You
don’t need to starve and suffer yourself to lose weight. Have you tried dieting
before and you ended up with no long lasting results? Follow the tips given
below to eat healthy and live slim forever!!
Breakup with dieting:
Breakup with the mindset of dieting and focus on healthy eating. Dieting is type of restriction where you’ll have a list of foods that you should eat and list of foods that you cannot touch at all. Extreme diets also controls how, when and how much you should be eating throughout the day. Dieting drains your energy and also your blood sugar level. If you have tried dieting before you would have experienced a thousands of thoughts going through your mind and emotional confusion just to make a simple decision on eating a meal. Some diets are in calorie depleted state which will make you feel hungry all the time and at the same time you can’t eat. In this case, what happens is, you give in for your cravings, consuming large amount of junk food and commit yourself “I’ll start again tomorrow”. This keeps repeating on regular basis and you start feeling really guilty, eat worse and gain even more weight. So ditch the idea of dieting as it actually makes it tough for you to lose weight and is certainly doesn’t help in maintaining healthy weight for long term.2. Get motivated on building a lifestyle of Healthy Habits:
If you want to lose weight and lead a healthy lifestyle you will need to make some changes to your current eating habits. The best thing to start is to keep a food journal of your current eating habits for 2 weeks. The purpose of this is to record positive habits and keep them. Again it is to record and identify negative habits and slowly change them to healthier habits. So you have to be honest with yourself so don’t change your eating pattern just because you are keeping a food journal. Instead eat as you eat regularly and record everything. Be precise and don’t forget to mention time, food amount you eat and what triggers you to eat? You may notice sometimes that when you’re stressed you head directly to your snack box and end up munching negatively just to relax yourself!! This may happen 2-3 times in a week. Now that you have identified unhealthy habit you need to work on changing it. Your food journal will also tell you the positive food habits you have. For example, you might start your morning with really healthy breakfast. Thus 30% of your meals in a week are already healthy and we want to keep that. Remember that habit is not build overnight and it is gradual process that we need to keep implementing always on daily basis until we become instinctive. Once you build a lifestyle of healthy habits, you’ll automatically be healthier!3. Eat “Real” Food:
What it really means? It means eating food closest to its natural state and minimally processed. Real food tends to be perishable and seasonal. The obvious are chicken, egg, grains, beans, fruits and vegetables. This includes frozen or canned foods so long as they are not in accompany of artificial ingredients or containing lots of added preservatives. So canned beans and frozen vegetables are fine. Just because food has been altered from its natural raw state doesn’t necessarily mean processing is bad. Minimally processed food such as grinding, baking or fermenting is fine by me. For example, tofu, yogurt, etc. The biggest issue with industry processed food is that they are highly processed with added preservatives, refined grains, refined sugar and basically to the extent that food is no longer recognized as what it claims to be. So next time you go for food shopping, remember this, IGNORE ALL THE “HEALTH” CLAIMS & “FANCY” LABELS!! They are only meant to distract you! The only thing you should pay attention to is the “Ingredient list”, especially the top 3 ingredients. If sugar or any form of sugar is in the top 3 ingredient it is best to avoid buying it. If there are too many scientific words or if the list is too long, try to avoid it. Find ingredients that sound like “Real Food”. Real foods have highly nutritious value and will help you to maintain healthy weight long term.
4. Practice mindful eating:
To simplify, STOP STUFFING food into your mouth! Due to our fast pace lifestyle nowadays, most of us are guilty of that including me, we eat so fast that we don’t even taste our food. We eat with distractions and we even eat food that we don’t know were eating. This is worst because it will suffer our weight loss goal. When you focus on your food, you will get more satisfaction and pleasure as a result you will eat less.Try these simple tricks to develop mindful eating:
a. Put your food on plate. Avoid eating out of bag straight from fridge or even from package.b. Enjoy the food with all your senses. So look, smell your food, take small bites and fully appreciate it with taste and texture.c. Sit at a dining table or place that’s meant for meal. No sitting on the couch!!d. Focus on the present moment and avoid any distractions. No eating in front of TV, computer or doing any other activity besides enjoying your food.e. Choose places with dim lightings. Because it has shown to slow down our eating pace and hence eating less! Bright fluorescent lighting in fast food joints and cafeteria are meant to speed up our eating and unknowingly you might end up eating more.f. Playing slow music in the background can also slow down your eating pace.g. The speed of another person you’re eating with, can also affect your pace and the amount you eat. Apply these tips and naturally you will start to listen to your body and STOP when you are satisfied and not when you are stuffed.5. Prepare your food yourself:
Start cooking yourself as eating healthy starts from home. A healthy meal means simple meals. I like meals to be easy, quick, lesser ingredients; stress free and I enjoy cooking.Try and practice these tips and it will help you to lose weight and maintain healthy weight for life without ever going on dieting.
ALL THE BEST!!
Reference:
http://www.summertomato.com/tag/mindful-eating
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