Whenever someone makes the decision that they are ready to lose weight and get in shape, they are confronted and bombarded by various methods that make outlandish promises. Past failures build up a wall of disappointment that can be difficult to breakthrough. While it takes a lot of determination, those walls do collapse when using the right tools. Healthy Eating is the wrecking ball that crushes your past disappointments and frees you from your discouraged and tired eating habits. The following is a simple but powerful list -the 3 Keys to guaranteed success in healthy eating.
- Count Ingredients, not Calories The value of knowing this can be demonstrated in a simple thought experiment. Let’s take a simple 3-ingredient meal of a chicken breast, crown of broccoli, and a baked potato. What you have is a healthy meal with sufficient protein, carbs, and vitamins to last you until you eat next -most importantly, you know precisely what is on your plate. Now, take a “healthy” microwave dinner with the same supposed ingredients. All you have to do is look at the ingredients on the back of the package to notice that there are more than three, and likely more than 30 (most of which you can’t even pronounce)! Be mindful of what you put into your body, the fewer preservatives the better -always. Ask any health professional and they would rather you eat a large low-ingredient meal than a low-calorie meal loaded with preservatives and chemicals.
- Don’t Drink Your Calories Consider this: one can of Cola has 140 of the simplest and non-nutritious calories around. 3 Can a day is almost one-third of the recommended total daily caloric intake of some people. It’s best to be wise about what you’re drinking because sometimes there is significant weight to be lost by simply choosing water instead of soda. Alcoholic drinks are also havened for empty calories so make sure you understand where you’re getting your energy from and work to ensure it’s from quality foods as often as possible.
- Eat Consistently You’ve heard of the 100 calorie/day diet, the juice diet, and various supplement diets. Options like these fail in their approach to making you lose weight for two reasons. First, low-calorie diets treat the symptoms and not the cause of weight gain; they take out the fuel your body requires rather than tackling the body that requires fuel. Second, they are doomed to fail from the beginning because they impose hunger and inevitably inspire binge eating once you can’t take it anymore. Let’s be clear, you will never achieve lasting weight loss by being hungry. You need to be eating fewer calories more often so that you can boost your metabolism to become a calorie-burning machine! The days of 3 big meals are out in the 21st century, it’s time we started eating when our body needs it most, and that’s a small meal once every 3-4 hours or so.
There are your 3 simple steps to ensuring healthy eating success. Keep diligent and the results will take care of themselves, and if necessary seek the support of communities and nutritionists if the challenges persist. Happy eating!
