor?

I love to watch the Asian Food Channel on Astro. My fav show is Anthony Bourdain, Without Reservation. His job is to go around the world and eat himself silly. How lucky. I don't mind having a job like his. His passion for cooking has become his passport to travel.

I want to share some healthy recipes for you to try. I bought this recipe book called "Resipi Sihat, Pilihan Bijak" published by Nutrition Society of Malaysia.




This book not only contains more than 100 healthy recipes from all 13 states in the country, but guidelines on how to practise healthy eating - Malaysian style. Each recipe comes with nutritional content per serving There is also a write up on "Diets and Diseases" by a nutritionist, Dr Tee E Siong; There are pages of nutritional content charts of foods. Do you know how many calories are there in 1 plate of nasi lemak? Well, in this book, it says 400 kilocalories (kcal). 1 plate of fried rice, with eggs, chicken and vegetable is more than 600 kcal!! This book costs only RM18.00, value for money. and its full of colourful, mouth watering pictures of food.

If you want a change from local food, check out the website on My Fav Link on Healthy Diet. Its full of recipes for western food. You might like to check out other websites yourself.

My Biology teacher has a daughter, Kak Aishah, who can cook really well. One day she invited me over for lunch and her daughter cooked "Nasi ayam". The chicken was done in two styles, steamed and roasted. I liked both of them and forgot about dieting and had two plates of chicken rice with side salads. I guess that's healthy eating, right. I will learn how to cook nasi ayam from Kak Aishah one of these school holidays.








Cooking at home is healthy because you know what you put into your dish. And its cheaper too. In these days when things are expensive, eating home cooked meals, can safe you a lot of money. and the skill of cooking can be very useful later, when we go out into the world, studying overseas, far from home and even later when we have our own family.


Eating together at the table is also very much encouraged. This way we get to bond with family members. We must not eat in front of the TV, alone or otherwise. Its antisocial and we tend to eat too much. In the west, people who are busy, buy ready prepared TV dinners in packages from the supermarket. They just have to heat the food in the microwave and voila, in 5 minutes the food is ready. I think its unhealthy lifestyle. Do you agree with me?

Many of us teenagers like to eat fast food. I love pizza and can eat half a large supreme pizza in one seating. I also like french fries and burgers and downing them with a large carbonated drink like coke. However, from my readings, I found out that fast food is full of calories and one can of coke contains 6-7 spoonfuls of sugar. This is bad for your health. Many Americans eat these kind of food everyday and the number of obese Americans is worrying. Have you seen the reality show, The Biggest Loser? I have seen the American show and now the show has hit Malaysian soil with the production of The Biggest Loser Asia, shot at The A'Famosa, Melaka. And now, my biology. maths and PE teachers, have also created The Biggest Loser SAPURA SMART SCHOOL!! I hope we won't be sued for copyright!! SHHHHHHH!

Teenagers - what is your problem?

What problems?
There are many. However this blog wants to concentrate on healthy eating habits. So if you are not eating healthy, what will happen?
Often, bad eating habits means overeating or undereating (malnutrition) and often this is closely related to not eating a balanced diet.

At our age, we are really concerned about our weight, especially the girls. This is due to influences from our friends (peers) and from the media (magazines, TV, films). The pressure to conform to a certain western view of beauty (a skinny body for girls and muscles for boys)is immense, enough to cause stress and worries.

Lets take overeating. If we overeat we become overweight. This is because we are taking in (consuming) more calories than we burn. Some of us don't like sports and remain rather inactive. The extra calories are turned into fat, and we simply become fat. If this is not taken care of, we will become obese, and that's when our weight problem becomes a health problem. Fats become deposited around our arteries and vital organs like the heart. This will lead to serious health problems later on when we grow older.



How to lose the excess weight?
A lot of us know that the way to lose weight is to go "on a diet". And often we want to lose this weight very quickly. Overnight if possible.

Sudden weight lose is bad for you. You often end up gaining back the weight you have lost. The method of dieting without a doctor's advise and is unhealthy. Some choose drastic measures of using crash dieting - by denying the body food (starvation diet). Others will eat as normal but will voluntarily vomit out the food. Yet others, turn to diet pills. These methods do more harm than good.

This brings us to the other problem of undereating/malnutrition - when you are not eating the way you should.Some just do not eat at all. This is sometimes called eating disorders. The disorders have strange scientific names such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia and compulsive eating.

Anorexia nervosa




Anorexia nervosa or simply anorexia, is actually a mental problem. The problem is often related to girls. The girls have in their head an image that they are fat. Every time they look in the mirror, what they see is a fat reflection of themselves. They become very obsessed with their weight, becoming very stressed, constantly worrying about her image. You can recognise a person is suffering from anorexia if she is excessively thin. Skin and bones. She might exercise excessively and has a fear of food, making excuses to avoid food or sometimes she will hide food and declare they have eaten.

