Healthy Eating Weight Loss Programs

The battle of the bulge is always a tug-of-war between your and your taste buds. If you lose, then your stomach, health, self-esteem and personality will suffer. To win you have to conquer your desires, plan your meals using pure common sense and garnish everything with a healthy dose exercise.

In our modern day eat-and-run world, maintaining a healthy weight can be pretty tough. Modern day restaurants haven’t made it any easier; in fact they have upsized their portions so they can sell you more food. This is a double whammy because not only is the food unhealthy for you (too many calories and too few nutrients), the massive portions really does you in.

As your body begins to bulge pretty soon you notice the sleekly advertised “lose weight” or “lose fat” adverts. These fad diets and “quick-fix” plans promise you the ultimate magic; no exercise weight loss. In fact, some even go to the extent of informing you that you don’t even have to change your lifestyle. If only there really was such magic, there would be no need for doctors or nutrition experts. In fact, none of us would be overweight would we?

However, the best thing about our body is its ability to mend itself provided of course, you mend your ways by eating sensibly and exercising regularly. Having an ideal body weight for our height, age and gender not only makes us feel and look good, it influences our health as well as the amount of money we spend on health insurance.

So what’s with the weight loss programs?

Almost all weight loss programs deprive you of a balanced diet leading to imbalances within the body. A weight loss program does not tackle the reason for excessive weight – it aims to tackle the result. Common sense tells us that if we try to tackle the effect without going into the reasons for the effect, we end up in a never ending cycle. Overweight people who have attempted to use weight loss programs know this as the ‘yo-yo effect’ i.e. lose weight and then gain double the weight we lost. The only loss that doesn’t come back is the money we’ve spent on special shakes and meals.

The only real healthy eating weight loss program is the common sense approach to losing weight:

Healthy Eating Weight Loss step 1: Seek out the local support group

Join the local weight loss group. This not only puts you on an ‘I can do it’ path, it also provides you with stimulus and encouragement to keep at it.

Healthy Eating Weight Loss step 2: Understand the relationship between food and your body

Check out our food chart printed elsewhere on this site. Understand the five food groups, the basis of the division and the inter-relationship between food groups. Understand how the body works and how it synthesizes food. For example, if you eat less than your daily requirement, you actually put on more weight. We’ve covered this adequately in another article elsewhere. So it’s vital to understand the basis of a healthy diet and its relationship to your weight.

Healthy Eating Weight Loss step 3: Work out a plan and stick to it

Read all the health related articles on this website. There is a wealth of knowledge here that will help you understand the key issues to eating healthy and maintaining a good body weight.

Once you feel you’ve understood the basics, create a plan for yourself. What you are going to eat, the quantity and when. Also, to start with, include a small exercise routine. Every week add half hour to your exercise routine until you reach a target of 5 hours per week.

Feel free to experiment until you find a plan that you feel is ideal for you. Once you do, stick to it.

Once again we reiterate: the only real weight loss program is the one which has healthy dollops of common sense in it.