How To Get Fit (and Stay That Way)
It’s a good idea to start by banning the word ‘diet’ from your perception about eating healthy. Diets usually do not work. Why? People eat healthy momentarily to drop a few pounds, then return to the junk that made them fat in the first place. It’s a vicious cycle! In order to lead a healthy life – and to look lean and fit and feel awesome as a result – a ‘diet’ should result in life change in how you eat.
Today, I’m going to expose some diet misconceptions that could help clear the air on why we’re not as fit as we could be.
Eat to Live
Why do we eat? Our bodies need fuel and nourishment.
We often have a bad habit of eating calorie-rich restaurant foods and random snacks that have very high fat, sugar, and sodium content but don’t provide quality fuel – and these calories take a lot longer to burn off.
The body burns carbohydrates, then fat for energy. We will never lose body fat while we’re consuming so many empty carbs and saturated fats because the body will keep using those for ‘fuel’, leaving the excess baggage we had to begin with.
The only solution is to eat to live – small, quality meals with a healthy balance of protein, fiber, carbs, and vitamins/minerals spaced every few hours leave us feeling amazingly energized and healthy throughout the day and keeps our metabolism in high gear.
Food should be the last thing on our minds. Your body will tell you when it is hungry (which should be every 2-3 hours), so have a healthy meal or a nutritious snack ready for those times. This will keep us from reaching for chips or fast food because we’re hungry and unprepared!
You Are What You Eat
I never understood this concept until I changed my unhealthy eating habits.
It’s pretty simple. When you eat healthy, you feel great. You lose body fat and water and your skin glows. Your hair is thicker and shinier. Who knew that eating healthy could do all these things?
Food not only affects your physical body, it also affects your mood. As a test, start to pay attention to the way your body feels after eating certain foods. You’ll then notice how food affects us in ways we never realized.
I used to feel as if I’d never have as much energy as I should. I felt lazy all the time, my skin was dull, and I couldn’t figure out why I was gaining weight. It took forever for me to wake up in the mornings and I could barely concentrate in school or work. When I stopped eating junk food and started eating regular, healthy meals, all of these things changed dramatically.
So it’s true. We are what we eat!
What Is Healthy and What Is Not?
The healthiest foods are generally those that took the least amount of processing/preparing to get to your mouth. Take chicken, for example. If you go to the store, purchase boneless skinless chicken breast from the meat freezer, go home, and bake it using some spices and low-calorie goods from your kitchen, you’ve got quality protein and fuel on your plate (along with anything else you’ve prepared).
When you order the same chicken breast from most restaurants, it has been cooked in more oil, with glazes, butter, salt and whatever else added to it to make it look and taste good. This is just an example. Those additives only add to our calorie toll and often wreck havoc on our weight and moods.
It just takes a discernment about what we throw into our shopping cart and what we order at restaurants.
Healthy meals should include a balance of protein (lean meats, eggs, soy products, etc), fruits and vegetables, and GOOD carbs (such as long grain rice, oatmeal, low-calorie tortillas, etc).
Portion control is a huge part of this equation. To keep it simple, we should be eating about a 3:1 ratio of protein/fruits/veggies:carbs. Remember that the body burns carbohydrates before fat. The more carbs and fats you eat, the more your body needs to burn before it burns stubborn body fat.
Healthy Food Options
If some of us have looked in our cupboards by now, we realize that there are a lot of foods in there that we should neglect if we are trying to be fit. Don’t think of this as limitation, but power. Knowledge is power and the more we know about feeding our bodies well, the better we can control our nutrition and weight/mood/appearance as a result.
When I shop for groceries, here are a few guidelines that I use. Feel free to tweak these to your own needs or abilities.
These habits have become robotic to me because I have learned a lot and have changed my attitude towards nutrition. I also shop at my local health food store where I won’t need to read labels as much – their foods have little to no preservatives and are as close to all-natural as you can buy commercially. So if you have a health food store nearby, go crazy!
It was impossible to cover everything but those ideas are a good starting point. In order to fine tune my upcoming fitness posts, please ask any questions you may have in the comments, whether it be, “Is X food good for me?” or if you have an issue with something I have addressed. I will answer all questions within the comments as well as addressing popular concerns in future posts.
Next up: Exercise tips. There is a lot more to cover so stay tuned (and stay fit)!
