A Remarkably Simple 3 Step Process To Help You Stop Thinking About Food

In a past life, you ate like a normal person.

You ate what tasted good and what was available. You weren’t a pig, and your diet was still pretty healthy, but you weren't strict about what you ate.

As time went on, you began to become more careful. Maybe you had some health problems and decided to change your diet. Maybe you became an athlete or got into bodybuilding or modeling. Maybe you’ve always been a little obsessive, like me.

You became more and more focused on what you ate. You started cutting out foods one by one. You only ate foods at certain times. As a result, you felt empowered, in control, and healthier.

Then as the months or years went by, your diet got old. You got tired of eating chicken breasts and carrots every day. Now, you can’t imagine going back to how you ate when you were a kid, but your current diet is also driving you nuts.

You’re ready for a change. You’re ready to have the freedom and comfort around food that you did when you were younger, with more structure and control so you can reach your aesthetic and athletic goals.

You want to put your diet on autopilot while staying healthy and lean.

Answer These 3 Questions to Create a Healthy Diet You Can Maintain

Most of the anxiety people face around eating is caused because they don’t know the answers to these three questions:

1. What am I going to eat?
2. How much am I going to eat?
3. When or how often am I going to eat?

Let’s answer them.

1. Decide what you’re going to eat.

Most people eat because the food is tasty, convenient, in sight, or smells good. That’s also part of why many people are overweight.¹

You aren’t like that. You care about your health and body composition. Your problem is that you always second guess your food choices. You always feel that you’re eating something that's bad for you.

When you get tired of obsessing about food, you either continue with your current behaviors, making yourself even more unhappy, or say “fuck it” and kill a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. I’ve done both, and it’s a frustrating cycle.

Solve that problem by sticking to the principles in this article.

Eat at least 80% of your calories from minimally processed, whole, nutrient dense plants and animals. Most research indicates that’s a healthy and sustainable way to live.

Feel free to add a few guidelines to keep yourself on track.

For instance, Nutella is kryptonite to my self control. I don’t keep it in my apartment because I can easily murder a jar in a day or two.

I also almost never eat fast food. I don’t think most fast food tastes very good, it’s easy to overeat, and it’s more expensive than cooking at home.

I could buy a jar of Nutella, and force myself not to eat too much, but I’d rather put my self control toward other things. Willpower is a limited resource,² and you should budget it carefully.

If you need to, think of a few guidelines that you can use to keep yourself on track while investing as little willpower as possible. Here are a few that I use:

• I don’t keep overly tempting foods in the house (damn you, Nutella).
• I prepare around 90-95% of what I eat from scratch.
• I don’t drink soda.

Now that you know what you’re going to eat, decide how much you’re going to eat.

2. Decide how much you’re going to eat.

Even if you’re eating a healthy diet, it’s easy to gain fat if you eat too much.

Everyone who hasn’t lost weight on a paleo diet is nodding their head right now.

Since you’re an informed dieter, you probably know which foods have more calories than others. You don’t need to weigh every piece of food to the gram.

Calorie counting and weighing your food can be extremely useful in the short-term, but neither is generally sustainable in the long-term. At least if you want to be a sane person with friends, relationships, hobbies, and a life.

So how do you decide how much to eat without a scale?

Eat until you’re satisfied. Then stop.

Not until you’re full or stuffed, but just until you're no longer hungry. Yes, you’ve heard this a hundred times before. That’s because it works.

Just like creating a budget, most everyone knows this is a good idea, but they don’t do it.

There are a few of you out there who probably still get hungry even if you’re eating till satiety. You probably fall into one of these two categories:

You’re trying to get leaner than most sane people, in which case you probably won’t feel satisfied from normal meals.

You’re eating mostly unfilling and high-calorie foods.

There’s a reason I told you to focus on food quality in step one. Your satiety system only works if you’re eating mostly unprocessed and filling foods.

Even then, however, you can still feel hungrier than you should if you’re stressed,^3,4 sleep deprived,^5,6eating while distracted,¹ and making other silly mistakes.

If you eat a healthy diet, get enough sleep, minimize your stress levels, and generally take care of yourself, you can usually eat until satiety and stay fairly lean.

3. Decide when or how often you’re going to eat.

For a long time, I had so much anxiety thinking about when I should eat that I avoided it till the last part of the day.

I’d have nothing more than an apple until about seven or eight at night. Then I’d let myself eat for an hour before I could go to bed and avoid the “problem” of eating for another 23 hours the next day.

This kind of behavior also nearly killed me. Not recommended.

On the other hand, some research indicates that one of the reasons people are gaining weight is because they are eating more often, not just more at each meal.⁷ That’s probably not your biggest problem, but if you’ve been doing what many (uninformed) nutrition experts recommend, and making yourself eat five or six meals a day, you know that can be exhausting too.

My “starve yourself all day” approach doesn’t work, and neither does grazing for most people.

Starting with 3-4 meals per day is a good idea for several reasons:

• It’s simple and easy to plan.
• It’s what most people do, which makes it easy to coordinate your diet with your social life.
• It means you can eat meals that are large enough to keep you satisfied, but not so big that you’re stuffed. (I always felt like a beached whale after my 23 hour fasts, despite only eating 800-1,000 calories per day).

