How to develop the proper eating habits to help you lose weight.
When it comes to weight loss, there is one ingredient that is usually missing from a weight loss plan. As a certified personal trainer, I have found the biggest struggle for my clients is learning to develop a healthy lifestyle that includes proper nutrition. Eating habits can either be your worst enemy or your best friend, so with weight loss, or any fitness goal for that matter, how you should eat needs to be a priority.
With weight loss, achieving your goals comes down to pure science. Weight loss is a calorie battle, so if you are eating more calories than you are burning off, you can try all you want, but you are going to continue putting the weight on. The goal is to burn off more calories than you take in. This is achieved by developing an exercise routine to aid in calorie burning, along with watching how much you eat. You need to develop a lifestyle where portion sizes are controlled with each meal. Picture your body as a funnel. With a funnel, if you pour too much water in a funnel at one time, the water cannot funnel through fast enough, and it overflows on the sides. That is how your body works. If you eat too much at one meal, your body cannot handle that many calories at one time, so the “overflow” is stored as excess fat. Just like a funnel, if you eat small portions throughout the day, or pour small portions of water in the funnel over an extended period of time, you will not get that “overflow” or storage of excess fat. Portion sizes are such a huge problem in this country; if you can learn to control how much you eat, you will be amazed by how much excess fat you can lose.
Another important area of nutrition is when to eat. Your body’s metabolism regulates how your body controls weight gain/loss. I love analogies, so another great analogy is to picture your metabolism as a fire. To keep a campfire burning brightly, wood needs to constantly be added to it. The same with your body; to keep your body’s fire (metabolism) burning brightly and burning calories (potential excess fat), you need to constantly be feeding the fire. Let’s say you only eat two meals in a day; what happens? You wake up from a fast during the night where your metabolism was very low, you chose not to break the fast by not eating “break”-“fast”, so your metabolism stays low and does not allow your body to burn off as many excess fat calories as it has the potential to do. Then, you eat lunch and your metabolism spikes, which results in you burning more calories off. It then drops, you get hungry, and you spike your metabolism again by eating dinner before going to bed. For many of you, this is probably what a typical day looks like. It is time to change that! Develop a meal plan that incorporates a meal or snack every 2-3 hours throughout the day. By eating around five times a day, your metabolism will shoot up at breakfast and never drop significantly between meals because a snack between each meal will keep your metabolism burning brightly, resulting in your body burning significantly more calories and aiding in your weight loss goals.
One other thing to think about; a calorie is a calorie. Do not think that you need to force yourself to drink and eat nothing but broccoli smoothies and organic, cucumber sandwiches with the little wheat flakes on the crust. Eat what you enjoy to eat! Just be smart about it. Remember, it is all about portion control. Eat the foods you like, just be careful about how much of it you eat. Do not make your eating a flavorless task; make it enjoyable because you are more likely to stick with a healthy nutrition lifestyle if you enjoy it.
So now you know. Try it! I challenge you to try this type of lifestyle for a month and see what happens. If you can make nutrition work for you, instead of against you, you will be amazed by how much better you will feel!
Dan Falkenberg is the co-founder and co-owner of Your Live Trainers at YourLiveTrainers.com