Eating to Lose Weight

A healthy lifestyle includes exercising regularly, eating healthy and maintaining a healthy weight. Eating healthy can be a hard task with so many choices today, so here are some do's and dont's to eating to lose weight.

Do

Eat fresh foods, like vegetables and fruit, they are nutrient rich and healthy low fat foods. You will feel full longer than if you eat processed foods, and so much healthier for you. Vegetables and fruit are high in fiber, fiber promotes weight loss. Eating fiber makes you feel full longer, and cuts your craving between meal times, also fiber helps you to stay regular and lose weight. If increasing your fiber intake make sure you drink plenty of water, 6-8 glasses a day.

Eat smaller meals and eat more often, have your main three meals, but have healthy snacks in between. This helps to keep your metabolism higher and you burn more calories. A healthy snack could be almonds and walnuts, or raspberries, blueberries and blackberries wich are high in fiber.

Make sure you eat breakfast, it is the most important meal of the day. Studies have shown that if you eat breakfast, you tend to eat proportionally fewer calories the rest of the day. Try having eggs or oatmeal for breakfast, you will feel full longer, and is a healthy choice in eating to lose weight.

Drink enough water, lots of time we mistake thirst for hunger. Keeping yourself hydrated will make you feel less hungry, and give you a clearer complextion and shinier hair.


Dont

Don't drink concentrated orange juice, or other concentrated fruit juices. During the concentration process the juices are stripped of their natural fiber, and all you are left with is the sugar, wich can spike blood sugar levels and put your body into fat storing mode. Concentrated juices usually contain more sugar than soda.

Margarine is another unhealthy choice, it is high in trans fats, which cause you to gain weight, wipes out good cholesterol, and increases bad cholesterol by building up plaque in your arteries. Try butter instead, it has fat to but its saturated fat. Just use sparingly, one tablespoon of butter has 11 grams of fat.

Also try to cut soda out of your diet, soda is high in sugar and what you call empty carbs, no nutritional value. Water is the best, if you want some flavour add some fresh lemons or limes, also adding cucumber to your water bottle gives a nice flavour.

One that was a suprise to me and probably most people is wheat. Try cutting wheat from your diet, wheat has been genetically modified to the point it has lost a lot of its nutritional value. And studies have shown that wheat can cause blood sugar levels to spike more rapidly than eating pure sugar. In the book  Wheat Belly it claims eating two slices of whole wheat bread can increase blood sugar more than two tablespoons of pure sugar can,  and that cutting wheat out of you diet can speed up your weight loss.     
                                             




Remember when eating to lose weight, make small changes gradually, trying to change overnight will not work, only burn yourself out. Make losing weight your long term goal, 1-3 pounds a week is a good weight loss, and you will likely be able to keep the weight off. Start small, try cutting out 25 grams of fat a day, that translates to 25 pounds of body fat loss in a year, and who wouldn't be happy with that!