Food Habits and Dietary Suggestions For a Woman With PCOS – Diet For PCOS
What do a typical women disease has to do with food habits? Moreover, the problem is related to the genital parts. Is there a contrary in your mind going on? The answer is here. There is an absolute relationship between the ovarian cysts and the recommended diet for PCOS. The giant reason for this confounding phenomenon is the reason itself! The hormonal imbalance that is caused by women’s menstrual cycle disorders, consequently in their general metabolism causes PCOS in women.
Eventually, problems like hormonal imbalance, abnormal metabolism can only be overcome through healthy diets and regulated food habits. Also, the after-effects of these above two problems become permanent, once they have attacked. For example, diabetes, cholesterol, heart problem, etc. These never vanish from the body. The only way to protect our body from these diseases is to maintain strict diets promoting metabolism in a healthy and natural way.
Diet plan for PCOS cannot be discretized. It involves precise analysis of the carbohydrates, fats, and fibers.
For this reason, let us go with different suggestions in the name of the best diet for PCOS.
Diet for Insulin Resistance
Foods to Eat
Foods to Avoid
Tips Before Following PCOS Diet
Let us go through the healthy and best foods for PCOS cure. We shall categorize what foods to eat and what not to eat, the best-recommended diet plan for PCOS.
Diet for Insulin Resistance:
Insulin improvement in the body is only a symptomatic treatment on the diet plan of PCOS. But it is not the permanent cure for it. We can, at last, convert the total fats into energy, but we cannot make PCOS disappear in this way.
As we know, increased insulin in the blood, upon incomplete conversion into energy, gets accumulated in the muscles, veins. This is mainly caused by hormonal imbalance. Especially in women, hormonal disorder leads to excessive hair growth on the skin, cysts on the ovary. Insulin is also one such affected hormone. Fatty liver, cholesterol, overweight are the other two side effects of insulin increment.
We have to go through a particular PCOS diet with low-carb, fiber-rich, healthy sugar contents to get control over them.
- Diet with refined carbohydrates causes an immense increment of insulin. High-fat foods lead to unhealthy cholesterol, thus weight gain. However, strategic diets with carbohydrates can help you maintain the weight.
- Glycemic index should be as low as possible to control the fats. In the process of searching best diet for PCOS, the glycemic index should be at the minimum level.
- We can also try cholesterol-reducing diets, which indirectly improve the insulin release, thus causing a hormonal stability, in a way.
Diet for PCOS Cure – Foods to Eat:
Fiber-rich
High fiber content in the food enhances the quality of digestion. This reduces sugar in the blood and carries out a healthy metabolism. This essential feature of such kind of food has a vital role to play in a diet for PCOS.
Some of the suggested food in the daily diet for PCOS women are below.
- Almonds favor metabolism with its high fiber content.
- Sweet potatoes
- Winter squash
- Beans and lentils
- Pumpkin
- All Cruciferous vegetables
Non-inflammatory foods
- Foods like tomato, spinach, olive oil reduce inflammation, also promote health on a regular consumption.
- Berry fruits, blueberry, and strawberry are also useful in the diet for PCOS.
- Fatty fish with high omega-3 fatty acids
- Kale is recommended in the diet for PCOS women particularly.
Lean protein
Lean protein helps in the same treatment, reduction of fats. It’s available in fishes, chicken, and tofu. They do not contain fiber, but in a dietary aspect, lean protein has a useful role in the PCOS diet.
Healthy fats
Healthy fats, particularly fatty acids are highly constructive in body cell Also, they cause detoxification. Drinks with detox-effect are on demand for this operation.
Weight management, fertility, hormonal balance are the other advantages with healthy fatty acids.
Nuts and seeds, avocado, oily fish contain plentiful amounts of fats that are important in the PCOS diet.
Fruits
Fruits are anyway important for a person to maintain a healthy life. In the selection process of diet for PCOS women, fruits are the utmost primary need as they serve any kind of mineral, vitamin, nutrient, and so on.
Green Leafy Vegetables
Green leafy vegetables contain a high density of nutrients that can be sufficed by many other foods altogether. Iron, calcium, potassium, magnesium, and vitamins like B, C, E, K are abundant in green leafy veggies. Vitamin B has a great affinity to curing PCOS in women.
Vitamin B is helpful in promoting thyroid functioning, fat metabolism, and hormonal balance. This results in an efficient treatment of PCOS.
Extra Supplements:
The above fiber rich, nutrient rich supplements are capable of giving you good hormonal balance. However, there are some more suggestions to be placed on the diet for PCOS.
