Healthy eating!

Originally uploaded by atache

So, you’ve written down your goals and you’ve checked out your toolkit. What now? What do we do to get started down the path towards better health?

The first and most important item for people trying to get healthy is to improve your eating habits. Don’t get me wrong, exercise is also an important component, but healthy eating is the best and easiest thing you can do for yourself. Let me illustrate this with a simple example. Let’s say that you, like most people, have a weight loss goal. In order to achieve this goal, you need to lose 300 calories per day. That’s actually a pretty modest goal by the way.

In order to achieve this goal through exercise you would need to do one of the following:

• Walk for about an hour
• Run for 30 minutes or more
• Lift weights for 45 minutes
• Play a strenuous sport like soccer for 40 minutes
• Bike for 45 minutes

Now these numbers will obviously vary by how hard / fast you do these activities and also by variables such as your body weight, but in general they’re good averages. By comparison, here’s what you would need to do to lose weight through healthier eating.

• Forgo one latte per day
• Go from a large fries to a small fries
• Order a diet coke instead of a coke
• One small bag less of chips

Compare these two things. Would you rather eat the small fries or would you pack your gym bag, head to the gym and run for 30 minutes?   Think about the time you would need to spend to work off those calories as opposed to simply drinking water instead of that latte. Honestly, I’m a huge believer in exercise but even I have to admit that losing weight through eating healthier is much much MUCH easier.

No Fad Diets!

That said, you don’t want to drastically reduce your calorie intake for a short amount of time as most diets would have you do. Those kinds of crash diets actually do more damage than good. You’ll end up slowing your metabolism and then regaining all the weight once you get off the diet. You also don’t want to try and follow one of those complicated diet regimes that has you looking at a spreadsheet each time you want to figure out what you can and cannot eat for lunch. Diets like these are doomed to fail because, unless you’re extremely rich and have your own dietitian and chef on staff, no one can keep up with all the rules and restrictions they include.
So, rather than telling you to eat nothing but one apple a day or asking you to look up everything by its exponential glycemic index minus effective carb load plus double the slow protein minus the square root of the Atkins index or eat nothing but cabbage soup, here are the basic rules to healthy eating. I’ve tried to make them as easy to understand and follow as possible.

• Eat slow – When you eat fast you end up eating too much. Eat slow, enjoy your food and stop eating when you feel full.  A great way to do this is by making meals social.  Go enjoy your meal with someone else and have a great discussion while you eat.  You’ll find yourself full before you eat too much and enjoying your food a lot more than when you used to scarf those cheeseburgers down while alone in your car.
• Eat mostly vegetables – If you’re looking at your plate, it should be ½ water rich vegetables like spinach, lettuce, sprouts, totatoes, cucumbers and so on, ¼ calorie rich vegetables like peas and corn and ¼ some kind of lean protein like turkey, chicken or fish. The corollary to this rule by the way is “stop eating so much red meat.” I love a good burger as much as the next guy but we eat way too much of it to be healthy. Same applies to pork. In general, heavy meats like these should be eaten once a week and no more.
• The stone age rule – If you showed what you’re about to eat to a human being from the stone age and his first response was “what the hell is this?”, then you shouldn’t be eating it. In other words, if it doesn’t look like natural food then it doesn’t belong in your mouth. That means Twinkies, breakfast cereal, Oreos, deep fried beer and anything else that looks nothing like anything you would find in nature.
• Drink water – It’s unbelievable how many calories we ingest and don’t even consider as good. According to some of the latest research, sodas, coffees and other drinks now account for more than 14% of an adult’s calorie intake, and it’s even worse for kids. That’s just crazy! Drink water, it’s good for you.

That’s it. Four simple rules to live by, or at least eat by. If you can start incorporate these simple rules into your eating habits, you’re going to be eating healthier in no time.