Thursday, October 21, 2010

How to eat healthy and lose weight

Nowadays, there are more and more adult even kids are overweight. Weight loss programs and health related magazines are everywhere to help us to achieve our fitness goal. Some people succeed and some people failed. The main reason could be they only focus on what to eat but do not know HOW to eat it right. A healthy diet means a diet plan with balance nutrition. Avoiding healthy carbs and fats will not help you to lose weight, even if you did lose some weight, most likely the result will not last long because you will get bored of it.


Eat 5 - 6 meals a day

Why? According to the research, eating 5 – 6 healthy meals a day will help you to burn calories all day long. Nothing complicated – 3 main meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and 2 – 3 snacks. If you eat every 3 hours, your body is working like a fat burning machine and prevent yourself from turning into hunger or starvation mode. If you starve yourself and you think you will lose more weight, you are wrong! You will actually eat more in your next meal and guess what? You will gain more weight. Several studies have shown that people who snack regularly tend to eat less at meal time.


Other reasons are:
 
• Better absorption – your body can only absorb so much nutrition and burn so many calories at a time. If you are overeating, your body is trying very hard to digest the foods, and the extra foods will be stored as fat. Simple equation: Calories in = Calories out. For example, if you sit in front of computer at work most of the time, you don’t need to consume many calories simply because you’re not burning many calories. If you don’t know how many calories you burn all day long, check on our Calories Monitors on our website. It’s critical to know how many calories we burn so we know how much we should eat.

• Stimulates muscle growth and burn more fat – if your body waits too long between meals, your muscle will be consumed for energy when your body is in starvation mode. As you know, muscle mass will help us to burn fat. So, you are losing muscle instead of fat if you eat 3 big meals or skip meals.

• Boosts your metabolism for maximum weight loss and to maintain blood sugar level - our body need energy to perform daily activities as a car needs fuel to run... continuously. Skipping meals or eating 3 big meals will lead to low blood sugar level if we do not feed our body. You will feel less energy and tempt to eat more in your next meal. When you are eating heavy meal, your blood sugar level is higher than what your body needs. Overproduction of insulin will lead to weight gain and excess calories will be stored as fat. How do you feel after you had heavy lunch? Do you feel tired and can’t stay focus?


So, what should you eat for snacks? The snacks can be steamed vegetables, fruits, raw almonds, or other healthy foods that you can think of. The recommended calories should be 100 – 200 calories per snack, again, depending on your total calories intake and activities a day. Donuts, chips, cookies, muffins and other junk foods are NOT counted as healthy snack please! Think of the junk foods that you eat are the foods that go into your body. Do you really want to put all kind of trash into your mouth?

 
We know it is difficult to eat multiple meals a day due to our busy schedule. So, plan ahead of time and commit to it, slowly you will get used to it. Believe it or not, you will feel great the day when you have multiple healthy meals. Don’t treat it like a torturing diet, it is a lifestyle changed!

Tuesday, October 5, 2010