Healthy eating habits, cont...

Yesterday, I started on my food pointers for the new year. Today I'll continue today and tomorrow and then I won't say another word about healthy eating for a while, I promise! If you have an great idea on how you watch your weight, post it! We can all use help!

4. Eat things as close to they lived as possible. I know, this sounds gross, it used to really gross out my students too. But here's the deal, the more processed your food is, the more of the natural taste is taken out and the more fake taste is put in. That's why processed foods have a lot of salt in them. The manufacturers have to replace that natural stuff with something!

Take chicken. If you want chicken, go for a real piece of chicken, not a nugget. Exactly where is the nugget on the chicken anyway? A real piece of chicken, leg, breast, thigh...is low in salt, not high in fat and tastes pretty good. A nugget, which is ground up chicken, is very high in salt and fat. Same for veggies and fruit, grains and breads. Go for the least processed and you'll always score better nutritionally.

5. If you want dessert, eat it! Don't deprive yourself of a few goodies in life! Have you ever noticed that skinny people often have a sweet tooth? Watch them, they eat the pie, they just don't eat it all. They usually savor it though, eating slowly enjoying every single bite. How often have you scarfed that candy bar and then realized that later you don't even remember eating it? Make those goodies really count!

6. Plan your meals. Truly, if your meals are planned, you will be less likely to just grab something. If you know that when you get home from work today, the ingredients for tacos, chili, your favorite soup, meatloaf...is waiting for you to just get out of the pantry, or even better, get it out of the freezer or crockpot, how eager are you going to be to get back in the car and go out? I make my meal plans almost monthly. That way, I can shop a week in advance for the big stuff and just buy produce and fruit each week or so. Yes, I did this when I worked full time, in fact, it was more important then because I had less free time. I can also big, batch cook easier if I had a plan. (I'll go into this later)

7. If you can't resist it, don't keep it in the house! Enough said.

8. Never, never, never go without breakfast. Your body is like a woodstove and if you leave the house without stoking that fire (your metabolism) it will be sluggish all day! Get it roaring and burning those calories! My students always hated this one. My anatomy & physiology kids would roll their eyes but about half of them would begin to eat breakfast during the year and always tell me that it made them feel better! Some even reported losing weight even though they didn't do anything else. Eat something with a protein in it, that will keep you from being hungry.

I'll post more tomorrow!
Have a blessed day!