If losing weight is your goal, your diet is the first thing you need to address. Exercise is certainly important also, but when it comes down to losing weight, diet is crucial. I hope this article will provide some useful tips and information on how you can make some healthy changes in your everyday diet.
1. You should always have “healthy fats” as part of your diet. They are essential for keeping up the body’s correct hormone levels. And these hormones are required for both burning fat and building muscle. They help to curb your appetite also.
You may be wondering where you can get all these “healthy fats”. Well, seeds, raw nuts and avocados are good sources, as are the yolks of organic eggs. Coconut oil contains medium chain triglycerides, a great source of healthy fats. Extra virgin olive oil has the highest level of antioxidants, and grass-fed meat has “conjugated linoleic acid”, which helps to build muscle as well as burn fat.
Here’s a good tip – try a handful of raw nuts, such as almonds or pecans, about 30 minutes before your main meals. This will help to quell the appetite, and give you protein, fiber and “healthy fat”. Just a handful will do the trick – nuts are very nutrient-intensive.
2. With each of your meals, try to include a high-protein item. I like to use a grass-fed dairy product, a grass-fed meat product, or high-protein beans or nuts. This helps to control your intake of calories and takes the edge off your appetite.
Getting proteins like these means that, if you are working out regularly, the body puts on more lean muscle rather than fat. And your metabolism will be able to run faster, thus better able to burn off fat.
3. By eating lots of protein with each of your meals, you are helping your body to control blood sugar and insulin levels. This is because the protein helps to slow down the breakdown of ingested carbohydrates. I am not in favour of low carb diets, but I would say that the reason most people struggle to lose weight is because of their high intake of processed carbohydrates like refined grain-based starches and refined sugar, day in and day out.
Although fruits contain sugars also, they are fine because the fiber within fruit helps to slow down the blood sugar response. But fruit juice should be avoided, because it has been stripped of fiber by the processing of the juice.
When people reduce their grain intake (bread,pasta,cereals etc), it usually follows that they start losing fat. If you can reduce your consumption of grains, and switch to fruit and vegetables as much as possible, you will find that losing weight has become a whole lot easier for you.
If you will follow these 3 steps to a healthier and smarter diet, I have no doubt that you will soon develop a leaner body and you will have lots more energy.
