Summer is on the way and you have a short time to be looking your best. Don’t despair, there IS time to make changes to your body!

I have to say that part of looking good is feeling confident. When you make positive steps towards self care by making healthy choices, you can’t help but feel better about yourself. Funny how that gets noticed too: you walk a little taller, you stop slouching and your head is held higher. This alone can make anyone look better without losing a pound of weight.

But, not only am I going to help you feel more confident, I want to give you the tools to lose some fat and get on a healthy path.

To begin, nutrition is all about mind set. Change the way you think about food and you will change slowly your body. We live in a culture of abundance and over abundance. Once I got my head around the fact that there will always be food, whether it is my favourite dish or dessert, it made it easier to back off on portion sizes. The scarcity mentality keeps you in over eating mode.  Thankfully, it’s NEVER the last meal or treat. If your favourite cake is eaten, you can always make another on another day. Getting this in my head really helped me to enjoy a small portion and not feel like I should clamber for more. Of course mind set isn’t the only way to change your nutrition, in fact it’s just the start, but it was a healthy start for me.

Take a few moments to examine your relationship with food. Is it a healthy one? Why do you eat and even over eat? Are you even conscious of the fact that you don’t make healthy nutritional choices? Getting this stuff on your radar is super important because you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. Once you figure out your triggers, then you’ll be so much more successful at supportive eating. And while you’re at it, this may be a time to look at other relationships in your life to ensure that if you have something unhealthy going on in another area of your life that this isn’t impacting your relationship with food. Yes, this is a big pill to swallow I know. This doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s the start of an awareness that will eventually help in your overall health and wellness.

Next there are just practical things that you need to do in order to lose weight and feel better about yourself. And by the way, if you don’t feel like you need to lose any weight, please continue to read. I sometimes make the mistake of assuming that most of you are looking at fat loss. If you just want to maintain your weight and be healthy, these are tips that will do just that-warning: you may lose some weight too. Here are my top seven tips:

1. Eat often. Your metabolism is less likely to crash when your body gets fed healthy food at regular intervals. Eat every 2-3 hours, just before you get the ‘eat anything’ feeling.
2. Healthy meals do not happen by themselves. They require planning. This includes time spent shopping and preparing. Sorry, there is no way of getting around this unless you’re going to hire a personal chef. Invest the time in yourself.
3. Make a promise to yourself that you will not put empty calories in your mouth. You will minimize any over eating damage when you eat nutritionally dense food.
4. Plan to eat more protein than you probably ever have before. This is because it’s difficult to over eat protein. As well, there is a thermogenic effect from the break down of protein; in fact, it takes more calories to metabolize protein that other foods. Another bonus is the blood sugar stabilizing effect that protein has. You will not get the blood sugar highs and lows that can be dangerous to health and healthy eating when you consume protein with every meal and snack.
5. Further to this, make sure to never eat carbohydrates alone. Try to pair up carbs with some healthy fat and preferably protein. By eating carbs alone, your body will turn those carbs into sugar and your body will respond by pumping out insulin. If you don’t burn up that blood sugar with exercise, the insulin will just shuttle that blood sugar into storage. You’ll be more likely to add junk to your trunk by eating carbohydrates alone.
6. Quality carbohydrate selection is imperative. You pretty much will never over eat on veggies, so that should take up the majority of your plate. Stay clear as much as possible of anything processed and eat close to the ground. That is, eat foods that look like they’ve just been picked and not processed to a point of  being unidentifiable.
7. Limit liquid calories. This includes alcohol. I know this doesn’t sound fun, but truly, what are you goals? To have a good time or to look your best? Or both? Chances are that if you’re looking your best, you’ll be much more likely to have a good time, alcohol or not! A drink will never feel as good as you will when you feel your best in your toned and healthy body.

There you have it. My best tips to improve your eating TODAY. Don’t wait until Monday or the start of the month. Start with your next meal. Look at your relationship with food NOW. You’ll be happy that you did.

This entry was posted on May 27, 2010 at 9:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Posted in Healthy Eating by Shawna 4 Comments