Food: Enjoy it and lose weight

Posted on August 10, 2007
Filed Under Diet |

Back to food my friends. But I want to keep it in the same strain as the last two posts… living your life now. The question you might have is, how can I eat well, enjoy my food and lose weight all at the same time? The answer to that is you are still thinking about life in the wrong way. In particular you are thinking about food in the wrong way. But you are not the only one.

First though, I want to say, if you are a body builder or a long distance runner, your diet will require a lot of special adjustments I will not be talking about here. So lets all relax. I am talking to the 90% of the world that wants to stay in shape, lose weight, lose the fat, etc.

OK, thats been said. Lets move on. Most of us have developed a lot of food habits that are just bad. Some of them have a lot to do with comfort. Some with the diet yo-yo. Some with a life being spent eating the wrong thing and the normal resentment that one has to being told to eat something good for them. In other words, a lifetime of learning that bad foods are good and good foods are bad. In case you haven’t figured this out yet, this is not an article about a special diet plan or percentages of fats, proteins and carbs. I promise to get to that soon enough. But right now I want to talk about how we eat as much as what we eat. I want to attempt to break the physcological, mental blocks you have in eating right.

I want you to think about the way you think about diets and eating right. The first thoughts we have on the subject are: depriving ourselves of the foods we love; the lose of those special foods that comfort us; happy celebrations with friends. Am I right? On the other hand, when we think of eating the way we like, we start thinking about ice cream, huge bowls of pasta, fresh breads, etc. Am I right here too?

Now if you are going to start living well, you are going to have to change your way of thinking. A good diet is good for you. A bad diet is bad for you. Simple enough concept so why do we all want to reject it? Why is it so hard to turn our thinking around? To accept the simple premise that our thinking is wrong?

It’s because we have been taught that the wrong way to think about food. And the wrong way to think about diets. Diets are stressful and don’t work. We are punishing ourselves on diets. And the fact of the matter is, most diets do just that. Food, we are taught has one of two effects, making us fit, or making us fat. No one has tried to tell us that we can actually eat well, lose or maintain weight. That those foods that are good for us can in fact be enjoyed. That a good diet can be as festive and enjoyable as the the worst banquest we have ever been presented. And when its over, we will still be able to walk away from the table without loosening our belts and feeling bad about what we just did.

Like many things in life, its all a matter of perspective.

You have to to start viewing food as a friend and not as the enemy. Food is one of the day to day building blocks of our lives. Abusing it, turns us into overweight, out of shape pigs. Eating well and enjoying it. Seeing food as what is it, not the enemy will allow us all to have a better life. A life where we do not panic when we eat a cookie or some chips. A life where we don’t fear good food. And those foods we shouldn’t eat, aren’t something we want to eat. You have to see as a friend to your fitness and life. Not as the enemy.

Food is fun and healthy, so don’t fear it and don’t hate it. Just be aware that there is good food and bad food and make your choices based on foods that make you and your body feel good.

After I started this article I came on an article in LifeHack called Eating for Energy or Stress Relief that addresses this subject as well. It talks about how we associate healthy foods with pain and unhealthy foods with pleasure. The post is right to explain that we have that totally backwards.

It might seem pleasurable to devour plates of fried chicken and mashed potatoes followed by huge slices of cake and ice cream. But what is that really doing to your body? What is it doing to your life? How is it affecting you? The honest answer to that is its making you fat, damaging you internal organs and in truth many time will damage your mind since you are not feeding it the amnio acids it needs to function properly. Exhibit 1: Notice how tired you get immediately after the meal. Its a result of the things you just put into your body. Not because your hunger has been satisfied. You just poisoned yourself my friends!

So when you are putting the healthy foods you think as punishment in your body, you are doing it a favor. You are doing you a favor. Your body will work better, your mind will be sharper and for a lot of us, you won’t get any fatter and may actually start to lose a few pounds and fell like taking that walk you keep saying you need. You won’t need a nap after a meal. You’ll be ready to do something like, ohh I don’t know… maybe LIVE!

You should be looking at your body as a machine, it needs to work well. Would you put water into the gas tank of your car? Hell no! So why do you take pleasure from putting poison into your blood stream? Your body can’t run properly on that stuff.

Maybe 10,000 years ago your body needed some fat on it to make up for when the hunting was bad. Maybe 2000 years ago a diet high in carbs helped you work the fields longer or allowed you to spend more time building temples for the king. But today? The only place you hunt for food is at the grocery. And the only temples you build are to your own gluttony.

OK, maybe a bit strongly put. But I am trying to get through to you that you need to totally reverse the way you look at food. As a reward for a hard days work, doesn’t a nice lean steak, a salad and some brown rice act as a better reward for your body and mind that a Big Mac and fries?

Keep in you mind what you are doing to yourself when you eat the truly bad stuff. Think of the punishment you are really doing to your health and mind. Imagine what the lack of protien is doing to your muscles and to your brain. Look inside yourself and see the clogging arteries, the liver over working itself. The brain starved of its essential nutrients. The extra calories turning themselves into fat molecules in your stomach and on your butt. Think about it every time you think that healthy food is punishment and bad food is a reward. What kind of reward exactly?

Change your mind. Change your life.

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