If you don’t like eating 3-4 times per day, then you can always try another approach. Meal frequency really doesn't matter, but this is a good starting place.

Eating a healthy, enjoyable diet shouldn’t be so hard.

It should be fun, relatively easy, and socially accommodating.

You probably got excited when you learned how some foods are toxic, why other foods will help you live longer and lose fat, and how nutrient timing is the secret to fat loss and muscle gain.

Then you realize there’s more to life than playing with your digital scale and reading weird sensationalist health blogs. You decide you’d rather spend your time and energy on having fun and improving yourself. You also realize that most of the stuff you used to believe, is pure crap.

You might be thinking “this is beginner stuff, I know what I’m doing.” Do you really?

If you’re taking any fat loss supplements, spending any time reading about why you should be eating one food over another, or counting calories while eating tons of junk food, you haven't mastered the basics in this article. It’s like someone calling themselves an astronaut when they don’t know how to fly a toy plane.

You’re wasting your time on stuff that doesn’t matter, and ignoring the things that do.

I’m as guilty as you. I love to obsess over details before mastering the basics, but it’s something we both need to change.

This is the diet that will help you stop thinking about food, and start living the rest of your life. So get to it.

Did you enjoy this article? Click here to check out my book, *Flexible Dieting*. Want an even more in-depth education on how to lose weight, build muscle, and get stronger and healthier? Join Evidence Mag Elite and get member's-only reports and interviews.

References

1. Wansink B. From mindless eating to mindlessly eating better. Physiol Behav. 2010;100(5):454–463. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2010.05.003.
2. Baumeister RF, Vohs KD, Tice DM. The Strength Model of Self-Control. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 2007;16:351–355.
3. Weinstein SE, Shide DJ, Rolls BJ. Changes in food intake in response to stress in men and women: psychological factors. Appetite. 1997;28(1):7–18. doi:10.1006/appe.1996.0056.
4. Rutters F, Nieuwenhuizen AG, Lemmens SGT, Born JM, Westerterp-Plantenga MS. Acute stress-related changes in eating in the absence of hunger. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2009;17(1):72–77. doi:10.1038/oby.2008.493.
5. Brondel L, Romer MA, Nougues PM, Touyarou P, Davenne D. Acute partial sleep deprivation increases food intake in healthy men. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010;91(6):1550–1559. doi:10.3945/ajcn.2009.28523.
6. St-Onge M-P. The role of sleep duration in the regulation of energy balance: effects on energy intakes and expenditure. J Clin Sleep Med. 2013;9(1):73–80. doi:10.5664/jcsm.2348.
7. Duffey KJ, Popkin BM. Energy density, portion size, and eating occasions: contributions to increased energy intake in the United States, 1977-2006. Duffey KJ, Popkin BM, eds. PLoS Med. 2011;8(6):e1001050. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001050.s001.

Source:- https://evidencemag.com/weight-loss-food-thoughts
                                                 

Why All Diets Fail And Why You Don’t Need A Diet To Lose Weight (The Secret Sauce Of Success)

Do all these new diets ever bug the crap out of you? It seems like there’s a new diet every week (I think statistically speaking there’s a new one every few weeks.)

Just last week I was in Barnes and Noble and saw half a dozen new diets on the shelf — most were some kind of re-purposed Atkins, Paleo, or Gluten-free diet, but some were new.

But to me it’s not really surprising that modern consumers have no clue who to trust in the health & wellness space.  A new diet every month. A new guru every month.  Sites like Bodybuilding.com geared towards bodybuilders but actually in the business of pushing supplements (that often do nothing) on customers.

And these are all marketed towards people that have the same hope: the belief in quick fixes.  New guide? Maybe it’ll have something the others don’t. New supplement? Maybe it’s a revolutionary new uber-antioxidant from a pillaged rain forest in South America.

So who do you trust? The story almost always ends up the same when I hear it from people:

“I have no idea who to trust anymore, so I give up, I’m just going to eat what I like, enjoy my life, and stop stressing over it.”

Sound familiar?

The Secret To Losing Weight From A Former Fat Guy

Photo, Getty Images.

It’s been 20 years since I was overweight, and I’ve learned a lot of tips and tricks for staying lean over the years. Think of this as part two to my last article about losing weight without losing your sanity. In this article I’m going to expand on the benefits of going to bed a little hungry.

Anyone who’s read my columns knows I eschew weight loss “miracles” and “magic,” but the trick of going to bed hungry is not that well known, especially when you consider how powerful it is as a tool for weight loss.

But it’s not always easy to do, and I’ll explain how to manage it later. First, let’s get into why you should do it.

It’s important to understand that when it comes to weight loss, calories are everything — the fundamental math has been proven time and again. This trick has nothing to do food getting stored as fat when you eat before bed – that’s a myth – and everything to do with restricting caloric intake in a smart way. The reason this trick works is because going to bed hungry is the only time of day it’s okay to be hungry!

