It’s been a few days; hope you are hitting those goals hard! I know so many people right now who are struggling to lose weight and get healthy, so let’s focus a little bit on your eating to start with. Do you know what it means to “eat clean”? When you are trying to lose weight you need to realize that although getting in daily activity is important the biggest thing to successfully loosing weight and getting healthy is what you put into your body on a daily basis. Not all calories are created equally and you need to view it as lifestyle change and not a diet. What’s the difference you ask? A diet is something temporary, a quick fix or a band-aid for the problem. A lifestyle change is something you can do for the rest of your life.
Let’s start with what it means to ‘eat clean”, there really is not one specific definition to describe it. To help with describing what clean eating is I am going to refer to clean eating guru Tosca Reno (LOVE her books, she is amazing). http://www.cleaneatingmag.com/food-health/food-and-health-news/what-is-clean-eating/
She describes it as eating smaller more frequent meals, three meals and two to three snacks throughout the day, approximately every two and a half to three hours. These meals should include lean protein, complex carbs (examples would be sweet potatoes or brown rice), and fresh fruit and/or vegetables (you want to eat more fresh vegetables and keep your fruits to before and after your workouts if you are trying to lose weight). If you learn what are considered portions then you shouldn’t need to track your calories. A good way to figure portions is by using your hand as a guide, example make a fist that is a good portions size for a potato, now hold your hand out flat that’s a good example of a portion for a chicken breast. You also need to drink plenty of water, Tosca Reno says you should drink two liters of water day, others say half your weight in ounces. So if you are a 120 pound female, than you should be drinking a minimum of 60 ounces of water a day. Many people without even realizing it drink the large portion of their calories in drinks like juice and soda, not only will this not be filling, the sugar and chemicals will cause chaos in your body. Your food should come from as close to earth as possible, this means learning to read the labels. Look for fewer ingredients and ingredients that are real. The less it takes to make it means the less processed it is, and the better it is for you. If it sounds it sounds like a science experiment than it probably is. When grocery shopping a good rule to follow is to stick to the perimeter of the grocery store, that’s where all the real food is. Another general rule about determining if the food is healthy is the farther out the expiration date it is, the more chemicals it has in it. Fresh food has a shorter shelf life because it lacks preservatives (AKA chemicals) to keep it from spoiling. Remember the big fat-free frenzy in the late 80’s, well there are studies and reports now that are saying this big change to our diets is what caused Americans as a whole to get fat. All the chemicals and processing that whole foods went through to become fat-free, in short couldn’t be effectively broken down and utilized by our bodies and instead turned into fat. We need to have fat in our diet, yes you read that correctly, you must eat fats to be healthy. Here’s the catch, it needs to be healthy fats from things like nuts, seeds, fish and not the processed chemical laden fat sources. Again learning portions is key, just because raw peanuts are healthy for you doesn’t mean you can seat down and eat two pounds of nuts in one day (and they need to be raw nuts, not mixed nuts with peanut oils in them). In the age of our fast paced lives people often do not make time to sit and eat a proper and healthy meal, we find ourselves going through the drive thru of major food chains for greasy burgers with super sized fries and soda and then we scarf down while driving. Not only are we not burning off the calories because of our inactive lifestyles but we are slowly poisoning our body with foods that are not healthy and well it’s even questionable whether we can call some of that stuff “food”. It is super easy to pack yourself a small cooler with some snacks in case you are going to be out for a long period of time, put hardboiled eggs, Larabars, nuts, fresh fruit and/or fresh-cut vegetables in it….and never leave home without your water bottle.
Ok, well I’m going to jump off my “clean eating” soap box, I could go on for days about it, but seriously I’ve included a link for Tosca Reno’s blog where she can help with getting on the right track with your diet. I am not a certified dietician (yet) and cannot offer specific advice, but I do recommend from personal experience starting with reading some of Tosca Reno’s books, it’s a step in the right direction. I specifically recommend her book, “The Rules: Tosca’s Guide Eating Right”, it’s chock full of information about clean eating, and I found it very helpful to start making baby steps to clean up my diet.
FitFulThinking 