Eating for Weight Loss

Eating for weight loss sounds like a contradiction in terms – but it really isn’t. The fact is that in order to lose weight – and keep that weight off – you must eat. Most people will automatically assume that losing weight means eating less food. In reality, it may mean actually eating more food – but eating better, healthier food.

If your favorite meal is chips and soda, naturally you would assume that eating less chips and consuming less soda will help you to lose weight – and you would be right, but you may also be wrong, on some level. Those chips and soda don’t need to be done away with – with no food to replace them. Instead, they need to be replaced with healthier, lower calorie foods.

There is still a great deal of argument concerning how often humans should be eating, but research is proving more and more that we actually need to eat about every two hours. Many health professionals now understand that if we allow ourselves to become hungry, two things are going to happen. First, our bodies don’t have the fuel that they need to burn calories. Second, it won’t be long before we start gorging ourselves on foods that we shouldn’t be eating – in amounts that we don’t need. Hunger causes these two things to happen.

Because we don’t want to allow our bodies to be hungry, we need to eat about every two hours. We should never allow more than three hours passing without something to eat, during the hours that we are awake. This is why breakfast is so incredibly important for good health, and for weight loss. You’ve been fasting for approximately eight hours, and your body needs food!

The key here is to give your body what it needs, without giving it too much. If you really like chips, have two or three chips with a diet soda, but consider that you could have the same number of calories in a much larger quantity of food if you make a better choice. An egg on a piece of lower calorie toast would be about the same number of calories – and would be much more satisfying for a longer period of time than those few little chips.

Losing weight isn’t about starving the body. Instead, it is about giving the body the fuel that it needs, without over feeding it, and without giving it more calories than it can possibly burn through your normal daily activities, as well as with a period of exercise each day. The sooner you realize this, the easier it will be to get the weight off – and to keep it off. You must eat to lose weight.