Recently I’ve been hearing alot about “cutting calories.” The idea of cutting calories has mutated into this wildfire of an epidemic. Most people believe that cutting calories will solve their weight loss problems, and while it does help momentarily, it’s only a quick fix and a long term disaster waiting to happen. So lets get into the Good, the Bad, & the Ugly about cutting calories.
The Good
Cutting down on calories can be a good thing! Especially, if you’ve been extremely overweight. Cutting calories is necessary. But for the rest of us. We need the calories. And most of us are either consuming too many of the wrong kind of calories or not enough of the right calories at all. In fact, you can eat food without having to count calories or cut back on them. Instead, focus more on eating whole grains, fruits, and especially more veggies! I can’t say that enough. EAT MORE VEGGIES. This doesn’t mean that you can make a super healthy salad and dump about ¼ a cup of ranch or thousand island dressings on it and call it healthy. Stay away from things that are heavy in cream, high in sugar, full of preservatives, and words you can’t even pronounce on a label. The secret behind losing weight successfully and keeping it off is, eating more of the right foods instead of eating more of the bad foods and cutting back on calories.
Pfft. I don’t know about you but i LOVE to eat. And the idea of having to “cut back,” anything makes me cringe. Why have a small cheeseburger from a fast food joint when i can have a coconut parmesan crusted chicken with a full plate of seasoned/ grilled asparagus. Ummmm HELLO!!! I’ll take the the chicken dinner that has about half the calories than a drive thru cheeseburger any day.
So remember, it’s not cutting back on calories that you should be worrying about. Instead i want to encourage you to EAT MORE healthy whole foods. Foods that will fuel your body instead of tearing it down like a slow form of poison. Eat more healthy foods and you will LOSE WEIGHT.
The Bad & The Ugly
Remember that time you were going on a diet? You had a granola bar or coffee for breakfast. Then opted for a small salad with dressing. And dinner? Well it was pizza night! Who can say no to pizza night!? Besides, you did really well for your first day of dieting! You had pudding for a snack! You’re totally going to lose weight and keep it off this time.
Well let me breakdown what’s going on inside your body while you’re dieting by cutting calories. So! After being asleep for 6-8 hours, you wake up and have a coffee or your granola bar. Your body needs a specific amount of calories per day to run well. Just waking up requires a certain amount of calories. When you deprive your body of calories ( let say by opting for a granola bar), it goes into survival mode. So everything you’re eating after that granola bar turns into sugar, which turns into fat. Your body starts to store whatever it gets into fat. “Well i’ve lost 5 pounds by dieting and cutting calories.” That’s great for you! But did you know that the 5 pounds you’ve just lost was muscle?
Your body starts to eat the muscle in your body and replaces the muscle with fat. And now, lets say you’ve given up on your diet because you’ve lost those pesky 5 pounds. Woo hoo! Forget dieting, back to eating out every day for lunch. Now you’ve gained those 5 pounds back. Whatever, you can go on a diet again. Well now you have 5 pounds of fat that replaced muscle PLUS the 5 pounds you’ve just gained back. Coming out to 10 pounds of fat on our body from starving yourself and cutting calories.
What sucks is now you have to work twice as hard to burn off those 10 pounds of fat that you’ve just gained. Pretty ugly in my opinion.
My advice? Stop yo-yo dieting. Seriously, cut the crap. Cut the drive thru food out. Stop buying white bread. Limit your sweets! Eat more veggies! There are literally THOUSANDS of recipes out there to help you make delicious meals? Picky children? No problem! There are moms out there that have perfected clean eating recipes for their kids? Picky meat eating husbands? Yippee!!! So many meals built AROUND men and their meat eating ways! If you can cut out one thing that you know you don’t need, then do it! Find a way to make it yourself, and then make it better! Clean eating doesn’t have to be boring! Start out small and you will SEE and FEEL the difference within 2 weeks!
The only thing you have to lose is weight. And there’s nothing wrong with doing it the healthy way.
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