The Biggest Key To Weight Loss

The Biggest Key To Weight Loss

Most of us are aware that diet and exercise are the two pillars supporting healthy weight loss. Despite this common knowledge, our culture is vastly different from ancestors of less than a hundred years ago. We have seen a huge shift in the obesity epidemic in the country because of these and other changes. When you break it down eating healthy is not complicated, it’s just not easy in our culture. It may be easy to do but most people have no clue how to do it. We all grew up learning how to eat the wrong way.

First of all, we have a significant overabundance of food available.

We have access to almost any kind and quantity of food we can think of 24/7. This is far different from recent history where food was more of a feast or famine situation. You ate based on local availability and what was in season. This is both a good and bad thing. The high availability allows us to eat healthier more often… if we choose. It also makes it harder to eat less. It’s even harder to not eat highly processed foods that are readily available but not healthy food. Combine this with a “busy” and stressful lifestyle and we end up not making our meals a priority until the last minute. When that happens we reach for the quick and easy choices to satisfy that hunger ASAP. We all do this and it is a recipe for disaster.

More families have both parents working or have only one parent who works two or three jobs. There are fewer homemakers preparing homemade meals with fresh ingredients. Often homemakers today use cheaper, highly processed, easy to prepare food products to cut costs and prep or because that’s what they grew up doing. For those of us that have to work, food often becomes a secondary priority. This leads us to rely on quick and easy instead of healthy.

American culture relies heavily on quick, fast, and convenient in everything, especially food. When you cut corners like this there is a cost. Farmers cut corners to grow more and bigger plants. This costs you a healthy variety of food, less nutrition, and more toxic chemicals. Grocers and food companies want food to stay on the shelves longer so there is less waste and they make more money. This results in heavily processed foods that aren’t fresh and live foods. The longer it can sit on the shelf the less nutritional value there will be.

How do we eat healthy?

Two words; Food Preparation or Food Prep. This has become a bit of a “fad” currently and for good reason. The popularity of the Crossfit® culture encourages the use of healthy eating in combination with their unique exercise programs. Many Crossfit® enthusiasts are regular working suburbanites. Meaning both parents work and have little time for homemaking. It used to be common for healthy meals to be prepared daily in our older culture. Our modern culture has lost the homemaker. To apply consistent healthy eating habits encouraged in Crossfit®, these suburbanites have adapted by preparing their meals in advance. Enter the surge of Food Prep culture.

This is a huge step towards healthy eating when done right and it’s not hard. We often over-complicate healthy eating with strict or complicated diets. The key is simple, fresh, meals that can be eaten as part of a healthy lifestyle, not a diet reliant on restriction. It may take some time getting used to eating differently that you’ve been trained to by your parents and culture but it can be done. It’s much more effective to make these changes slowly as part of a lifestyle change instead of abruptly as part of a crash diet just to lose weight. People who diet almost always gain the weight back. Changing your lifestyle greatly reduces this risk and it’s easier. The only con is that it is often slower and takes a longer learning curve but it’s not bad.

• Prepare food in advance for the week.

  • Most people take Saturday or Sunday and spend an hour or two to prepare some meals for the week. The time it takes will depend on how many meals you make and if you make a lot of variety.

• Create meals by weight or volume.

  • Everyone is different and some may need to eat bigger meals or start big and reduce as they get healthier. Most people don’t realize how much of an impact this will have on your appetite. Regular healthy meals will make it easier to eat less.

  • Here’s a simple guide for creating healthy meals. Take one from each section per meal. Each meal receives 4, 6, 8, or 10 ounces of each category. Find a weight or volume that is right for you and reduce if you don’t feel or see changes after 6-8 weeks. If you want to be really healthy, replace the Clean Starch with a second vegetable.

    
    

  • Focus on more greens and veggies with healthy fats:

    • avocado, grass-fed butter, coconut oil, olive oil

    • avoid vegetable oils like vegetable oil, canola oil, hydrogenated oils, margarine

    • avoid processed sugar of all types

    • reduce high sugar fruits in excess (eat twice as many greens veggies)

  • Meal example

    • Green Vegetable: 6oz of blanched green beans add pink salt or grass-fed butter

    • Lean Protein: 6oz – 12oz grass-fed organic beef hamburger

    • Clean Starch: 6oz of cubed and seasoned baked sweet potatoes

• Heavy on the spices

  • Instead of relying on sugar or carbs to improve taste use quality sea salt, Himalayan salt, Real Salt and lots of herbs and spices.

  • Many of these spices have incredible health benefits and will reduce the need to added nutrient void calories to feel full or satiated

  • Here are some of my favorites: cumin, cinnamon, turmeric, basil, rosemary, curry, cayenne powder, coriander, cardamom, clove, oregano,

  • Copy premade blends: garam masala is a popular Indian food spice blend and one of my favorites. Italian seasoning, Jamaican seasoning, taco seasoning, Cajun spice, pumpkin spice are all good examples that you can copy or find variations online.

  • Different spices allow for the same types of foods to be completely different meals. This makes food prep easier. You prepare the same foods but just change up the spices.

• Get help

  • Don’t be afraid to pay for others to help you get started. It will be more expensive but often worth it just to get an idea of the size types of meals that you like.

  • Use them for one meal a day and then when you learn what you like and how much you need to eat. COPY it at home!

  • Making your own will often cut the cost in half.