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How Your Body System Works Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths around about weight loss, exercise and nutrition.Here are just 3 of them: 1. Carbohydrates are fattening. There are a lot of people avoiding foods like breads and pastas at the moment because they believe that because they are high sources of carbohydrates that they are fatting. The truth is that anything is fattening if you eat more of it than you bodyneeds. Even lettuce can be stored as fat. Any food or drink which contains calories can be stored as body fat if it causes your blood sugar levels to exceed what the body needs at that time. Natural breads and pastas are great sources of complex carbohydrate which help fuel your body and keep you feeling full and satisfied for longer. The key is how much you eat and when you eat it. 2. Lack of exercise makes you fat. The truth is you don't gain body fat because of a lack of exercise. You gain it because your blood sugar levels exceed what you are using. Basically, you are eating too many calories. Exercising everyday has many health benefits and can help you burn excess calories. But if you eat far more than you need, exercise alone will not make you slimmer. No matter what you hear about weight loss, the simplest rule to remember is this; if you take in more calories than you burn, your body will store those calories as fat and you'll gain weight. 3. Eating after 7pm makes you fat. This isn't true. Eating at any time will make you fat if your body doesn't need the food you eat. Eating after 7pm is OK if your body needs the amount of calories you consume at that time. Remember, your body is burning calories 24 hours a day, it just burns them at different rates throughout the day and you should try to feed your body at those times when it needs the calories most. Changing your Eating Habits: Changing our eating behavior is one of the critical lifestyle changes necessary to successfully lose weight and keep it off. For many people, changing old eating habits is one of the hardest things they’ll ever do, as anybody who has failed at dieting can attest. If you’ve tried to change your eating habits before and have failed, or if you’re about to embark on a weight loss plan that involves a change towards healthier eating, the tips in this article may help you succeed. First things first: One of the reasons most people fail to stick to a diet is that they take the wrong first step. There are broadly two ways to change your eating habits in order to help you lose weight: 1. Change what you eat 2. Change how much you eat Ideally, in order to maximize weight loss over the LONG TERM we need to change both. But it’s not a good idea to change both at once. This is where most people make mistakes. They try to change both at once or if they only change one, they change the wrong one first. When faced with the above two options, most people take option 1 first when the best first option to take to help you lose weight is typically option 2. Why? The reason is actually quite simple. It is far easier for most of us to go from eating 3 to 2 pieces of friedchicken for dinner than it is to go from 3 pieces of fried chicken to a garden salad. Sure, eating the salad will help us lose more weight than forgoing only one piece of fried chicken, but permanent weight loss is a long term process and going down to 2 pieces of chicken forever is far better than eating a garden salad for dinner for 1 week and then going back to 3 pieces of chicken for the rest of our life. Tips On How To Reduce Your In-Take Here are some tips to help you reduce the amount you eat: Making small permanent changes are better than radical changes that you won’t be able to live with. 1.1 Don't worry about falling back to your old behavior for a day or two, only the long term counts. 1.2 Use portion controlled packaged foods to help you (prepackaged frozen meals and single serve snack packs for example). 1.3 Use smaller plates than usual to serve your meals. 1.4 Eat small amounts of food every couple of hours so you’re not starving at main meal times. 1.5 Drink plenty of water throughout the day –most people mistake thirst for hunger. 1.6 Eat slowly and concentrate on your meal –don’t watch TV while you’re eating for example. 1.7 Gradually reduce your serving sizes over time until they reach the ideal size. 1.8 Be the last one at the table to start eating. 1.9 Place leftover food in small, single serve containers. 2.0 Have soup or a salad with low calorie dressing to begin a meal. 2.1 As soon as you begin to feel full, stop eating. Another step OK, you’ve gradually started to reduce the amount of food you eat and are starting to slowly (but surely) lose weight. If you haven’t already, now is the time to start to become more active to improve your general level of fitness, increase your energy levels and of course speed up the weight loss process. Now that these habits are well established, it’s time to start thinking about making minor positive adjustments to what we eat. Instead of eating a piece of fried chicken for dinner for example (we’ve migrated from 3 down to 2 and now down to 1) maybe we can have a piece of fried chicken without the skin or a piece of grilled or broiled chicken instead. And maybe we can replace half of the chips that accompany our chicken with a corn cob or a handful of your favorite steamed vegetables. See how we’re making small positive changes that we can live with? While changing what we eat is often more difficult that slowly but gradually reducing how much we eat, there are things that we can do to make sure that when we do begin to change this aspect of our behavior that we are successful. |
    
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