- Multivitamin foods should be taken with good mineral content.
- Minerals like folic acid, magnesium, chromium, manganese, iron, zinc, selenium, and vitamins of B-complex, A, D, E, C are vital in the diet plan for PCOS
- Essential fatty acids are however a need of the hour.
Foods to Avoid with PCOS:
Refined Carbohydrates
Best foods to eat on a diet for PCOS cure are low carb foods. The converse becomes another hint, i.e. avoid foods like white bread, pastries in order to limit the PCOS symptoms further. Some more things to keep away are
- Muffins
- Sugary desserts
- White potatoes
- White flour made foods
Pasta noodles are highly rich in carbohydrates and fiber is in the least amounts. So, for a woman, the best foods to avoid with PCOS are the pasta.
Inflammatory Foods
French fries cause inflammation in the body with excessive consumption. Processed meat, red meat are rich in carbohydrates. They also cause inflammation. Better avoid them in your diet.
Soda, juice also contain harmful fats, sugars. Better avoid these things with added sugars when you are on a diet for PCOS.
Sugary foods
Sugar has various forms, viz. fructose, glucose, sucrose, etc. Any of these forms is dangerous from the carbohydrate viewpoint. Check out the ratios of these contents, if any found in the packaged food material that takes part in your diets.
Tips Before Following PCOS Diet
Some more salient points that come handy while following your diet are listed out here.
Be Patient with the Disease
Sometimes, if you are brought up in a sensitive atmosphere regarding your food habits, you might be frustrated to follow these strictly calculated diet habits. But this is the high time. You must be cool while carrying the things, and subtle towards your restraints. Diet plan for PCOS doesn’t demand intense food habits like 7-day weight loss meal plans. But, there are restrictions on some parts like sugars and carbs. This will be only a problem is you are that one sweet addicted folk.
Identify the good fat/bad fat contents before adding certain things to your diet.
The best diet for PCOS is already there with you, which is you are following right now. But with small changes above mentioned.
Replace margarine, white bread with whole grain bread, avocado. This improves fiber in the diet.
Should I Remove The Entire Carbohydrates?
Carbohydrates are filled with energy. Then why people recommend low carb foods? It is because the energy, on the whole, doesn’t get digested at one go of digestive juices. But the fibers involve in faster digestion, which is more recommended.
So, the low fiber carbs are not recommended for anybody. High fiber carbohydrates are the suggested foods.
Snacks like cookies, chips, and sugars like juices, soda, bread should be minimized in the diet for PCOS.
Whole grains are the one that help you a lot in enriching the energy with least accumulation, i.e. fats and cholesterol.
Protein and Glycemic Index
Protein added with carbohydrates work better than fibers alone.
Instead of regular rice and cereal, add some protein rich nuts, beans, eggs, meat, chicken to the food. This promotes in the healthy utilization of insulin in converting the food into energy.
In place of butter, margarine, cheese, mayonnaise, red meat, better have protein rich foods to faster your metabolism and keep your body fit. Best foods for PCOS is incomplete without good fibers and protein.
Glycemic Index indicates the sugar’s impact on blood. Higher sugar in the blood says the glycemic index to be more. Add fibers to the lower GI foods to benefit the metabolism some more.
Some foods with low glycemic index are
- cucumber
- Broccoli
- Carrots(Carrot benefits article)
- Oranges and grapes
- Plums
- Apples and berries
- Tomatoes and spinach
- Zucchini
- Celery and Cauliflower
High GI foods are potatoes, squash, peas, dried fruits, which are the foods to avoid with PCOS.
Nutrition Facts
Last, but not the least! One must be aware of what we are eating and how much. While going for factory-made ingredients, we must be more cautious about the nutritious portions of it. This is provided by nutrition facts chart on every packaged food product.
*Another point of concern is, the nutritional details are given per one serving. Some companies might provide daily recommended value for an adult.
Calories, fat in the calories, trans fat, and cholesterol are found in the fat description in the food.
Fiber, carbohydrate, protein are the dietary content of the food.
Vitamins, and Minerals like Calcium, Iron, Sodium, etc. are also provided in the chart.
Regarding the food, we must be cautious of only nutrients, but not the specific foods. For example, if you need the calcium more, search for the best food for PCOS and also that is more loved by you. You can also compare the same kind of foods basing on the nutrients chart for the better choice.
This is how one can maintain the health with proper food habits and also succeed to have the specific healthy diet for PCOS cure.
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