This post comes to us courtesy of our friends at Optimal Body Balance.
Most diets these days focus heavily on calorie counting. Most people believe that weight loss results from creating a calorie deficit, burning more calories with physical activity than you consume. Seems simple and logical, but it doesn’t hold water.
Calories don’t tell you anything about the quality of your diet. If you’re loading up on sugar-free, fat-free foods and guzzling diet soda, you may have a low calorie count but I guarantee you’re lacking on necessary vitamins, minerals, fiber and other essential nutrients you need to be at your healthiest.
Instead of tracking your calories, take a more simple and stress-free approach: eat real foods that taste good. That means buying and preparing foods that are unprocessed. You should be buying fresh foods that haven’t been touched by food scientists or processing plants. Packaged foods should be a minimal part of your diet. When you look at the ingredient list of a packaged food, make sure the ingredient list is short and you recognize everything listed. You want to especially stay away from special “diet” foods. Yes, the fat-free and sugar-free foods, the artificially sweetened foods, and the frozen lean cuisine dinners. Those are often times the worst foods you could be eating at a time you want to lose weight.
Just as important as what you are eating is when you are eating it. The timing of your meals can greatly help or hurt your weight loss goals. If you skip breakfast and visit the vending machine for lunch, hardly eating anything until you get home, then you are putting your body in conservation mode. Your metabolism will shut down and burn energy so slowly and efficiently that it will be nearly impossible for you to lose weight. And then when you do eat something, your body will store as much of it as it can as fat because you body doesn’t know when it’s next meal will be.
Ideally you should eat a balanced meal every 3-4 hours. So you have breakfast at 8 am, lunch at 11:30 am, second lunch at 3 and dinner at 6. Eating this way will help your metabolism function properly and regulate your blood sugar and insulin levels. You will also have more energy, increased concentration and be more productive. Sounds great, huh?
