Smarter Food Choices 101: Tips for Busy Dieters
Making Smart Food Choices To Get A Great Start into The Next Season
Food for a #HealthyLifestyle
Smarter Food Choices 101:
Tips for Busy Dieters
Summer is often synonymous with beaches, ballparks and barbecues, all offering tempting snacks and treats. To many busy dieters who are watching their weight, the back-to-school season is an ideal time to enroll in their own “Making Smarter Food Choices 101” class and refocus on a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle.
To help these busy dieters make wiser food choices, we are suggesting this plan of action as we watch our weight into the next season. With these few short tips, we can create a line of defense against impulsive binges and bad food choices.
Sweet baked goods that make the grade in convenience, portability and taste can also be the villain when it comes to over consumption of sugars. However, with proper meal planning, it still may be possible to enjoy those treats and not get too far off of our weight watching path to success.
Meal plan ahead with a healthy and balanced diet plan and see for yourself that it is still possible to squeeze in some of your favorite and satisfying treats. Sweets are still an option but try when you can to exchange the high calorie choice with one that is healthier for you. Try exchanging treats for fruit or vegetables. Each week, plan to eat a few more items that are healthier and eat a few less that are not.
Eat more fresh and natural food and less processed food with high fat.
Sweets and high fats may satisfy you in the short term, but in the long run you will be shortchanging your better health.
Satisfy hunger with foods that are lower in calories and bad fats and replace them with choices that are healthier and packed with nutrition.
We all want flexibility in our lives, be it in our daily routine or in our food choices, but it’s all about balance while consuming the foods our bodies really need for healthful living. We just need to make sensible choices.
Food for a #HealthyLifestyle
Most foods can fit into a balanced diet – in moderation.
Some tips for making smarter food choices include:
* Go whole grain. Consume three or more 1-ounce servings of whole-grain products per day, along with three servings of enriched grains.
* Eat calcium-rich foods. Consume two cups per day of fat-free or low-fat milk or milk products.
* Find balance between physical activity and food you eat. Make sure you aren’t taking in more calories than you’re using or burning.
* Limit intake of saturated and trans fats. Trans fats have been linked to increased risk of heart disease. Look for low or no trans fats on the label.
* Get active. Engaging in regular physical activity and reducing sedentary activities can promote good health, psychological well-being and a healthy body weight.
* Size does matter. Buying treats in small, individual packages for portion control helps to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Diet: When We Face Lousy Choices
It’s 11:30 AM. You’ve been up since 5 o’clock and the hunger meter is on high. “What to eat?” you think to yourself.
You pore over the menu for the deli downstairs but nothing you can allow yourself looks that good. Sure, you could go out for fast food but there’s a meeting coming up and you don’t really want to move your car and then have to find a new parking spot when you return.
So you decide not to go out. That leaves eating in.
You look at your choices, wishing you’d had the foresight to bring something from home. There’s the vending machine in the break room, filled with plastic-wrapped, rubber-textured sandwiches, bagels, muffins and Danish. Ugh, you keep spinning the carousels, hoping that by some miracle, there will be a vegetable snack plate or something half-way decent. You narrow down your choices to a cup of noodle soup or a chicken breast sandwich.
Now you have another choice: eat something to take the edge off or power through the minutes of temptation until you are sitting in your meeting and eating is out of the question. After an hour of dreary, repetitive discussions, your hunger may have calmed down.
How you handle it each day, depends on your mood. Often, if we can get through that one tempting half hour, we’re set for the afternoon and can easily wait for our well-planned light dinner. On other days, you know in your heart that if you don’t eat something, you won’t be able to concentrate on your work because all you can think about is food while you try to conceal the embarrassment of a gurgling stomach.
On those days, take the chicken sandwich, remove the bun, and microwave the miniscule piece of chicken provided. Then cut it into tiny pieces and eat slowly with a plastic knife and fork. If you can make the pea-sized pieces last for 15 or 20 minutes, you’ll feel like you’ve actually eaten an entire meal and be on your way to a pleasant non-food-focused afternoon on a very limited caloric intake. Try it, it really works!
If you truly want to control your weight, you can do it anywhere. The key is never to eat until you’ve had a lengthy internal dialog with yourself that forces you into a full awareness of your food intake and then select the lesser of all evils and consume it as slowly as you can manage.
