To often people come into my gym and they’re depressed, frustrated and at their wits end. Either they couldn’t take weight off or they did and within weeks it returned….and often brought friends. There’s a logical reason that dieting doesn’t work and it’s all about those pounds finding their way back home after the diet ends. When you diet, it always ends. That’s when you go back to your normal eating habits that put on weight in the first place. Of course, you’ll gain that weight back again. Keeping the pounds off requires more than just lowering your caloric intake for a few weeks or months, it means changing your eating habits for a lifetime. When you add a program of exercise, you keep your metabolism burning hot!
What’s the difference between eating healthy and dieting.
When you diet, you often feel deprived or hungry. You have are limited to the food listed on your diet. Some diets, like fad diets, limit that selection severely by focusing on a “magic soup” or “weight loss elixir to drink three times a day.” Eating healthy just means making smarter choices when it comes to food. For instance, just switching from white rice to brown rice can save a few calories, while also boosting the nutritional content of the meal.
You might have a diet to follow initially, but that’s only until you learn the best changes to make.
It takes time to change old habits. Those eating habits may have come from your childhood, so many are rooted in the comfort food area. These are go-to foods when anything significant affects your life. Changing that doesn’t happen overnight. Learning what’s healthy and lower in calories isn’t always easy. In fact, food manufacturers often do everything they can to confuse the average consumer. The easiest thing to remember is that eating healthy means eating food that’s closest to its natural state and less processed.
Eating healthy also means eating food without added sugar.
You won’t eliminate eating food with added sugar by skipping the bakery area or pushing the cart quickly past the candy area. Sugar is in everything. To make matters worse, the amount of sugar something contains is often hidden by using several different types of sugar and listing each separately. If there were just 8 ingredients in a food and four of them were different types of sugar, from dextrose to sucrose or HFCS, if they were listed separately, sugar might not be the top ingredient. The last four ingredients might be the sugars, even though combined, they equaled over 50 percent of the contents.
- You’ll be surprised at how good food tastes once you get your taste buds back to normal. Today’s eating habits overload them with sugar. Once you give it up for a while, you’ll get more of the true taste of food.
- Don’t despair if you think you’ll never get to have your favorite foods again. It’s just not so. When you eat healthy, you can eat almost anything, just not on an everyday basis and with portion control in mind.
- Smarter eating is also combined with regular exercise. When you workout regularly, you’ll build muscle tissue and that boosts your metabolism to help keep pounds off 24/7.
- Regular exercise also builds your energy level, so you’ll be more active. The more active you are, the more apt you’ll be to keep pounds off permanently.
For more information, contact us today at The Worx by Maia