subject: Is It Possible To Loose Pounds Without Sacrificing A Normal Life? [print this page] For people who have spent years on and off of diets with little success the concern of ever being able to live a normal life can be overwhelming. When you need to loose pounds but cant seem to succeed, it can really affect your self esteem as well as your health.
There are two ways to address this challenge the first is to redefine what normal actually looks like, and the other is to reevaluate how you go about eating to lose weight.
What is Normal Anyway?
Normal is a washer setting, as a friend once told me. The fact is that while there is a lot of pressure to quantify normal, normal is different for every individual.
Being aware of what you eat is normal, being obsessed with every bite you put in your mouth so that you are thinking about food constantly in order to loose pounds, isnt. It is essential to find a middle ground that you can live with.
How to Eat to Loose Pounds
While weight loss can be very important, learning to have a healthy relationship with your food should have greater significance. That goes beyond just what you eat, but how you eat and when you eat and how you feel when you eat. The purpose of food is to nourish life, and it should be a happy experience.
Think about the best, most satisfying meals you have ever eaten. Chances are you will remember a gathering of friends or family where the food was simple yet well prepared. There was enough but not too much and you really enjoyed the company as much as the food.
Few people will remember meals where they sat on their own in the kitchen guzzling down a pint of Ben and Jerrys. You dont need me to tell you which one is more life-sustaining.
Weight Loss is a Common Result of Proper Eating
If you eat healthy foods, in healthy quantities, you will start to loose pounds. In fact, if you try to eat too many healthy foods, deliberately, chances are you wont gain any weight either.
Weight gain results from a complex combination of circumstances, but eating foods that cause an insulin reaction from your metabolism is probably one of the largest factors.
Your body reacts to elevations in blood sugar levels strongly. The insulin that your pancreas releases causes the body to store sugar as fat rather than to use it for energy.
To prevent that sort of reaction, you need to focus on complex carbohydrates eaten with lean proteins. When eaten together they encourage the body to burn fat rather than sugar--improving your metabolic rate and helping you to lose pounds. Of course, this is just the tip of the nutritional iceberg.
You Can Lose Pounds and Still Enjoy Your Meals
There is a popular misconception that diet food has to taste awful or leave you feeling hungry all the time. If you think that losing weight requires you to feel constantly deprived, it simply isnt true. Good nutrition in proper amounts, will leave you feeling good, full and energetic.
What should you be eating? How about having a steak from grass fed beef, wild caught deep water fish and organic poultry and eggs? Those are all great sources of healthy protein that are good for you and taste great. Skip wheat entirely and enjoy the gamut of whole grains and sprouted grain bread products you can find in any healthy food store.
Just about every vegetable under the sun is yours for enjoying as well. So are many fruits and berries. Dont all of those sound like something you would want to eat? Every one of them is normal.
You dont have to lock yourself at home and abandon a normal lifestyle to drop weight and loose pounds. Its time to move beyond all those strange diets and learn to live again.
