If eating healthy and losing extra weight seems impossible, you might just need a re-frame to turn your thoughts around. Healthy weight loss is the result of a conscious choice to make eating a balanced diet a priority. It’s about honoring yourself rather than the difficulty of dieting or the fake reward of indulging in junk food.
Here are three tips to re-frame your thoughts:
1. Knowledge Is Power
Learning as much as you possibly can about why healthy foods are so good for you can help motivate you to eat them more often, so healthy eating just becomes a habit. Start with the healthy foods that you like, and learn about all of their benefits.
Apples, for example, might seem pretty ordinary, but one medium-sized apple gives you 14 % of your daily intake of vitamin C. About 85 % of their weight is water, which contributes to your daily fluid intake. Fluids, along with the fiber that is plentiful in apples, help maintain a healthy colon and rids your body of toxins and waste in your system.
[pullquote]A healthy and efficient colon is crucial to healthy weight loss.[/pullquote]
Apples are low in calories and fat, so they make a good snack to fill you up without throwing off your healthy eating plan. They also have phytosterols, which have been shown (in combination with other healthy diet habits) to reduce the risk of heart disease.
Apples are just the beginning – fresh fruits and vegetables are the best things you can add in to your daily routine, for both exceptional health and weight loss.
2. Plan Healthy Snack And Meals
Having a couple of snacks during the day is a helpful way to maintain energy levels and reduce the chances that you’ll overeat at meal-time. But if they aren’t properly planned, snacks can easily lead to unhealthy choices and add a lot of calories to your daily intake without you even realizing it.
For example, 100 grams of plain tortilla chips add nearly 500 calories and 100 grams of milk chocolate add almost 550 calories. Both have refined fats, salt, preservatives, and other harmful ingredients to your body. If instead, you have an apple with a tablespoon of peanut butter as your snack, it’s a more reasonable 200 calories plus valuable nutrients.
When you plan your meals, to make sure you have a filling and nourishing breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you should find it easier to resist the temptation of a quick treat.
3. Don’t Restrict
So many diet plans focus your energy on avoiding, losing, and reducing. Fad diets always encourage you to restrict something, whether it’s calories, carbohydrates, protein, fat, or something else. There’s always some kind of restriction. And that leads to feeling deprived and then to cravings and binges. This then leads to feeling bad about yourself. That’s not a healthy way to live, and it’s certainly not very fun.
Instead, why not turn your energy around and focus on creating good health for yourself? It’ll take some time to shift your thinking, but it’s a much healthier outlook on diet and weight loss.
Re-frame the mindset of restricting calories by focusing on reducing calorie density. Eat foods that have a low calorie level for their volume – things like cucumbers, celery, apples, pears, grapes, and squash.
By doing this, you not only redirect your energy to a positive upward cycle of nourishment rather than a negative downward spiral of cravings and guilt but also fill yourself up so that there’s not as much room for the junk you know you shouldn’t be eating.