Even trapped in the office with nothing more than a killer vending machine, you can turn bleak choices into a self-esteem building triumph.
EAT MODERATELY:
The first step to lose weight.
Did you know that your new automobile is likely to have a larger cup-holder than your older model? That restaurants use larger plates, bakers are selling larger muffins, pizzerias have larger pans, and fast food companies are using larger French fries and drink containers than 20 years ago? Did you know that identical recipes for cookies and desserts in the old editions of recipes specify fewer servings?
It is evident to all of us that overweight and obesity have increased sharply in many countries in adults and children in the last few years. Since studies show that activity of people has not changed much in the last decades, the increase in body overweight has probably and often come from a change in the food intake. Considering that many very busy people consume their meals outside the home, portion sizes become an important factor in the changes of body weight.
A published nutritional study about the current sizes of portions in restaurants, fast foods, and food manufacturers recognized these changes. The authors compared the data with the sizes of the past 30 years, and they came up with some amazing numbers. First they noted that all the portions offered in every category exceed by far the guidelines of previously accepted healthy portion sizes. Cookies are seven times bigger than recommended, cooked pasta five times larger, muffins three times larger, and so on.
Then they discovered that portion sizes began to grow in the 1970s and have continued to grow at the same rate as body overweight. Food and fast food companies today promote larger items and use larger sizes as selling points. Why not? Especially when hungry, thirsty, and on the go! However, in all reality, we have to accept that healthy living and proper food choices require a careful and planned balance.
The food industry invests billions in making their products more attractive, sexier, saltier, or sweeter and we are vulnerable to their promotions. This happens at a moment when we become more sedentary and kids spend longer hours in front of the TV or their computers. That means we have to be more conscious of how and what we are choosing to eat.
There is no doubt in my mind that the larger amounts of food we ingest today, by choice or by convenience, is one of the main causes for the general growth of excess body weight in the people around us. This affects people with a weight problem, but it also affects those who are maybe only a few pounds over and struggle to control the size of their waistline. In an environment where lifestyle and advertising pushes us to eat out more and in larger quantities it is imperative that we learn how to control ourselves.
Here's one very good way to start. I encourage everyone to try this out and make it a new habit. It is very simple: On a notepad write down everyday for a week everything that you ingest. Take note of the quantities, not only for the main meals, but even the smallest things such as drinks, candies and snacks. Then with the help of a calorie chart add up the numbers. Many people say I don't know how I gain weight. I dont eat very much. I bet they are ready for a big surprise. It is incredible how all those little things we munch during the day add up to a large number of calories.
After the shock, the realization will come that something needs to be done.
First, it is important to understand what a regular portion looks like;
- 3 oz meat: is approximately the size of a deck of cards or a bar of soap (when was the last time you saw a steak of that size?)
- 3 oz fish: the size of a checkbook
- 1 oz cheese: the size of a matchbox
- one medium potato: the size of a computer mouse
- 1 cup pasta: the size of two eggs
Okay. Now that's reality!
Visualization, and we've got something to work with…..
When eating out,....
- Choose the small or medium sizes instead of the large ones.
- Ask for half of the meal to be packed to go.
- Share your portion with a friend.
- Don't eat the bread and butter before the meal.
For at home, don't buy a lot of food, but instead buy with meal planning and single servings in mind. If you snack, don't eat from the bag but instead place a few chips or crackers on a dish. Cut down the amount of sauces, mayonnaise and cream cheese, and use low calorie types if possible. If you are a big eater, fill yourself with a large quantity of vegetables and eventually fresh fruit. Drink a glass of water.
Busy dieters that try to keep their weight under control know how difficult that is.
The first step is to be an inventive busy dieter in ways to reduce the sizes of the food portions and make healthier choices.
#GoodFood #HealthyMealChoices #Diet #DietResults #MyOptimizedBeauty #Success #BusyDieterPlan
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Be Responsible About Changes in Diet and Exercise.
Results May Vary: the weight loss results testimonials are in no way a guarantee of results. Individual weight loss results, including amount and time, will vary. Whether genetic or environmental, it should be noted that food intake, rates of metabolism and levels of exercise and physical exertion vary from person to person. This means weight loss results will also vary from person to person. No individual result should be seen as typical.
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