Picture this: yourself in your eighteen-year-old body, lean and muscular with smooth skin, walking across a beach like the Girl from Ipanema.
But you’re not eighteen anymore. Now you have a full-time, demanding nursing career and a family at home, and you just haven’t taken the time to make nutritious meals and exercise regularly and effectively. You’ve been too busy caring for others.
You know you need to get involved in some kind of weight-loss program to bring what you have become more into line with your picture of yourself.
It’s not just about the picture, though. Your weight gain is a very fortunate outward sign of what’s going on inside. It’s a fortunate sign because people who are more slender but are eating the wrong things and not exercising are susceptible to the same diseases of aging as those who gain weight, but they don’t know it.
Here are five myths and partial myths about weight loss followed by five tips for your lifelong diet to help you become more like that picture in your head. Not completely like it . . . because one myth is that when you’re in your thirties and forties and up, you’ll look like you did when you were eighteen. But why would you want to? Here’s a good goal: be your best, healthy and fit self, whatever age you are.
Partial Myth #1. It’s all about the calories. You need to burn more energy than you take in. Well, yes and no. You do need to burn more energy than you eat, but that doesn’t mean that the way you get those calories makes no difference. Some kinds of calories make you feel more satisfied, so you’ll eat less and crave less. Some kinds of calories raise your blood sugar more quickly than others — which means it will also drop more quickly, causing hunger. In addition, those blood sugar spikes will cause systemic inflammation and eventually, disease, including diabetes and associated weight gain, because your exhausted system can no longer process sugars.
Myth #2. There’s a diet that’s just right for me. Wrong. Almost any diet will work if you follow it. It’s just that some diets are easier to follow than others. It’s easier to follow a diet that doesn’t require complicated preparations or calculations every time you take a bite. It’s easier to follow a diet that allows you to feel satisfied and not deprived. And it’s important to follow a diet that supplies the nutrition and pleasure you need from a lifelong diet, because that’s what you’re going to do, develop a new, healthier way to eat for the rest of your life.
Partial Myth #3. Exercise is more important than what I eat. Wrong and right. Monitoring what you eat is a more effective way to lose weight than exercise. On the other hand, after years of eating incorrectly and not exercising, your metabolism can slow down, and exercise is the best way to reset that mechanism. You will probably have to work harder, that is, exercise more, for the rest of your life.
Partial Myth #4. I need to avoid fats to lose weight. Again, wrong and right. You do need to avoid bad fats — trans fats and too many Omega 6s, way out of proportion in the American diet thanks to commercial food products. Good fats, though, will not make you fat. In fact, more good fats in your diet, including some saturated fats that contain essential fatty acids, will help you lose weight.
Partial Myth #5. You’re more likely to lose weight on a vegetarian or vegan diet. Remember what we said about losing weight on any diet that you follow? Many have lost weight on the Atkins Diet, a meat-heavy program. A vegetarian diet, and certainly a vegan diet, however, provides much more bulk for many fewer calories, and it is nutrient dense. As a result, vegans and vegetarians tend to eat fewer calories.
So what should you eat to lose weight and get healthy?
1. Eliminate added sugars from your diet, including artificial and so-called “natural” sugar replacements. Effectively, this means eliminating most processed foods, where sugar masquerades under different names.
2. Eat real foods, whole foods, with all their fiber. This includes skipping the juice, even natural juices with no added sugar. Instead eat whole fruits and drink water. Be very suspicious of commercial “whole grain” breads, but enjoy real whole grain breads, especially if they are homemade.
3. Enjoy good fats as part of your diet, things like extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil and even limited amounts of butter.
4. Eat a good breakfast, carefully planned to supply essential nutrients for your most active part of the day. Ideally breakfast is your biggest meal and your evening meal your smallest.
5. For satisfaction and weight loss, aim for a ratio of 30% protein, 50% carbohydrate and 20% fats. And make the bulk of those carbohydrates nutrient dense, higher water content, lower calorie veggies.
Before you know it, you’ll be back on those beaches, knockin’ them dead. More than that, you’ll have more energy to care for those who depend on you.
Teri
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