Building Healthy Eating Habits For Better Health.
It seems like everywhere you look there are new ideas and trends in healthy eating. There are books and articles that advocate everything from skipping meals to full on cheat days where you can eat anything and everything you want. Common sense should tell us that healthy eating is not deprivation or complete indulgence, but it can be hard to weed through the hacks and figure out what is good information and what works for you.
Calories and Meals
Whether you want to maintain your weight or lose weight, you need to eat properly every day. Your body needs a consistent supply of energy in order to function optimally. Just like you probably have a routine of when you go to sleep, go to work and do other things, you should have an established pattern of when you eat. If you are trying to lose weight the foods you eat and when you eat accounts for 60 to 70% of your weight loss goals. If you start skipping meals it becomes easier to eat anything and everything that is available when you are hungry. By eating meals and snacks you ensure that you can maintain portion control for each meal.
Alcohol and Weight Loss
If you have weight loss goals, drinking alcohol will not help you achieve your goals. Your body metabolizes alcohol differently than food. Your body views alcohol as a toxin and begins processing it immediately to get it out of your system. While your body is dealing with the alcohol, calories from fats and carbohydrates gets stored as fat. Alcohol also stimulates your appetite and impairs your judgement. When you feel hungry and have impaired judgement it becomes very easy to forget your healthy eating and weight loss goals. The calories you consume from alcohol are not going to make you feel full, so you still need to eat. Even though there are health benefits associated with a glass of wine or a beer a day, calories from alcohol can add up very quickly. For instance a glass of sweet red wine has 165 calories, a glass of regular beer has 153, and lite beer has 100, while 1oz. of alcohol (think gin, vodka or rum) has about 100 calories. Once you add mixers you can add anywhere from 100 to 250 calories per cocktail. If you drink two-three cocktails you can easily add close to 1000 extra calories to your diet per day.
Why Cheat Days Don’t Work
There’s so much wrong with the concept of “cheat” meals and “cheat” days, it’s hard to know where to begin. The concept of cheating your body out of nutrient dense foods in favor of foods that don’t provide proper nutrition or that are mainly fats, sugar or refined carbs is wrong across the board both physically and emotionally. It’s common for us to be told that we deserve to eat treats and cheat meals, but this isn’t true. If you have weight loss and fitness goals, you don’t deserve to eat foods that do not support our health and goals. You deserve better! If you spend all week eating healthy and making healthy choices, you do not deserve to eat a chocolate cake or a platter of fried chicken on Saturday. What you deserve is a healthy tasty meal that nourishes your body and allows you to take a rest day from working out. Cheat meals and cheat days support unhealthy eating patterns. If you like certain sweets or foods that are considered unhealthy, you have three choices: eliminate, reinvent or moderate. You can either stop eating those foods, figure out how to make the food so it’s healthy, or eat a smaller portion of the food and include it into your regular meal plan in proper portions so you don’t exceed your caloric intake.
What Does Work
Having clear goals about what you want to achieve with your fitness and weight will help define your caloric needs. Eating a healthy balanced diet that meets your macro nutrient needs based on your goals will help you to avoid the pitfalls of skipping meals, or falling into eating chat meals or having cheat days. Keeping a check on how many alcoholic beverages you add to your day will help you avoid adding extra calories to your diet. Make smart decisions based on your needs, goals and lifestyle. These decision will have a positive impact on your success.
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