Eating “Healthy” 101
Lets start off with describing what “Healthy” means to me. It is a mixture between sustainable and productive towards your life and what you want to get out of your life. Let us say you are someone who doesn’t care about how they feel, look, move, think and sleep. Then healthy to you must be eating a bunch of junk and overly processed foods. Fine. Okay I can’t convince you there to start making a change. BUT, for the rest of you who do want to improve your life and make a change here we go.
Eating healthy needs to be sustainable. For 99.9% of people eating a fully non processed diet is unobtainable, and most of the people who do only do it for a short amount of time if they are trying to diet down for some athletic feat. WE are not those people and we are people who have lives we want to start living lives to the fullest. So we are going to start making better choices. Not perfect or horrible decisions just a little bit better everyday.
Now that we have reframed our mind that eating healthy is not a binary system of good or bad, and is more of a spectrum from worse to better we can start to make better choices. What are these choices you ask? Let me tell you. Maybe we start off with increasing water intake, the time it takes to eat meals, listening to our natural hunger cues. Whatever we decide to do we must establish a goal that is obtainable.
So here are some goals I would like for us all to work on this year:
Eating slower without distractions. We all seem to eat while doing something else, whether that is work or just sitting their on your phone doom scrolling. If we are present while we eat we get a break from our busy lives, it will relieve stress but most importantly allow us to tap into our hunger/ satiation singles and we can stop eating when we are satiated and not stuffed. Doing this will allow you to auto regulate your eating and naturally lose weight. Now for me eating without distractions is hard, so the goal I am setting for myself is to start off with one meal a day I will eat without distractions.
Drinking more water. Many of our problems come from not hydrating properly. Low energy, headaches and overeating are common symptoms of dehydration which is why we need to make sure we have this in check early on. The goal I want everyone to have is drinking half their bodyweight in ounces of water. I way 195 pounds so I went out and bought a 32 ounce water bottle and my goal is to drink 3-4 of these a day. I encourage you to do the same if you aren’t hitting your water goals already. The beauty of drinking more water is it going to improve your energy withing the first water bottle, the headache that seems to come everyday will start becoming less and less frequent. Maybe the most important part is that we won’t crave for as much food anymore because we are full of water.
Eating more protein. This is arguably the hardest one on the list. We want to eat our bodyweight in grams of protein. Foods high in protein aren’t always the most tastiest which makes it harder to eat enough of but the benefits will pay for this ten fold. Protein is satiating, meaning it makes you more full, making you stop eating the other foods that are making you keep on weight. Protein burns calories being digested, so from just eating more protein it will boost your metabolism, again making you lost weight. And most importantly protein is the building block of muscle, with increased muscle your metabolism also increases.
With these 3 goals we are going to become healthier in no time, again the goal is to pick obtainable and sustainable goals. So if eating slow every meal is hard, start with one meal, if drinking half your bodyweight in ounces of water, start with just one more glass a day or one glass at every meal, if eating your bodyweight in grams of protein is to much, start with half or making sure you are eating protein at every meal. There is no one size fits all, we are all in different stages of becoming healthier so I empower you to create your goals and roadmaps to improve your health. However if you need help you know who to ask!
