I'm a strong believer in healthy habits towards healthy eating and moving more.
I hate diets. I’ve tried them all and as most of you failed again and again.
If you are following a new diet now, ask yourself how many years you have been stressing out about your weight? All your life? The last 2/5/10 years? How many different diets have you tried and finally how much mental effort you put into analysing what you should eat and shouldn’t. In the worst case scenario, you miss out on friends’ birthdays just because you are on a diet and have no control over the food that would be there. You are missing on your whole life! Imagine that you can spend all this mental energy on something more constructive in your life.
Some of the diets are pretty effective and you can loose weight. Short term. Most likely in a couple of months or years you’ll end up at where you were at the start. Plus extra kilos.
It’s not sustainable for a person to live on a 800 cKal. NOT LIVABLE. NOT REALISTIC. You probably exercise, or have a high demanding job, or looking after the kids. You need calories for a healthy life!
You won’t last long if you are trying to quit sugar completely and have a sweet tooth. Any attempt to get give up chocolate is doomed to failure. I personally quit sugar for the whole 8 weeks. 8 weeks out of my whole 36 years of life – and here I am again, eating a bit of dark chocolate here and there every day and feeling happy about it.
Read now: all diets SLOW DOWN YOUR METABOLISM. You deprive your body with low calories and it tries to conserve calories to keep you alive. The longer you diet, the more you damage your metabolism. Read again: the less you eat (particularly on a high caloric restriction diet) the less you weight you loose.
Once you get back to your ‘normal’ eating your body still tries to save these calories. Just in case you decide to deprive it again. And again. And again. Vicious cycle.
I also think that some of us require a guidance and maybe a meal plan at the beginning of our journey towards the healthy lifestyle. Then a detox or I QUIT SUGAR program might work, to reset your eating habits.
We need to establish and understand what’s good for our bodies, how broccoli or chocolate chip cookie makes us feel after and even next day and make choices based on it.
Once you learn how to eat good food like broccoli and add ginger to your stir fry instead of mayo, diverse your diet, don’t be scared of trying new things.
If you fuel yourself with 3 mugs of coffee because you are following a new trend of the Intermittent Fasting or feeling sluggish at 3pm, guess what? You are hungry! Eat! It means you didn't eat enough food in the morning or throughout the day and there's no magic that you are feeling like a massive dish of pasta with extra cheese and an ice cream at the end of the day. It's not a rocket science: eat more during the day and you see what a massive difference it will have on your dinner appetite.
You might not even have an addiction to chocolates. It's just a signal of your body to get some calorie rich food as fast as it could through pushing you to reach out for snacks. Next time instead of cookies have a sandwich or a piece of fruit or a bowl of rice. Real food. Eat it and see if you are still hungry for sweets.
The general rule remains the same: eat more REAL food, less processed food, minimise consumption of junk and sweets. Don't even buy chips or chocolates. Leave them as a treat which you can have occasionally when you eat out or hang out with friends.
Never ever feel ashamed after eating a chocolate! Enjoy it to the last bit, but make it special. Don’t eat it everyday!
