Getting Healthy: Watch what you eat!
You don’t have to thrash yourself in the gym or run 10 miles everyday to lose weight. Weight loss is 80% diet & 20% exercise. Watching what you eat and cutting out the unwanted carbs and sugars is enough to get started on the path to a healthier you.
Counting Calories
Avoid filling your grocery cart with common junk foods like cookies and chips at your grocery store. Even if you eat out, skip the cookie after your subway sandwich, trade in that soda for a bottle of water. Make small changes in your diet, pretty soon, you will be calorie counting as you see the results on the scale and the mirror. Calorie counting is similar to planning your budget. You don’t go to a clothing store and buy a pair of jeans without looking at the price tag, however great it fits, of course unless you are not fiscally responsible. Being physically responsible is also similar, much like you check the price of the jeans to ensure it fits within your budget, you should check on the nutritional info for a food product before you consume it to make sure it fits within your calorie budget for the day.
For eg., a chocolate chip cookie from subway has 210 calories in it, including 30 grams of carbs & 17 grams of sugars, while a 6″ turkey breast sub has 280 cals/46 gms carbs/7 gms sugars. If you are on a 1500 calorie per day meal plan, would you rather have a 490 calorie meal or a 280 meal? 280, of course, so, you could by simply looking at the numbers, cut your lunchtime calories almost half by eliminating that one cookie from your meal.
Start Logging your food
A good way that has helped a lot of people is to start logging the food you consume everyday. It is really a game changer. You can see when sometimes you consume too much. For eg., you might love fruit juices, lemonade, milk, chocolate milk, and can easily drink them multiple times in a day. You might think what’s wrong with these things, they are not bad like soda or cake, but if you look at the labels you will realize, that’s easily about 400 – 1200 calories you are consuming each day and that’s just the liquids part. Instead of these, change to drinking only water, black coffee or green tea.
Once you start logging food, you will see how the calories add up and you are eating 2000-3000 calories per day. New research shows that a person who is used to snacking on handfuls of things like cheese or chocolate candy or chips have stopped doing it when he started logging all the food consumed. Eventually, the cravings for these snacks disappeared!
So the takeaway from the above is:
- In order for you to lose weight, start watching what you eat.
- Calorie counting helps you in choosing the right foods and eliminate the bad ones.
- Start logging your foods, this will help you seeing what you eat and will aid you in cut your cravings.
More helpful tips: Meal prepping, 30 minutes per day.
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