“Obese people tend to eat little in the morning and much in the afternoon and evening,” wrote nutrition researcher France Bellisle in the Scandinavian Journal of Nutrition. “In extreme cases, a ‘night-eating syndrome’ is observed.”

The importance of eating breakfast isn’t about “revving up metabolism” – another myth – but establishing a healthy meal pattern that keeps you satisfied during the day. If you allow yourself to get hungry during the day, it builds. It builds to the point where, come the end of the day, willpower is overwhelmed and you can be tempted to stuff in lots of unhealthy calories before bed, taking in too much overall for the day and not achieving your desired weight loss.

The smart way to restrict calories is to eat three or four satisfying meals and then after dinner, stop eating. Going to bed a little hungry, a number of days each week, is going to drop the pounds. It’s the smart way to do it because your appetite resets overnight, and you don’t have to worry about runaway “night eating” later on. You start fresh with breakfast the next morning.

Be cautious, however, not to go to bed so hungry you wake up in the middle of the night needing to raid the fridge.

That’s the why, now here are three tips on how to do it:

1. Establish a meal patternAs I mentioned above, it’s important to focus on three or four meals at regular intervals during the day. Snacking is to be limited as a way to fuel exercise by eating something healthy. The focus should be on eating at regular intervals like breakfast, lunch and dinner.

2. Have all your meals at the dinner tableDoing things like eating on the couch, at your desk or in your car create a snacking mentality that allows you to eat anywhere, at any time. When you program your brain to think that you should only be eating while seated at a proper table (to focus on eating and nothing else) then it makes it a lot easier to resist snacking.

3. Beat late-night snackingThese are a number of tricks, because you may find that at around 9 p.m. you’re starting to feel that hunger, and you want that snack. You need to power through another hour or so to make it until, and here are some tactics to succeed:

a) Realize that it may be boredom instead of hunger. Chances are you’re busy all day long, and this is the time you’re finally not busy. You’re used to always doing something, and eating is doing something, so you eat. Things you can do instead of eating to relieve this boredom are to stretch, take a short walk, call or send an email to a friend you haven’t spoken with for a while, play a game or write in a journal.

b) Chew gum.

c) Brush your teeth. Most people associate this with an inability to eat so give it a try.

d) Have some hot herbal tea. Make it hot enough so that it takes time to drink in small sips. Don’t burn your tongue, though.

e) Go to bed and read.

Again, you don’t have to do this every day, and you don’t want to be starving, but just a little hungry. Remember that it needs to be coupled with a focus on being “satisfied” during the day rather than “full.” Throw in a regular exercise routine and you’ll be on your way to a healthier, leaner you.

Source:- http://www.chatelaine.com/health/fitness/the-secret-to-losing-weight/

If You're Tired Of Dieting, Please Read This!

Like many women over 40, I’ve experimented with a wide variety of weight-management strategies since my teens, including near-starvation, bingeing, deprivation, limiting myself to certain food groups or only eating at certain times of the day, never snacking, only snacking, sugar-free, fat-free, carb-free, fruits only, veggies only, food combining, over-exercising, under-exercising (usually when I didn’t eat enough to have any energy), living on Diet Coke (ugh!) and the list goes on. I am sure I have forgotten some of them. Aside from gaining weight during three pregnancies (and far more than the “healthy” level for the first two) and consciously losing it afterwards, my weight has usually been “average” with a few highs and lows. Since I am fairly tall (5’8), a few extra pounds are easier to carry. Being underweight was more obvious as my long limbs looked longer than usual and along with that came comments (usually from my parents) about not eating enough. If I were totally frank with myself, the reasons I had such an unhealthy relationship with food had a lot to do with some bad childhood habits that blossomed into teenage weight gain and the dreaded freshman fifteen in college, resulting in the usual self-esteem issues for a young woman trying to find her real adult self.

The Fat Trap

For 15 years, Joseph Proietto has been helping people lose weight. When these obese patients arrive at his weight-loss clinic in Australia, they are determined to slim down. And most of the time, he says, they do just that, sticking to the clinic’s program and dropping excess pounds. But then, almost without exception, the weight begins to creep back. In a matter of months or years, the entire effort has come undone, and the patient is fat again. “It has always seemed strange to me,” says Proietto, who is a physician at the University of Melbourne. “These are people who are very motivated to lose weight, who achieve weight loss most of the time without too much trouble and yet, inevitably, gradually, they regain the weight.”

Anyone who has ever dieted knows that lost pounds often return, and most of us assume the reason is a lack of discipline or a failure of willpower. But Proietto suspected that there was more to it, and he decided to take a closer look at the biological state of the body after weight loss.

Beginning in 2009, he and his team recruited 50 obese men and women. The men weighed an average of 233 pounds; the women weighed about 200 pounds. Although some people dropped out of the study, most of the patients stuck with the extreme low-calorie diet, which consisted of special shakes called Optifast and two cups of low-starch vegetables, totaling just 500 to 550 calories a day for eight weeks. Ten weeks in, the dieters lost an average of 30 pounds.