Diet

It cannot be stressed enough how important eating a healthy diet is to your weight loss efforts.

If your diet is not right, then your chances of losing any weight are slimmer than your waistline stands any chance of being.

So what exactly is a healthy diet and how will it help in losing that excess weight?

What is a Healthy Diet?

A healthy diet is one that is well balanced between the three main food groups, which are proteins, carbohydrates and fats and also includes sufficient dietary fiber, vitamins and minerals to promote the healthy running of the physical body.

Just as a car engine needs the right kind of fuel to run efficiently, so a human body needs the right food to use as fuel.

If you put the wrong fuel in a car, the engine performs badly, misfires and sends out clouds of dirty, black smoke from its exhaust. Keep feeding it the wrong fuel and eventually it will die a premature death.

The same applies to the human body. While we are pretty resilient and can digest a wide and varied diet, we cannot remain healthy if we keep eating the wrong foods and will eventually become ill and may even be facing an early grave.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Avoiding the wrong foods can be a real boost to health.

What Should You Avoid Eating?

Such foods to avoid are processed foods which include ready meals, pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs and in fact any store bought meals that have been pre-cooked, or pre-prepared and do not need any preparation at home.

Include cakes, cookies, candy bars and other sweet things in there as well as store bought desserts, ice cream, potato chips and similar savory snacks.

Also avoid foods made with refined white flour which has little or no nutritional value but packs a lot of carb-calories. The experts don't say that white bread is bad for you for nothing!

Also avoid fried foods such as bacon, sausages, deep fried foods such as fish cakes, chicken nuggets, croquettes and other processed tidbits that you deep fry and that you can buy in the frozen counter. Don't drink soda (doesn't matter if its diet or not) or any other flavored drinks.

The list is much longer than this, but hopefully you get the idea from these examples.

It's not all bad news, although it is understandable the foods you should not eat are the ones you probably like the best!

The reason you like all the bad stuff the best is because a clever food industry has been creating good tasting junk food for decades. In that time the companies that make the different food products have perfected the balance of additives and artificial flavor enhancers to make them not just irresistible, but almost addictive.

A study done with rats in 2009 who were fed a normal diet then had junk food introduced into that diet soon ate much more than normal, became overweight and became so addicted to the junk that when it was taken from their diet and only their natural food provided, they refused to eat it to the point of starvation while they waited for the junk food to be reintroduced.

If you think that what a bunch of lab rats like to eat has little to do with the way humans behave, think again. Rats are used in research like this because they are a lot more similar in their behavior patterns to humans than we may think.

So the smart move is to avoid all processed junk food completely and switch to eating a wholesome, natural diet made up of food created from only fresh, natural ingredients that you prepare and cook yourself at home! If you think that is too tough for you, then you had better start seriously considering your current state of health and what you may project it will be like in ten years time if you do not change your diet for a good one.

If you can't or won't cook, then you should make good friends with someone who can and will and maybe come to some arrangement.

This is important stuff and if you are really serious about losing weight, you have to take this step. Because waiting around for some magic pill to be invented may leave you too ill to get any benefit from it assuming it ever gets invented! You have to take responsibility for your own health because no one else can do it for you.

How Will a Healthy Diet Help Me Lose Weight?

A healthy diet will boost your metabolism and improve your digestion. It will not put so many additives into your system and put so much strain on your body.

You can arrest the tendency for weight gain by eating healthy and when you combine this with some light exercise, you will begin to lose weight naturally. This is because an elevated metabolism will burn more calories and because you are consuming fewer calories as you will do by eating the right foods, the balance will shift in favor of you consuming fewer calories than you are using by the exercise that you are doing.

This is a simplistic view of the process, as a full blown explanation will take many pages to do justice to. Hopefully, it is sufficient to give you enough to understand what is needed for you to improve your health and lose weight if you need to. Some of these points will be expanded on in more detail in future posts.

What Readers Say:

"A couple of weeks ago I started a diet that does pretty much what you are explaining about here. Eating good food that is balanced and contains all the right nutrients and cutting out all the junk. So far I've lost 5lbs and looking good! Thanks for the great post!" - Steven

"I don't really have a bad diet myself, although I know I do slip up every now and then by eating chocolate bars or drink soda. Far too many of these weight loss blogs have no idea what they're talking about a lot of the time, but you sound like you know your stuff right here. It seems like you know a great deal on the subject of diet, so I'd love to see some more in-depth posts along these lines published here, which would make it a lot more accessible to everyone who may need some good advice." - Jamie

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