Bulimia

This is an eating disorder where a person eats a large amount of food, due to an urge to do so, then induce vomitting to get rid of the food shortly after. The other characteristics of a bulimic is much like the anorexic.

Compulsive Overeating



This is a disorder too - when you use food to feel good after something bad had happened to you. Food becomes an addiction. Therefore the person then suffers from being overweight. This person becomes stressed when told about his/her weight problem and then he/she turns to food to destress, coming back to the same point that started the problem in the first place, in one big circle. The person hides behind his/her weight using it as an excuse. He/she also has a low self-esteem.


Watch the video on Healthy Eating Tips-Avoid Bad Eating Habits

FYI, your BMI is PDI

If I sent an SMS to my mum containing the above message, she will probably be dumbfounded. How about you?
Let me translate for of you who are less informed:
FYI - you know what that means right? Oh come on!!! It stands for For Your Information.
BMI? It stands for Body Mass Index. What's that? I hear you. Its another calculation, sorry to those who hates maths. If you divide your weight (in kilograms) by your height (in centimetres) squared, then you get a figure which indicate the amount of body fat you have. The figure is just an estimate, mind you. Then you can check against a chart that will indicate whether your BMI is in the healthy range.
PDI = Pretty Darned Important

Click on the link to use this cool tool to calculate your BMI.

To eat, or not to eat: that is the question

Since we are discussing about healthy eating, how much to eat to remain healthy is a big issue to some of us. I remember a poem I learned in primary school about Jack Spratt who could eat no fat, and his wife who could eat no lean.
How much we eat depends whether you are a boy or a girl, on age and how active we are. Kids our age, who are more active, burn a lot of calories ( a nutrition term meaning the amount of energy that you get from your food). Our bodies need calories to give us energy but too much calories and too little activities to burn it up, will make us fat/overweight.

Some foods (and drinks) contain more calories than others. For example, peanuts that you eat with your nasi lemak for breakfast contain a lot of calories but the cucumber that accompanies the sambal ikan bilis contains less. You can count the number of calories in the food you eat by looking at the components of food groups in your meal:
1 gram of protein - 4 calories
1 gram of carbohydrate - 4 calories
1 gram of fat - 9 calories

If you know how many grams of each one of the food group are in the food you eat, you can calculate the total calories.

For example if one serving of nasi lemak has 10 grams of fat,

total number of calories = 9 x 10 = 90 calories

If you are aware of the calories you are taking in your meals, then you can control your weight. The recommended range of calories for school-going kids like us are 1,600 to 2,500 per day.

What is healthy eating?

To understand healthy eating we must understand the Food pyramid.

The pyramid represents the five food groups:
At the bottom of the pyramid are the carbohydrates, on the the next level up are the fruits and vegetables (which contain a lot of vitamins and minerals). On top of that are the dairy products (containing a lot of protein and minerals like calcium)and on top of that the proteins from meat and fish (again contains protein), and at the top of the pyramid are the fats and oils (which contain just that - FAT!).

A healthy meal according to the food pyramid should contain lean meat,beans, nuts, fish, milk, dairy products, fruits, grains, vegetables and some fats.
The food pyramid also tells us that not all food must be taken in the same amount. We have to eat more grains, fruits and vegetables and smaller portions of sugar and fats.

Are you eating according to the food pyramid guys? Remember the food pyramid when you are enjoying your nasi lemak in the mornings, rice and curry chicken or fried noodles during lunch and snacks after school, and more rice and meat/fish/chicken dinner.

I Love to Eat

Yes! I admit I really love to eat. Any food! Don't you? And I have been battling this weight problem lately. But there a few people out there, who are pencil thin and that makes me feel uncomfortable. When my bio teacher asked us to do this project, we learned about balanced diet.

What is a balanced diet?

From what I have read, to be healthy, our body must have food that contain nutrients such as carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and minerals. Then only can we grow, develop and have the energy to go to school to learn and do all those walking and running up and down those stairs (the lift is ONLY for teachers!!) and swimming and taekwando.

To be at our healthiest, and to look good and feel good, we need to give our body the right kind of food and in the right amount.

Click on my fav website: Bam! Body and Mind for expert opinion and cool games related to nutrition

WELCOME EVERYONE!!

How do you want to live? Do you want to live wealthy or healthy? Do you know what is BMI, anorexia, obesity? What is a teenagers' daily nutrition requirements so you have the energy to go to class, stay awake, learn and play? Do you know what you are eating everyday? What makes a meal healthy? What are the problems related to eating?
If you have been trying to find the answers to these questions, then this the blog for you.

HI EVERYONE!!
My name is Salmah from SAPURA Smart School. I am 13 years old and currently studying in Form 2. My classmates, Sugada and Razlinda, and I, were given this project on nutrition and among the tasks given to us was to create a blog based on the project title. I hope to learn a lot of stuff on nutrition (as well as how to create an interesting blog) and hope that you will enjoy the blog too.

Happy reading and learning!!